I woke to find dawn’s light smeared like wax across the eastern sky. My head throbbed, and my body ached in a dozen places where the crocodile had battered me the day before. I rolled over groggily to find Ruc lying naked on his back, one arm tossed across the rushes, the other, the one with the wound, cradled at his chest as though he were trying to hold close something vitally important. I watched him for a while, his wide chest rising and falling, the twitching of his closed lids as he lived some dream I would never see. Then I turned away, searching for my knives.
I found them by the basket just inside the door, though I didn’t remember taking them off or placing them there. Whole portions of the night, in fact, seemed vague or missing altogether. I could remember Ruc’s lips against mine, his fingers tracing wonderful arcane shapes over my skin, his fingers inside me, his tongue between my legs—but those memories were lightning flashes—too bright, almost vicious in their precision—separated by long, dark blanks.
I straightened, worked the kinks from my legs and back, then bent over to strap a knife to each thigh. The weight felt good, right. Those knives were a reminder that, no matter how much I wanted my legs bare for Ruc’s hands to explore, I was here for a purpose. I wasn’t wearing the knives for self-defense or ornament. They were my instruments, just as I was Ananshael’s. If I could find love in the darkness of my heart, dredge it up—strong, gleaming, writhing—into the light, those knives would be the tools with which I finished it.
I glanced back at Ruc, tried to imagine driving a blade between his ribs, forcing it past the muscle into his heart. Something inside me quailed. I stopped, half turned in the light of the doorway, naked save for the blades at my legs, trying to understand what had just happened in my mind, to chase after that fleeing emotion, haul it back out, pin it down, look at it. It had been a long time, a very long time, since death had troubled me, and yet, for just a moment, the vision of that knife parting the flesh, of the hot blood pouring forth—it made me queasy.
I watched the pulse rise and fall at Ruc’s neck, traced the hard lines of his body with my eyes.
Is this love? I wondered. Could that sickness in my gut be love?
It seemed unlikely, but that’s the trouble. Love is not like the things of the world—trees, sky, fire—to which you can point and affix a name. Strangers from different lands speaking different languages can teach thousands of words with no more effort than the breath spent to say them. This is a flower. This is my hand. That is the moon. Love, however, gives nothing to point to. All we have are a woman’s words, her actions, the way she holds herself, the things she does or does not do. For most people, millions scattered the world over, love is the opposite of burying a knife inside a chest. To hear them tell it, Skullsworn are incapable of love. Ela, of course, disagreed, but who was I to say if they were right, if she was? I couldn’t see inside their heads. I could barely make out what was going on inside my own.
Irritated, and vexed with my own irritation, I turned away from Ruc, pulled on my pants and vest, stepped out the door, and froze.
Everything was gone.
Not the delta, of course. The lake was still there, mud-brown water bunched by the breeze, ringed in the distance by that wall of rushes. Winebeaks darted in and out of the reeds. Half a dozen tufted ducks bobbed on the wavelets a few paces distant. The raft beneath my feet was solid enough, and the hut from which I’d just emerged. There was one just like it tethered to either side, and our own boat tied off just beyond. All that was as I remembered. The rest of the village of the Vuo Ton, however, the barges and boats, the scores of floating homes, the dugout canoes—all of it had vanished.
For a few heartbeats, all I could do was stare. My mind, still groggy from exhaustion, from an evening smoking and drinking, struggled to yoke my fragmented memories to the scene before me. As I stood gaping, Kossal stepped from the door of the next hut down, glanced at the vacant expanse, scowled, spat into the water, and then, before I could frame an appropriate question, disappeared back into his hut. A few moments later he emerged again, this time with Ela. The priestess had shed her soaking clothes for a light blanket draped over one shoulder, tied around her waist. She looked as bleary as I felt, spent a few moments rubbing her eyes and knuckling her back before she noticed her surroundings. Then she started laughing.
“I thought that quey tasted strange.”
Kossal shook his head. “I didn’t drink the quey.”
She wagged a finger at him. “But you drank the water.”
“Drugged,” I said stupidly. “They drugged us.”
“For which I, at least, am grateful,” Ela said, shrugging. “I appreciate a good, dreamless sleep after a day fighting crocodiles and a night of dancing.”
“Where did they go?”
“Somewhere else.”
I turned to find Chua standing in front of her own hut, fully dressed, fishing spear in hand, studying the empty lake.
“There were a hundred buildings here at midnight,” Kossal said.
