I’d given Ruc his space when we loaded up—his men didn’t know me, and I didn’t want to get in the way of his command. I’d stayed well out of the way as the sun rose grudgingly above the rushes and the ship fell into the creaking rhythm of oars and grumbled orders. Since casting off the hawsers, however, he’d barely glanced at me. His indifference, in fact, was so absolute that I might have stumbled onto the boat entirely by accident, an irrelevant, extra passenger fetched up on the deck.
Sick and prickly with my own disappointment, I retreated to the rail, tried on a look that seemed appropriately military and aloof, and remained there most of the morning, watching the deadly creatures of the delta slide silently past.
I’d been surprised to discover, when I first set foot outside Dombang, that everyone else on the continent seemed to view the Shirvian River with a kind of complacent indifference. For the majority of its great arc across Eridroa, the current is easily navigable—sinuous and swift above Lake Baku, wide and strong below, broken by only two cataracts. To the people of Sia or Ghan, the river is little more than a benign, undying mule, one that can be relied on, season after season, to patiently bear the people and property of half a dozen atrepies on its broad, glistening back. Everywhere above the delta, the river is a servant.
In the delta itself, however, in the thousand braided channels that constantly threaten to strangle Dombang, the river is a god, and not a gentle one.
Maps are almost useless. The delta is always changing and growing in unpredictable ways. Deep channels will silt up in months, become suddenly impassible. Islands that might have made reliable points of reference sink into the murk almost overnight, swallowed in mud and reeds, leaving no sign of their passage. New mounds of clotted earth are constantly cropping up where there had been nothing more than silently swirling water. Only the city’s fishers, who ply the waters with their nets every single day, can stay ahead of the constantly shifting labyrinth, and even they fall prey to the delta.
Of course, Dombang would never have grown to its current size if no one had done anything to drive the watery labyrinth back. Among Goc My’s many achievements was the establishment of a corps of engineers charged with building and maintaining a reliable channel, deep enough for heavy seagoing vessels, linking the upper course of the Shirvian to the sea. The city doubled in size in a single generation, then doubled again, and again. Even as gold and silver flooded in, however, borne in the hands and hulls of foreigners from a dozen nations, there were those who whispered that Goc My had betrayed his city and her gods. In all these years, it is the delta that has kept us safe, they whispered, and he has profaned the delta. He has had the hubris to try to tame it.
From the deck of the double-hulled boat where I stood, the delta looked anything but tamed. We were following Goc My’s central channel eastward, the oarsmen working with the sluggish current. From the relative safety of the deck, I could make out the slick-bellied eels twisting in our wake, the long snakes basking in the riverbank mud, the crocodiles floating silently, patiently along the river’s edges, waiting for some unwary prey. Boulders broke the current’s surface in some places; in others, the jagged rocks lurked just beneath, stone teeth ready to tear the bottom out of our hull. The boat’s navigator perched in the bow, shouting directions back to the helmsman—Avoid the bank there! Hard port! Slip wide of that eddy!—who handled the tiller with one steady hand, his face lost in the focus of the moment.
Ruc didn’t seem to notice any of it, not the sandbars or the crocodiles, not the deck rocking softly beneath our feet. He’d had his eyes fixed on the horizon for most of the morning, as though staring at something past the limit of mortal vision. As the sun climbed higher, however, baking the deck, glittering like a million coins on the ruffled water, I began to hear Ela’s voice—smooth and sly as the priestess herself—murmuring inside my mind:
If you can’t even stand the right way, you’re never going to fall in love.
I took a deep breath, then turned my attention to the arrangement of the space between us. Ruc stood up in the bow, just a few paces behind the navigator, back straight as the boat’s mast, scarred hands clasped behind him. In my irritation, I’d taken myself almost as far away from him as I could get, all the way into the stern, where I could lean on the rail while resting an arm over the transom.
Once I’d drummed up the courage to consider the situation, to really look at what was going on inside my own fool head, it became clear what I was doing. I had retired to the stern of the boat in the hope that Ruc would notice my absence and follow me. It was, I had to admit, a strange vision of intimacy, one based on retreat and pursuit, one in which the proof of his interest would lie in his willingness to hunt me down regardless of how far I fled. I could almost hear Ela laughing in my ear: Are you a woman, Pyrre, or a little girl? I sidestepped that question, raising my eyes to study Ruc instead.
Vexingly, he had not hunted me down, if hunt was even the word for a stroll of a dozen paces down an open deck. He hadn’t even turned since I left him in the bow, didn’t even have the good grace to seem wary of me. With his back turned like that, I could have driven a knife between his shoulder blades, bursting his heart before he had a chance to cry out. I’d gone to great lengths, of course, to convince him that we were on the same side. I wanted him to believe I was Kettral, to believe we both served the same empire, but I didn’t want him to be so ’Kent-kissing relaxed.
How much could a man love a woman, after all, if he wasn’t a little worried she might kill him?
I realized I was tapping my knife. I stopped, gritted my teeth, pushed myself clear of the rail, found my balance as the boat rolled gently beneath me. If Ela was right, then I was all wrong. There were no hot edges in the space I’d built between us, no hooks. I’d come to the far end of the boat hoping he would join me, but he hadn’t joined me. I could wait, hope, pine, or I could try something different. I spared a silent curse for Eira, whose canny ways were so unlike those of the god I’d chosen, then strode forward.
I tried to feel the emptiness between us as it closed, tried to find the shape of it, the angles and edges. The first few paces made no difference, but by the time I stood an arm’s length from Ruc’s back, something had changed. I could feel it inside me, as though someone had tied a hair-fine invisible cord to my softest organs and was using it to pull me, gently but insistently, toward Ruc. It irritated me that Ela was right, but I didn’t have time for irritation, because Ruc was turning, finally taking his eyes off the maze of the delta for the first time. Whether he, too, felt that silken tether as he met my gaze, it was impossible to say.
“We’d be there already if we had your bird,” he said.