It was cold beneath the surface. The water shone a deep, quiet blue that turned black the deeper they went. Rasim forgot everything but maintaining the air he'd brought with him. He thrust himself closer to the serpent, folding one hand around a sharp-edged scale. He couldn't let the knife go, not if he wanted to kill the thing, but he couldn't hold on or pull himself forward with the blade in one hand, either.
A memory of how the knife had stuck in the crow's nest railing, vibrating with energy, struck him. Rasim slammed the blade into the serpent's side, giving himself purchase to edge forward with.
The beast didn't even shudder, only swam more deeply. A pin-prick, that's what the knife's cut was. Maybe not even that, although a thin stream of blood trailed out when Rasim pulled the knife free so he could drive it in again, a little farther ahead, pulling himself toward the serpent's head. If the beast didn't even feel the blade as he climbed its body, he wasn't sure he could strike deeply enough to kill it, but he would try. In Kisia's memory, he would try.
The pressure around him grew more intense, making moving more difficult. He breathed as normally as he could, afraid his heart would burst from pressure if he held his breath. The air he carried with him would last because it had to. Length by length, he hauled himself closer to the serpent's head. It began to glow as they went deeper, a faint blue light of its own that came from beneath its scales and ran the length of its sinuous body. Beautiful, Rasim thought again. It was beautiful, and he was going to kill it so it didn't kill him.
It noticed him when he reached its head. Their downward journey stopped, the serpent twisting round and round itself as it tried to scrape him off. Any faster and he would be dizzy, and this was hard enough with his air running out. Its eye glowed too, deep blue around a black pupil. A target, he thought gratefully, and struck.
The serpent's scream was much worse beneath the surface. It vibrated the water, making wobbles like a stone hitting a pond. It came from just in front of Rasim, not quite from the creature's mouth, but from nose-like slits that a gilled creature couldn't possibly breathe with. He was grateful to be behind them: he would have been blasted free if the full force of the scream hit him.
But he had only caused the thing pain, not killed it, or the scream would have died already. He squirmed forward, jamming the knife deeper into its eye, then deeper still, until his wrist, his elbow, the whole of his arm, was buried in the gelatinous ruin that had been the serpent's eye. He gritted his teeth, holding back a shriek of his own. He couldn't afford to use the air, and he was afraid he wouldn't hear himself beneath the serpent's cry. He would lose his nerve if he couldn't hear his own voice.
Finally something scraped at the knife's end. Rasim swirled it around, stirring the beast's brain into goo. Its scream faltered, then failed. It flung itself wildly through the water, no longer diving, no longer fighting, just dying. Relief sapped Rasim's strength. He relaxed, weariness gathering him close. Water rushed by as the serpent began to sink. Rasim felt the current coming closer to his face, and shocked awake again. His air was nearly gone, if he could feel the water so closely.
Blood flooded the water as Rasim pulled his arm free of the serpent's eye. He closed his own eyes against it, then panicked and opened them again to watch the dying serpent begin to sink. If it went that way, then air, breath, a chance to live, was the other way. Rasim flung himself away from the serpent, using his whole body like a flipper and undulating toward the surface. When that became too much for his weakening lungs, he kicked with his legs alone, praying that the air would last. It had to last.
He pushed against the water with his magic, propelling himself upward as best he could. Desimi would be at the surface already, drinking in gulps of clean air, but Rasim's power was too slight for that. His ears blocked as he kicked up, an ache that ran all the way to his throat before they cleared in a burst of squealing discomfort. The water around him was purple with blood, swirls of it catching in the currents. There would be sharks soon, if there weren't already. The fleet had to still be nearby, or he would be dead even if he reached the surface.
He popped through with a surge of energy he didn't know he had, then collapsed into the water on his back, heaving for air. The sun made a soft gold ball on the horizon, still barely awakened for the day, though he felt he'd been working for hours.
