Chapter 48

  Rosma awoke where she had died only a moment before: on a black beach of cold iron filings beneath a low and menacing storm. Sleet pattered around her. Thick waves lapped at the rust-stained iron beach. Salty slush sloshed over steel shells and black iron sand on the snowy shoreline. Dark, wet, icy cold. None of this bothered Rosma in the least.

  She sat up, looked blankly out at the sunless sea, the metallic coral, the drizzling sleet. She stood, hesitant. She bent over, flexed until her head scraped the rusting iron filings. She performed an acrobatic flip and fell awkwardly because her body moved differently now.

  Rosma lay where she landed, hardly able to comprehend the sensation. No pain. None. Derxis had been right. Cold relief trickled through her. She almost felt like laughing. Almost.

  She stood again, and this time she took up her spear as she cast her gaze about. Rhamnusia, the Coral Moon. Ice and rust and traitors and judgment, storm and snow and hard metal. The shape of her moon was irregular, a vast agglomeration of shells and coral cupping pockets of icy seas. All the shells and coral, and many of the beasts, were of cold metal—except, perhaps, for the scintillack glimmering in the depths. And she, Rosma, Hero of Sea, was the last in a long line of Judges who ruled this world. Her tower was a place of scales and balance. Yet there was no balance. There could not be, for there could be no mercy. Not here. The sea does not forgive.

  Fiora believed that Rosma was supposed to bestow mercy. Fiora, among others, had warned Rosma about slaying so many of the residents of her own moon. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps she was not “supposed” to implement pure justice. If so, then this world was at fault. It was the writer of the story who failed to understand. Mercy was antithetical to justice. And Rosma would do that which required doing. As she had always done.

  Rosma hated her moon. She much preferred Fiora’s Wave Moon, with its endless warm seas and countless beautiful sea creatures. The floating isles, the jungle cities with their supple trees swaying crazily in the waves, strung together with stretchy vines like rubberband trampolines, the resplendent animals, some with blinking lights over their heads denoting sentience. Monsters and mysterious caverns deep below. Rosma could admit, secretly to herself, that she had even had fun on Quelk.

  She wiped a crust of ice from her medallion. Her conch sigil shone brighter—hers, along with Derxis’s. Emmius’s symbol was dark. Rosma’s gaze came to rest on Fiora’s drop-shaped symbol, glowing green.

  Rosma hesitated, then strode along the shore. The black filings caked her webbed feet with a pitchy crust of sharp granules. A white shape, incongruous in the darkness, rose from the soupy black slush of the sea. Her shark, her angel, reported negative on its patrol.

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  A flash of lightning illuminated a tall, hunched shape perched nearby on a spiky formation of weathered copper coral. Wings like stiff canvas rasped as they twitched around the Watcher, unfolding, unfurling. One twitched upward to direct her attention above. Rosma saw nothing but the roiling darkness overhead. Perhaps the great shark was passing overhead, masked by storm.

  The Watcher at last revealed its face, or at least the shadowy hollow where Rosma assumed a face lay. A dim light glinted there. An eye?

  “Should I call her?” Rosma asked of the creature, shouting to be heard.

  It stretched out a wing, cracked and ragged like a sheet of ancient leather. Ink ran like blood to form a rune in a language Rosma did not know. Somehow, she understood anyway. It was an affirmative. Already the word dripped into incoherence, washed away by the pounding sleet.

  The Watcher ensconced itself once more within its inner pair of wings. The outer pair opened up like parachutes, caught the wind, and with an awkward hop, the Watcher barreled away into the icy skies over the dark sea.

  Rosma sat on a small coral outcropping of some black metal. It was magnetized, made fuzzy by iron filings.

  She called Fiora, and they spoke a while. Fiora feared her quest. She feared to understand. Rosma told her that it was supposed to hurt, that their quests were meant to be painful, that she had no right to talk, for she had just cheated, according to Derxis.

  Fiora, of course, was overjoyed to learn of Rosma’s freedom from pain. And Fiora implored Rosma, as she always did, to show mercy to those on the Coral Moon who did not deserve it. And Rosma, likewise, advised Fiora to show less mercy—to still her kindness and quell her compassion.

  And it occurred to Rosma, in a dim but poignant way, that she and Fiora would have done well had they each inherited the other’s moon and quest. That she and Fiora were like two sides of a coin, mercy and justice, though some would say kindness and cruelty. Perhaps they were friends for this.

  And in the end, with Rosma’s aid, Fiora made up her mind. She would do it. She would let her guardian die.