The Last Mortal Bond

8

Gwenna stood in the bow of the Widow’s Wish, squinting toward the horizon. Though it was clear overhead, storm and the coming of night had bruised the eastern sky a livid purple darker than the sea itself. She couldn’t make out any land above the low, shifting swells, but the seabirds perched in the rigging meant they were close.

“We’ll take the smallboat from here,” Gwenna said, turning to the ship’s captain.

Quen Rouan raised his bushy brows. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“I wasn’t asking for your recommendation.”

Gwenna had nothing against Rouan. Twelve days on the ship, and he’d treated her Wing with respect, even deference. He’d handled his vessel well through the squall that kicked up east of the Broken Bay, kept his men firmly in line, and didn’t ask questions. Gwenna had watched him, one calm afternoon, dive into the water with a rope around his waist to retrieve an albatross feather floating on the waves. For my daughter, he’d said after the men had hauled him back aboard. She’s never seen one. Rouan was a good sailor. A good captain. Maybe even a good man. Which was all the more reason to try to keep him from getting killed.

“I don’t know how much you were told about this particular run…,” Gwenna began.

Rouan held up a hand to forestall her. “I go where I’m told. That’s it. This time I was told to deliver you to the Qirins, and the Qirins are still at least thirty or forty miles east, depending on how much time we made up today. I’ll know as soon as the sun drops and the stars come out. Whatever the distance, it’s too much to cover in a smallboat.”

Gwenna snorted. “Gent and I rowed a dory a hundred miles once, and that was before I turned thirteen. The distance is the whole point, Captain. Ships that get too close to those islands haven’t been coming back.”

“I understand there is risk,” Rouan replied, stiffening, glancing east as though he expected to see topsails cresting the waves.

“Well, there doesn’t have to be. Not for you. Get the boat in the water, and we’ll be out of your hair.”

Rouan hesitated. Gwenna could read the pride in that hesitation, the reluctance to leave an honest job unfinished, the unwillingness to run from an unseen threat. He was brave, but he wasn’t trained for this.

She made her voice hard. “I’m not asking, Captain.”

He met her eyes a moment, then nodded brusquely, turning to bark orders at the half-dozen men on the deck. It was a good crew, and before the sun had slipped much farther down the western sky, the boat was bobbing in place, small hull bumping up against the larger vessel like a duckling against her mother. Two barrels of gear-food, mostly, and water, and extra weapons-had been packed a week earlier, and it took no time at all for Talal to secure them beneath the thwarts of the boat.

“You’ll want the sail,” Rouan said. “At least partway.”

Gwenna shook her head. “No, we won’t.”

She started to turn, but the captain brought her up short with a hand on her arm. Gwenna went for her knife, had the ’Kent-kissing thing half drawn before her mind could calm the reflexes of her flesh. Rouan looked at the steel, pursed his lips, and withdrew his hand.

“The world’s all upside down,” he said quietly. “I’ll grant you that. But not everyone’s trying to kill you.”

Gwenna forced herself to shrug. “That hasn’t been my experience.”

He watched her for a long time.

“How old are you?” he asked finally.

Gwenna met the gaze. “Does it matter?”

The man shook his head slowly. “I suppose it doesn’t.” He turned east, toward where the Islands lay over the horizon. “What do you think you’ll find?”

“After two weeks, you want to start asking questions now?” Gwenna asked. “Questions get people killed, same as blades.”

He didn’t shy away. “I just want to know what the chances are.”

“Depends on whose chances you’re talking about.”

“Ours,” he said gravely.

“Yours and mine?”

“Annur’s.”

Gwenna started to make a crack, then stopped herself. It was an honest question and it deserved a real answer. She glanced down into the boat. Talal and Annick were already aboard, the leach at one of the oars, the sniper in the bow, her shortbow held loosely in one hand. Daylight was fading fast, and the low sun lit the chop to the east, making the small wave crests look like scratches on the dark surface of the sea. Somewhere beyond that darkness, the Islands waited, an upthrust atoll barely large enough to support human settlement, and then, beyond that, the open plain of the indifferent ocean. She looked back at Rouan.

“Our chances suck.”

He shook his head. “You don’t sound worried.”

“Me?” Gwenna asked. “I’m always worried.”

“A hard way to live,” Rouan murmured.

Gwenna glanced over at him, this man who collected feathers for his distant daughter, who feared his world might be collapsing around him. She clapped him roughly on the shoulder. “I didn’t know there was an easy way.”

* * *

Annick noted the incoming kettral in the same voice Gwenna might have used to discuss the blister that the oar was raising on the flat of her palm. In fact, Annick sounded considerably less concerned about the bird than Gwenna was about the blister, despite the fact that one was a minor inconvenience and the other had probably come to kill them all.

Still holding the oar, Gwenna twisted in her seat, searching for movement against the dark cloud piled up in the east.

“There,” Talal said, pointing upward, higher than she’d been looking. “Looks like a patrol. Call it five miles out.”

“Well, shit,” Gwenna said.

