Page 17 of Prima
ChapterFive
The present
Pain. So much pain.
Water. Sunlight, shining from a single point somewhere above the surface, bounces and refracts. The light drills deep into his head even though he has shut his eyes tight.
He must be dreaming. He can feel the bed underneath him, firm, supportive, resolutely dry.
But his dream self, underwater, is deafened by agony. Strange flickers and flares pulse on the inside of his eyelids, in rhythm with the shredding and scalding of his nerves. He can find no calm center, no point to focus on that isn’t bright, dark, everlasting pain.
I’m sorry I can’t take all your torment. I hope this is enough. Please let this be enough. Please come through.
Who is he talking to—or thinking to? He opens his eyes and sees his mother, her hair swirling against the blinding light from above. His sister too, dress billowing, eyes closed. They are all three in a tight embrace, their foreheads touching. But his mother and his sister look unconscious—drowned.
He tightens his arms around them and, despite his mortal fear of the light above, pulls them up to the surface. They flail and suck in air. Water cascades; droplets fly. He screams but manages no sounds. The pain is so much worse under the blaring sun. He counts—shaking all the while—to ten and submerges everyone once more.
But being underwater again does not lessen the agony this time. This time, it burns and burns and burns.
I wish I were dead. I wish I’d died long ago. No, no, please don’t let me die.
He opens his eyes once more to check on the women. But his mother and his sister are nowhere to be found. Instead he is holding a stranger, his forehead against hers.
He is holding Lady Sun.
* * *
Ren bolts upright, gasping.
Like bioluminescence delineating the internal structure of a deep-sea jellyfish, ghost pain crackles along his nerve endings. It takes him a tense minute to understand that he isn’t in active torment, that he’s only reacting to the overwhelming affliction of the dream.
He forces his muscles to relax and his fingers to unclench from around the sheets.
The sheets.
Enough light drifts in from the porthole for him to see the sweep of fabric fitted perfectly to a…bed. He is in the cabin that he dutifully offered to Lady Sun.
He lay down on the bench in the lounging area—he recalls it clearly. How has he ended up here?
Alarm shrills through him. But no, he’s alone. Alone in the bed, alone in the cabin. The clock next to the bed says twenty minutes past two o’clock—he’s slept a solid five hours.
Next to the alarm clock lie his vambraces, which he made surenotto take off because he remains in mortal peril. He has no difficulty accepting that she is strong enough to carry him, but how did she figure out the intricate release mechanism on the vambraces?
Light seeps in from under the door. He gets up, fastens his vambraces, opens the door, and walks into the lounging area. Lady Sun is there, reading on the bench. She wears a simple, almost humble green dress that leaves her arms bare and a hairband that looks like garlands of tiny white and green flowers wrapped around her head. In her lap she holds a stack of sketchbooks,hissketchbooks.
“You’re up, Prince Nineteen,” she says, not remotely self-conscious to have been caught snooping. “This is exactly what it looks like, by the way: I have chosen to peek into your private creations.”
He should be seething. Instead, an unfamiliar fear tears through him, crowding out any spark of righteous anger.
She has read his story, which he has never shown anyone.
She smiles a little, an expression of great loveliness underpinned by melancholy. “Will you come and sit down, prince?”
He cannot. At least, not right away. He heads to the galley, opens the cold storage, and pours two glasses of guava juice. Only after he sets the glasses on the table does he take a seat at the far end of the bench.
Her dress might be made of common muslin, but it still features what in Dawan would be considered a plunging neckline. She wears a delicate chain that, due to the weight of an unseen pendant, duplicates the V of her decolletage. Under different circumstances, he would have trouble looking away from the filament of gold on her gleaming skin, but now he can only focus on his secret creation that she has brought into the open.
She flips a page in the sketchbook at the top of the stack. The next page, the last, is taken up entirely by a three-masted sailing ship traveling among the stars, accompanied by a whale whose presence in outer space is just as improbable as that of the ship. A lone figure stands at the helm, peering into the endless distance.
