𝑮𝑳𝑰𝑻𝑻𝑬𝑹 | 𝑘.𝑏.

44

• { RIETVELD } •

UNRAVELING ONE'S HISTORY IS DANGEROUS. Picking at fraying threads and trailing them back through dark places all in the name of making sure you get it right. You need to be quite sure of the accusations you're making, the life you're wrenching out of the dust.

When Feta was a child fresh out of icy Fjerdan terror and still believing the obelisk to be magical, she could never sleep through the night. Her parents couldn't either. They would pretend to be asleep for her sake, but the truth was they all laid awake sick from the life they'd barely escaped.

Just in time, too. Mere weeks after they'd arrived in Kerch, the island was terrorized by the Queen's Lady Plague, the city below them erupting with panic and the rotten smell of bodies.

It was all luck, at the end of the day.

Feta left the side of her "sleeping" mother to join her father at the obelisk's stout window that overlooked the True Sea. The water never looked much less murky in the smoggy daylight. Although at least in the dark, one couldn't as easily make out Reaper's Barge, the horrid hazard of corpses just a few miles out from the island of Kerch.

A member of the Council was to assign that week's supply runs and watch schedule with those in various obelisks along the Lid, and it was between Feta's mother breaking the illusion of rest or Feta's father standing in. The Cadners prided themselves on always committing to an act. Feta's father left her to guard the harbor alone — the plague had halted shipping in and out of Kerch meaning the harbors were deserted save for the occasional flatboat that ventured out to Reaper's Barge. Besides, she was meant to be a council member in training anyway — and not even five minutes after he stepped out did the cries begin.

I'm alive.

Small. Severely hoarse.

It left Feta chilled to the core.

If she'd been considering sleep at all, it was no longer an option. Although maybe she was making it up, for her mother didn't flinch and she had been the most sensitive of them all to the moaning of the diseased along the canals.

I'm alive.

So she hadn't been hearing things.

Perhaps her mother had finally fallen asleep. Perhaps her mother figured this wasn't their problem, and was drowning it out with the rest of the sick.

The voice was nearly lost in the tumble of the waves, in the commotion of the Staves, but Feta sat unmoving, unable to do anything but listen intently over the pounding of her heart as the sea tossed the message up to her.

The water listens and understands. As Ketterdam's canal rats would later teach her, although it was something Feta already knew, Water has a voice.

Feta didn't move even when her father came back. He took up his post at the window beside her and tried to come to terms with his daughter's bloodshot eyes, her vigilant posture. Believe it or not, despite her wonder and her sparse delights in the small things, Feta didn't laugh much as a child. There was hardly cause for it; her parents had hoped Ketterdam's entertaining clamor might help with that.

Besides feeling the tides tug to their heart's content, Feta and her father didn't have much else to do, and Feta saw to it that they hardly spoke. She was still listening.

Morning approached and Feta was still restless, inconsolable, though she hid it well. She convinced her father to go lay down, get some sleep, assured him that she could finish the night watch. Maybe he was only humoring her, but he left her to it. He knew that sometimes she enjoyed the distraction the Staves had to offer, but she had an acute sense of the water, and was more than capable at the bright age of nine of multitasking her duties with the delight she deserved.