Clever, Captain Asindo had said. Rasim was clever. Not clever enough to let the serpent go when it dived, though. Not clever enough to forget vengeance and save himself. He closed his eyes and let himself sink a few inches into the pool of salty blood that surrounded him. Not clever by half, but terribly lucky. It should be him sinking toward the ocean's bottom, or, more likely, lining the serpent's stomach. He was much warmer now, the rising sun and the surface temperature enough to take the chill of the depths away. Either that or the cold had confused his mind, in which case he was far closer to death than he had hoped after such a narrow escape.
In a moment. In a moment he would straighten himself in the water and search for the fleet. It had to be visible: the serpent had taken him into the depths, not out into the sea, hadn't it? Yes. It had, because no other option was bearable. To survive the beast only to drown or be eaten by sharks would be unforgivable, so in a moment Rasim would right himself, and wave to the fleet.
The sea closed over his head, and he sank.
#
A hook fished Rasim from the water. He banged against the side of a ship as he was lifted upward, no finesse or skill in the rescue. Water poured from his lungs, coughs wracking his body as he was swung over a rail and dropped unceremoniously to a deck.
Not one of the fleet's decks. The wood was the wrong color and not smooth enough: Rasim had time to notice that before he vomited water again. He curled up, hands clenched over his head, forehead against the deck, and coughed until tears ran from his eyes. He convulsed with shivers, cold all the way to his bones. Deeper than his bones, even. He might never warm up, the way the sea had crept into him, the way the serpent's blood still tasted sour and cool in his mouth. He wasn't sure he was alive, not really. Siliaria, goddess of the sea, might have taken him directly into her arms, though he would think a Siliarian death ship would be made of finer wood. On the other hand, he probably had to be dead, because the fleet had been alone on the water that morning, and this was not an Ilyaran ship.
"Turn 'im over," someone said. "Let's see what we fished out."
A kick like the ones Desimi delivered hit Rasim's ribs. More water spewed out, some of it falling back into his throat as he flipped over. He sat up, blind with tears, and leaned forward to cough until the pain in his ribs was from inside, not from the kick.
Through tears, he saw bare feet, ragged knee pants: the usual garb of a sailor. Tanned skin, though, not Ilyaran brown: where the pants ended, the color faded quickly, so as the people around him moved he caught glimpses of paler knees. Northerners were that color, and turned bright red under the Ilyaran sun. Rasim wiped his eyes and lifted them to see who had rescued him. Lifted them not to the sailors surrounding him, but to the flag they flew high above the crow's nest.
For a moment it made no sense. Not Ilyaran blue, but Rasim hadn't expected that. Not any of the other local sailing nations, either, not even one of the far distant trade nations like the Northerners. It was a black flag, a plague flag intended to warn others off, only marked with a grinning skull and crossed swords. Plunderers used that mark, plunderers and—
—and pirates.
Rasim fell back, shock wiping away whatever strength he'd had left. His head hit the deck hard enough to make him see stars, and he coughed again as unfamiliar faces bent to examine him. They were curious, not cruel. Perhaps even pirates couldn't be murderous all the time. And they'd taken him from the water, which was something. A big man with a beard shoved a couple of the others away to frown at Rasim, his face upside-down to Rasim's. "Where the devil did you come from?" He spoke the trader's tongue, the common language every sailor and merchant had at least some familiarity with. Rasim had studied it well, hoping fluency would help to make up for his stunted magic.
The question was a good one. His focus went past the bearded man to the sky. Light blue with morning, no longer sunrise-colored, but also nowhere near night, so he might have some sense of how far he'd come off track by the stars. He wet his lips, tasting salt and dried blood, and tried to find an answer. The truth was preposterous.
There was no lie any less unlikely, though. Rasim tried to speak and coughed instead. The bearded man waited, then lifted his eyebrows—it looked strange, upside-down—and Rasim tried again. "A sea serpent dragged me here."
A smile twitched the man's mouth. "Did it now. From where?"
Rasim waved a hand weakly, judging the direction from the sun's position: from the east. Closer to land than they probably were now.
"And what happened to the serpent?" the man asked genially.
