LITMIR.BIZ

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I can make a lot of weapons.”

      This time, Hannah fell silent, perhaps sensing the tide turn.

      “So we’re agreed?” Anka asked. “We’ll free the combatlords during the Blood Moon festival?”

      One by one, Sartes saw the others nod. Even Hannah did, eventually. He felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. He saw the approval in his eyes, and it meant the world to him.

      He only prayed that his plan would not get them all killed.

      CHAPTER THREE

      Ceres dreamed, and in her dreams, she saw armies clashing. She saw herself fighting at their head, dressed in armor that shone in the sun. She saw herself leading a vast nation, fighting a war that would determine the very fate of mankind.

      Yet in it all, she also saw herself squinting, searching for her mother. She reached for a sword, and looked down to see it was not yet there.

      Ceres woke with a start. It was night, and the sea before her, lit by the moonlight, was endless. As she bobbed in her small ship, she saw no sign of land. Only the stars convinced her that she was still keeping her small craft on the right course.

      Familiar constellations shone overhead. There was the Dragon’s Tail, low in the sky beneath the moon. There was the Ancient’s Eye, formed around one of the brightest stars in the stretch of blackness. The ship that the forest folk had half built, half grown seemed never to deviate from the route Ceres had picked out, even when she had to rest or eat.

      Off the starboard side of the boat, Ceres saw lights in the water. Luminous jellyfish floated past like underwater clouds. Ceres saw the faster figure of some dart-like fish slipping through the shoal, snapping up jellyfish with every pass and hurrying through before the tendrils of the others could touch it. Ceres watched until they disappeared down into the depths.

      She ate a piece of the sweet, succulent fruit the islanders had stocked her boat with. When she’d set off it had seemed as though there was enough to last for weeks. Now, it didn’t seem like quite so much. She found herself thinking of the leader of the forest folk, so handsome in a strange, asymmetrical way, with his curse lending him patches where his skin was mossy green or roughened like bark. Would he be back on the island, playing his strange music and thinking of her?

      Around Ceres, mist started to rise up from the water, thickening and reflecting fragments of the moonlight even as it blocked out her view of the night sky above. It swirled and shifted around the boat, tendrils of fog reaching out like fingers. Thoughts of Eoin seemed to lead inexorably to thoughts of Thanos. Thanos, who’d been killed on the shores of Haylon before Ceres could tell him that she hadn’t meant any of the harsh things she’d said when he left. There in the boat alone, Ceres couldn’t get away from just how much she missed him. The love she’d felt for him felt like a thread pulling her back toward Delos, even though Thanos was no longer there.

      Thinking of Thanos hurt. The memory felt like an open wound that might never close. There were so many things she needed to do, but none of them would bring him back. There were so many things she would have said if he were there, but he wasn’t. There was only the emptiness of the mist.

      The mist continued to coil around the boat, and now Ceres could see shards of rock sticking up out of the water. Some were razor-edged black basalt, but others were in rainbow colors, seeming like giant precious stones set in the roiling blue of the ocean. Some had markings on them that swirled and spiraled, and Ceres wasn’t sure whether they were natural, or if some long distant hand had carved them.

      Did her mother lie somewhere beyond them?

      The thought brought a thrill of excitement in Ceres, rising up through her like the mist that swirled around the boat. She was going to see her mother. Her real mother, not the one who had always hated her, and who had sold her to slavers at the first opportunity. Ceres didn’t know what this woman would be like, but just the opportunity to find out filled her with excitement as she guided the small boat along past the rocks.

      Strong currents pulled at her boat, threatening to pull the rudder from her hand. If she hadn’t had the strength that came from the power within her, Ceres doubted that she would have been able to hold on. She pulled the rudder to the side, and her small boat responded with an almost living grace, slipping past one of the rocks almost close enough to touch it.

      She sailed on through the rocks, and with every one she passed, she found herself thinking about how much closer she was getting to her mother. What kind of woman would she be? In her visions, she’d been indistinct, but Ceres could imagine, and hope. Maybe she would be kind, and gentle, and loving; all the things she’d never had from her supposed mother back in Delos.

      What would her mother think of her? That thought caught at Ceres as she guided the boat onward through the mist. She didn’t know what was ahead. Maybe her mother would look at her and see someone who hadn’t been able to succeed in the Stade, who had been nothing more than a slave in the Empire, who had lost the person she loved most. What if her mother rejected her? What if she were harsh, or cruel, or unforgiving?

      Or maybe, just maybe, she would be proud.

      Ceres came out of the mist so suddenly that it might have been a curtain lifting, and now the sea was flat, free of the tooth-like rocks that had jutted from it before. Instantly, she could see that there was something different. The light of the moon seemed brighter somehow, and around it, nebulae spun in stains of color on the night. Even the stars seemed changed, so that now, Ceres couldn’t pick out the familiar constellations there had been before. A comet streaked its way across the horizon, fiery red mixed with yellows and other colors that had no equivalent in the world below.

      Stranger than that, Ceres felt the power within her pulse, as though responding to this place. It seemed to stretch within her, opening out and allowing her to experience this new place in a hundred ways she’d never thought of before.

      Ceres saw a shape rise from the water, a long, serpentine neck rising up before plunging back beneath the waves with a splash of spray. The creature rose again briefly, and Ceres had the impression of something huge swimming past in the water before it was gone. What looked like birds flitted through the moonlight, and it was only as they got closer that Ceres saw that they were silvery moths, larger than her head.

      Her eyes suddenly growing heavy with sleep, Ceres lashed the tiller in place, lay down, and let sleep overcome her.

***

      Ceres woke to the shriek of birds. She blinked in the sunlight as she sat up, and saw that they weren’t birds after all. Two creatures with the bodies of great cats wheeled overhead on eagle-like wings, raptor beaks wide as they called. They showed no signs of coming closer though, merely circling the boat before flying off into the distance.

      Ceres watched them, and because she was watching them, she saw the tiny speck of an island they were heading for on the horizon. As quickly as she could, Ceres raised the small sail again, trying to catch the wind that rushed past her to push herself toward the island.

      The speck grew larger, and what looked like more rocks rose out of the ocean as Ceres got closer, but these weren’t the same as the ones that had been there in the mist. These were square-edged, built things, crafted in rainbow marble. Some of them looked like the spires of great buildings, long sunk beneath the waves.

      Half an arch stuck out, so huge that Ceres couldn’t imagine what might have passed beneath it. She looked down over the side of the boat, and the water was so clear that she could make out the sea bed below. It wasn’t far to the bottom, and Ceres could see the wreckage of long past buildings down there. It was close enough that Ceres could have swum down to them just by holding her breath. She didn’t, though, both because of the things she’d already seen in the water and because of what lay ahead.

      This was it. The island where she would get the answers she needed. Where she would learn about her power.

      Where she would, finally, meet her mother.

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Lucious swung his blade overhand, exulting in the way it glinted in the dawn light, in the instant before he cut down the old man who had dared to get in his

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