“You all right?”
“Relatively,” he muttered, sweeping an eye around the deck. “Did we lose anything?”
“One of the bags of supplies.”
“Which one?”
“The big one.”
“Oh, good. Just the one with all the food and the medicine, then.” He rubbed his neck, easing out an angry kink in his spine. “I assume we don’t need those. Not with your plan to guide us.”
“For someone who wants to find an island no one knows the location of, you’re awfully picky about how we get there,” Kataria replied, glaring at him. “We’ve still got that.” She pointed to the spear, tangled amidst the rope upon the deck. “That’s all we need.”
“Maybe it’s the concussion affecting my reasoning, but I can’t help but suspect that one needs slightly more than a rusty spear to kill a serpent the size of a tree.”
“How would killing it help us?”
His face screwed up. “I’d love to answer, but I don’t think I was prepared to hear anything quite that insane today.”
“The fact that we are not trying to kill something is insane?”
An unsettling question, he noted, one that would be far less unsettling had it not been accompanied by her stare. Eyes like arrowheads, hers jammed into his, hard and sharp and aimed at something he could not see in his own head.
Something cold and cruel that didn’t want to be seen.
“I need you to trust me.”
“I can’t.” The answer came tumbling out on a hot breath, on his own voice and no one else’s. He shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“I know.”
She flashed him a smile, something old and sick and full of tears. She walked toward him slowly, hands held up before her, as though she approached a frightened beast and not the man she had kissed, not the man she had betrayed.
“I’m not going to apologize for it,” she said.
“I don’t want apologies.”
She was before him. He could feel her warmth through the chill of water. He could see her clearly through the haze of the fog. He could hear her. Only her.
“Then let me give you what you want,” she whispered. “Lenk, I-”
Her voice was drowned in the crash of waves and thunderous roar as the sea split apart before them. They cowered beneath the railing, a great wave sweeping over them and sending their vessel rocking violently. Lenk looked up and beheld only the writhing blue column of the creature’s body, the rest lost to the mist as he stared upward.
And, like a single star in a dead sky, a yellow eye stared back at him.
Absorbed as he might have been in the creature’s stare, Kataria shared no such fascination. He could hear her bow sing a mournful tune as she let an arrow fly into the fog, aiming for the eye.
“The spear!” she screamed over her shoulder as she drew another arrow. “The spear! Hit it! Hit it now!”
The deck trembled with Gariath’s charge, arm drawn back and splintering spear in hand as he rushed to the bow and hurled the weapon. It sailed through the air, rope whipping behind it before it bit into the beast’s hide with a thick squishing sound.
Undeterred by the length of wood and rusted steel jutting from its hide, the beast began to crane toward them, the eye growing larger. A curse accompanied each wail of arrow as Kataria sent feathered shafts into the mist.
And still, the beast came. Each breath brought it closer, taking shape in the wall of gray: the great crest of its fin, the jagged shape of its skull. Within three breaths, Lenk could almost count the individual teeth as its jaws slid out of the fog and gaped wide.
He wondered almost idly, as he brought his impotent sliver of steel up before the cavernous maw, how many it would take to split him in half.
If the answer came at all to him, it was lost in a fevered shriek of an arrow flying and the keening wail of a beast in pain. The missile struck beneath the beast’s eye, joining a small cluster of quivering shafts in the thin flesh of its eyelid.
“Didn’t think I knew where I was shooting, did you?” Kataria shrieked, though to whom wasn’t clear. “Did you?”
The Akaneed, at a distinct loss for replies that didn’t involve high-pitched, pained screeches, chose instead to leave the question unanswered. Its body tipped, falling into the ocean where it disappeared with a resounding splash.
“See? See?” Kataria’s laughter had never been a particularly beautiful noise, though it had never grown quite as close to the sound of a mule as it did at that moment. “I told you it would work! Damn thing’s not going to risk its only eye just to kill you.”
“I should have killed it,” Gariath muttered, folding massive arms over massive chest. “It deserved better than you.”
She sneered over her shoulder at him. “Maybe it just thought I was prettier.”
“What. .” Lenk had hoped to have something more colorful to say as he stared out over the waves, “what was that?”
“That,” Kataria replied, “was the plan. To lure the thing out and then send it running. Any wounded animal will always flee to its lair.” Her ears shot up triumphantly. “In this case. .”
“Jaga,” Lenk finished for her. His eyebrows rose appreciatively. “That. . almost makes sense.”
“Almost?” she asked, ears drooping slightly.
“Well, what was the spear for?”
A faint whistling sound brought their attention to the rope sliding across the deck.
“Oh, right.” She bent down, plucking up the rope and sturdying herself against the bow. “Pick that up.” She looked past Lenk to Gariath, “Mind grabbing the rudder? This is the part I didn’t really think out.”
Lenk plucked up the thick rope. He opened his mouth to inquire but found reason to do so lacking. Everything became clear the moment he felt the tug on the rope and felt the boat move.
Questions did tear themselves from his mouth, though: noisy ones, mostly wordless, mostly curse-filled. If any answers came back, he didn’t hear them, what with all the screaming.
It was funny, he thought as he was jerked violently forward, but he had never before thought of arm sockets as a liability. As he was pulled from his feet and slammed upon the deck, though, he wondered if it might not have been easier if his arms had just been torn off and gone flying into the mist with the rest of the rope.
That thought occurred to him roughly a moment after he skidded across the slick timbers to crash against the railings and a moment before instinct shouted down rational thought.
Get up, it screamed. Get up!
He did so, staggeringly. And even when he found purchase, it didn’t last long. Even as the vessel tore through the water, pulled along by its unwilling, bellowing beast, the deck slowly slid beneath his feet. He was dragged forward, skidding across the timbers until he came chest-to-back with Kataria.
The shict stood her ground, bracing with her legs spread and feet firmly against the bow as she leaned back and held on tight. He slid into her stance as he collided with her, the rope slipping out of his hands briefly.
She let out a sharp cry as she was jerked forward, looking as though the thing would pull her over at any moment. He snatched up the rope again, feeling it gnaw angrily at his palms as he struggled to regain his grip.
“Hold on!” Kataria shrieked to be heard over the roar of waves beneath them and the bellowing of the Akaneed before them.
“I am!” he cried back, seizing the rope and holding it tightly.
“Hold on!” she screamed again.
“I said I was!”
“HOLD ON!”
“That’s not as helpful as you might think!”
“LEFT!”