Chương 16: Out to Sea

Miriam stood at the edge of the beach, one hand holding the canoe fast against the pull and push of the gentle waves lapping on the sand. The sun had just crested the horizon and the ocean had receded to its normal levels, no trace of the Night Shoals to be seen. Miram breathed deeply, feeling the touch of the sun like a blessing. Its warmth radiated throughout her whole body - it was as if she had spent the last month half-starved. She suddenly felt less worried about what she had to do next.

In fact, her every muscle thrummed with energy, eager to be off. Miriam gripped the side of the canoe and ran with it deeper into the water, pushing as hard as she could, right up until the water reached high enough to slow her movement, when she leapt into the small boat and began paddling.

"They're a sea-going ship," Eoin had told her.

"They won't be able - or really have any inclination to - bring the vessel close enough to the shore to talk to you. You're going to have to find a way to meet them out in the water." Easy enough, Miriam had thought. Her powerful form was made for rowing it seemed, her every stroke of the oar lurching the canoe blazingly fast across the water. The hard part would be finding the Líadan in all that open water. She paid not a single look back to the cabin that had been her prison for the last month.

The only regret she left behind was that she should have burned it down. Within mere moments the shore was lost to her and she was in the open water. The sun blazed a path of gold across the sea, literally a blinding, radiant road to the horizon. Miriam doggedly followed it, though she had to keep her eyes down to do so until the sun had moved high enough in the sky that the golden road vanished, correcting her trajectory whenever she noticed that her little canoe had strayed.

Now the euphoric warmth the sun had provided was beginning to be oppressive, a burning heat with no shade to suppress it. Ever since she became a dryad Miriam had felt very little in need of food or water - she could go days without noticing that she had forgotten to partake in either. But now her tongue felt huge in her mouth and her throat was closing on its own, her entire body drying out like the wrong kind of plant left out on the window sill.

This was just the sort of challenge having a Water Nature should be good at overcoming, she reasoned. Stilling her oar for a moment, he held out her hand and concentrated, flexing out both her Water and Life fórsa in the same pattern she had so cheerfully showed off to Eoin after she had learned to make her dual natures coexist. Vines snaked together to form a small cup and water condensated into it, filling it to the brim.

The cup seemed to be leakier than normal, but Miriam didn't mind the patter of cool water on her overheated hands and legs. She tipped the little cup and swallowed the water in one big gulp. Miriam retched instantly, coughing up foul and brackish liquid. She looked in horror at the inside of the cup. The water still clinging to the vines looked thick, the whole cup tainted with a thin layer of slime. Far from being pure, the water was festooned with tiny specks floating in it.

Even the vines were rotting - that likely being the reason her cup had leaked so badly. She screamed in frustration and threw the slowly disintegrating bundle of vines and water as far as she could into the sea. Blight had tainted even her simplest of efforts. Unlike her Water and Life Natures, she couldn't see how to make it work together. She needed those two fórsa natures to sustain her life, when Blight was the antithesis of that goal. Miriam prayed she found the way to purge Blight from her fórsa soon.

Even though she had lived an entire life where the power of fórsa manipulation would have been a fantasy, she'd had a taste of the power it offered now. She didn't want to have to give it up. In fact, she yearned for more. In spite of her growing thirst, she had no choice but to press on. Noon was upon her and so far she had seen no hint of any sails in the distance. She had felt certain this was a foolish approach, but Eoin had been insistent.

"The ship will find you, I guarantee it. You just have to get as far east as you can." Miriam, still constrained by Solas's wards at that point, paced back and forth in her small area.

"Eoin, I have worked on ships before. Out in the ocean a canoe and a ship a mile apart might as well be on opposite sides of the world." He had smiled the same confident smile she had trusted a lot more back then.

"Trust me. You'll be fine." Continuing to row under the noon heat with no ship in sight, Miriam was beginning to doubt the wisdom of blindly following Eoin's word. She was seriously entertaining thoughts of turning back when her canoe lurched to the left violently, slamming her into the hard wooden side. A line of knife-like fins sawed through the surface of the water, scraping the side of the canoe with a sound similar to the felling of a tree.

Splinters littered the water as the creature moved and her feet suddenly got very wet. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Miriam scrambled into a crouch, holding the short oar before her like a sword, trying desperately to keep her balance as the boat rolled beneath her. She had no way of knowing how big the creature was - nor even what type of beast it might be. What she did know was that in less than ten minutes she would be swimming.

