Chapter 2082: Family Matters (Part One)

~...if I don’t survive the trial, then at least I tried.~

Rhys stared at Jocelynn’s letter for several minutes as he tried to come to grips with what she’d said.

His pipe had gone cold on the corner of the desk where he’d left it, well away from the last traces of the raven’s frost. Rhys picked it up without thinking, the way he’d done ten thousand times before. He drew a long wooden spill from the cup beside the lamp, touched it to the flame, and held it over the bowl, puffing slowly until the leaf caught and glowed orange in the dim light.

Then he rose, crossed to the iron-bound chest beneath the narrow window, and unlocked it with the key he wore on a chain around his neck. Phylip’s journals lay at the bottom, wrapped in oilcloth, stowed carefully like the treasures they were.

Normally, the chest itself would have been hidden away in the family’s hidden archives. These weren’t the sort of thing to risk being easily discovered. But after Esselk’ti’s visit, he’d brought this chest and a few others back to his study, poring over them late into the night in an attempt to understand both his ancestor’s life and the Eldritch world.

The pages were brittle and water-stained, and the ink had faded to brown, but Rhys didn’t need to search. He’d read the passage so many times since Ashlynn’s birth that the journal all but fell open to it on its own.

Phylip had written of the trial he faced to become the Witch of Ebbing Tides. According to his journal, the Mother of Tides carved open his chest with the shell of a razor clam and placed a pearl within the wound. For six days and nights, he was lashed to a rock on the shore, facing a high tide that rose to his neck and waves that crested even higher.

Phylip wrote that he was tested and tempered in his trial. He watched as everything he held dear was ripped away from him by a relentless, merciless tide. During that time, he said that he learned how to hold on to that which was most dear and to let go of things that were trivial.

It was that disciplined understanding of the Ebbing Tide that allowed Phylip to make peace with the rise of Gaal. He told the Eldritch people living in the Sunrise Isles that their lives were treasures beyond measure, but to preserve them, they would have to let go of their homes. At the same time, the nation he built in the Bay of Black Sails was carried away by the Kingdom of Gaal’s rising tide, but Phylip’s family and his crew escaped execution and destruction at the hands of the Church.

As the Witch of Ebbing Tides, Phylip had been shaped by his trial and his power... So what would becoming the Olive Witch do to Jocelynn? How would she be shaped by it and by the power that came with it?

And could she survive the trial?

A gust of wind off the harbor rattled the window in its frame, and the fire in the hearth sank lower, its flames shrinking back against the coals. Rhys set the journal down and fed the fire another log before he returned to his chair, but the chill in the room didn’t seem to fade.

Phylip was already a man well into his twenties when he encountered the Mother of Tides. He’d faced countless dangers, won his ship, and built his crew. He might have been a young captain, but he knew himself, and he knew what was important.

Jocelynn wasn’t even twenty years old yet. She’d faced hardship, to be certain, but she was far too young to have been tempered by life. Could she really succeed if she had to face what Phylip had?

"But Ashlynn has already raised four witches in her coven," Rhys said, looking back at the second page of Ashlynn’s letter. "That’s twice the size that Clair DuGaal managed. Maybe she knows something to ensure their success," he mused. "Or maybe it isn’t as difficult for witches to join the coven of the Mother of Trees... but then, why was Clair’s coven so small?"

There was too much that he didn’t know. It was impossible to come to any conclusions based on the little he’d been told, and the rest of Jocelynn’s letter wasn’t very helpful. She mentioned that she’d already written a longer letter that explained what had happened the past year and that she’d entrusted it to Sir Elgon Prowell, but that she hoped her parents would never read it and that she’d be able to tell them everything in person after she became the Olive Witch.

"I wish you’d wait for me," Rhys said, thumping the surface of his desk with a fist as he set the letter aside. "I hate being so far away from you three..."

Part of him wanted to toss everything overboard, leave the planning of this war and the oversight of the county in the hands of his barons and rush off to the Vale of Mists to be with his daughters... He should at least be present while Jocelynn faced this trial! Smoke curled up from his pipe as he sat back, and he realized he’d clenched the stem so tightly between his teeth that his jaw ached.

"You could have told me about this, Ash," he said, looking once again at Ashlynn’s letters with a frown on his face as if his eldest daughter were sitting there. "I’d sleep better if you could explain what’s going on with Jocey to me. If I could share Phylip’s journals with you..."

"Arrrggg... I should have done that before you left," he said, making a fist with one hand and thumping the desk again. If he’d handled things better from the start and prepared her with the things held in the family archives... If she knew what he knew, then she could speak to his concerns and ease his fears.

But Ashlynn had no way of knowing how much he knew or didn’t know, not when he’d kept those secrets from her in the interests of protecting her and hiding her from the Church.

"I’ve wronged you, my Little Sanderling," Rhys said. "I suppose I’ll have to join Jocey in finding a way to make it up to you. Consider the blockade an installment on what I owe," he told the letter. "And we can speak about the rest when we’re together again," he said as he reached for the final letter.

The third letter was lighter than the others. A single sheet, folded twice, with his name on the front in Maela’s neat, careful hand. Rhys turned it over in his fingers and held it for a long moment before he could bring himself to break the seal.

~Rhys, if you haven’t read your daughter’s letters yet, put this down and read them first.~

"Demanding a bit, loveling?" Rhys said with a chuckle as he continued to read.

~You better have done as I told you and read their letters first. I’m cross with you, Rhys. I thought we were partners. I thought we would sail from dawn to sunset together. I thought we were on the same ship, together, from dawn to dusk and all through the night. Isn’t that what you promised me when we married? When you charmed me away from the marriage my father arranged?~

~You fought for me. Risked your life for me. But you lied to me, and you lied to Ashlynn, and you did it for more than twenty years, Rhys. How can I forgive that? How can I forgive what you’ve withheld from me all these years?~