Weightless. Swinging.
In the hazy first moments of waking, Bela remembered rocking on an old wooden swing that was hung from the oak outside a Merchanter’s house in the Maze. She remembered how it felt to hang loose as it swung, her hands gripping only enough to let go. Free. Like a bird, she imagined.
A childhood moment, forgotten for years, now remembered, now real—until a sharp gust of wind raked across her body, probing the open wound at her side with icy claws.
Bela gasped in shock and pain. Her eyes came open.
She was hanging in her harness-loop off the taut harpoon line, swaying in the wind, bouncing around the pulling line that ran down to the others in her team. Looking up toward the swirling sky when she opened her eyes, she saw how the harpoon line—the rope that was holding them all—was already deeply frayed by the sharp edge where it bent up and over the ice-covered precipice above.
Bela twisted in her harness to look below her, and the sight almost made her pass out. Tew, Oni, and Eshe were all dangling in their various loops off the main pulling line. Beneath them, pulling them all down like a leaden anchor, was the outboat. And beyond it all was the cliff face, etched with clinging ice and deep scars. It curved away into blank nothingness. They’d fallen off the edge of the world.
Bela closed her eyes to fight back the urge to vomit.
“Mistress?”
It was the reader’s voice, coming up from below. Bela opened her eyes. Her stomach heaved no matter where she looked, so she concentrated on his face. “Tew?” she called down. “All safe?”
“We are,” Tew shouted back. “Thought the sword or the fall had killed you, mistress!” Farther below the reader, Bela saw Oni twisting to look upward, shouting something to Tew that she couldn’t hear through the wind.
Tew nodded, then waited for a lull before he turned back toward Bela. “Oni and Eshe are banged up, but they’re alive. But Eshe says the boat’s empty.”
Bela nodded, then actually managed to hear Eshe shouting from below: “They’re all gone!”
Tew ignored Eshe’s distant shouts. He fixed his eyes on Bela’s. “Should I tell Eshe to use her knife to cut it loose?”
Another gust battered them for a few seconds. When it cleared, Bela nodded. “Do it. We’ve got to get up.”
“The rope?”
Bela nodded again, her face grim.
Tew exchanged shouts back and forth with the women below, then turned back to Bela. “Eshe’s lost her knife, mistress. Can’t cut loose the boat.”
Of course, Eshe had lost her knife.
Bela fought the sudden urge to smile at the sad fate of it all. A Seaborn woman without a knife was about as useless as a shipmistress with one arm. It seemed like the punchline to a joke told over cups of rum.
Bela glanced back up to the taut rope above them. It looked like it was even more frayed now. It was her imagination, she was sure, but a part of her was certain she could see the strands snapping away from the sharp ice. She tried to lift herself along the rope, but it only took a moment to recognize that the weight of the three other crew and the boat was too much, even if she had two working arms. She couldn’t climb up. She couldn’t do anything.
When she looked back down at the others, all she could do was shake her head. With the howling of the wind, she couldn’t even tell them she was sorry.
Bela closed her eyes and tried to imagine that swing again. That peaceful memory. She’d hold it for as long as she had.
Not long now, she was sure. A snap. Then a fall.
Shouting made her open her eyes again, made her look back down at the others on the line. Tew and Eshe were the ones doing the shouting, she could tell. The reader was yelling in a pleading tone as he looked down. Eshe was screaming in misery and horror as she looked up.
Both of them were focused on Oni, who was moving her hand back and forth across the rope above her.
Eshe might not have a knife anymore, but Oni did.
“What’s she doing?” Bela called down. But then, with a sudden and unmistakable horror, before anyone could answer back, she knew exactly what her maiden was doing. She was using her knife to cut the weight of herself, Eshe, and the boat off the line. She was trying to save her mistress.
“Don’t!” Tewrick yelled.
A strand in the rope shook, and Bela didn’t know whether it had come loose from above or below. “Oni!” she cried out. “Oni, stop!”
But Oni didn’t stop. She cut with more speed, more determination. Eshe’s wails were terrible. Even at the distance, Bela could actually see the strands of rope popping loose from Oni’s blade. The line below her cutting started to sway to a different rhythm in the wind.
Tewrick stopped his pleading and just stared. Far below, Eshe ceased her cries and wept, pleading with a mother that might have been a god.
Then, for a moment, the wind was gone. And Oni, holding back her final cut, looked up.
She caught Bela’s eyes. She smiled. “Keep going!” she shouted. “Find it!”
Before Bela could reply, Oni took one more slice across the rope. Then, as she was drawing her hand back for one final stroke, the last strands snapped with a crack. For a heartbeat, she, Eshe, and the boat were frozen in air. Then they were lost to the swirling mists below.
It took a second or two longer for Eshe’s quaking scream to fade into the wailing of the wind.
Bela stared at the cloud for a moment, as if she expected to see them come back. But they wouldn’t. And if the clouds parted, she knew she didn’t want to see.
Tewrick was crying, but Bela knew there wasn’t the time for that. Tears could come later. It was a time to do her duty. Oni’s sacrifice had bought them minutes. Nothing more.
Bela reached up with her one hand and gripped the rope. Without the weight of the boat and the other women pulling it down, she was able to wrap the cord around her forearm. Then she lifted, inch by inch, until she could grip the rope between her booted feet beneath her. That, in turn, was enough to let her loosen her grip so that she could let the rope pass through as she stood up against it, resetting her hand higher up.
What remained of her right arm flailed and flexed at her side, mimicking the movements it had made in pulling her up lines since she was a child. It was all the help of a ghost, and Bela ignored its futility. She focused on her one remaining hand.
Grip by grip, she rose. It was slower than she could ever remember climbing before. But she reached the rim of the chasm.
Secure on the ice, she pulled up the rest of the rope, heaving Tewrick up and over the edge.
The sun was going down. Night was approaching. They did not speak.