I shook my head. “There’s no place to hide a Kettral in Dombang. If we’d tried, half the city would know we were here.”
For a while, he didn’t respond, just looked at me, eyes warm and dangerous as the delta itself, and slightly narrowed, as though he were trying to make out the shape of some dangerous sandbar through a heavy morning fog. Unlike the rest of the Greenshirts on the boat, Ruc wore no armor, just a loose pair of cotton pants cinched tight at the waist with a rope belt, and the customary vest favored by everyone in Dombang. He’d unbuttoned the top buttons—Ruc had never been one for starched uniforms or martial bedazzlement—and I could see an old scar carved across the muscle of his chest, one he’d acquired down in the Waist years earlier, the healed flesh smoother and a shade paler than the rest of his skin. Like everyone else on the boat, he was sweating, but unlike the Greenshirts, who looked hot and miserable in their helmets and mail, Ruc looked ready, like a fighter warm and limber for the contest to come.
I could hit him.
The thought bloomed inside me, quick and unbidden. A part of me knew it was ridiculous, but then again, it had worked when we were in Sia. I had yet to find Love’s undiscovered country, but I felt certain it shared a border with a darker realm, one that I knew all too well, a land of constant struggle governed by Violence and Fury. Breaking my fist against the stone-hard muscles of his ribs might not be love, but it was some kind of intimacy, at least, the touch of skin against skin.
I shoved the thought aside.
For one thing, attacking the commander of the Greenshirts on the deck of his own vessel in front of a score of his own men wasn’t likely to further my claim that we were allies. There was more to my reluctance than that, however. I could remember all too well Ela’s arm locked around my throat, her whispered insistence on the tiny distinctions and degrees of all human intimacy. Almost loving, she murmured, her brown eyes so violently close to my own. I felt her lithe body shift. Almost killing.
I had already tried hitting Ruc. We’d fought each other half a dozen times, and though the violence led to several months sharing the same bed, we hadn’t, either one of us, fallen in love. I could tread that path again, and easily enough, but I needed something better this time, something more. I tried to imagine how the other women of the world—women raised outside Rassambur, women trained in other arts than the cutting of throats and the ending of lives—potters, maybe, or princesses—might approach a young man standing on the deck of the ship.
I could hug him.
I couldn’t imagine a more irritating vision: leaning in, pulling him close, resting my grateful head against his chest like some sort of supplicant or idiot. The thought redoubled my desire to hit him, and to resist that, I shifted half a foot away.
“If it wasn’t the local insurgents,” I asked finally, stepping up to the rail beside him, “then who?”
The Greenshirts had been eyeing me warily all morning, obviously unsure who I was or why I was there. A couple of the oarsmen muttered under their breath as I approached their commander, but they were too far down the boat to hear us.
“It’s the insurgents,” Ruc replied.
“Not what your man told me when he tried to kick in my door. Said they were all dead—both the legionaries and whoever attacked them.”
“My ‘man’ is a terrified twenty-year-old telling you a story he heard from another twenty-year-old who heard it from a pair of fishers who were so drunk when they finally got to the Shipwreck that they couldn’t stand up.”
“You think they’re wrong?”
“I think,” Ruc said, flexing his hand, testing out the fist, “that the only people you tend to find after an ambush are the dead ones.”
“When’s the last time the insurgency hit an Annurian transport?”
He shook his head grimly. “Never.”
“Historical moment,” I said, smiling brightly.
“I’d have thought Kettral would be a little more vexed by assassination and open rebellion.”
“When vexation starts making the bad guys dead, I’ll look into it.” I glanced down the channel, which was overhung by rushes on both sides. Tiny birds in the rushes cried their feathered fury at our passage, then fell silent. “Have you considered that this whole thing might be a trap?”
Ruc’s stare was flat as the ocean before a storm.
“Let me rephrase,” I said. “What are you planning to do if it is a trap?”
“We have ten boats,” he said, gesturing to the vessels behind us. “Two hundred Greenshirts.”
“There were a hundred legionaries on the transport,” I pointed out, “and according to your man, they were all slaughtered.”
“That boat was vulnerable, alone, taken by surprise. When the trap slammed shut, there were no other vessels to back it up.”
“Meaning, if there is a trap, you intend to row straight into it.”
“Only the first boat. The others will hang back.”
I glanced over my shoulder at the vessels creasing the dark water behind us.
“I can’t help noticing that we’re the first boat.”
I wondered what degree of concern to feign. The truth was, I didn’t much care if it was a trap. I’d spent most of the trip thinking about Ruc, about love, about whatever was wrong with me that meant I needed to think so hard about the first two things. I knew, obviously, that a ship full of slaughtered soldiers waited at the end of our foray, but that was nothing new: Ananshael waits, finally, at the end of all voyages, bottomless and patient as the sea. I had had a lifetime to get used to that truth, and yet it seemed that I ought to try to look … what?
Frightened? That couldn’t be right. I’d never met any of the Kettral, but as a fighting force they were legendary, equal to my sisters and brothers. Kettral weren’t likely to be scared by the thought of a little violence. On the other hand, the Kettral weren’t priests of Ananshael. Death, to them, was failure. I tried to find my way into the character I’d created—a strong, fierce young woman who had trained all her life to fight for the glory of her empire, who had come back to the city of her birth to see it pacified, to make sure the job was done right. I shifted my face into a new expression, one that I hoped might approximate a resolute and unflinching civic devotion.
Ruc narrowed his eyes. “If you’re going to be sick, do it over the rail.”
That was the last time in my life that I aimed for an expression of civic devotion.
I turned away to hide my irritation. Our boat’s navigator had taken a side channel, one far narrower than the river’s main course. The current ran more sluggishly here, and the banks were closer, as though threatening to choke off the flow altogether. The small man was sweating, leaning halfway out over the boat’s stem, desperate to spot the rocks or sandbars before we ran aground.
“None of the soldiers noticed they left the main passage?” I asked. “Or that the banks were getting uncomfortably close?”