The fisher shook her head. “A hundred boats. I told you the Vuo Ton do not stay in the same place.”
“You knew where to find them,” I pointed out. “We came directly here.”
“No,” Chua said. “I knew where to look. We passed half a dozen other moorings, empty moorings, before finding this place, and we only found it because they allowed us to.”
“But they did allow it. We passed the test. They welcomed us.”
“I certainly felt welcomed,” Ela added with a wink, “by a lovely couple whose names now escape me.”
“The Vuo Ton move,” Chua said, “when they need to move. When the village is threatened.”
“Where’s the threat?” I asked, gesturing to the wide, empty lake.
The door to the hut behind me rustled, and a moment later Ruc stepped out, shirtless, his good hand balled into a fist. “The threat,” he said grimly, “is fucking late.”
Ela raised her eyebrows. “How mysterious.”
I struggled for a couple heartbeats to make sense of the strange proclamation. Then it all fell into place.
“You planned an attack,” I said, studying his face.
He nodded wearily. “If they were responsible for the slaughter on the transport, this was the only chance.”
Ela cocked her head to the side. “I’m a little unclear on the details. Were we supposed to massacre everyone last night? Because if that was the plan, I would have done less dancing and had less sex.”
“No,” Ruc said. “We were just the dogs. The hunters are behind us, following our baying.”
“I’ll admit that I enjoyed myself,” Ela said, frowning, “but it seems uncharitable to use the word baying.…”
“The chum,” I realized. “Yesterday. The barrels you dumped overboard. That wasn’t a sacrifice.”
“Blood brings qirna,” he said. “Qirna bring delta hawks. The birds have a wingspan of eight feet. With a long lens, you can see them circling from miles away, high above the rushes.”
“Your men have been following us,” I said.
He nodded. “The Greenshirts and the legions both. They have orders to ring the village and attack at dawn.”
Chua spat in the water. “I told you already—no one finds the Vuo Ton if they do not want to be found.”
“I expected a settlement,” Ruc said. “Not a batch of boats tethered together.” He scanned the waving rushes, searching for some break. “How far away are they?”
“Miles,” Chua replied.
“Can you track them?”
She fixed him with a flat stare.
“Why all the feasting?” Kossal asked. He was picking at something caught in his teeth, squinting speculatively into the waxen sky. “Why let us in at all, if they knew about the trap?”
“The blood rush we plucked in the delta,” Chua said.
Kossal frowned. “Sticking a bit of the local plant life in the front of a boat seems like a pretty meager excuse for planning an ambush.”
“The Vuo Ton were never in any danger,” the woman replied. She turned to Ruc. “You will have told your men to stay well back, to let us make contact before closing in.”
He grimaced, nodded.
“So … what?” I said. “They just wanted to get to know us?”
Chua shrugged. “The Vuo Ton trust in the providence of the Given Land. It is not often a boat from Dombâng finds its way here. Those that the Three let pass are not to be ignored.”
“We found them,” Ruc said, “because you knew where to look. Not because the delta brought us here. Not because the Three were secretly leading the way.”
“Even after what you’ve seen,” the fisher said, “you still do not believe.”
“What have I seen?” Ruc demanded, turning to face her. “A trick village built out of boats. Two of my men killed, one by a croc, one by a snake.” He gestured to the rushes. “No gods. No golden-eyed women leaping out of the water.”
“You have seen the Vuo Ton,” Chua replied. “Do you still believe they killed the men on your transport?”
Ruc stared at the swaying reeds as though they were a script he could almost but not quite decipher. “I don’t know,” he admitted finally.
“Sometimes it’s better,” Ela suggested, “to kill everyone first and leave the details for later.”
“My orders weren’t to kill everyone,” Ruc said, shaking his head. “Not if they didn’t fight back. I just wanted the leaders, the warriors, whoever was responsible for the attack on the transport.”
“And how many men,” Kossal asked, “did you think it would take to subdue the leaders, the warriors?”
Ruc grimaced. “Two hundred. I would have brought more, but I didn’t want to weaken the force remaining in Dombâng.”
“Two hundred,” Kossal said, “against thousands of Vuo Ton.”
“It was a gamble,” Ruc admitted. “I figured half the population would be children or men and women too old to fight. I knew they’d see the boats before the final attack, but figured that still gave us an element of surprise. We have the superior weapons—flatbows, the rest of it.”
