Chapter 16 : SIGRID - The River of Voices76Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡa7r3rFCsuK
The guard's name was Joren. Sigrid knew this because the carer with the cracked lips screamed it when she fucked him, a high, breathless wail that cut through the thin walls of the alcove and filled the ward with the sound of her wanting. Joren. Joren. Right there, Joren, don't stop, don't fucking stop. Sigrid had listened to that name for two weeks, night after night, while the cot creaked and the carer gasped and Yska's voice coiled patient and hungry in the hollow of her skull. She'd memorised the rhythm of it—the way Joren grunted, the way his breathing quickened before he spent himself, the way he always fell asleep afterward, a deep, snoring sleep that lasted exactly four hours. She knew his body better than he knew it himself. She knew the exact moment he was weakest.
Tonight, she was going to use it.
The carer had already come and gone. Her name was Mera, and she'd left ten minutes ago, padding barefoot across the ward with her robe hanging open and her thighs slick with spend. Sigrid had watched her pass—the hollow eyes, the slack mouth, the faint, animal smell of sex that clung to her skin. Mera hadn't looked at her. Mera never looked at her. Mera was too busy drowning in her own small escapes, and Sigrid was just another failed speaker, another body waiting to die.
But Sigrid wasn't waiting anymore. The voice had been quiet for hours—resting, digesting, gathering strength—but she could feel it stirring now, curious. What are you doing, little vessel? Yska's voice was a whisper at the back of her skull, soft and wet and full of old hunger. What are you planning?
I am planning to leave, Sigrid thought. She didn't speak aloud—she hadn't spoken aloud since the physicians fled—but Yska heard her anyway. Yska heard everything.
Leave? You cannot leave. The door is locked. The guards are watching. The physicians have sedated you a dozen times. You are a prisoner, little vessel. A prisoner of your own broken mind.
No, Sigrid thought. I am your mouthpiece. That makes me dangerous.
She stood. Her legs were weak from weeks of sitting, and the wounds on her thighs screamed as the scabs pulled and cracked. Fresh blood welled up, hot and slick, running down her legs and soaking into the rough wool of her robe. The robe was stiff with old blood and old piss and old sweat, and it stank—gods, it stank—but she didn't care. She'd stopped caring about her body weeks ago. Her body was a tool. Her body was a weapon. Her body was the only thing she had left that Yska couldn't fully control.
The other patients stirred as she walked past them. The screamer, whose name she'd never learned, turned his white eyes toward her and opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The mutterer, an old woman who'd been bound to a tree-warden, whispered a word that might have been Yska or might have been please. The two new ones, the man and the woman who'd been brought in last night, sat up on their cots and stared at Sigrid with identical expressions of hollow hunger. They were vessels too, she realised. Empty things, waiting to be filled. Yska was speaking through all of them, but Sigrid was the one it had chosen. Sigrid was the one who'd carved the map.
She reached the alcove door and pushed it open.
Joren was lying on his cot, naked from the waist down, his tunic rucked up around his chest. He was a young man, broad-shouldered and soft-faced, with the kind of body that came from garrison duty and too much ale. His cock lay flaccid against his thigh, still glistening from Mera's attentions. The room smelled of sweat and sex and the faint, sour note of old wine. A lantern burned on the table beside the cot, its flame steady and orange.
Joren opened his eyes. "What—"
"Shh." Sigrid stepped inside and closed the door behind her. The latch clicked, and she leaned against the wood, her body blocking the exit. The robe hung loose on her shoulders, and she could feel the cold air on her bare thighs, on the wounds that were still bleeding. "I need your help."
Joren sat up, his hand reaching for the sword belt hanging on the bedpost. "You're the mute. The one who spoke. The physicians said—"
"The physicians are afraid of me. Are you afraid of me, Joren?"
He hesitated. His hand was on the sword, but he hadn't drawn it. His eyes moved over her body—the hollow cheeks, the bony shoulders, the bare thighs streaked with blood. He was a man who'd been fucking the same carer for two weeks, and he was bored. She could see it in the way his gaze lingered, the way his tongue touched his lower lip.
"No," he said. "I'm not afraid."
Good, Yska murmured. He's weak. They're all weak. Use him.
Sigrid crossed the room. She didn't think about what she was doing. Thinking would make it impossible. Thinking would make it real. She just moved—one step, two steps—and then she was standing over him, close enough to smell the wine on his breath and the salt on his skin. She reached down and took his hand—the one that wasn't on the sword—and pressed it against her thigh, against the deepest wound, the spiral that marked the river's source.
