"We're climbing down to the river," I said. "You have to hold on. I'm going to lead the horse."
He nodded and weakly threaded his hands through the horse's mane. I grabbed hold of the reins and tugged and the horse lurched forward. Its whole body was covered in white frothy sweat. I hoped it could make it down to the river.
The climbing was slow but not as difficult as I had thought. Showers of stone and sand fell beneath our feet, shimmering on their way down. Every noise we made echoed through the darkness, and the desert night's chill laid over the sweat and heat of my exertion.
At one point Naji nearly slid off the horse. I caught him and, with a burst of strength I shouldn't have had, shoved him back into place. I grabbed his wrist and checked for his pulse – still there, thank Kaol and her sacred starfish, even though it was faint, the whisper of a heartbeat.
I let myself get in one round of curses and then moved us on our way. Eventually the sand and stone gave way to soft pale grasses, and as soon as we stepped onto flat ground, onto the riverbank, I let out a holler of victory that rang up and down the canyon walls. The horse trotted up to the water and took to drinking, Naji still slouched on his back. When the horse bent down, Naji swung back his head and twisted sideways and I ran up to catch him and let him down easy on the riverbed. I pulled the mask away, my hand brushing against his scarred skin. He stirred and moved toward my touch, but he already looked like a dead thing. Ashen skin, sunken eyes.
While the horse slurped at the river, I scooped some water in my hand and dripped it across Naji's face, hoping to hell that he'd drink some of it. His lips, cracked and bleeding, parted a little, and I went back and forth, dribbling water a little at a time. Then I cracked open his armor, careful as I could. The inside was coated with blood, and the fabric of his robes was stiff to the touch.
I pressed my hand against the side of his face. His eyelids fluttered. "Naji," I said. "Naji, I need you to wake up. I don't know how to treat you."
He moaned something in his language, words like rose thorns.
"Damn it, Naji, I don't know what that means!" I slammed my fist into the riverbed. Mud ran up between my fingers.
He moaned again, lifted one hand, and then dropped it against his chest, dropped it down to his side. His blood glimmered in the moonlight.
I sat back on my heels and stared at him and thought of wounds I'd treated back on Papa's ship, knife cuts and bullet shots, bruised faces and broken fingers. Ain't never anything done by magic. The rare occasion something like that came in, Mama took care of it.
Mama. I wished she were here now, her and her magic, the magic of the sea, of water–
The river.
I crawled down to the river's edge. Everything was silver and light, cold and beautiful. The horse had wandered off, blending into the shadows. I'd never been able to talk to the water. But Mama had told me you got to want it, and maybe before I never wanted it enough, maybe before I never needed it.
I crawled into the water. The cold cut right through me, made all my bones rattle. Silt drifted up around my bare legs. I closed my eyes, concentrated hard as I could.
"River," I said. My voice ran up and down the walls of the canyon. It became a million voices at once. "River, I ask to speak with you."
Those were the words Mama had told me a long time ago. And I waited, but the water just kept pushing past my waist, tugging on my dress.
Then I remembered. Mama casting gifts into the ocean. I had to give a gift.
The camel had run off with my money, so all I had left that belonged to me was the protection charm Naji made me and the knife I used to save his life. I threw the knife into the water. Mama always said the water knows the true value of things. And this was a trade, one way of saving his life for another.
I said my request again, louder this time, filling my voice with meaning and purpose, with pain and sorrow. If I let Naji die, my voice said, not in words but in tone, I as good as killed him.
The way I killed Tarrin of the Hariri.
This time, the babble of the river fell quiet. The river kept moving, swirling past me, but I couldn't hear nothing. And I knew I had permission to ask my request.
"Naji's dying," I said. "I need to know how I can fix him." I thought about it for a few seconds and then I added, "If there's anything in the river that can help him, please. I would appreciate it." Mama always told me to be polite when you're dealing with the spirits.
A heaviness descended over the canyon, a stillness that made me feel like the last human in the whole world. Then the river began to rise, inching up above my waist to my chest, flooding over the bed, washing over Naji, then under him, buoying him up. From somewhere in the darkness, the horse whinnied.
Then, quick as it flooded, the river retreated to normal.
River nettle. The name came to me like I'd known it all along, even though there ain't no way I'd ever heard it before. I splashed toward the shore, slipping over the stones to get to the riverbed. Naji gasped and wheezed, droplets of water sparkling on his skin. I walked past him, stumbling out into the grasses, feeling around in the dark for something that grew low to the ground, in places where the river flooded during that time of heavy run-off from the mountains. It would be covered in stiff, spiny leaves, like a thistle–
My hand closed around a thick stem, and my palm burned like it had been bitten by ants. This was it.
I yanked the nettle out of the ground, flinging clods of damp dirt across the front of my dress. Then I stumbled back over to Naji, who was panting there in the mud. The sound wrapped guilt around my heart and squeezed so hard it hurt.
"Hold on," I whispered to Naji, smoothing his hair back away from his face, wiping off the water that dripped into his eyes. "I got something to help you."
He gasped and shuddered and I knew he was dying and I knew I had to do this fast.
I used Naji's knife to cut his robes away from the wound. It wasn't like any wound I ever saw – it wasn't a cut or a burn, but a hole about the size of a fist in the center of his chest, like a well, a place of darkness and sorrow going all the way down to the center of the earth. I stared at it for a few seconds, and it seemed to get bigger and bigger, big enough to swallow me whole.