“We need shelter,” I shouted at Kol over the hammering rain, the continuous rumble of thunder and surf, and the maelstrom of sounds and smells that filled my head with more images than I could possibly sort out. “Humans die of cold and wet.”
I saw no benefit in pressing the point. The Dané would choose to help or not. I believed he would. He had squatted ankle deep in the surf and spread his fingers in the incoming wavelets, as if ensuring that their texture met his expectations. Rain sheened his long back like a cloak of transparent silk.
“Thou shouldst not have brought the woman,” he called back without looking up. “I could have taken thee into the sea again.”
“Did he do that?” I asked Saverian as we waited and shivered. “Take me under water? I mean, I experienced something. Naught I’d want to do again.” My antipathy for water was too deep-rooted. The gray waves churned and frothed in nauseating rhythm. “I felt as if I were dreaming of the sea…of drowning…of his voice. I didn’t think it was real.”
“Nor did I. When you came out from your w-washing, he grabbed your shoulder and led you right back into the water.” The shivering physician grimaced and wiped water from her eyes. “The waves boiled bright b-blue around you. You both vanished. I’ve seen nothing like it…nothing ever. How did you b-breathe, Valen? It was hours before he led you out again. Why aren’t you d-dead?”
“Hours? That’s not possible.”
“I’m a good judge of time. I was beginning to think I would need to find m-my own way home.”
I jabbed my fingers into my ribs. It hurt. “Well, I’m not dead. But I’m not going to try diving in on my own.”
A reluctant smile teased at her mouth. “I’d planned to examine your new skin to see if you had scales or gills. But I’ve no paper or pens to record my findings. A poor practitioner to get caught without.”
I could not but return her smile, grateful for her astringent practicality. Had she screamed or shrunk from me in disgust, the anxious knot lodged in my own breast might have unraveled into panicked frenzy.
Kol unfolded his limbs and struck out northward along the shore. His hand twitched in a gesture I interpreted as an invitation to follow. Saverian must have gotten the same notion. She sped after him like a constable after a thief. The physician might miss her bed or her books, but I couldn’t imagine she would regret the absence of any person.
I used the moment’s privacy to relieve myself and wrestle my ugly arms into my soaked wool shirt, hoping it might cut the wind and soften the impact of the driving rain. Then I set out after the others.
Saverian’s time estimates could not be accurate. I could feel the sun hiding behind the storm. I could almost see it, in the way you see the rider in an approaching cloud of dust or envision a Syran woman’s body within her cloud of drifting veils. And it had scarce moved from the cliff top since Kol’s dance of greeting. As I marveled at this certainty, all out of nothing, a moment’s flush left me warm and cold together. I tried to hold on to the sensation, but sounds and scents and images piled one up on the other like unruly children demanding my attention, and soon I was naught but cold and wet again. Strange.
Kol moved swiftly. Just past the slumped cliff where we’d found fresh water, the shoreline curved and took the two of them out of sight. I trotted a little faster and caught up with them just as the Dané started up a steep bank scored with rivulets of mud. The footing was tricky, and I was just as happy to be bootless, able to feel where rocks and rooted shrubs gave surer purchase.
Saverian climbed like a goat, but with far less grace. She was confident and fast, but grabbed on to every protruding rock and twig, and her boots slipped every other step. Her black braid had escaped its bonds and water cascaded from her straggling hair down her neck and the back of her cloak. When I came up behind her—by sheer virtue of my longer legs—she was mumbling through chattering teeth. “Wretched royal b-bastard. ‘Leave your b-books and ride out with me,’ you said. ‘I need you.’ Yes…to be trapped in a city full of torch-wielding madmen, chased by Harrowers, saddled with a d-doulon-raving lunatic, frostbit, saddle-sore, bashed in the head, d-drowned, and now abandoned in a monsoon in company with said madman and a cold-blooded dancing g-gatzé. Never again, Riel. Enough is enough.” She stomped through the mud as if it might be Osriel’s face.
I scrabbled upward, wondering if she’d find it amusing if I accused her of whining. Likely not. “You’ve not traveled with the prince all that much, then? On his visits to Gillarine? Or to…battlefields?”
Locked in her grumbling misery, she perhaps forgot what she considered my business and what not. “Stearc keeps him to his regimen when traveling. I give the thane spells and medicines enough to get Osriel home if he gets very bad. Of course, now Stearc’s commanded to stay at the abbey, it’s left to the dead man to see to Riel. The god-cursed fool oughtn’t travel at all…”
The dead man…Voushanti? An extra chill raised my neck hairs. Her commentary flowed like the mud around our feet, and I didn’t want to interrupt it, but someday I’d get her to explain.
“…and certainly not in winter. The cold torments his joints, and swells his lungs and air passages. One day he’ll fall off his horse and die, and then what of his grand plans? What of his father’s wishes? What of his warriors and his subjects and his—The rest of them? Blasted, mite-brained, cold-blooded, soul-blind idiot.”
The rest of whom, physician? Another question to save for a better time. “He told me that life is pain and only movement makes it bearable.”
“Pssh.” Saverian dispensed disdain as innkeepers dispense gossip. “His father spewed that drivel when Osriel was a boy and he was trying to coax the child out of bed on a day when every move Riel made was agony. He’d put Osriel on a horse or force him to run races with him. It wasn’t fair. The child would do anything to please his father, though it caused his saccheria to flare and he suffered for days after, and King Eodward knew it. The king called this torment love.”
“But Osriel got out of bed.”
“He did. He does it every day. Honestly, I’ve no idea how. His father’s love left his joints like broken glass and his soul a grinding stone.” Saverian slipped again and only her grip on a pine sapling saved her from falling face down in the mud. “The Mother spare me any such love.”
I didn’t think she had to worry. Loving the physician would be as rewarding as romancing the dunes we’d just left behind.
Mud squished between my toes as I climbed. I could well imagine robust, ruddy Eodward prodding his sickly child to be strong enough to survive in a brutal world. Yet I had received a privileged glimpse of the king’s nature once when I was a young soldier under his command, and I surmised that the pain Osriel experienced on those hard days did not outstrip that his father felt at forcing him to it. Eodward had been rewarded by seeing his sickly child grow to manhood, an uncommon fate for a victim of saccheria. Saverian was right, too, though. Pain could change a man. Make him hard.
“Did you love the prince…when you were children?”
“No. We were friends. Playmates. My mother was his physician.” As if she realized, of a sudden, the personal turn the conversation had taken, Saverian tightened her jaw and hauled herself upward even more forcefully. “Where is this creature taking us?”
That, too, was a most interesting question, for a glance back over my shoulder showed naught but rain and a valley of trees. No sea, no shore. Even more unsettling…the sun, yet buried deeply in the clouds, now lay behind us, what my instincts deemed west, though our path had not turned and scarce an hour had passed from my recovery. What daylight the storm had left us was rapidly failing.