Chua shook her head. “I could have told you this was wrong.”
“I didn’t trust you not to warn them.”
The morning was still. The sun, ruddy and reluctant, had risen a handsbreadth above the eastern rushes. I pointed to it.
“You said your men had orders to attack at dawn. So where are they?”
* * *
We still hadn’t answered the question by the time we returned to Dombâng. After spending the whole day retracing our route through the delta’s winding channels—the same channels Ruc’s soldiers should have been following—we’d encountered only crocs and tufted ducks, winebeaks and tiny blue-headed rush thrushes. The sun had dropped out of the purpling sky by the time we could see the smoke rising from Dombâng’s chimneys. The first boat we spotted was a long coracle crewed by half a dozen fishers. They paused in the hauling of their nets, studied us warily, but didn’t raise a hand in greeting or cry out.
Ruc and I had been rowing all afternoon, but when he noticed the fishers he shipped his oar and stood up.
“Have you seen Greenshirts?” he shouted. Like most sound in the delta, his voice didn’t carry. It seemed to fade into the reeds, to sink into the mud. “War boats,” he went on. “Packed with soldiers?”
The oldest of the fishers shook his head gravely, watched us a moment longer, then turned back to his nets.
“Your soldiers are probably dead,” Ela announced lazily. “Just like the others. The ones on the transport.”
It wasn’t the first time during the long trip back that she’d made the observation, but for the first time Ruc responded. He rounded on the woman, who was reclining lazily in the bow, leveled his finger at her as though he planned to plunge it through her neck.
“The men on that transport were tricked, then ambushed. Most of them were probably drunk, finishing off the last of the journey’s rum before gliding into the city. Every one of the soldiers I sent out this morning was armed with a flatbow, sword, and spear. They knew the foe and they were ready.”
“No one is ready for the Given Land,” Chua said. She slid onto the bench beside me, lifted the oars from my hands. “Move.”
“I can finish,” I said.
“Night is almost here, and you are slowing down. I do not intend to die so close to Dombâng that I can smell the smoke.”
Reluctantly, I climbed aside. Ruc and I hadn’t spoken all afternoon, but there had been a satisfaction, even a joy, in sitting close to him, matching my rhythm to his, listening to his breath, deep and even, as he leaned back against the oar, feeling his bare shoulder brush against mine. We’d spent so much time vying with each other, sparring, testing, distrusting; it felt good to labor at the same task, to work in concert. The oar felt honest in my hands. As long as we were silent, there could be no lies.
Chua was right, though; I was exhausted. The sooner we docked at the Shipwreck, the sooner we could find out what happened to Ruc’s missing boats and the missing soldiers. More than that, I realized I wanted to be back in Dombâng. No one had died on the return trip—Chua had neatly speared the one snake that swam close to the boat—but the open delta at night brought back memories of my childhood, of huddling hungry and terrified in the low branches of that tree, knife clutched in my hand, waiting for something to emerge from the shadows to kill me. The dying part didn’t bother me any longer, but not all fears are about death, and I breathed a long sigh of relief as the city buildings closed around us once more, as ruddy lanterns replaced the last light draining from the sky.
The relief didn’t last.
Before we’d gone two dozen boat lengths into the city’s canals, I realized something was strange. There were too few people on the docks, bridges, and causeways. Usually, the folk of Dombâng tended to congregate outside in the relative cool of the evening. Tavern terraces overlooking the canals would begin to fill. Fishers would yoke their boats together, come out from the canvas tents onto the decks. Stalls on the bridges, closed during the day’s worst heat, would open, selling fruit and crushed ice, plum wine and a hundred varieties of quey. That, at least, was what happened on a normal night. This night felt different. At first I thought my mind was playing tricks after two days in the delta. Maybe it wasn’t as late as I thought. Maybe this part of the city didn’t see the same kind of traffic. As we slid noiselessly over the darkening water, however, I noticed Ruc, too, studying the walkways and bridges, a frown on his face.
Ela picked her head up from the bench where she’d been dozing, cast a sleepy eye over our surroundings. “It seems less lively than I remember.”
“Something’s wrong,” Ruc said.
The few people who were out scuttled along the walkways, glancing furtively over their shoulders every few paces. The boats on the canal gave us a wide berth as we approached. No one hailed us. No one so much as looked our direction. We might have been ghosts drifting through the evening on an empty boat. We might have died out in the delta for all the notice anyone gave us.
