The trip upriver was uneventful. Shane was torn between the knowledge that it was much better to have a boring trip than an exciting one, and the fact that at least an attack by river pirates would have given him something to think about other than Marguerite, his own failings, and possible demonic cultists, in that order.
Mind you, any river pirates on this river would have to get in line. Literally.
All the barges going upriver used animals on the river bank to haul, and that made passing each other an extremely delicate proposition. There were designated crossover spots every few miles, but Shane still wasn’t sure how they did it without getting everything hopelessly tangled. At night, all the barges would tie up in a line along the bank, the animals would be unharnessed and rubbed down, and gossip and supplies would be swapped between the crews. Shane was pleased to see that their captain was as taciturn with other boat crews as she was with her passengers.
Of course, Marguerite must have chosen this barge specifically for that fact. She knows what she’s doing.
Which had him thinking about Marguerite again. Bedding, blackmail, or breaking and entering.
The way her lips had formed the word bedding was going to haunt his dreams. He tried very hard to focus on the other two.
As a former paladin and, somewhere under all that, a knight, he knew he should object to blackmail and burglary on a moral level. But he also knew that Beartongue had undoubtedly blackmailed many people in a good cause, so it wasn’t as if he could claim innocence. And Beartongue had sent him on this mission and told him to use his best judgment.
He blew out a long breath and stared over the river. The sun was hot but the breeze off the river was cold, which meant that his lower half was chilly and his shoulders and the back of his neck were uncomfortably warm.
The difference, of course, was that Beartongue had an entire temple of people to protect her if things backfired. And it’s not as if she’s doing the breaking and entering herself, either. Marguerite had him and Wren. As soon as Marguerite had mentioned blackmail, his mind had filled with visions of dangerous men willing to kill to protect their secrets. Noblemen who can afford guards, troops, even assassins. How many can I stop? Particularly in a place that I do not know, surrounded by people I cannot trust?
You will fail, whispered the chorus in his mind. You can do nothing else. And when you fail, it will all be down to Wren, and Wren has never learned to back down, and so your failure will likely doom you both.
He turned to look back across the barge, shading his eyes from the sun. Wren was doing weapon drills, the light glinting off her axe blades. Axes that she could hardly carry with her, in her guise as a noblewoman.
Marguerite was sitting cross-legged by the low cabin, working on altering one of the dresses that the Rat had sent with them for Wren. “I can’t do much about the fashion,” she’d said earlier, “but there’s no reason you can’t have a decent fit.”
Well, Shane thought dryly, that’s covered dwelling on Marguerite and your own failure. Would you like to worry about the demonic cultists some now?
That, at least, was unlikely to affect him directly, though he would definitely mention it to Beartongue when they returned. Perhaps she could send someone to investigate who had a chance of learning more. The Dreaming God’s people were not known for the subtlety of their approach. Someone probably rode in wearing a white cloak and shouted, “Hey! Anyone seen any levitating cows around here?” No wonder they can’t get good information.
(Granted, Shane’s method would have been to walk in wearing a gray cloak and shout “Excuse me, have you heard of any strange cults around here?” but at least he was aware of it.)
Marguerite leaned back and stretched, which did impressive things to her torso, then grimaced. “These beds aren’t my favorite,” she said. “At least it’s our last night on the river.”
Shane considered this, and what he knew of Marguerite’s fears. “Does it…ah…bother you?” he asked. “That we will be going to a place that you know holds those that hunt you?”
She snorted. “I’m not exactly being hunted. I almost wish I was.”
His eyebrows went up at that, and Marguerite’s lips twisted in a rueful smile. “If someone was actually hunting for me, I’d know exactly what to do. I could hire a dozen armed guards and sit in a fortified room and wait for them to come for me. But that’s not what’s happening. I’m an afterthought. A target of opportunity. Frankly, it’s maddening.”
“Because you don’t know who to trust?”
