Tidespeaker

1

The last day of summer, and my eighteenth birthday, found me suspended upside down in a tank of water.

It was hardly the coming-­of-­age I’d hoped for, but no one celebrated birthdays at Arbenhaw. Here, all days were filled with the same three things: training for our service to the Queendom of Nenamor, history lessons on why that was the only life fit for us, and—­far more frequently than seemed fair—­practical examinations, testing our control.

Today, I was facing one of the last. The flutters of panic I’d been feeling all morning intensified as I blinked through the water at my classmates. Their blurry figures, weirdly inverted, were lined up along the walls of the hexagonal chamber, and I knew every one of them would be smirking at the tank, hoping to witness my spectacular failure.

I was the only Floodmouth being examined today, and I’d never been tested like this before. This ordeal was reserved for our final year, for the day we turned eighteen and were deemed ready for service—­and the pressure of all the eyes fixed on me was almost worse than the pressure of the water. As my heart hammered out the familiar beat that always accompanied anything new or unexpected, I felt the telltale burning in my lungs and knew that in about sixty seconds I’d be drowning.

Perched in the gallery, like a row of roosting vultures, were the Instructors who’d come to oversee my exam. They hadn’t bothered to heat the water, of course, and it chilled my skin as I wriggled in my restraints. I knew they would all be watching closely; better performance at Institutions like Arbenhaw meant better positions out in the Queendom after graduating. I was acutely aware that poor or even mediocre results would mean serving out the rest of my years doing something dangerous, or downright horrible: protecting the harbor builders down south, irrigating flooded farmland, clearing the sewers in the cities out east . . .

It didn’t help that one figure was conspicuously absent from the room, a person whose attendance would have made this much easier.

For a decade, Zennia, my only friend at Arbenhaw, had been a stalwart presence in these echoing chambers, her steady brown gaze—­as familiar to me as a sister’s—­the anchor I needed to remind me I could do this. But a month ago, my friend, my anchor, had gone, whisked away after her own final exam to serve some noble family on the coast.

I knew the chamber outside the tank would be silent, perhaps only the scuff of a slippered foot breaking the quiet. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to feel out the water. After ten years in this place, the water we practiced with, drawn from the mountain springs outside the complex, was nearly as familiar to me as Zennia was. But today it seemed im­placable, almost haughty.

Without Zennia, I felt like a shipwrecked sailor. Since she’d left, I’d struggled through our practicals, slogged through our lessons, but this—­this was new. My fear was snowballing. And the water, coldly cocooning me, seemed to know it.

There were only two things that could render us Orha useless: laco­nite stone, and emotions. Strong emotions. I needed to wrest control of mine, or my eager classmates would get what they hoped for.

I knew what my friend would have willed me to do, had she been out there in the line with them, watching. I forced myself to clear my thoughts, to ignore the cold pressure, the unfurling fear, and tried to picture my emotions in my mind.

It was a trick Zennia taught me nearly two years ago, when I’d floundered in one of our eighth-­year tests. Since then, it had helped me impress the Instructors—­but I wasn’t sure it would save me today.

“What do your feelings look like? As an image?”

Mine always looked chaotic, even frightening. And sure enough, they burst into my mind’s eye like a firework: a shivering, scarlet ball of panic, bolts streaking out into the black like lightning.

“Squeeze it. Shrink it. Smother it to nothing.”

Her words came back to me as I grappled with the ball. The idea was to slowly force it inward, mentally crush it to the size of a pinprick. But all I could see, overlaid upon it, was my friend’s sad smile as she was led away.

Seconds passed. My body shook. The need to breathe was like a hunger, starvation, a burning torch held too close to my skin. I didn’t have long. I needed to control this, but in my head, I could only relive Zennia’s exam. The sight of her hanging, serene, in the tank, black hair scrunched and tied into bunches. The glint of light on the brooch I’d given her for her own eighteenth birthday fastened tight to her blouse.

She’d excelled, of course; flown through it with ease. Since we’d all been thrown together at Arbenhaw, having passed the test that granted us entry—­and a route to the best possible service placements after graduation—­Zennia had surpassed the rest of us in practical after practical, and many of our classmates disliked her for it. Well, that and the fact that she refused to dislike me, the watchful one on the periphery who could never seem to say the right thing.

But though Zennia had landed her prestigious placement, mine was even now slipping from my grip.

With a heave, a spasm, my mouth jerked open, my lungs now searing, desperate for air. But instead of gulping, dooming me to drown, I spoke instead. Commanded the water.