She looked back to the west. They weren’t far from the Widow’s Wish-maybe a mile or so-and the sun had only dipped fully beneath the horizon in the last few hundred strokes. She could still make out the dark lines of the ship’s masts, the sail full of the evening’s breeze and the last red light of the lost sun. In the growing darkness, the billowing canvas might have been ablaze.

“Shit,” Gwenna said again.

It was good luck for her Wing, actually. The ship was impossible to miss. Whoever was flying the bird would almost certainly be focused on it, hopefully so focused that they missed Gwenna’s own boat with its sails down, nosing forward silently through the waves. The conversation with Rouan came back to her suddenly; her flippant remark, It all depends on whose chances you’re talking about.

“Barrels out,” she said, eyes still on the ship. Rouan had swung west just after dropping them, aiming his bow away from the Islands. It didn’t matter. No ship could outrun a bird in flight. “Bodies over. Talal, is there enough steel about to scuttle this bitch?”

“They haven’t made us yet,” he observed quietly. “And forty miles is a long swim.”

“Good thing we like swimming,” Gwenna snapped. “Can you scuttle the boat, or should I start prodding at the caulking with my knife?”

Talal met her eyes, then nodded. A moment later, a section of planking ripped free with a groan. The boat jerked as though they’d struck a reef, but there was no reef here. Gwenna had anticipated the motion, had demanded it, in fact, and she still felt a twist in her gut as water started pouring into the breach. They’d trained for this very event hundreds of times, but there was still something unsettling about seeing your boat slip beneath the waves in the middle of the open ocean, beneath the roiling arc of the blackening sky.

Gwenna flipped both oars out of the oarlocks, tossed them free of the sinking boat, rolled over the gunwale, kicked her way clear, then turned. Treading water, she watched the small boat vanish beneath the waves. For a few heartbeats she imagined it sinking, settling down through the water, washing back and forth like a leaf, nosed at by curious fish as it drifted deeper and deeper into the gloom. She waited for it to hit bottom, but it just kept sinking through her mind’s dark depths.

“Incoming,” Annick said.

Gwenna pulled her eyes from the spot where the boat had disappeared and looked up.

The bird was much closer-almost directly overhead. It looked as though she’d dropped a little bit of elevation-Scanning the waves, Gwenna thought grimly-but it was hard enough to see a swimmer’s head above the waves in daylight, let alone after sunset. She let herself sink deep in the water, just her nose and eyes above the low chop, and watched, half holding her breath, as the bird cut across the clouds, so silent it might have been no more than the shape of the night wind.

“Whoever it is,” Talal observed quietly, “they’re headed for the Wish.”

“Might just be taking a look,” Annick said.

Gwenna stared at the sniper. “You really think that?”

Annick shook her head. “No.”

They watched in silence as the ship heeled over, fleeing helplessly west toward the setting sun. Gwenna was breathing hard, and not with the effort of treading water.

“You want to go back?” Talal asked. “Can’t be more than a couple of miles.”

“And do what?” Annick asked. She’d already tied one of the barrels to her waist with a short leash of rope, tossed her arm over one of the discarded oars. It was a cumbersome technique, sluggish but easy. With that much floatation, they could go for days. Annick had already started, ignoring the ship as she set out east in a slow sidestroke calibrated to cover the distance ahead.

Gwenna watched the bird as it glided in on a low approach to the ship.

“It’s not even a navy vessel…,” she breathed.

The flash cut her off, a bright, incandescent burst, then another, then another. It took longer for the sound to come, and at the distance, with the ocean’s waves slapping at her ears, it might have been no more than far-off thunder. It might have been, but it wasn’t. Gwenna had spent her whole life around Kettral munitions, studying them, designing them, deploying them. Faint or not, distant or not, she recognized the vicious growl of starshatters, the shape of their explosion against the sky. When she turned her head, the afterimage followed her, and when she turned back, she could see that the real fires had already begun, the deflagration of decking, and masts, and sailcloth.

Rouan’s men would try to put the fires out. They would, even now, be desperately hurling buckets of water on the blaze, hoping to keep their ship afloat. They would fail. Gwenna thought she could hear them screaming, but the wind was blowing the wrong way for that. Even after the slarn egg, her ears were not so sensitive.

“Go back?” Talal asked again.

Gwenna watched as the fire lapped at the sky. She’d lost sight of the bird behind the blaze, but whoever was on it would be circling back to finish the work if it wasn’t already finished. She imagined Rouan watching, his hand clutching the rail, teeth gritted. Stupidly, pointlessly, Gwenna wondered if the albatross feather had already burned.

For the first time in her life, she saw the Kettral-the birds and the soldiers that rode them-not as warriors, but as agents of an unstoppable, almost unspeakable horror. For all his competence and pride, Rouan could do nothing against explosives shot from a soaring bird. It wasn’t a fight, sinking a boat from the air like that; it was a slaughter.

Gwenna watched the ship burn a moment more, then turned away, waves cool against her burning face.

“Annick’s right. We can’t help. Let’s do what we came here to do.”

She started swimming east, faster than was really wise, cutting through the waves, not bothering to look back to see if Talal and Annick were keeping pace.