“The city was skittish when we left,” I pointed out. “If there was another riot…”
Ruc nodded. “Curfew. I gave orders for the Greenshirts to lock the city down at the first sign of violence.” He cursed quietly. “That explains where the legions went.”
“I thought you left enough men to deal with the city.”
“So did I. But it’s a big fucking city. Wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong.”
Despite rowing all afternoon, he picked up the tempo. Chua glanced over, then matched him, and the boat darted forward, carving through the water as though it were a living thing eager to be home. I watched the great buildings of the city slide past: the Temple of Intarra, spangled with glass; the brooding, half-collapsed custom house of Old Harbor; the water gates, built by Anho the Fat as a way to close off the city’s heart from any ocean-borne attack. It looked dead, all of it. Instead of lanterns and cook fires, singing and drumming, we passed empty alehouses, empty whorehouses, boats with empty decks. I had thought a lot about killing in my life, had witnessed the life pour out of dozens of people, but I’d never imagined the death of an entire city. There was something holy about Dombâng that night. It seemed larger than I remembered, more grand, less filthy. I found myself wanting to explore the dark canals, to leave Chua, and Kossal, and Ela, take up my oar again at Ruc’s side, see for the first time the city where I had grown up.
Ruc, of course, had other concerns. When we rounded the tip of First Island, the Shipwreck loomed into view. The huge, haphazard wooden fortress brooded over the canal, low towers stabbing the sky, ramparts, like rows of jagged, broken teeth, gnawing at the night. There, at least, the windows were ablaze with light, as though every candle and lantern were burning, every soldier awake. Down at the docks, too, torches and lanterns illuminated the ranks of boats. Two dozen sentries patrolled those docks, chain mail catching the light, breaking it, reflecting it back. All of them carried flatbows.
Ruc glanced over his shoulder to where I was holding the tiller. “Stay wide,” he murmured, then nodded toward one of the larger vessels swinging at anchor in the center of the current. “Over there. I want some cover while we decide what to do next.”
“You don’t think they’re your men?” Kossal asked.
“Can’t tell yet,” Ruc said, “and sitting still in the middle of the river doesn’t seem the greatest place to find out.”
One of the Greenshirts noticed us just as we slid in close to the looming hull of the double-masted carrack.
“Fishers,” he called out. “You’re in violation of curfew.”
A few of the Greenshirts moved toward one of their own boats tied off at the dock.
“Curfew?” Ruc replied, voice barely loud enough to carry over the water. “Under whose authority?”
“Commander Lan Lac,” the Greenshirt said. “There are to be no unmoored boats between sunset and sunrise.”
“You’ve been busy,” Ela murmured. “Chasing down the Vuo Ton and issuing orders back here in the city.”
Ruc shook his head. “I left instructions.” He raised a hand to his mouth. “Hoai,” he called out. “Those are my fucking orders.”
That caused a stir on the dock, Greenshirts murmuring to one another, lowering their bows, pointing into the darkness where we floated. The soldier named Hoai turned to another, shorter man, conferred for a moment in a voice too quiet to hear, then looked back to us.
“Apologies, Commander,” he said. “I didn’t recognize your voice. Still, I need to ask you for the pass phrase before you approach. Your own orders, sir.”
“How delightfully paranoid,” Ela observed.
Ruc ignored her. I expected him to call out a word or sentence, but instead he raised his voice and began to sing the haunting opening bars to Antreem’s Mass. His singing voice was deeper than his speech, a full octave lower, and the notes seemed to vibrate the very hull of the boat, to tremble the surface of the water, to shake something inside my chest, a drum-tight organ that might have been my heart. He sang for a few moments only, but the music lingered in the air, in the ear, even after he was finished. The last time I’d heard the Mass had been that night in Sia, the night we first met. Ruc glanced toward me as he fell silent, but in the darkness I couldn’t see his face.
“Come on in, sir,” Hoai said. “And again, my apologies.”
“Stop apologizing,” Ruc said. “If you’d ignored my orders I would have had you flogged.”
He nodded to Chua, the two dipped their oars, and the boat shifted beneath me as we slid over the glass-black water toward the dock.
Hoai caught the painter as Ruc and Chua backed water, snugged the bow in close while another of the Greenshirts reached out to haul in the stern. Ruc was out of the vessel before it was even tied, leaping across the gap, landing easily, already asking questions.
“Riots or an organized push?”
