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She would have been wrong.
Battle armor suits you. And unfortunately, you’ll need it in this place. If they manage to cut you, don’t let them see you bleed. If they make you bleed, make them hurt. Never let them see you flinch. And forget, entirely, about me.
Carefully, she refolded the note and slid it back into the envelope, the envelope back into the coat. She would not forget. He was the only one who had ever seen her flinch, seen her bleed. Before this was done, she would make Alaric hurt. And if she had armor, now she needed a blade.
She slipped off her boots, shrugged out of the coat and handed it to Marquin. “Hold onto this for me.”
He took it reflexively. “What are you doing?” he asked as she waded into the lake.
“Reclaiming history.” She dove beneath the surface. The cool waters enveloped her, the taste against her lips briny, as if the lake truly had been born from humanity’s tears, as the legends claimed. Bright sorrows slithered through the currents like eels. She sang, her voice garbled beneath the water, and called them to her.
They noticed her at once, ceasing their lazy serpentine movements, and swarmed. At the shift in their attention, she swam upward, breaking the surface of the lake once more, inhaling a deep breath as the first sorrow reached her. It twined around her ankle, up her calf, and then she was falling into it.
Loss washed over her, a flurry of emotions and distress, of suffering and longing and endless nights of weeping. The person whose sorrow it had been had lost their son, and they had come to the lake to forget. She did not try to fight the feelings, to bury them. She had heard Ferrian’s legend enough times to know better, to know that sorrow could be neither fought nor destroyed. It could only be lived.
So she lived it, and in so doing, bought that sorrow a moment of peace. Its form stilled in the water, no longer battering at her. The relief was brief, a mere handful of seconds before the next one gripped her. A lover, this time. Lost not to death or disloyalty, but to a slow fading of passion. To long years of tiny miscommunications and small hurts that seemed like nothing at the time and yet, strung together, caused an end. She lived that slow separation that was heartbreak and desolation.
A third sorrow was more intricate, a loss of a different kind, born from secrets and betrayal and slow-plotted revenge. It was, surprisingly, the sorrow of the person who had hidden and schemed and brought the plans to fruition, rather than the sorrow of the person who had been harmed. And she knew, from the Song’s sadness in her mind, that the moment they had laid the sorrow for those actions down, they had gone out and done it all again.
The fourth that came to her was born from failure and uncertainty. From all the ways a person could allow fear to keep them from ever living a moment of their life and how they might, near the end of it, understand as much. Just as Clare understood that, had they not given the sorrow for it to the lake, they might have found the strength to finally live.
Then the fifth came, and the sixth, and the seventh. On and on it went. So many sorrows, all different and yet all the same, an inundation of hurt and tragedy. Her limbs grew leaden, her breathing labored, and she struggled to keep her head above water as the weight of a thousand sorrows tried to drag her under. And when they didn’t, when she had acknowledged the final one and the sky was beginning to lighten on the horizon line, the lake tried to convince her to give them back. To give them back and lay down one of her own alongside them.
Wouldn’t it be easier, the lake seemed to ask, if she did not have to carry the weight of all those choices she had made? All those deaths? If she didn’t have to feel the consequences of the cage she’d made for the Song when she was so young. The one that had locked away from her the only power that could have saved her from the years of torment that had been Simian. The one even she hadn’t been able to open until she’d finally broken, and it had cracked the cage, and then to keep herself intact she’d had to break the tether to her body.
Wouldn’t it be easier if she hadn’t spent two years in madness, in the muck and mire of the swamp, her mere touch a death sentence to anything living? Easier if she hadn’t come back from it, hadn’t found the Arrendons and Chalen, Alys and Lina, Kialla and Numair? Her greatest sorrow was that she had come to care and, having never cared for anything before, she did so all the more fiercely now.
