Eye of the Ocean Book 3 Ji'jin Station

Eye of the Ocean – Book 3: Ji’Jin Station
“I saw you in the girdle all that time ago,” Cassa said. “Only you and as hard
to see then as you are now.”
Sitting cross-legged beside the water, she toyed with a reed in her lap, the
crystal mouth blinking in the light. She wasn't hard to see at all. Kneeling beside,
he took the reed from her hand and kissed her palm. Her wrist braid ends floated
in the wind, he saw the sparks at the ends, black to the light of his robe.
“You said when it was over...” She tasted the same. “Is it?” he asked, speaking
against her palm. Then said the same against her lips.
At his touch, she had lain back, his hair a fall of lavender touched silver over
her, but she turned her face away when he would have kissed her again.
Her skin was smooth against his fingers. Amber to cream. “Have I done
something wrong? Are you my conscience instead of my Lady? I hoped not to be
creating this.”
“Did you? You created me a long time ago. What would I be without you?”
He looked into her brown eyes to see himself as he had before. Creating this or
recreating - the old man was gone. “You'd be free of Empire, for one.”
She shrugged and turned further away from him. “Free?” The one word held all
the despair he remembered so well.
He let her go and she rolled to sit up, watching the water again, her hands in
her lap. “Or would you be free instead of your promise to me?” he asked. “You've
always kept to your word, as best you could.”
“Someone did,” she said, looking up at him.
“Who if not you?”
“You forget how many times this has happened. Or if not this happening...”
One hand motioned out. Dark water stretched to the horizon. “... then me. Too
many times.”
Sitting next to her, he put his arm over her shoulder. “Is happening. Will
happen. Cassa...”
“Don't play word games with me, Garm.”
Her scent filled his mouth. Lavender with a bloom of sweat. The moist cotton
of her tunic, warmed by her body. “What is it that you want me to do?”
She let her head rest against his shoulder. “Tell me a story. Let me know how
this ends.”
A story. He thought a very long time. Time. There was no sense of it passing,
or of urgency. So many books and stories, but he didn't need them here.
Three were possibilities. One he was tempted partly by the resemblance of the
paper used to the colors of the ni'at tree bark and wood and partly by the tidy
ending, all the loose ends tucked in. Another was a strange story, and strangely
happy as hardly any of them were. Was it too small a story, he wondered, too
simple? Or was his reluctance that at the last, it had no place in it for him?
Laurel Hickey www.2morrow.bc.ca