“Organized, sir,” Hoai replied. “Three coordinated attacks.”
“The result?”
“We crushed two. The third we’ve got bottled up just south of New Harbor, although there are outbreaks of violence all over the city. Hence the curfew.”
“Casualties?”
Before the Greenshirt could reply, the man behind him gasped, choked, then collapsed, clutching at a knife buried in his chest.
My knives were out of their sheaths before he hit the dock, as was Ruc’s sword. The rest of the soldiers, who had lowered their flatbows as we approached, scrambled to train the weapons on us once again, some dropping to a knee to steady their aim, others spreading out, as though to block off any avenue of escape. Hoai was staring, frozen, at Ela, who spread her hands innocently.
“What have you done?” Ruc demanded, rounding on the woman.
She nodded toward the fallen soldier. His blood, slick as polished lacquer, caught the starlight, reflected it back in a score of bright pinpricks.
“I thought it might be a good idea to kill him,” she said mildly, “before he killed us.”
“These are my men,” Ruc spat.
Ela pursed her lips, glanced over the Greenshirts. “I don’t think so.”
Ruc laid the tip of his sword against her throat.
She didn’t flinch, didn’t even seem to notice.
“Hoai,” he said, not moving his eyes from the priestess. “Take her. Take all of them to a holding cell.”
The Greenshirt’s silence was wide and dark as the night itself. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were bleak.
“He’s not on your team, love,” Ela said, shaking her head.
“She’s right,” Hoai said. He glanced over at Ruc’s men, at his men, two dozen of them, every flatbow aimed at one of us. At that distance, a child could put a bolt through an eyeball. “Take all of them to a holding cell,” he added, then nodded to Ruc. “Including him.”
Ela glanced over at Kossal. “We could make a great gift to the god.”
The older priest shook his head irritably. “I want to see Pyrre’s golden-eyed, unkillable goddess before I am unmade.”
“Drop your sword, sir,” Hoai said.
Ruc turned from Ela to his lieutenant, the sword still in his hand.
His voice was the scrape of a knife over stone when he replied. “Why?”
Hoai shook his head, as though the question were too big to answer. “Drop your sword.”
“Tell me why.”
“No,” the younger man replied grimly. “You tell me why you betrayed your own city.”
“Where is the betrayal in stopping centuries, millennia of bloody ‘sacrifice’?”
“What of the sacrifice required by Annur? The coin stolen from our pockets? The freedom torn from our hands? What about the history scrubbed out, the pride annihilated? What about the people, our people, that we execute right here, in front of this very fortress?”
His voice was shook, and even when he fell silent I could see his shoulders trembling with barely suppressed rage.
“Without law,” Ruc replied quietly, “there is only suffering.”
Hoai shook his head. “From now on we will make our own law. As we did before Annur put her boot on the city’s throat.”
“You are an idiot. You won’t know how easily this city breathed until these so-called priests begin choking it.”
The Greenshirt started to respond, then checked himself. “This is the last time I’m going to ask you to drop your sword.”
I put a hand on Ruc’s arm before he could attack. If it were darker, if the range was greater, if we had any cover or flatbows of our own, we might make a fight of it. As it was, however, we stood near the center of an empty dock. The nearest escape was the water, half a dozen paces away. The men with the flatbows wouldn’t even need to be fast to put bolts in our backs, and before I died I wanted to pass the Trial. When Ananshael finally untangled the stuff of my soul, I wanted him to know the full measure of my devotion.
“Not now,” I murmured.
Ruc didn’t look at me, but after a moment he tossed his sword contemptuously aside.
“The rest of you, too,” Hoai said.
Kossal spat onto the dock. “Don’t have any weapons.”
“Which, at the moment,” Ela added thoughtfully, “is starting to look like an oversight.”
* * *
I caught a glimpse of the cell as Ruc’s renegade Greenshirts shoved us inside: a narrow box ten feet by ten feet, the floor and walls carved out of the island’s red-brown bedrock, ceiling built of cedar beams, each one nearly as thick as my waist. Not the perfect prison. Given a chisel, a stool to reach that ceiling, and an uninterrupted week in which to work, anyone with a brain and a little muscle could break out. Of course, no one had given us a chisel or a stool, and a week seemed optimistic. I was still scanning the space for another weakness when the door slammed shut behind us and darkness closed its unrelenting fist.
“I’ll admit I’m vexed,” Ela said after a few moments of silence. “I was looking forward to a bath, a bottle of plum wine, and one of those attractive young men from Anho’s Dance.”