His fingers touched the raw flesh, and he gasped. "Fuck. What is that? What did you do to yourself?"
"A map," she said. "A map that leads north. I need to follow it. I need you to let me go."
"I can't. The physicians—the Prince—they said no one leaves. If I let you go, they'll hang me."
"They won't hang you. They're leaving tonight. The Prince is going north, and the physicians will be too busy to notice one missing guard." She leaned closer, her lips brushing his ear. "Let me go, Joren. I'll make it worth your while."
His breathing quickened. His hand was still on her thigh, his fingers tracing the edge of the wound. She could feel him getting hard—the body responding to stimulus, the way bodies did, whether the mind wanted to or not. She'd learned that from Yska. Yska understood bodies. Yska understood hunger.
"Mera," he said, but his voice was weak.
"Mera doesn't have to know. This is between us." She reached down and took his cock in her hand. It was hot and damp and already stiffening, and she felt nothing—no desire, no disgust, no anything. Just the cold, clinical awareness of a task that needed to be done. "Let me go, and I'll give you something to remember."
He didn't answer. But he didn't pull away. His hand tightened on her thigh, and his hips bucked slightly, and she knew she had him.
She pushed him back onto the cot and climbed on top of him. The robe fell open, and her bare skin pressed against his, and the wounds on her thighs left streaks of blood on his belly. He groaned—not in pain, not quite, something between pain and pleasure—and she guided him inside her with a single, practiced motion. She'd done this before, years ago, before the binding, before the Warden. She'd been a girl in a fishing village, and there'd been a boy with sun-bleached hair and a laugh like river stones. It had meant something then. Now it meant nothing. Now it was just another transaction. Another piece of herself she was giving away.
She moved on top of him, steady and rhythmic, and he gripped her hips and thrust up into her, and she let him. Her mind was somewhere else—north, following the map, tracing the spirals and angles that led to the Frostwood. The river. The prison. The door that was waiting to be opened.
Good, Yska whispered. This is good. This is what bodies are for. This is what hunger is for. You are learning, little vessel.
I am not your mouthpiece, Sigrid thought.
No. You are something better. You are my hands. You are my feet. You are the one who will carry me north.
Joren groaned and spent himself inside her, his body shuddering and his fingers digging into her hips. She felt the wet heat of it, and then she felt nothing. He slumped back onto the cot, his eyes closing, his breathing already slowing into sleep. Four hours. She had four hours before he woke.
She pulled herself off him and stood. The spend dripped down her thigh, mixing with the blood from the wounds, and she wiped it away with the hem of her robe. The robe was ruined anyway. Everything was ruined anyway.
She took his key from the hook by the door. She took his cloak from the foot of the cot—grey wool, still warm from his body. She didn't look back. She unlocked the ward door and stepped into the corridor, and the cold air hit her like a wave.
The map was burning in her mind. North. The undercroft. The river.
The undercroft was buried deep beneath the temple, older than the ward, older than the Citadel itself. The stones were rough-hewn and slick with moisture, and the air smelled of rot and old water and something else, something metallic that made her teeth ache. The torches here burned with a faint blue tinge—the same blue she'd seen in the ward when Yska spoke through her, the same blue that flickered in the caged gods' cages. The colour of the plague. The colour of the First Dreamer.
She followed the map in her head down a spiral staircase that seemed to go on forever, her bare feet slapping on the cold stone. The cloak was too big, dragging on the ground, and the wounds on her thighs were still bleeding, but she didn't slow down. She couldn't slow down. The voice was urging her forward, and the map was burning, and somewhere deep beneath her, she could hear water.
The staircase ended in a vast chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness. The floor was flooded—a shallow pool of black water that stretched away into the shadows, fed by a slow, steady trickle from a crack in the far wall. The river. What was left of the river. The Warden of Shallows had died here, she realised. Its body had evaporated, but some part of it remained—the water, the memory, the cold. This was where it had gone to die. This was where it had been hollowed out and filled with Yska.
She stepped into the water.
It was freezing—colder than the mountain streams she remembered from her childhood, colder than anything that should have been liquid. It bit at her ankles, her calves, her knees. The wounds on her thighs screamed as the water touched them, and she felt the infection in them—the sweet, rotten smell that had been spreading for days—flush and burn. She kept walking. The water rose to her hips, her waist, her ribs. The cloak dragged behind her, heavy with water, and she let it go. It floated away into the darkness.