"I killed it."
Guffaws roared up around him. Rasim closed his eyes, waiting for them to fade. Closing his eyes was almost all he could manage anyway. His entire body still trembled with cold and exhaustion. His stomach was sour with sea water and serpent blood, but he could feel hunger prodding at its edges. He hoped his rescuers would feed him, since they'd bothered to save him.
"Try again, Ilyaran," the bearded man said eventually. "Give us a tale to top that one."
Rasim opened his eyes again. The man was not a captain, he thought. First mate, maybe, because there was something of command in his crude joviality, but he lacked the presence Asindo had. He even lacked the presence that Hassin, who would be a captain someday, had. There was intelligence in his light-colored eyes, and although he laughed there was a flatness to it, warning Rasim that the man was dangerous. He reminded Rasim of Desimi, just a little.
Desimi wouldn't much care what Rasim said next. He would have decided already if he was going to beat him up or not, and Rasim's response would only determine how badly. Feeling confident he was in trouble one way or another, Rasim shrugged and spoke as clearly as he could. "Can you think of a more likely reason for one boy to be floating in a pool of blood ten miles from shore, with no other ships to be seen?"
"Mermaids," somebody suggested with a grin.
Rasim squinted at the speaker, a young woman grimy with shipboard work and too little bathing, and tried to think of what Hassin might say. "If it was mermaids, I'm glad they threw me back, because none of them was as pretty as you."
He stumbled at the end of it, his tongue thick with embarrassment at even trying to say such a thing, but the woman turned pink under her tan and everyone else shouted with laughter. Applause scattered through the group looking down at Rasim, and the crewmen to either side of the woman gave her good-natured, teasing shoves that made her blush all the more.
The big man laughed too, then glanced up as someone else on board called, "The gulls, Markus. Are we going that way or not? We could use a net of fish."
The bearded man—Markus, definitely not the captain if they called him by name instead of rank—twirled a finger and pointed south, command clear in the action. The crew fell into action, wrenching the ship against the wind and sailing it south more through luck than skill, Rasim thought. Even the Northmen with their big square single sails were better at guiding their ships. Markus caught Rasim's arm and hauled him to his feet, then thrust him toward the rail. "Pretty words to Carley won't keep you alive, Ilyaran. Give us a better story."
Rasim's knees gave out, not from fear, but weariness. The crushing pressure of the sea had been more debilitating than he could have imagined, and the cold still sat deep in his bones. He watched the sails buckle with wind, then turned a tired gaze toward a vast cloud of gulls, not far away from where he'd been taken from the water. He looked back the way they'd come, at the puddle of blood still staining the ocean, and shrugged again. "It's the best story I have. Give me a better one yourself."
"There's sharks," Carley reported. "Lots of sharks, Markus. We're going to fight for our supper if we want it."
"It's not fish." Rasim sank down beside the rail, not caring that Markus tried to haul him up again. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to eat, too, and he wanted to not be thrown overboard to drown again. But mostly he wanted to sleep, and his fear of a pirate ship and its first mate was nothing in the face of such weariness.
Markus grunted curiously. Rasim shrugged again. "It's not fish. It's the serpent. A deep current must have carried it back to the surface. That's why there are so many sharks, for the carrion. If you're going to throw me to them, at least hit me on the head first."
The bearded man gave him a peculiar look, then ignored him as the ship slid into the outer edge of the screaming, circling gulls. Eager birds dove at the ship and wheeled away again, disappointed with the pickings. No one spoke beneath their shrieks, only maneuvered the ship deeper into their circle. The water turned darker, purpling with blood. Rasim shuddered and dragged in a breath deep enough to make him cough again, just to be certain he could still breathe. He could, but the scent of blood rose even over the smell of salt and fish, and stuck in the back of his throat. He slouched further, folded his elbow over his mouth, and tried not to breathe.
He still knew when Markus saw he'd been telling the truth. Knew the moment the serpent's remains became obvious, because the big man finally spoke, his voice deep and very serious: "Get the captain."