Something scraped against the small of her back. There was a high, thin scream-Cora-and Raesinia saw a dizzy, spinning view of the darkening sky. Something dropped out of the pit of her stomach, and then she was falling.
It was a long way to the rocky riverfront below. She had time to let go of Faro and push him away. Raesinia hoped, in the muzzy-headed way of one whose brain had largely been converted into a cloud of flying gore and splinters, that she’d gotten enough momentum to get away from the wall and hit the water, but as she spun the ground came into view and it became clear she wasn’t going to make it. The base of the wall was a jumble of rocks, rounded off by the river at the waterline but still jagged above it.
Oh dear. This is going to hurt.
It turned out Raesinia could lose consciousness. All it took was driving a pistol ball through her brain, then smashing it to a red paste in a hundred-foot fall onto unforgiving stone.
She’d always wanted to have one of those out-of-body experiences sometimes described by seamen who’d been rescued from drowning, hovering above her corporeal form while a celestial chorus beckoned. It would have answered certain key questions raised by her postmortal state. But either those poor sailors had been telling stories or there was no choir of angels waiting for Raesinia. No army of demons, either, though. Just. . nothing, a blank in her memory from the moment she’d hit the rocks. It was a little like waking suddenly from a deep sleep, but with none of the refreshed feeling from having rested.
The binding was still working furiously, pulling wounds closed and regrowing flesh to replace what was lost. It went about this process with a blind, idiot determination that reminded Raesinia of a swarm of ants, doggedly building and rebuilding their anthill every time some curious child kicked it over. There was no intention there, no thought, just the mindless response of an animal.
It couldn’t understand, for example, when circumstances were unfavorable. As best Raesinia could tell, she was stuck on the edge of the skirt of rocks at the bottom of the Vendre’s walls, with her head and shoulder underwater and her legs sticking up in a most unladylike fashion. Her lungs were full of muddy river water, and her heart was limp and still in her chest. But the binding had straightened the fractured bones of her arms, and she could move, after a fashion. When she brought her hands up to explore her face, she found a coin-sized patch on her forehead of smooth, freshly knitted bone, surrounded by a slowly closing knot of regenerated skin.
The most urgent problem was what she was stuck on. Her eyes weren’t in working order yet, but she explored it with her hands. A splintery column of rock, freshly exposed by some underwater cracking, had driven itself some distance into her abdomen and caught there, leaving her hanging like a speared fish. As the gentle currents of the river moved her, she could feel it grate against her bottom ribs. The binding worked feverishly to repair the damaged flesh around the intrusion but could do nothing to push her off it.
Well. I suppose it’s up to me, then. Raesinia flailed her legs for a few moments until she determined to her satisfaction that nothing could be accomplished with them. Her hands could reach the offending spike, but it was slippery and offered little purchase, and the angle was bad. Scrabbling and pushing at it earned her only torn skin on her palms, which the binding went to work repairing with-she liked to imagine-an exasperated sigh.
All right. Now what? She couldn’t just hang here forever. There were people who went about picking up corpses, weren’t there? Eventually someone would notice the upside-down body under the walls of the Vendre and send a boat out. They would discover the Princess Royal of Vordan, her arse in the air, impaled on a spiky rock. She wondered if whoever did it would die of shock on the spot.
A moot point, though. Sothe will get here first.
She hung motionless awhile longer. Her eyes were beginning to clear, but there wasn’t much to see, just the dark waters of the Vor. Her hair settled in long spiderweb patterns around her head, twitching this way and that in the weak currents. She felt a tug at her leg through a rent in her trousers. A scavenger, she assumed, and kicked her feet to indicate that she wasn’t dead yet. Or. . well, whatever.
Something splashed into the water nearby. Raesinia turned her head, but all she could see was a dark shadow in the murk, making its way along the rocks. A moment later it was beside her, a pair of hands groping gently along her body until they found the protruding chunk of stone. Whoever it was took hold of her, above and below the intrusion, and lifted. Dirty water flooded into the wound, and thick, dark blood flowed out. Raesinia pictured the binding sighing again, this time with relief, as it went to work knitting up the torn skein of her intestines.
Whoever it was pushed her away from the rocks, and someone else took hold of her hands and pulled. Between the two of them they managed to roll Raesinia over the low gunwale of a boat, to lie dripping and motionless on the bottom. She felt the boat rock as the figure who’d been in the water pulled itself back in.
This left Raesinia in something of a quandary. She could pretend to be dead for only so long. It might be Sothe, but it might not, and she dared not open her eyes to check. She opted to lie still, feeling her insides rebuilding themselves, and hoped that whoever they were, they would say something.
There was a long silence, in fact, broken by the splash of oars as the boat cleared off from the rocky walls of the Vendre and moved out into the slow, calm waters of the Vor. Eventually, though, the rowing sounds stopped, and strong hands took Raesinia by the shoulders and rolled her onto her back, letting her look up at her rescuers.
“I must say, Your Highness,” said Janus bet Vhalnich, “you’ve looked better.”
Raesinia sat up, her clothes squishing damply, and looked around. They were in a tiny rowboat, really too small for three. In the back was Sothe, an oar in each hand, resolutely refusing to meet Raesinia’s eyes. In the front, Janus was stripped to a white shirt and trousers, sopping wet.
She opened her mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a thin stream of river water. Raesinia held up a finger to indicate he should wait, and Janus nodded gravely. She leaned over the edge of the boat and vomited up a mix of water and blood that went on for far longer than she’d expected. Then, feeling quite a bit lighter, she turned back to Janus and took an experimental breath. The binding tingled across her lungs, repairing the damage done by hours of immersion. Her heart started with a jerk, then settled reluctantly into its familiar rhythm, like an ancient machine squealing along a rusty track.
“I have,” she said, and paused to cough a bit more water over the side. “I have been better. Considerably better.”
“I trust that you’ll recover?”
“I expect so.” Raesinia felt a little giddy, either as a result of her rescue or because the binding hadn’t created enough blood to replace all she’d lost. She looked down at her torn, bedraggled shirt, and sighed. “I think these clothes have about had it, though.”
A smile flickered across Janus’ face. He looked up at Sothe. “Back to the North Shore docks, then.”
“Wait,” Raesinia said, as the oars started to cut the water again. “I have to go back. The others-”
“Think you’re dead,” Janus interrupted. “Miss Sothe has been good enough to inform me of what happened. Your reappearance now might provoke suspicion, to say the least.”
“She has?” Raesinia caught Sothe’s eye and got a look that said, I’ll explain later. She shook her head. “I could. . think of something. Some miracle. It doesn’t matter. I need to-”