When the beast did not immediately attack again Miriam grabbed at the hole in the bottom of the boat, willing her Life Nature to sew the hole closed with vines, but they broke apart quickly in a blackened slurry. That gods-damned Blight! One thing did strike her odd, and it reminded her of what she had seen the first time she had ever set foot in this canoe. When she pressed her fingers tight against the wood of the hull, her fingers seemed to pass through, as if threading her digits through thick sand.

But wherever she pulled her hand back, the wood remained unblemished. Was this a dryad thing? It had happened before she had ever touched the Life Nature. In the lull when the monster seemed not yet ready to attack again, Miriam chanced an experiment. While her fingers were pressing deeper into the wood, she compressed her hand gently, wrenching the hole in the wood closed.

Which of course, tore a new one at a different point - she could not create new material, at least not without her Life Nature, so whatever she took to spread elsewhere was removed from somewhere else. Patiently, waiting at any moment for the monster to return, she gingerly worked the hole higher and higher on the hull until it had cleared the waterline. The puddle at her feet seemed to be getting no deeper. Miriam swallowed hard, her lack of fresh water all the more front of mind from her work.

Looking out at the water, the beast was not gone - she could still see flashes of a smooth serpent's tail or the spikes of its fins among the ripples. She feared it was being cautious - making sure the prey wasn't a threat before striking. Having no other plan, she took up the oar once more and began to paddle, though now she had no sense of direction at all.

The sun directly overhead, she was just making her best guess as to which way east might be, when the prow of her little vessel skidded off the side of the sea serpent, whose blue-gray body was writhing in a mass right in front of her… but not attacking. Miriam's heart raced, but she began to paddle in a different direction, trying desperately not to panic. Once again the serpent blocked her way, then again, and again. It was herding her, she realized. To what end?

From what she could see of its form its body was wider than her torso - it could easily destroy the boat and gobble her up in seconds. Was it luring her to a nest? Were there young sea serpents waiting to take a bite out of fresh dryad at the end of this maze? She was just steeling her resolve to take a swing with her oar - better to go out fighting one serpent than many small ones - when another thought struck her.

Mustering up her courage, she took a deep breath and dunked her head into the water off the side of the boat. For a moment all she could see, through the sting of salt in her eyes, was a murky blur. Then, a shape approached her quickly. She tensed her arms, ready to pull herself back out, but the shape slowed. Coming more and more into focus she saw the face of the sea serpent, a horrifying maw of teeth in a mouth that seemed impossible to close with all the knives protruding from its gums.

The only other discernable feature at this end of the serpent were two rows of eyes, three on each side, small and beady. Each one glowed a strangely comforting blue. Miriam pulled her head out, gasping for air. Then she smiled. This was Eoin. Somehow he was controlling the beast with his fórsa. He must be guiding her to the ship. Suddenly, she felt a strange kinship with Solas. She marvelled at the kind of power Eoin had, to control a monster like this with just his power, from far away.

She could almost understand how someone like Solas could stand next to a man like Eoin and feel nothing but envy. When she was a teenager, she had a best friend, Rue Harald. They worked after school at the lumberyards like most of their schoolmates, but they made every effort to try to get assigned the same shifts, so that they could gossip and giggle together at any silly thing that might enter their heads. One day there had been an accident at the raw wood stacks - a man had been buried and was fading fast.

The pair of them arrived just as Todd Rogers, a man a few years their senior but with whom they had shared a few school terms before he graduated, pulled the trapped worker out of the pile, his powerful arms flinging heavy lumber around like it was nothing. Rue had been in love. She saw his strength, imagined what it would be like to be wrapped in those strong arms, safe and watched over by someone with the power to protect her from anything. Miriam had felt something very different.

She had looked at the ease with which someone like Todd Rogers enacted his will upon the world - to save a life, to fell a tree, to protect a loved one - and felt the very same pull she imagined Solas must have felt. She wanted that for herself - not to be protected by it, but to own it. That might be how Rue Harald had become Rue Rogers and Miriam had absconded across the world in a sharp divergence of fates. They'd ultimately had very different desires.

Following the serpent's lead, oar in hand, Miriam resolved once more to cleanse the Blight from her fórsa. She wouldn't feel satisfied until she could match Eoin, strength for strength. Match… or exceed. This was a world where her gender couldn't limit her power - and she had never been comfortable being the one protected. She wanted to be strong enough that no one could ever hold her against her will again.

The sun had just begun to set behind her when she finally saw what she had been searching for: a light on the horizon against the darkening sky.

"That's it," Miriam whispered, dreaming of fresh water nearly as much as she was a firm deck to stand on. Within reach! Then the back half of her canoe disappeared with a crash of teeth and a roar. Something huge slid roughly against her back.