Night’s last mud-dark weight still sat hot and quiet on the city when someone began hammering furiously on my door. I went for my knives first, shoving aside the light sheet, snatching the blades off the bedside table, then rolling to the floor. The floor isn’t generally a coveted position from which to enter a fight, but I wasn’t in the fight yet, and I’d spent too much time studying the “Knock, Wait, Stab” approach to killing to go near the door with my head held high for the convenience of my adversary.
Be where you shouldn’t—an old Rassambur aphorism.
The frantic hammering paused for a moment, replaced by a man’s voice: “Pyrre!”
I was still bleary-eyed from sleep and aching from Ela’s drubbing, but I wasn’t about to give away my position. After a moment, the drumming started up again, so violently it seemed he wasn’t knocking so much as trying to beat down the door. With the tip of one knife, I silently lifted the hooked steel lock.
“Pyrre,” he growled again. “The commander sent me.”
This time, just as the pounding resumed, I lifted the latch, then yanked the door inward. Carried forward by the force of his own urgency, a young man stumbled into the room. I tripped him with an outstretched ankle, then leapt on top, setting the tip of my knife against his throat. The position reminded me uncomfortably of Ela’s lecture the night before. I could hear her voice murmuring in my ear: It’s the space between the bodies that matters. I glanced down at the man’s mud-spattered tunic, the short sword belted at his side, at my own bare legs pinning his shoulders to the floor, then grimaced. Somehow, in trying to create the About to Kill space, I’d stumbled into something … else.
The young Greenshirt—he was wearing one of the standard uniforms—didn’t seem to notice my nakedness. Instead, his gaze was fixed on the hilt of the blade I’d laid against his throat, eyes nearly crossed with the effort, as though he could keep the length of steel from plunging through his neck with the power of his stare. He seemed an unlikely assassin.
“I’m going to get up,” I said, trying to speak in a voice slow and calm enough not to panic him, “and I am going to put on some clothes. Please don’t try to kill me.”
His lips moved in some silent prayer, but he seemed unable to respond. I shifted the tip of my knife from his neck, but his stricken gaze followed the blade.
“Hey,” I said, slapping him on the cheek until he met my eyes. “Are you going to kill me?”
He shook his head stupidly, slowly. “No. The commander sent me. I’m here with a message.…”
“Save the message,” I said, rising to my feet, “until I’m wearing pants.”
When I went to close the door, I found Ela leaning against the casement. She’d had time, I noted irritably, to slip into a loose silk bed shirt. Or maybe she’d been sleeping in it. Or maybe she hadn’t been sleeping at all. Whatever the case, the priestess looked relaxed and amused.
“When I suggested you pay more attention to your body, I didn’t mean you had to go at it hammer and tongs right away.”
“He’s a messenger,” I growled.
Ela just shrugged. “That’s what I like about you, Pyrre. You never pass up a chance to learn.”
The Greenshirt was getting unsteadily to his feet behind me. “Who is she?” he managed.
“No one,” I said, slamming the door with my foot. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Anho,” he managed.
I suppressed a frown. It had always seemed a unique form of cruelty, naming children after famous women and men. As though the burden of one’s own proper name, one’s own unlived life, were not weight enough already to crush a person. I’d almost forgotten that about Dombâng, how so many people were named for the city’s founders and protectors: Goc My, Anho, Chua, Thum, Voc. It was, I suppose, one of the only ways left for the parents of the city to hold on to some of the history that the Annurians had denied them.
He stared at me, momentarily wordless, as I snatched my pants off the back of the chair, slammed my legs into them, then pulled a loose, sleeveless tunic over my head. I flicked aside the curtain to the room’s single window. Off to the east, night’s indigo dye was fading into dawn. “What does Ruc want so bad he can’t wait till the sun’s up, Anho?”
I couldn’t hear Ela’s footsteps retreating down the hallway, but that didn’t mean anything. I hadn’t heard her approach, either. Not that it mattered. It was my conversations with Ela that I needed to hide from Ruc and the Greenshirts, not the other way around.
“You have to come,” he said, reaching for my wrist, intending, evidently, to drag me out of the room. Not too bright, this one. By this time, though, I’d woken up thoroughly enough not to kill him. I knocked his hand away, took him by the throat, and pulled him close. His artery throbbed in my grip, and his warm eyes went wide, but he made no move to pull away. He couldn’t have been far into his twenties, just one more kid in Ruc’s dilapidated army. I let up on the pressure slightly, tried to make my voice friendly, even cheerful.
