In the
evening she gives up and lets the rain fall where it wants, and
though it's only a light shower it completes the feeling of misery,
and she grows so cold and sluggish she steers Beatrix almost
headfirst into a rock before noticing it's there. It's a bare, jagged
rock, barely large enough for Aseka to curl up on it, but she does,
just to touch the ground. She may be more comfortable in the water
than many other sea elves, but there's nothing in the world like
feeling Mother Earth under her feet, she finds. Maybe she's just that
starved for touch.
And the
rain ends and the stars come out and Aseka chokes down half of her
rations and washes herself furiously, carelessly, using magic every
step of the way: to cleanse and heat water and heal the cuts from
Beatrix's rough-edged suckers she uses to to scrub the salt out of
her skin, and draining a lot of it to coerce the rock into a more
welcoming shape. Then she lies with her feet in the water and watches
the western horizon, imagining what it will be like to see the land
rise out of the water when she gets far enough.
The
heat doesn't last long, and even colder than before she urges Beatrix
to hand back her clothes and recieves only the staff and the cloak.
Her tunic and skirt are nowhere to be seen, and she wearily and
shamefully sends Beatrix to search for them with no hope at all and
spends the last of her energy pressing the water out of the cloak and
wraps it around herself and drifts off to sleep.
Beatrix
wakes her, much later, seeking assurance after failing her task.
Aseka hugs her absently, drinking in the unfamiliar feeling of
disorientation. Her body is recovered, fully rested, but her thoughts
are leaden, disorganized, unsteady. So long since she last lost
consciousness. But she watches the full moon walk across the sky and
nibbles on a nut and lets time wash over her and feels at ease. More
than at ease. Free.
It's
not that there's no one to tell her what to do, she thinks, if they
ever could. But there's no one to see what she does. Beatrix looks
but does not judge, indeed, she can sense even the bare rock reacting
to her presence in its way, and she learns the difference between
being alone and being lonely, and begins meditating, warm and
comfortable as if resting in the hand of Mother Earth.
And in
the morning she takes a length of spider silk rope from a little
pocket in the cloak and ties it around her waist and a mouthful of
bitter hazelnuts from another and starts swimming. Before she knows
it she spots mountains ahead, silhouetted against the setting sun,
from the crest of a larger wave. She swims late into the night in a
churning foaming sea, desperately spending her magic and pulling
ahead of an exhausted Beatrix, when things go dark.
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