“Part,” I choked out, bubbles streaming from my mouth. “Give me air. Let me breathe.”

My chest, my body—­all was pain. This must be what it felt like to be crushed under a boulder. Ordinarily, when my emotions were in check, the water obeyed me readily. But today . . .

I waited three seconds. Five. My torso shuddered, my limbs twitching wildly. Ten full seconds now since I’d spoken to the water. It wasn’t listening. I’d known it wouldn’t.

I opened my eyes, felt them sting with the cold. When we were little, the trainees in the years above us tried to scare us with lurid stories about this exam. They claimed that if you failed, you were left to drown. An Orha who couldn’t perform at all wasn’t even useful in the mills, mines, or military: the lowest tier of employment for our kind. Why bother sending us back to our families, draped in humming, scarlet laconite, when there was no place in society for us without work? Staring out at the blurry figures of the Instructors, I wondered if I’d been foolish to scoff at these tales.

It was over. The craving for air was too strong. My lips stretched wide, my chest sucking inward, and cold water gushed down my throat.

But at the same time, around me . . . something was happening. A shift in the water; a sudden great heaving.

I was buffeted as bubbles of air broke against me, my breeches rippling and my long sleeves billowing. My red braids whipped around my face like loose rigging as the water rumbled, groaned . . . and displaced.

The gap of air above me, at the top of the tank—­through which I could just see a shimmering silhouette—­moved downward, and my now-­dripping face was left clear. The water sloshed against the crown of my head, and I coughed and coughed, gasping in rasps of air.

One thought broke through: That shouldn’t have worked. Emotions that strong should have smothered my power, since nature, unimpressed by feelings, balked at them. Either the water had taken pity on me—­which was impossible, unheard of; it didn’t work like that—­or somebody in the chamber had.

Firm hands hauled me up, sending hot relief spiking through me. Below, the hovering water crashed back down, slopping noisily against the tank as though enraged.

A wooden platform had been erected against the tank, with a rickety ladder leading down to the flagstones. It was Rhama who’d pulled me out—­the bald, bespectacled Instructor had also been the one to lower me in and must have been up here the whole time, watching. I collapsed at his feet, spluttering water. He picked me back up, sat me upright, and slowly, my breaths began to come a little steadier.

I waited as his deft hands worked at my bindings. I was glad it was him. He was one of the fair ones, and we shared a serious, thoughtful demeanor. I wasn’t his favorite—­he had no favorites among us—­but he’d always put a firm end to the needling from my classmates. Not like Instructor Caerig, who could be downright vindictive and was currently lurking at the edge of the gallery, her hawk’s gaze pinned on us from the shadows.

Rhama, I noticed, was watching me carefully. His eyes betrayed neither approval nor disappointment, but I detected a faint line etched between his brows: frustration. The clock above the gallery marked me at sixty-­eight seconds. I should have done better—­clearly Rhama thought so, too—­and in the end, had I even succeeded at all? The water’s delayed reprieve still confounded me.

I was offered no cloak or cape to warm me as I climbed down the ladder and faced my classmates. Along the line of them, there were lifted eyebrows, quirking lips, eyes flashing with delight. I made my stare as poisonous as I could, though behind it simmered a horrible shame.

Rhama, who’d come down the ladder behind me, was still watching me, and I quickly schooled my expression. We were expected to maintain strict control at all times, not just when we were communing with our element. Outbursts of feeling, aside from hampering our abilities, were a sign of weakness and punished harshly.

“Thank you, Corith,” he said dispassionately. “That concludes your final examination. You’ll be informed when a suitable placement becomes available. Until then, you’ll attend lessons with the others, as normal.”

“A suitable placement.”

My skin tightened painfully, and not from the chill of my soaking garments. Sibilant whispers started up in the line. I heard a few shuffles, a stifled laugh.

“Silence,” came Caerig’s voice from the gallery: curt, emotionless. A hush descended. “Anyone,” she continued, “who so much as clears their throat will find themselves in the Confinement Locker from dawn until dusk tomorrow.”

Traditionally, the exhausted examinee was permitted to leave while their classmates emptied the tank and mopped water from the floor.

But Caerig’s lip lifted as her gaze met mine.

“Now, all of you: Clean up this room.”

With a thumping heart and trembling hands, I lagged behind my classmates as we wound through the halls, dodging a couple of whispering Sparkmouths clad in their flame-­resistant wools and leathers. As keen as I was to get out of my sodden clothes, I knew if I kept up with the others, there’d be biting words and barbed jokes.