Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
thing again. Cayse, I could almost want some kind of control. Ri and Simic, they
hardly hold me here at all anymore. You say I come and go, and that's what I do.
I envy Ulanda her youth. It's like I remember the words of how to live but have
forgotten how to speak them.”
“Not all the words. You told Raswini to let you die.”
Had she? “A captive god - the Spann don't have it wrong, not entirely. It’s
almost as though I might shed my body.” And the converse: what Angansit would
want. Would she really want to shed her will instead? To be an obedient puppet?
Cayse saw the fear; the countering gentleness in him showed her that. Years
together, did he sometimes wish her more pliant?
“I'd rather see you die then helpless,” he said.
She hadn't realized she'd spoken the other. “I am helpless in so much. Cayse,
would you kill me if A'in weren’t here to do it? If I fail?”
“And Ulanda? It's an option, Possi. Let her choose to die.”
“We're here,” she repeated. “All of us. She could have died already if that's
what supposed to happen. Or what it was that brought her here through a
diamond that should never have opened again, should never have released them
if they had gained entrance. What drives this, I can feel it, but I can't explain
what it is. I don't know those words. Or, rather I do, but I... I don't know why I
try.”
He smiled gently. “To have someone listen.”
“I'll miss Raswini, I won't forget too. She always listened.”
“Better than I do.”
“A butterfly.”
“I didn't say that.”
“In a meadow. She loved him, you know. Your father. She would have been
happy with him, living with him, I mean. Not stealing time. Did he know who she
was?”
Cayse shook his head. “He didn't want to. He accepted things as they were.
Just before he died, we talked and I tried to explain, but he stopped me. He said
that Haltinport was Haltinport, that there was no Temple there, or people from
Temple, or reason for anyone to think differently.”
He copied the accent, or had remembered it from his childhood. “And now
she's flown away.”
“I was thinking about Kascin when I thought that.”
A meadow, a high mountain meadow, sunlight and flowers. Poss a'ltic pulled
herself back with a shudder. “A dark bird on the wing, Cayse. Oimit's felt the wind
of her flight, and Tu'pin.”
“And you.”
“I'm a butterfly, Cayse.” She couldn't stop saying his name.
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca