But she didn’t know how to save him.
She followed the Tree as she swam downward, a gleaming white road to the bottom of the sea. The girth of the trunk grew rapidly as she went, and after a while she could no longer see all the way around it.
The water was murky and dull, and the muffled weight of an impenetrable silence echoed all around.
A ghostly face appeared before her, translucent and green, its dead mouth open in a silent cry. She jerked herself away from it and nearly collided with another face, twisted in agony, it too soundlessly screaming.
And then there were faces everywhere, crowding around her as she swam: wavering images of men and women and children, all of them in anguish, all of them shrieking without voices. They had no bodies, no hands to reach for her—they were just the echo of people, faces pressed up against a window.
She tried not to look into their eyes. She tried not to be caught in their despair. She tried not to shudder as she swam on—through them—ghostly mist clinging to her scales.
Music sprang suddenly into being, eerie and awful and filled with fear, nearly deafening her after the long silence. It was the opposite of the Whale’s song—it made her want to hide from watching eyes and crawling worms. It filled her with shame, every dark thing she’d ever done rushing into her consciousness. She wanted to die, because only death could free her from the music, the darkness, the regret.
Screams mingled with the song, the haunted cries of the ghostly faces all at once magnified beyond bearing. She could not shut them out.
But something drove her onward, downward, deeper and deeper and deeper into the sea.
She wouldn’t turn back, not if the faces grew hands and ripped her flesh from her body.
On and on, down and down, the music and the screams and the ghostly faces howling around her. She didn’t know how long she’d been here. A year. A century. The torment was unending.
She forgot she was once human, she forgot her mother and the Ruen-Dahr and Wen. The memories of what had happened to her, long ago on the shores of the sea, slipped away. There was only water and darkness, only agony and screaming and the awful, shrieking music.
She thought it would swallow her whole.
The last piece of her soul unraveled.
And then she reached the base of the Tree.
The images and music and screams ceased. Her memory came rushing back: her journey, the storm, the Whale being torn apart by the serpents.
Wen.
She twisted around to look back the way she had come and saw him still following her, his wings pressed tight against his sides—the power of the Words that bound him into his bird form must be protecting him, allowing him to breathe even down here.
The Words that the Whale had taught her burned once more in her mind, and just as Wen touched the ocean floor with one of his clawed feet, dust and ground seashells swirling up around him, she let those Words spill out of her.
Pain fractured her. She felt herself unfolding, out and out, stretching, tearing, growing. The Words burned through her and she shouted more of them as she changed, Words of protection and strength, for Wen as well as herself.
The pain pulsed, and faded. Her vision cleared. She looked down at her hands—her skin was once more her own. It felt impossibly strange down here, caught in the sea’s hand but not crushed into oblivion. Her hair pooled around her in the water, her gown whispering at her ankles as though stirred by some quiet wind. Everything moved slowly, the drifting tendrils of a dream.
She turned and saw Wen standing beside her, human Wen, his feet bare in the powdery sand. They were both wearing white, their clothing shimmering with the power of the Words that bound them.
“Wen.” His name slipped from her mouth and spun out like honey. The knapsack hung over Wen’s shoulder.
He smiled. “Thought you might need this,” he said, brushing his hand against the leather.
She stepped to his side and wrapped her arms around his neck, wildly glad he was here with her. And terrified about what might happen to him because he was.
He hugged her back, solid and warm. Strong. She didn’t ever want to let go.
But the weight of the sea pressed heavy on her body, the faint threads of music echoed in her ears.
She pulled away.
He looked at her, his eyes, as always, seeing deep. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, shrugging out of the knapsack and handing it to her. She slipped it over her head. “I’ll be all right.” He brushed his finger across her cheek, and her stomach wrenched. Then he took her hand. She could feel his heartbeat, pulsing with hers, in their joined palms.
Together, they paced around the Tree.
Chapter Forty-Nine
THEY STOOD ON THE VERY OUTSKIRTS OF the Hall of the Dead, a space so strange and immense Talia couldn’t properly comprehend it. On the far end of the Hall, hundreds of feet away from them, a dais jutted forty feet into the air. A point of light shone so brightly from it her eyes teared when she tried to look at it: Rahn’s Star.
Between them and the dais, a dark river poured, silent and raging.
Tree roots coiled beneath the powdery ocean floor like huge burrowing snakes, winding around the Hall to form its boundaries. Here and there the roots twisted up above the sand to form beautiful arched doorways that looked into inky darkness.
Away to her right sat the Billow Maidens all in a row, their hair pouring to the ground in brilliant shades of cerulean and coral, vermillion and stone. From this distance they all seemed to blend into one another, haunted music spilling from their harps. Their presence unnerved her. Even after all this time and every impossible thing she’d already seen, Talia hadn’t quite believed they were real.
She glanced over at Wen. “We have to talk to the Waves.”
Slowly, they stepped further into the Hall, chalky dust swirling up from their feet.
That’s when she noticed that the river in front of the dais wasn’t a river at all.
She recoiled, dragging Wen to a stop.
Scores of gray shrouded figures danced in a torrent, moving in endless formation to the sighing of the Billow Maidens’ harps. They were clothed in shadows, slippery gray garments that ate up the light. They did not speak as they danced, following the everlasting steps with quiet solemnity.
To get to the Billow Maidens, Talia and Wen would have to pass through them.
And they would have to do it quickly, before Rahn noticed them.
They stepped into the ranks of the dead, the embodiment of the ghostly faces that had haunted her during her long descent to the Hall: men and women, children and babies, queens and princes and sailors alike. Patches of gleaming bones showed through their cold, dead skin. Every face was twisted into soundless torment, every pair of eyes unblinking, unseeing, unknowing.