“It was a mistake,” Kossal said, “putting us in the same cell.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Ela replied.
The old priest snorted. “We’re more dangerous together.”
“To whom?” I asked. My eyes had had time to adjust and I still could see nothing, not even shadows to attach to the various voices. “We might have made a play on the docks. Now that we’re in here, all they need to do is keep the door closed to kill us.”
“They’re not going to kill us.” Ruc’s voice, at the far end of the cell. In the momentary silence that followed, I could hear him dragging a hand along the rough wall. It was easy to imagine he wasn’t a man, but some animal, patient and dangerous, even caged. “They want us alive. Probably for some mockery of a trial.”
“I can understand why they want you,” Ela said. “Traitor to your home, your people, all that. I’m not sure what they’ll get out of putting Kossal and me on trial. He’s done nothing but sit around and gripe since we arrived in the city, and unless Dombâng has some ridiculous archaic laws about who is allowed to put what inside whom, I can’t imagine I’ve done anything wrong.”
“You just put a knife in the chest of that Greenshirt on the dock,” I pointed out.
“Surely a woman can be forgiven the occasional indiscretion.”
“How did you know?” Ruc asked. He had paused in his circuit of the cell just behind my shoulder. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel him there, a strength in the darkness.
Kossal replied instead of Ela. “They were all looking at the wrong thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Us,” the old priest went on. “They had their flatbows aimed at the river, but they were watching us.”
“We’d just returned from two days in the delta,” Ruc pointed out. “It could have been amazement. Curiosity.”
“Could have been,” Kossal said. “But it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
“If I said something, one of you fools might have done something. They had flatbows on us, which meant dying, which is fine, but I’m still keen to put a knife into whatever’s out there in the delta.”
From the far corner of the cell, Chua spoke. She sounded older in the darkness, more tired. “You might still have the chance.”
“They’re not going to put us on trial,” I said, the whole thing blooming in my mind at once. “That’s not why they’re keeping us alive.” It only made sense once I saw it. “Trials aren’t native to Dombâng. They’re Annurian. To anyone who worships the Three, justice and sacrifice are the same thing. Before the empire came, criminals weren’t tried by courts; they were given to the delta.”
No one spoke. The only sound was our breathing’s whispered polyphony.
“Well, that,” Ela said finally, “raises my spirits considerably. A trial sounded tedious.”
* * *
Lock most people in a hot, lightless cell with only the promise of a bloody, vicious death to look forward to, and they will stay awake all night, imagining the horrors of the future in a thousand different forms. Most minds will supply their own torture well before the executioner comes with his ax, before the sticks are piled around the stake, before the furious mob hurls the first stone. History is filled with tales of women and men locked in small rooms, sane on the day they entered, raving mad by the time they emerged to face their various fates.
Kossal and Ela were not like those people.
After establishing that there was no way out, that there was no point clawing at the walls, that, in all likelihood, we would be sacrificed to the delta—a positive development as far as both of them were concerned—they chose the smoothest spots they could find on the rough floor and went promptly to sleep, Kossal’s snoring the jagged bass line to Ela’s deep, steady breathing. Peace is one of Ananshael’s greatest gifts—when you have spent your whole life preparing to meet the god, his approach holds no terror.
Chua took longer.
“I knew this,” she said after Kossal and Ela had fallen asleep.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“That I would die here.”
Ruc was sitting next to me, his back to the cool rock wall. “We’re not dead yet,” he said.
“We will be.”
“You survived the delta once,” I pointed out. “Twelve days alone.”
“Ten days alone,” she said. “Tem was with me for the first two.”
I tried to find some shape in the blackness, some human form, then gave up and closed my eyes.
“What happened to him?” I asked. “How did he die?”
“I killed him.”
Ruc shifted at my side. I could imagine him, too, staring into that perfect black. For a long time, no one spoke.
“Why?” I asked finally.
“The knife seemed kind. More kind than spiders or crocs, jaguar or qirna. I did not expect to survive. Not him. Not me.”
The next question seemed wrong to ask, and I had no idea how to pose it, but I needed the answer.
“Did he know? That it was you?”
“I stabbed him as he slept. He woke, looked into my eyes, and died.”
“And you thought you could escape from that,” Ruc said, “with a few hundred pieces of gold?”