But more than that, she was sorrow. She, who had seen so much of life’s depravity. She, the lake promised, belonged here. She had once nearly lost herself beneath the waters of one of its sisters, and it had tasted her and found her welcome. Why should she want to leave, carrying the burden of a thousand sorrows with her, when she could remain here?
Stay, the lake whispered, and be my lady. Stay, and we will neither of us be lonely again.
And Clare felt the lake’s sorrow then, for it had once made the offer to another, but Ferrian had refused it. And like Ferrian before her, Clare could not be swayed by the tranquility she knew would be hers if she let the waters claim her. If she became the lady of this lake. For her heart was not a thing made for tranquility and forgetting. Hers was a heart designed for rage and vengeance, and no force in this world would quell it.
She had lived her own sorrow. She had lived a thousand more. And there was power in sorrow. In surviving it.
She called them to her now, every now-quiescent bit of soothed pain. They rushed to her, filling the space between her hands, folding in on themselves in order to fit. Once she had them all, she drew her hands together, compressing them into a small sphere of brilliant orange light.
She clasped the sphere to her chest and dove, willing tired eyes to stay open, tired lungs to hold breath. Down and down and down she went, until her ears and lungs both felt as if they would burst from the pressure. Until one questing hand found the lakebed, and the light of the sorrows finally washed over the hilt of a sword.
It rose vertically from the rocky floor, the tip plunged deep into solid stone, the hilt pointed toward the surface. The blade was impossible to discern beneath layers of algae and aquatic buildup, the hilt eaten bare of its former wrapping, mussels latched onto its frame like ornaments.
She teased a single sorrow from the sphere and fed it to the sword. The mussels fell away, algae sloughing off the blade in chunks that broke apart and turned the water to a cloudy haze. The sorrow she had fed into the sword called to the others in her sphere, dragging the next to join it, and the second called to the third. So they went, one after the other, all connected to each other like a rope made of so many sashes tied together.
As they slid into the sword rust fell from the metal, the ragged, cracked edges of the blade repairing themselves, the tattered remnants of the hilt-wrapping growing once more supple and whole. With each sorrow absorbed, the sword’s black blade shone with orange light, until it took in the last sorrow and, vibrating with heat and energy, the rock holding the sword blade began to melt. She reached out, curling her fingers around the hilt, and pulled the sword from the stone.
It was a wicked, undulating thing with a flamberge blade, each dip and curve like flames sprouting from the sides. The hilt felt right in her palm, as if it fit with her. She clasped it to her chest and kicked for the surface, her vision blacking and her head thrumming with the incessant need to breathe. Every inch of her body screamed at her to open her mouth and inhale, to let out the breath trapped inside her lungs and trade it for another, pulse hammering against her temples until she thought her skull would split from the pressure.
She kicked furiously, bursting above the lake’s surface and sucking in great heaving breaths. Ferrian’s sword cast an orange, sun-dance glow, lighting her way as she swam for the shore, her teeth chattering with wet and cold. When her feet at last found purchase and she walked out of the lake, Marquin and Verol were there. The former wrapped her in Numair’s coat, the spelled warmth of it driving away the water and its chill.
Verol stared at the blade in her hand. “Is that…?”
“The Sword of a Thousand Sorrows.” It hissed and sparked as the sorrows burned the water from the blade, and Clare slid it into the sheath that appeared in her left hand. She buckled it around her waist and its weight there also felt right. Familiar.
She closed her eyes and saw the last battle this blade had fought. Saw it through the eyes of a woman several centuries dead. A woman who had also lived a thousand sorrows so that she might claim vengeance as her own. A woman whose bloodlust now clamored in her Clare’s veins, whose memories now pressed at the back of her skull.
She inhaled deeply, the faint scent of flowers and rich earth that lingered on Numair’s coat grounding her back in the present. She opened her eyes, letting go of Ferrian’s ancient battle to focus on the one ahead of her. Her lips curved, offering the Arrendons a smile that was all promise and no comfort.
“Come,” she said. “We have work to do.”