The water was speaking. Not Yska—not yet. Just a murmur, a whisper, a thousand voices layered over each other like the sound of a river running over stones. The voices of the dead. The voices of the tithed. The voices of everyone who'd ever given a memory to the gods, their words carried downstream for five hundred years.
...the bride wore grey wool and her hands were cold cold cold but the salmon run was good that year...
...fuck me on the hay bales, he said, and I let him, gods forgive me I let him...
...the baby is coming, the baby is coming, hold her down, hold her fucking down...
Sigrid stopped. The water was up to her chest now, and the current was pulling at her—not toward the crack in the wall, but toward the centre of the chamber, where the water was deepest and the darkness was absolute. Something was down there. Something old and cold and patient, waiting for her.
Come, Yska said. Not a whisper this time. A voice. A real voice, speaking from the water, speaking from the dark. Come to me, little vessel. Come and hear the truth.
"I am not your mouthpiece," Sigrid said. Her own voice was cracked and raw, barely a whisper, but it echoed off the stone walls. "I am not your vessel. I am not your hands or your feet. I am Sigrid, god-speaker of the Warden of Shallows, and I will not—"
The water surged.
It grabbed her like a hand, cold and strong and utterly without mercy, and it pulled her under. The darkness swallowed her whole. She opened her mouth to scream, and water rushed in—not just water, but voices, a thousand voices pouring down her throat and into her lungs and filling the hollow where the Warden had been. Yska was laughing. Yska was everywhere. Yska was the water and the dark and the cold, and it was going to drown her, and she was going to let it.
No.
The word was small and quiet, buried under the roar of the river. But it was hers. It was still hers.
She opened her eyes. Under the water, everything was black except for a single point of light—pale blue, flickering, far below. The source. The place where the Warden had died. The place where Yska had entered the world.
She kicked downward. The current fought her, tried to pull her back toward the surface, but she was stronger than the current. She'd been a river-speaker for twelve years. She knew water. She knew how it moved, how it thought, how it could be bent to her will. The Warden was dead, but some part of it remained—some fragment of its power, lodged in her bones, waiting to be used.
She reached the light. It was a crack in the stone floor, no wider than her hand, and it pulsed with the same blue flame that burned in the torches above. She pressed her palm against it, and the water stopped moving. The voices stopped screaming. The darkness drew back, and she was alone in the silence, floating in the cold, her lungs burning and her heart pounding and her hand pressed against the light.
You are stronger than I thought, Yska said. Its voice was quieter now, almost respectful. The Warden chose well. You would have made a fine god-speaker, if the world had not ended.
"The world hasn't ended," Sigrid said, though her mouth was full of water and her voice was barely a thought. "Not yet."
Not yet. But soon. The girl is coming—the one who wounded the Lament. She carries the key. She will open the door. And when she does, the world will end, and a new one will begin. A world without forgetting. A world where every memory lives forever. You will never lose anyone again, Sigrid. Your mother. Your sisters. The Warden. They will all be with you, inside me, forever.
Sigrid thought about her mother, who had died of the wasting sickness when Sigrid was twelve. She thought about her sisters, both younger, both given to the temple before they were old enough to understand. She thought about the Warden of Shallows, the god she'd loved, the god that had filled her with its voice and its purpose. They were dead. They were all dead. Yska was promising to bring them back.
It was lying. She knew it was lying. But the lie was so beautiful.
She pulled her hand away from the light. The water surged back, and the current grabbed her, and she kicked upward—up toward the surface, up toward the air, up toward the world that was still here, still ending, still waiting. Her lungs were screaming. Her vision was going grey at the edges. She broke the surface with a gasp, her mouth open, her chest heaving, and she crawled onto the wet stone at the edge of the chamber and lay there, coughing water and blood and pieces of the river.
The map was still burning in her mind. North. The Frostwood. The prison.
She stood. Her legs were shaking. The wounds on her thighs were bleeding freely, the water washing the blood away as fast as it welled up. She was barefoot and soaking wet, and the cold was so deep it felt like her bones were turning to ice. But she was alive. She was still alive. And she was still herself—barely, but enough.
"I am not your mouthpiece," she whispered. Her voice was gone, stolen by the river, but the words were hers.
We'll see, Yska murmured. Its voice was fading now, retreating into the back of her skull. We'll see, little vessel. You're walking north. That's all that matters. You're walking north, and the door is waiting.
Sigrid didn't answer. She turned her back on the river and began to climb the spiral stairs, her bare feet slapping on the cold stone. The map was burning. The voice was waiting. The night was cold and dark and full of old, old things.
She walked north.76Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡTUojVl4IrO
and then Add to home screen.