“Anho,” I said, speaking slowly. “Stop pounding on things and shouting and trying to drag me out the door. Just tell me Ruc’s message.”
His brown face was purpling toward plum. When I let him go, his words splashed out all in a single gasp.
“They hit a transport.”
I frowned. “They, I assume, being the local insurgency, and the transport being a ship carrying more legionaries from Annur?”
His head yanked up and down in a puppet’s nod.
I tried to imagine the scene. Any transport would have been carrying at least a full legion, maybe two, over a hundred armed solders, almost certainly veterans, if they’d been sent to Dombâng. This, against a rabble of idolatrous zealots. Hardly seemed like a fair fight.
“How many prisoners did you take?”
The young soldier gaped at me. I slapped him gently on the cheek. “How many?”
He shook his head in a mute, bovine denial, wandered his own mind a while before finding the words. “None. They’re all dead.”
I whistled. “No prisoners? Ruc must be less than pleased. I wouldn’t want to be the legionary commander when Ruc catches up with him.”
Anho stared at me. “He’s dead.”
I frowned. “The commander?”
“All of them. The legionaries, the insurgents. Everyone. They’re all dead. Someone massacred them all.”
* * *
I spent most of the morning sulking, standing at the rail of the ship, staring down into the murky water as it slid past.
The sudden, unexpected arrival of Ruc’s messenger had filled me with excitement. Whatever was happening, Ruc had sent for me. It meant my plan was working. He wanted my perspective, my advice, and maybe he wanted me around for something more. The thrill of the night’s chase through the canals of Dombâng came back to me as I followed the messenger over the causeways, then in through the iron gates of the Shipwreck—the huge, haphazard wooden fortress of the Greenshirts.
I’d given Ruc his space when we loaded up—his men didn’t know me, and I didn’t want to get in the way of his command. I’d stayed well out of the way as the sun rose grudgingly above the rushes and the ship fell into the creaking rhythm of oars and grumbled orders. Since casting off the hawsers, however, he’d barely glanced at me. His indifference, in fact, was so absolute that I might have stumbled onto the boat entirely by accident, an irrelevant, extra passenger fetched up on the deck.
Sick and prickly with my own disappointment, I retreated to the rail, tried on a look that seemed appropriately military and aloof, and remained there most of the morning, watching the deadly creatures of the delta slide silently past.
I’d been surprised to discover, when I first set foot outside Dombâng, that everyone else on the continent seemed to view the Shirvian River with a kind of complacent indifference. For the majority of its great arc across Eridroa, the current is easily navigable—sinuous and swift above Lake Baku, wide and strong below, broken by only two cataracts. To the people of Sia or Ghan, the river is little more than a benign, undying mule, one that can be relied on, season after season, to patiently bear the people and property of half a dozen atrepies on its broad, glistening back. Everywhere above the delta, the river is a servant.
In the delta itself, however, in the thousand braided channels that constantly threaten to strangle Dombâng, the river is a god, and not a gentle one.
Maps are almost useless. The delta is always changing and growing in unpredictable ways. Deep channels will silt up in months, become suddenly impassible. Islands that might have made reliable points of reference sink into the murk almost overnight, swallowed in mud and reeds, leaving no sign of their passage. New mounds of clotted earth are constantly cropping up where there had been nothing more than silently swirling water. Only the city’s fishers, who ply the waters with their nets every single day, can stay ahead of the constantly shifting labyrinth, and even they fall prey to the delta.
Of course, Dombâng would never have grown to its current size if no one had done anything to drive the watery labyrinth back. Among Goc My’s many achievements was the establishment of a corps of engineers charged with building and maintaining a reliable channel, deep enough for heavy seagoing vessels, linking the upper course of the Shirvian to the sea. The city doubled in size in a single generation, then doubled again, and again. Even as gold and silver flooded in, however, borne in the hands and hulls of foreigners from a dozen nations, there were those who whispered that Goc My had betrayed his city and her gods. In all these years, it is the delta that has kept us safe, they whispered, and he has profaned the delta. He has had the hubris to try to tame it.
