As she sailed in the direction of Felldust's Bone Coast, Jeva suffered the strangest sensation of her life: she worried that she was going to die.
It was a new sensation for her. It wasn't something that her people were used to experiencing. It certainly wasn't something that she'd ever wanted. It probably amounted to a kind of heresy, floating along, seeing the possibility of joining with the waiting dead and actually worrying about it. Her kind embraced death, even welcomed it as a chance to finally be one with the great wash of their ancestors. They did not fear the risk of it.
Yet that was exactly what Jeva was feeling now, as she saw the faint line of Felldust's shore appearing on the horizon. She feared the thought of being cut down for what she had to say. She feared being sent to join those ancestors, rather than being able to help on Haylon. She wondered what had changed.
The answer to that was easy enough: Thanos.
Jeva found herself thinking of him as she sailed toward land, watching the seabirds that gathered in floating flocks as they waited for their next chance at food. Before she had met him, she had been…well, perhaps not the same as all her people, because most of them didn't feel the need to wander all the way to Port Leeward and beyond. Even so, she had felt the same as them, been the same as them. She certainly didn't feel fear.
It wasn't fear for herself, exactly, although she knew perfectly well that her own life was at stake. She was more worried about what would happen to those left on Haylon if she didn't make it back; to Thanos.
That was another kind of heresy. The living didn't matter except as far as they were useful to fulfill the wishes of the dead. If a whole island of people died at the hands of an invader, that was a glorious honor for them, not something to treat as an impending disaster. All that mattered in life was fulfilling the wishes of the dead and achieving an end for oneself that was suitably glorious. The speakers of the dead had made that clear. Jeva had even heard the whispers of the dead herself, when the smoke rose from the seeing pyres.
She sailed on, ignoring that, feeling the pull of the waves against the tiller as she kept her small boat on course for her home. Now she found herself hearing other voices, arguing for compassion, for saving Haylon, for helping Thanos.
She had seen him risk his own life to help others for no good reason that Jeva could see. When she had been tied to a Felldust ship like a figurehead, waiting to be flayed, he had come to rescue her. When they had fought side by side, his shield had been her shield in a way never seen with her people.
She had seen in Thanos something to admire. Maybe more than admire. She had seen someone who was in the world to do the best that they could there, not just to find the most perfect way of exiting it. The new voices Jeva was hearing told her that this was the way she ought to live, and that going to help Haylon was a part of it.
The trouble was that Jeva knew these only came from within herself. She shouldn't have been listening to them so strongly. Her people certainly wouldn't.
"What's left of them," Jeva said, the wind carrying her words away.
Her tribe's village was gone. Now she was going to go to another gathering place and ask another clutch of her people for their lives. Jeva looked up at the way the wind billowed the small sail of her boat, out at the play of foam over the ocean; anything to keep from thinking about what she would have to do to make that happen. Even so, the words came up, as inescapable as the end of life.
She would have to claim to speak for the dead.
It had taken the words of the dead to get them to Delos, although Jeva and Thanos had not claimed to speak for them with that. But Jeva couldn't just leave this to the speakers with this. There was too much of a chance that they would say no, and then what would happen?
The death of her friend. She couldn't allow that. Even if it meant doing the unthinkable.
Jeva guided her boat closer to shore, working her way in between the rocks and the wrecks that had foundered on them. This wasn't the beach nearest her old home, but a place a little further along the coast, in another of the great gathering places. They had still managed to pick the wrecks clean, though. Jeva smiled at that, taking a little pride in it.
Boats came out onto the water to meet her. Mostly, these were light things, canoes with outriggers, designed to intercept what was obviously not one of the Bone Folk's craft. If Jeva had not obviously been one of them, she might have found herself fighting for her life then. Instead, they crowded around, laughing and joking the way they never did around strangers.
"A beautiful boat, sister. How many men did you kill for it?"
"Kill?" another said. "They probably went to the dead at the sight of her from fear!"
"They'd go to the dead at the sight of your ugliness," Jeva shot back, and the men laughed with her. It was how things were done here.
How things were done mattered. Her people might seem strange to outsiders, but they had their own rules, their own standards of behavior. Now, Jeva was going to go to them, and if she claimed to speak for the dead, then she would be breaking the most fundamental of those rules. She could be cut off from the communion of the dead for breaking it, slain without her ashes being mingled with the pyres to be consumed.
She brought her boat in to the shoreline, jumping from it and pulling it up onto the beach. There were more of her folk waiting there. A girl ran to her with a funerary urn, offering her a pinch of the village's ashes. Jeva took it, tasting it. Symbolically, she was one of the village now, a part of their communion with their ancestors.
"Welcome, priestess," one of the men on the beach said. He was an old man with papery skin, but he still deferred to Jeva because of the markings that proclaimed she had undergone the rites. "What brings a speaker of the dead to our shores?"
Jeva stood there, considering her answer. It would have been so easy then to claim that she spoke for those who were gone. She had seen her share of visions; when she'd been a girl, there were those who had thought that she would be a great speaker for the dead. One of the older speakers had proclaimed as much, saying that she would speak words that would shake her whole people.
If she claimed that the dead had called her there, and required her people to fight for Haylon, they might believe it without argument. They might obey her borrowed authority as they obeyed so little else.
If she did, she might actually be able to save Haylon. There might be a chance that her people would be enough to break the attack by Felldust's fleet. They might be able to buy the defenders time, at least. If she lied.
Jeva couldn't do it though. It wasn't just the lie at the heart of it, although the fact that she was considering it horrified her. It wasn't even the fact that it went against everything her people felt about the world. No, it was the fact that Thanos wouldn't have wanted her to do it that way. He wouldn't have wanted her to trick people to their deaths, or to force them to face up to the might of Felldust without knowing the truth of why they were going.
"Priestess?" the old man asked. "Are you here to speak for the dead?"
What would he do then? Jeva already had an answer to that, forged from the last time he'd been to her folk's lands. Forged from everything he'd done since.
"No," she said. "I am not here to speak for the dead. I am Jeva, and today I wish to speak for the living."
