He couldn’t save them.
He nodded his failure to Cruxer. He had to leave. They couldn’t be saved.
Cruxer threw the rope toward Kip, but immediately dozens of hands reached up to catch it.
A man grabbed it and tore the ends away from his neighbors. “Save me! For the love of Orholam, please!”
Kip waded up the main aisle between the rowers’ benches, feeling a panic build in him. He was going to be trapped here. He not only wasn’t going to save them, he was going to die himself.
Bubbles came up in the water as a submerged man despaired of holding his breath any longer.
“Breaker!” Cruxer shouted. “I believe!”
Cruxer cracked open a mag torch, and it flared shocking green.
Kip couldn’t leave them. He had to do this. He was the only one who could.
He made it to the man holding the rope. “Give me the rope. I can save you.”
But the man was fear-frozen, desperate, beyond reason.
Kip clobbered him and took the rope. He pushed back into the deeper water, took several deep breaths, and pushed under water.
He found the lock again. But the lock didn’t matter. The chain was too strong to break. But the chain was just a bond, and a bond wasn’t evil. A chain could be a lifeline. What mattered was what you were bound to.
By touch in the cool, murky water, Kip found the enormous metal loop that bolted the chain to the deck. He wound green luxin thick around the chain, pushing his will into that space until the green luxin filled it.
He called to mind then that boy he had been so long ago, trapped in that closet with the rats, biting, scratching. It came back all too readily. But he pushed past the remembered terror—that wasn’t what he needed now—and there it was: the unspeakable thirst for freedom, the longing to break something, to get out.
Every muscle in his body flexed and he roared, bubbles erupting from his mouth, and he felt something crack.
Kip surfaced, gasped, and went down again, even as another row disappeared under the waves.
The big loop was torn loose of the decking, but only one huge nail had pulled fully free. The bolt hadn’t broken; one of the clinch nails that had been pounded through the deck and then bent aside had been pulled through.
Kip pushed the chain beneath the freed side, and then moved up the submerged rows by feel.
There were identical, much smaller loops holding the chains bolted to the floor at every row.
But Kip had the process now. Attacking the clinch nails rather than the bolts, almost as quickly as he could push through the water, he tore out one after another with an explosion of luxin and wood and breath.
He surfaced again, and waded forward. The men were shouting. They didn’t understand because they couldn’t feel the slack in the chains until their own loops were broken.
Finally Kip pulled the last one free, directly beneath Cruxer. He looped the rope Cruxer had given him through the chain. “Pull!” he shouted.
And suddenly help arrived as the Cwn y Wawr from the first boat freed themselves one at a time. First a single man helped Cruxer lift men out of the hold, pulling the chain in like a fishing line, the enslaved flopping about like fish.
Then another man jumped into the hold with Kip, giving the imprisoned men a foot up to climb out. And then another came to help keep the chain from getting tangled. And others arrived, pulling the dead from the water.
The whole line was still bound together, so if any part was dragged underwater, at least half the men would be pulled down with it.
There was a sharp crack, and water gushed into the boat, but the men didn’t feel it, even as the deck bucked beneath their feet.
The healthy heaved on the chain, and the chained made it to shore.
A few exhausted minutes later, Kip and everyone else had been dragged onto the bank. Nine men couldn’t be revived and several others had died in the initial blasts or in their own escape attempts—at least two lay facedown on the riverbank having cut off their own arms to escape their shackles, only to bleed to death in cold freedom.
The pale Cwn y Wawr commander, the short, gap-toothed, black-haired man named Derwyn Aleph, had tried to use his barge’s key on the still-chained men’s locks. It hadn’t worked.
He looked at the corpses bound to his men, and he looked to the forest, from which reinforcements might come at any time. He turned to Kip, who was seated on the riverbank, barely able to move.
“By your traditions, you can’t defile the dead, nor can you leave them behind,” Tisis said. Kip had no idea when she’d arrived. “But your men can’t possibly carry them through the forest with the speed you need to move if you’re to escape.”
The man gave a stiff nod.
“Tell your men to look away,” she said. “Ferkudi, Big Leo, if I’m to lead these people, I can’t be ritually unclean in their eyes. Cut these men free of the chains, and put their bodies on our skimmer.”
She walked around so the commander could look at her rather than seeing what Ferkudi and Big Leo did. And to their credit, the Mighty did it quickly and without question or complaint, quickly lopping off hands and feet and freeing the dead from the chains that still bound them to the living. To Kip, it was a sudden synecdoche of all that warriors do: the stomach-turning, soul-scarring butchery that society asks for the safety and squeamishness of its soft souled.
Tisis said, “We’ll lay them out on Fechín Island at the Black River confluence. Burial is yours, though.”
Derwyn looked overwhelmed with gratitude. He pointed at Kip with his chin. “Who is he?”
“Does it matter?” Tisis asked.
“Only to spread the tales,” Derwyn said. “A hero’s due.”
“Then he is Kip Guile, leader of these Mighty, who call him Breaker. Perhaps he is the Luíseach, perhaps he is the Diakoptês, though he claims neither. He is my husband. Even were he not, he is the man I would follow to the ends of the earth.”
Derwyn looked into the wood, deep in thought or merely peering for approaching enemies, and then turned to Kip, who sat on a stump, wrung out and wet, feeling anything but heroic.
Kip’s thoughts were running in the opposite direction: Wow, that was really dumb. I never should have done that. Why can’t I think before I do anything? Cruxer’s gonna kill me.
As his men sat or stood or stretched or bound up each other’s wounds, they all watched, and the Forester said, “These names tell me that you are a great man. I have seen great men. The chains you lifted from my wrists tell me that you are a strong man. I have known strong men. But you didn’t dive into that water to save us so that we might be your weapons. You knew we’d sought a coward’s peace. Most men would leave us to the hell we deserve for our faithlessness. The lives you have saved this day will testify unto eternity that you are a good man. A man who risks his life to save strangers testifies not to their worth but to his own. I have never seen or known a man to be great and strong and good as well. I will see you in three days with any who will join me. I care not what others call you; if you will have me, I will call you lord.”
Unable to quite process so much kindness at once, looking for some way to shrug it off and make a joke, Kip glanced over to find Cruxer glowering somewhere.
But Cruxer wasn’t glowering. He beamed. The rest of the Mighty ranged from Winsen’s expression of ‘Of course we’re awesome’ to Big Leo’s stolid approval to Ferkudi’s huge smile. Ben-hadad was had already processed whatever he was feeling and was back to fixing something.
Last Kip looked at Tisis, but even she didn’t give him some humorous out. Her eyes shone with tears of pride. It was as if all of them were reflecting back a different man than Kip had ever thought he was. What if the story I’ve been telling myself about who I am has been wrong?