From the deck of the double-hulled boat where I stood, the delta looked anything but tamed. We were following Goc My’s central channel eastward, the oarsmen working with the sluggish current. From the relative safety of the deck, I could make out the slick-bellied eels twisting in our wake, the long snakes basking in the riverbank mud, the crocodiles floating silently, patiently along the river’s edges, waiting for some unwary prey. Boulders broke the current’s surface in some places; in others, the jagged rocks lurked just beneath, stone teeth ready to tear the bottom out of our hull. The boat’s navigator perched in the bow, shouting directions back to the helmsman—Avoid the bank there! Hard port! Slip wide of that eddy!—who handled the tiller with one steady hand, his face lost in the focus of the moment.
Ruc didn’t seem to notice any of it, not the sandbars or the crocodiles, not the deck rocking softly beneath our feet. He’d had his eyes fixed on the horizon for most of the morning, as though staring at something past the limit of mortal vision. As the sun climbed higher, however, baking the deck, glittering like a million coins on the ruffled water, I began to hear Ela’s voice—smooth and sly as the priestess herself—murmuring inside my mind:
If you can’t even stand the right way, you’re never going to fall in love.
I took a deep breath, then turned my attention to the arrangement of the space between us. Ruc stood up in the bow, just a few paces behind the navigator, back straight as the boat’s mast, scarred hands clasped behind him. In my irritation, I’d taken myself almost as far away from him as I could get, all the way into the stern, where I could lean on the rail while resting an arm over the transom.
Once I’d drummed up the courage to consider the situation, to really look at what was going on inside my own fool head, it became clear what I was doing. I had retired to the stern of the boat in the hope that Ruc would notice my absence and follow me. It was, I had to admit, a strange vision of intimacy, one based on retreat and pursuit, one in which the proof of his interest would lie in his willingness to hunt me down regardless of how far I fled. I could almost hear Ela laughing in my ear: Are you a woman, Pyrre, or a little girl? I sidestepped that question, raising my eyes to study Ruc instead.
Vexingly, he had not hunted me down, if hunt was even the word for a stroll of a dozen paces down an open deck. He hadn’t even turned since I left him in the bow, didn’t even have the good grace to seem wary of me. With his back turned like that, I could have driven a knife between his shoulder blades, bursting his heart before he had a chance to cry out. I’d gone to great lengths, of course, to convince him that we were on the same side. I wanted him to believe I was Kettral, to believe we both served the same empire, but I didn’t want him to be so ’Kent-kissing relaxed.
How much could a man love a woman, after all, if he wasn’t a little worried she might kill him?
I realized I was tapping my knife. I stopped, gritted my teeth, pushed myself clear of the rail, found my balance as the boat rolled gently beneath me. If Ela was right, then I was all wrong. There were no hot edges in the space I’d built between us, no hooks. I’d come to the far end of the boat hoping he would join me, but he hadn’t joined me. I could wait, hope, pine, or I could try something different. I spared a silent curse for Eira, whose canny ways were so unlike those of the god I’d chosen, then strode forward.
I tried to feel the emptiness between us as it closed, tried to find the shape of it, the angles and edges. The first few paces made no difference, but by the time I stood an arm’s length from Ruc’s back, something had changed. I could feel it inside me, as though someone had tied a hair-fine invisible cord to my softest organs and was using it to pull me, gently but insistently, toward Ruc. It irritated me that Ela was right, but I didn’t have time for irritation, because Ruc was turning, finally taking his eyes off the maze of the delta for the first time. Whether he, too, felt that silken tether as he met my gaze, it was impossible to say.
“We’d be there already if we had your bird,” he said.
I shook my head. “There’s no place to hide a Kettral in Dombâng. If we’d tried, half the city would know we were here.”
For a while, he didn’t respond, just looked at me, eyes warm and dangerous as the delta itself, and slightly narrowed, as though he were trying to make out the shape of some dangerous sandbar through a heavy morning fog. Unlike the rest of the Greenshirts on the boat, Ruc wore no armor, just a loose pair of cotton pants cinched tight at the waist with a rope belt, and the customary vest favored by everyone in Dombâng. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons—Ruc had never been one for starched uniforms or martial bedazzlement—and I could see an old scar carved across the muscle of his chest, one he’d acquired down in the Waist years earlier, the healed flesh smoother and a shade paler than the rest of his skin. Like everyone else on the boat, he was sweating, but unlike the Greenshirts, who looked hot and miserable in their helmets and mail, Ruc looked ready, like a fighter warm and limber for the contest to come.