“I get around that by not trusting anyone.” She gave him a wicked grin when she said it, and Shane had no idea if she was joking or not. “No, being an afterthought means that if someone tries to kill me, I don’t know if they’re going to try again, or if it was just some operative passing through and going, ‘Oh, hmm, I remember her, someone deal with that,’ as they head out of town. I am just important enough to send some hired thugs after, if they’re standing around anyway, but not significant enough to warrant a skilled assassin. Except that every now and again, I run into a member of the Sail who is bloody-minded enough that they get annoyed when I don’t agree to die quietly, and then I have to run for it, without knowing whether they’ll pursue me, or whether it’s enough that I’ve left town.”
“Ah. So if you did hire armed guards and sit in a fortified room…”
“They’d sit around and play cards until I ran out of money and nothing would happen. And then a week later I’d spend the night at a posting inn and someone would come in for five minutes to change horses and spot me at the bar and one of their grooms would come through the window that night and try to strangle me.” Judging by her expression, this was not a purely hypothetical scenario. “Fortunately, in the Court, I know the rules, and so do they. I don’t know if the branch of the Sail who wants me dead will be attending, or if they’ll consider it worthwhile to go after me, but I do have a pretty good idea how they’ll go about it if they do. Which is where you come in.”
“I live to serve.” Shane put a fist over his heart and bowed his head. Marguerite snorted and went back to sewing.
He watched her for a long moment, then turned back to gaze upriver. The mountains had grown steadily closer. Tomorrow, land. And after that, the Court of Smoke.
And may the Dreaming God have mercy on us all.
When Marguerite crawled out of the cabin the next morning, she was surprised to find that Shane was not waiting for her. She looked around, puzzled. The mist lay thickly on the water, but the light was starting to break through and he should have had no difficulty seeing her.
And? What, just because he brings you tea a couple of times, you decided that was part of his duties?
She spotted him sitting near the railing a few feet away. He was kneeling with his hands clasped in his lap, gazing downward with an expression of intense concentration.
Is he praying?
She climbed to her feet. He looked up at her, nodded once, and said, “Please forgive me for not bringing you tea.”
“It’s not your job,” she said, mostly to kick her earlier thoughts in the teeth. Was that something in his hands? “What have you got there?”
“I believe it is some kind of swallow,” said Shane gravely.
Marguerite was not expecting that answer. She peered down.
Yes, indeed, the man had a small bird clinging to his fingers. It had a forked tail and looked at her with lacquer-bright eyes.
“All right,” said Marguerite, “I’ll bite. Why are you holding a swallow?”
“It flew right to me,” said Shane. “I believe the mist confused it. It is not apparently injured.”
Marguerite couldn’t help but laugh. With the bird clinging in his hand and the pale, indirect light, he looked more like a marble sculpture than a man. An allegorical representation of Strength, perhaps. Or, given the bird, Compassion. Although Marguerite had seen plenty of allegorical representations of the latter, most of them female, none of which left the viewer wanting to tear the statue’s clothes off and see just how much passion there was in Compassion.
Down, girl. You don’t know anything about him. He could have a sweetheart back in Archon’s Glory for all you know.
“How long have you been sitting there with a bird?” she asked.
“Only a moment.” He turned his hand, but the swallow showed no interest in moving.
“It’s avoiding a river devil,” said the captain of the barge.
Both Marguerite and Shane turned to look at her. The old woman stumped across the deck toward them, her hands shoved deeply into her pockets.
“A river devil?” asked Shane.
The captain nodded. “It’s a river swallow,” she said. “They go back and forth picking off insects. And the devils pick them off.” She pulled one gnarled hand out of her pocket and pointed. “Watch.”
Marguerite peered into the mist. Another bird was flying along the water’s surface, making long, repetitive arcs that made the fog tremble. She couldn’t see anything that resembled a devil, though.
She was just about to ask what she was looking for when the surface of the water broke and something large and flat leaped up after the bird. She had an impression of blunt wings, a pale underside, and an open, lipless mouth, before the devil struck the water again and vanished beneath the surface.
