The governor's men, Annen sends back with bitter word. "Tell him that the Dreamsinger has entered the courts of the fae," she says. "And that they have sent in her place a changeling with her face, that we may act against the source of the evil's power both here and in dreams at once." She fastens her mouth into a thin line. "I keep watch on the fae emissary," she adds. "Only the gods keep watch on Eislyn; prayer speed their eye."
"Oh, you hate me," the changeling says to her afterward, lips curved upward cruelly. "Am I not paladin enough?"
"No," Annen says stonily.
"I could be more paladin than you've ever had," it whispers, eyes glittering, and struts away, its breathing tireless and easy; and what can Annen do but follow it, for the changeling is the one that knows the way.
Eislyn walks long, on the strange hills that lie beneath the cold salt dark of the sea, and the drowned and coral-crowned kings of it watch over her weary way, whispering.
All things return to salt, they sneer. Your pain and woe are futile. None hold you to this but you; this is pride, not duty. Hubris, not help. To whom do you owe? From whom have you ever had thanks? All things return to salt. The sea expects nothing; there is nothing for the sea to forgive. Lie down and let the sea take your flesh, as it always will.
"If the sea expects nothing, and has nothing to forgive," Eislyn bubbles from heavy, sea-filled lungs, "then it will wait, and not begrudge."
The sea-afturgangr fall silent at her denials, only their eyes weighing on her, as she lifts slow and tired feet, over rock and coral and shell, mud and flindered ship, beneath countless eternities of water.
There is no true distance in dreams, she knows; they do not follow the rules of stuff and space. No; the rules she moves by are those of poetry, the logics of the heart. She is tested with weariness because she is weary; she is tested at all because she has self-doubt, because she believes in her marrow that being put through the purifying fires of suffering will prove her — or burn her to ash.
She walks. And finally, the sea pales above her; the water's chill eases, the eyes heavy upon her close, and she rises upon the rocks to the shores of faery, shining under the sun in white armour of the sea's salt, crystallised around her.
Annen stoops to splash river-water on her tired face, robbed of sleep by restless distrust of the thing that walks alongside her. Even now, she prickles with the awareness that she has left it behind her turned back, with her own and Eislyn's belongings, unwatched.
"Annen," the changeling sing-songs behind her, having approached on silent foot.
"What," she grumbles, scrubbing at her face.
"Annen," it repeats, even more tauntingly musical, and she launches to her feet to wheel angrily on it.
The changeling smirks. It has slipped Eislyn's clothes from its shoulders, pooling coyly around its waist, twisted a little away at the hips in false modesty even as it flaunts Eislyn's bare breasts at her.
Annen steps back, foot splashing in the river's edge, teetering for a moment. "Curse," she hisses at it. "Fiend. Betrayer—"
"Would you not like to hold hands, then?" the changeling mocks, fluttering eyelashes not its own. "We could sit shoulder to shoulder upon a mossy log, whisper girlish confidences to one another, press innocent little kisses upon each others' lips like bosom childhood friends—"
"We could test whether it's true that evil can't abide running water." Annen's hands are clenched painfully tight at her sides. "Here, I'll volunteer to be the one who holds you under—"
"Annen of Tienadell," the changeling says, and shifts lightning-quick in posture and mien, clutching a fold of robe to its chest and assuming a mask of Eislyn's gravitas. "My dearest dearest. We are on a mission sacred—"
"She's on a sacred mission," Annen says, raw and furious. "You're a pox and an imposter."
"Am I?" it croons, smile sliding back to sly. "Am I, though, Annen? What have I done to make you call me that? Did I take something from her and leave her somewhere to suffer alone?"
Annen stares at it, as though she has discovered a poison snake within her boot. It takes a few moments for her voice to come to her, and when it does, it's a cracked and small thing in her throat.
"She forgives me," Annen says.
The changeling smiles wider, bright and cold as winter.
"Should she?" it says, and sashays back up the riverbank, shrugging Eislyn's robes back into their proper place.