“I told myself I might.” Chua paused, then went on. “I knew I could not. The Given Land is inside me.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Ruc demanded. He sounded more tired than angry, despite the edge to his words.
“No one escapes. Even those who walk out walk out different. The Land makes them into something else.”
All over again I could feel the boa coiling around my eight-year-old body, could feel myself slamming the knife into the snake over and over and over, then later, days later, into the chest of my father as he slept, into my mother’s neck, the blood hot all over my hands, my own scream strangled in my throat.
“Save the superstition for the priests,” Ruc growled.
He couldn’t see my memory. With the hot darkness packed between us, he couldn’t see my hands trembling. “The delta is a place like any other place. More dangerous, maybe, but still just dirt and water, plants and animals.”
“And something else,” Chua said quietly.
I dragged myself free of my memories. “Did you see her?”
“Not her,” Chua replied. “The other two. Sinn and Hang Loc. I saw them first just as I killed Tem. They were watching, standing on a bank across the channel. I took them for men at first, called out, but what men would be standing naked on a mudbank with no boat, no spears, nothing but those beautiful, awful eyes?”
“What did they do?” I asked.
“Watched. For days they watched, followed me. I thought they were gone a dozen times only to find them around the next bend, through the next wall of rushes. They moved through the delta like shadows, like sunlight.”
“For creatures that love killing,” Ruc said, “these gods of yours seem to let a lot of people go.”
“I was too weak to hunt,” Chua replied. “After snake bites and spider bites I could barely move my left arm. Half my blood I had poured into the river. There was no sport in hunting me.”
“Maybe they’ll let us go this time, too,” Ruc said.
“No,” Chua said. “I go into the delta this time to die.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I feel it.”
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Ruc burst out. “What is it about the Three that obliterates all capacity for rational thought? I’ll concede there may be something out there, something unbelievable. Maybe even Csestriim. I don’t understand why that means we need to abandon all reason and start speaking entirely in ominous, meaningless fragments.”
“Bring your rational thought with you into the delta,” Chua said. “All men should have something to cling to as they die.”
* * *
During the long silence while I waited for Chua to fall asleep, my mind shuttled back and forth between two problems. The first was one of devotion. All women die, but when the moment came, I wanted to go to my god a priestess rather than a failure. I had two days left to complete my Trial, two days in which to make two offerings: a pregnant woman and the love of my fucking life. Putting aside the vexations of the latter, even the first of the two kills suddenly looked improbable. There was a dearth of mothers ripe with new life inside the cell, unless Ela had been improbably careless in her liaisons. If we’d been free, out in the city itself, I could at least have completed that part of the Trial. As it was, I expected to be dragged directly from the cell to the delta. If there were some sort of trial, some public spectacle, I might manage to kill a woman en route, but that would do nothing to solve the other, larger problem.
Love.
I lay my head back against the stone wall of the cell and closed my eyes. I could remember Ruc’s hands on my skin, his mouth on mine, could remember him moving over me, inside me, those eyes, that scarred, bronze-brown skin flexing with the muscles beneath. That night with the Vuo Ton had brought us closer than we’d been when I first arrived in Dombâng, and not just because of the sex. We’d survived the delta together, fought our way free of the crocs, found the Vuo Ton. Every challenge shared, every revelation, seemed to bind us closer. On the other hand, those revelations had their limits: almost everything I’d told him, everything except the story of my childhood sacrifice, had been a lie.
Is it possible to love a person you’ve lied to? Possible to love a person to whom you’ve told almost nothing but lies? How could I love Ruc if he didn’t know me, and how could he know me if I never told him the truth? Ela could love a man who’d never seen her before, love a man based only on the shape of his face or the work of his hands—but I was not Ela. To drop my guard, to test the full limit of my feeling for Ruc, I needed to know what he felt for me … and to know that, I needed to give him the truth.
But which truth? How much of it?
I came here to find you.
I came here to fall in love with you.
I came here to kill you.
The first two were all right, but the last statement seemed unlikely to kindle in him the unquenchable flame of desire. The ways of my lord are obscure. Even brave men misunderstand his justice and his mercy. Ruc’s comments to the Vuo Ton were evidence enough that he saw himself as a soldier, not a sacrifice. If I had more time, I could have explained it to him, I could have shown him the truth: sacrifice is part of who we are. Without it, nothing we do—not the loving or hating, the victories or defeat—mean anything. The Csestriim and the Nevariim were immortal vessels, but hollow. Antreem’s Mass would be impossible without its ending, and Ruc was a creature every bit as gorgeous and ungraspable as that mass. All true music ends. Death is no diminishment.