The flying swallow was gone. The one on Shane’s hand was perfectly still.
“Did it…?” Marguerite asked.
“Oh, aye.” The captain nodded to her. “They mostly eat little bitty fish, but they’ll take a bird if they can.”
“Are they dangerous to people?” asked Shane. She could understand the question—the thing had been at least five feet across, maybe more.
“Nah. They leave us alone, we leave them alone.” She turned to go, then paused. “If you catch one in your net, you got to throw it back, though. It’s bad luck otherwise. And iffen one dies in your net, you got to make an offering to the river gods.”
“Are they sacred to the gods, then?”
The captain frowned at him. “No, but they belong to ’em. Like a mule belongs to its owner. You kill somebody’s mule, you got to make it right with them.”
Shane nodded understanding of this fine theological difference, and the captain went back to her perch near the back. Marguerite felt a twitch of amusement. That was more words than she’d ever heard the woman speak willingly. Indeed, she hired this barge specifically because the captain spoke so little and was entirely resistant to gossip.
And I consider that a virtue in her, and not in Shane. What a hypocrite I am. I should simply be glad that he will not gossip to anyone else about our mission.
“You still seem to have a bird,” she said.
“So I have noticed.” He gazed at the bird with an air of resignation. “I cannot begrudge it the sanctuary, but my hand is becoming cramped.”
“Can I get you anything? A perch, perhaps?”
Shane considered this. “I would not object to tea,” he said finally. “If I may impose on you.”
“Ah yes, a truly monstrous imposition, tea. But I’ll allow it.” She went to the small galley in back of the raft and returned a few moments later with two steaming cups.
The fingers that touched hers felt like ice. Marguerite wondered if the bird was getting cold as well.
Apparently the bird felt the same way, or perhaps when his hands shifted, it decided it was time to leave. It leapt up in a flutter of wings and was gone into the mist in a heartbeat. Marguerite let out a startled laugh. Shane gazed after it, then dropped his head. She would have sworn that he smiled.
He signed a benediction in the air after the bird, then washed his hands in the river and finally took a sip of tea. “Thank you.”
“Glad to help.” She cocked her head, studying him. “Are you a knight?”
Shane stilled. “Why do you ask?”
“Curiosity. You move like one.”
“How so?”
“You kneel and get up again too easily.”
Shane frowned. “I don’t follow?”
She smiled. “The only people who spend as much time on their knees as knights are whores and holy men. You’re not the latter, though I admit I’m merely guessing with the other one.”
He blinked at her. The tips of his ears went suddenly, blazingly scarlet. Marguerite did not know whether to feel guilty or charmed.
“I. Uh.” He cleared his throat. “Yes. Technically. I was knighted as part of my training with the…as part of my training.”
He might as well have held up a sign saying ‘Please Do Not Ask About The Dreaming God.’ Marguerite had no intention of doing so. “It’s not a bad thing,” she said. “I was just curious. Should I be calling you Sir Shane?”
He sighed deeply, and Marguerite wondered how she’d ever thought that he was expressionless. “It would be Sir Shane of Templemarch. And I’d really rather you didn’t.”
“Then I won’t.” And now, my finely honed conversational senses are telling me to change the subject. She scanned the water, but saw no sign of the river devil. “You know, I’ve gone up and down this stretch nearly a dozen times, and I’ve never seen a river devil before. I didn’t know they were so large.”
“I had never even heard of them.” He stretched his fingers, shaking out the stiffness. “It is unsettling to think that there are such large creatures passing beneath us.”
Marguerite chuckled. “We’ll soon be at the Court of Smoke. Fewer rays, but a great deal more going on beneath the surface.”
Shane sighed. “I will look forward to being off the boat,” he confessed, “but I am concerned about the rest.”
“You and me both,” said Marguerite with a sigh. “You and me both.”