I could hit him.
The thought bloomed inside me, quick and unbidden. A part of me knew it was ridiculous, but then again, it had worked when we were in Sia. I had yet to find Love’s undiscovered country, but I felt certain it shared a border with a darker realm, one that I knew all too well, a land of constant struggle governed by Violence and Fury. Breaking my fist against the stone-hard muscles of his ribs might not be love, but it was some kind of intimacy, at least, the touch of skin against skin.
I shoved the thought aside.
For one thing, attacking the commander of the Greenshirts on the deck of his own vessel in front of a score of his own men wasn’t likely to further my claim that we were allies. There was more to my reluctance than that, however. I could remember all too well Ela’s arm locked around my throat, her whispered insistence on the tiny distinctions and degrees of all human intimacy. Almost loving, she murmured, her brown eyes so violently close to my own. I felt her lithe body shift. Almost killing.
I had already tried hitting Ruc. We’d fought each other half a dozen times, and though the violence led to several months sharing the same bed, we hadn’t, either one of us, fallen in love. I could tread that path again, and easily enough, but I needed something better this time, something more. I tried to imagine how the other women of the world—women raised outside Rassambur, women trained in other arts than the cutting of throats and the ending of lives—potters, maybe, or princesses—might approach a young man standing on the deck of the ship.
I could hug him.
I couldn’t imagine a more irritating vision: leaning in, pulling him close, resting my grateful head against his chest like some sort of supplicant or idiot. The thought redoubled my desire to hit him, and to resist that, I shifted half a foot away.
“If it wasn’t the local insurgents,” I asked finally, stepping up to the rail beside him, “then who?”
The Greenshirts had been eyeing me warily all morning, obviously unsure who I was or why I was there. A couple of the oarsmen muttered under their breath as I approached their commander, but they were too far down the boat to hear us.
“It’s the insurgents,” Ruc replied.
“Not what your man told me when he tried to kick in my door. Said they were all dead—both the legionaries and whoever attacked them.”
“My ‘man’ is a terrified twenty-year-old telling you a story he heard from another twenty-year-old who heard it from a pair of fishers who were so drunk when they finally got to the Shipwreck that they couldn’t stand up.”
“You think they’re wrong?”
“I think,” Ruc said, flexing his hand, testing out the fist, “that the only people you tend to find after an ambush are the dead ones.”
“When’s the last time the insurgency hit an Annurian transport?”
He shook his head grimly. “Never.”
“Historical moment,” I said, smiling brightly.
“I’d have thought Kettral would be a little more vexed by assassination and open rebellion.”
“When vexation starts making the bad guys dead, I’ll look into it.” I glanced down the channel, which was overhung by rushes on both sides. Tiny birds in the rushes cried their feathered fury at our passage, then fell silent. “Have you considered that this whole thing might be a trap?”
Ruc’s stare was flat as the ocean before a storm.
“Let me rephrase,” I said. “What are you planning to do if it is a trap?”
“We have ten boats,” he said, gesturing to the vessels behind us. “Two hundred Greenshirts.”
“There were a hundred legionaries on the transport,” I pointed out, “and according to your man, they were all slaughtered.”
“That boat was vulnerable, alone, taken by surprise. When the trap slammed shut, there were no other vessels to back it up.”
“Meaning, if there is a trap, you intend to row straight into it.”
“Only the first boat. The others will hang back.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the vessels creasing the dark water behind us.
“I can’t help noticing that we’re the first boat.”
I wondered what degree of concern to feign. The truth was, I didn’t much care if it was a trap. I’d spent most of the trip thinking about Ruc, about love, about whatever was wrong with me that meant I needed to think so hard about the first two things. I knew, obviously, that a ship full of slaughtered soldiers waited at the end of our foray, but that was nothing new: Ananshael waits, finally, at the end of all voyages, bottomless and patient as the sea. I had had a lifetime to get used to that truth, and yet it seemed that I ought to try to look … what?