With more time, I might have explained this, but I didn’t have more time. I had two days. I couldn’t give him the whole truth of who I was or why I’d come, but maybe I could give him more. Maybe I could give him enough.
I opened my eyes, stared blankly into the dark. I could hear him breathing evenly beside me. He didn’t seem to be asleep.
This is a terrible gamble, I thought, then reminded myself that everything is a gamble. Life is a gamble. The only sure bet is death. I turned my face to him, glad he could not see me when I spoke.
“I started this.”
He shifted slightly. I could imagine his eyes on me. “For a short sentence, that’s remarkably unclear.”
I gathered myself. “The revolt.” The first words were the hardest, like the first few strokes in cold water when the chest constricts and breath comes jagged and uneven. “When I arrived in the city, I was the one who left the bloody hands everywhere.”
The air in the cell felt suddenly, dangerously still. I found myself tensing for a fight, turning slightly to face the coming attack, getting ready. I forced myself to stop. The whole point of the truth was to drop my guard, not to redouble it. Ruc was still as a boulder balanced at the top of a great cliff.
“Why?” he asked finally.
I hesitated. The whole point was to approach the truth, but just how close?
“You’re not Kettral,” Ruc said after a long pause.
I dragged in a long, unsteady breath. “No.”
I felt the space between us shift then deform beneath the weight of that single syllable.
“What are you?”
“I was hoping you would ask who.”
“I guess neither one of us is going to get what we’d hoped for tonight.”
“I’m telling you this,” I insisted, trying to seize the conversation, to hold it together, “because I want to be honest.”
“And what, exactly, is it you’re telling me? You’re not Kettral. You came to Dombâng to start a riot, maybe a revolution.” He paused, testing the various possibilities. “If you’re with them, I’ll kill you before we ever get to the delta. I’m about finished with betrayal for today.”
Truth is like a snake. If you’re vigilant, you can keep it caged. If you’re brave, you can set it free. Only an idiot, however, lets half of it out hoping to keep the rest penned in.
“I am a priestess of Ananshael,” I said. The words felt good, right. “Trained in Rassambur. I came here, came home, in service to my god.”
Ruc was silent a long time, but when he finally spoke, he didn’t sound shocked.
“Skullsworn.”
“It is not a term we prefer.”
“You came back to Dombâng to murder people by the boatload, and you’re worried about names?” I could hear him shake his head. “I should kill you now. All of you.”
“You couldn’t,” I said quietly. “Besides. If they really are sending us into the delta, you’re going to need us. You’re going to need me.”
“So you can put a knife in my back?”
“So I can stand beside you.”
“Is Two-Net Skullsworn, too?”
“Chua is what she says she is.”
I could hear him shaking his head. “You sure? Sounds like she killed her beloved husband quick enough.”
“You’ve seen people die of snake bites,” I replied. “That knife was a kindness.”
To my surprise, Ruc started laughing. The sound was hollow, rusted, mirthless. “Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you justify it?”
“We learn early not to try to justify ourselves. Our devotion can be difficult to understand.”
“Then why are you telling me?”
“I’m telling you because I want you to know the truth.”
It’s easy, when you’ve lived a long time among women and men for whom death holds no sting, to forget how the rest of the world sees Ananshael’s mercy. I didn’t expect Ruc to rejoice at the revelation. I expected him to be furious and confused, to demand answers, some of which I couldn’t provide, some of which weren’t mine to give. I expected the conversation to be difficult, but my mind was too full of the peace and beauty of Rassambur. When I thought of Ananshael’s faithful, I thought of people like Kossal and Ela, men and women vibrant, full of life.
It seems stupid now, but I didn’t reckon on Ruc’s disgust.
I could feel whatever heat had been between us draining away. I reached out through the darkness, found his shoulder. He caught my hand in a vicious grip, and for a moment I thought everything would be all right after all. Then he let it drop. I heard the scrape of his boots on the stone as he moved to the far side of the cell.
“Ruc—” I said.
The silence swallowed his name. I could hear his breathing, heavy as though he’d been running for miles, as though he were holding some impossibly heavy weight, unable to put it down.
I began again: “Ruc—” but everything beyond his name seemed useless.
The truth was out, free. Half of it, anyway. I stared into the cage of my mind, wondering what I had done.