Frightened? That couldn’t be right. I’d never met any of the Kettral, but as a fighting force they were legendary, equal to my sisters and brothers. Kettral weren’t likely to be scared by the thought of a little violence. On the other hand, the Kettral weren’t priests of Ananshael. Death, to them, was failure. I tried to find my way into the character I’d created—a strong, fierce young woman who had trained all her life to fight for the glory of her empire, who had come back to the city of her birth to see it pacified, to make sure the job was done right. I shifted my face into a new expression, one that I hoped might approximate a resolute and unflinching civic devotion.
Ruc narrowed his eyes. “If you’re going to be sick, do it over the rail.”
That was the last time in my life that I aimed for an expression of civic devotion.
I turned away to hide my irritation. Our boat’s navigator had taken a side channel, one far narrower than the river’s main course. The current ran more sluggishly here, and the banks were closer, as though threatening to choke off the flow altogether. The small man was sweating, leaning halfway out over the boat’s stem, desperate to spot the rocks or sandbars before we ran aground.
“None of the soldiers noticed they left the main passage?” I asked. “Or that the banks were getting uncomfortably close?”
“Would you?” Ruc asked.
I turned to face him once again. Despite the mounting tension, Ruc didn’t scowl, didn’t snarl or shout. His hands remained clasped behind his back, his face still. I knew that stillness, though. When Ruc stopped moving, it meant he was holding something back, some violence that couldn’t be safely unleashed.
I liked that violence.
I moved closer to him, my mind only half on the conversation. “Of course I would. Goc My’s channel is a hundred paces wide. It runs straight east-west. This…” I waved a vague hand at the encroaching weeds, “doesn’t look anything like it.”
Ruc shook his head. “You grew up here. The soldiers on that transport, most of them wouldn’t know a reed snake from a rock. They trusted their pilot and helmsman.”
“Good lesson, I guess, in trusting fewer people.”
“This from the woman insisting I trust her.”
“I said fewer people, not none.”
“And you, I suppose, are one of the few?”
“I figure I’ve earned a spot.”
It felt good to be sparring again. The verbal jabs tossed back and forth offered something like the intensity of a physical fight, but without all the fists and blood. I shifted my footing, as though we were actually back in the ring together, using the rolling of the deck as an excuse to step closer. Ruc didn’t move back, but I could see the change in his posture, the way he turned at the waist to match my movement, how he unclasped his hands behind his back, let his arms fall to his side. It seemed, for just a moment, that we were dancers exploring a set of undiscovered steps. But of course we were not dancers.
Dancing was something for other people, for women who knew better the clandestine measures of their own beating hearts, who understood what it was to love or be loved. Fishers or farmers could dance. People who could barely keep time with a stick on the bottom of a barrel could, inexplicably, dance. Women whose bodies were entirely untrained, who stumbled through the most basic movements, still found a way to animate their own clumsy motion with something even I could see was true feeling.
I, on the other hand, could move through the steps of a complicated piece with relative ease—the training of Rassambur is good for more than killing—but I never liked dancing. I never understood it. I felt wooden when I danced, slack-limbed and pointless in a way I never did while hunting or fighting. Not that dancing was love, but it seemed the same breakage in me was responsible for my failures at both. Love, Ela claimed, was a matter of bodies, and I didn’t understand my own if I wasn’t doing something dangerous with it.
“Hold water,” the pilot cut in, raising his hand to signal the oarsmen.
A hundred paces on, the channel twisted sharply, winding out of sight. The delta seemed unnaturally quiet when the oars finally fell still. A blue-throat croaked out its pained, discordant music somewhere in the bank off to the right, then fell silent. The sky, fat and bright with hot afternoon light, crouched low overhead. The Greenshirts behind us shifted uneasily, muttering, checking weapons. I glanced over my shoulder. The other boats were nowhere to be seen, hidden behind the last bend, holding back as Ruc had ordered, waiting to see if we would spring a trap.
I tapped gently at the knives strapped against my thighs, an old familiar eagerness rising inside me. I might not know how to dance, but this was no time for dancing. When a sluggish gust kicked up out of the north, I caught the thick, too-sweet, meaty scent of rot. There were bodies not far off, already putrefying in the equatorial heat. I could feel the quiet, implacable grandeur of my god swelling through the air, could feel my own heart swelling to meet him, the quick, even beat of my devotion.
For just that moment, love stopped mattering. I could stop agonizing over my own romantic inadequacy. Death waited around the bend in the canal, and if the men behind me were terrified, I felt relief, a clean red eagerness to be reminded of his clarity.