“Would you?” Ruc asked.
I turned to face him once again. Despite the mounting tension, Ruc didn’t scowl, didn’t snarl or shout. His hands remained clasped behind his back, his face still. I knew that stillness, though. When Ruc stopped moving, it meant he was holding something back, some violence that couldn’t be safely unleashed.
I liked that violence.
I moved closer to him, my mind only half on the conversation. “Of course I would. Goc My’s channel is a hundred paces wide. It runs straight east-west. This…” I waved a vague hand at the encroaching weeds, “doesn’t look anything like it.”
Ruc shook his head. “You grew up here. The soldiers on that transport, most of them wouldn’t know a reed snake from a rock. They trusted their pilot and helmsman.”
“Good lesson, I guess, in trusting fewer people.”
“This from the woman insisting I trust her.”
“I said fewer people, not none.”
“And you, I suppose, are one of the few?”
“I figure I’ve earned a spot.”
It felt good to be sparring again. The verbal jabs tossed back and forth offered something like the intensity of a physical fight, but without all the fists and blood. I shifted my footing, as though we were actually back in the ring together, using the rolling of the deck as an excuse to step closer. Ruc didn’t move back, but I could see the change in his posture, the way he turned at the waist to match my movement, how he unclasped his hands behind his back, let his arms fall to his side. It seemed, for just a moment, that we were dancers exploring a set of undiscovered steps. But of course we were not dancers.
Dancing was something for other people, for women who knew better the clandestine measures of their own beating hearts, who understood what it was to love or be loved. Fishers or farmers could dance. People who could barely keep time with a stick on the bottom of a barrel could, inexplicably, dance. Women whose bodies were entirely untrained, who stumbled through the most basic movements, still found a way to animate their own clumsy motion with something even I could see was true feeling.
I, on the other hand, could move through the steps of a complicated piece with relative ease—the training of Rassambur is good for more than killing—but I never liked dancing. I never understood it. I felt wooden when I danced, slack-limbed and pointless in a way I never did while hunting or fighting. Not that dancing was love, but it seemed the same breakage in me was responsible for my failures at both. Love, Ela claimed, was a matter of bodies, and I didn’t understand my own if I wasn’t doing something dangerous with it.
“Hold water,” the pilot cut in, raising his hand to signal the oarsmen.
A hundred paces on, the channel twisted sharply, winding out of sight. The delta seemed unnaturally quiet when the oars finally fell still. A blue-throat croaked out its pained, discordant music somewhere in the bank off to the right, then fell silent. The sky, fat and bright with hot afternoon light, crouched low overhead. The Greenshirts behind us shifted uneasily, muttering, checking weapons. I glanced over my shoulder. The other boats were nowhere to be seen, hidden behind the last bend, holding back as Ruc had ordered, waiting to see if we would spring a trap.
I tapped gently at the knives strapped against my thighs, an old familiar eagerness rising inside me. I might not know how to dance, but this was no time for dancing. When a sluggish gust kicked up out of the north, I caught the thick, too-sweet, meaty scent of rot. There were bodies not far off, already putrefying in the equatorial heat. I could feel the quiet, implacable grandeur of my god swelling through the air, could feel my own heart swelling to meet him, the quick, even beat of my devotion.
For just that moment, love stopped mattering. I could stop agonizing over my own romantic inadequacy. Death waited around the bend in the canal, and if the men behind me were terrified, I felt relief, a clean red eagerness to be reminded of his clarity.
12
Maybe you’ve stood inside a hall or private home the morning after a great festival. The guests are gone, the revelry finished, the music silent, but signs of the evening’s delight remain—half-full glasses of wine, burned-out lanterns, that one scarf tossed over the back of a chair as though whoever had forgotten it might return at any moment. There’s a particular feeling to an empty room that hours earlier was brimming with human life, a taste to the quiet, a melancholy. The transport ship reminded me of that.
The broad-beamed, shallow vessel was no hall, of course, and instead of glasses and scarves, we had swords, bloody organs, piles of the festering dead, but the feeling was the same: the party was over. We had stepped into a space where something singular had happened, where people had poured themselves utterly into the moment and then departed, never to return. The great celebration of Ananshael’s glory was finished. All that was left was the detritus.
One of the Greenshirts vomited over the side of the transport. Another was crying quietly, staring at the scene, not even bothering to wipe the tears from his eyes. Unlike my sisters and brothers, these men were not accustomed to the aftermath of my god’s passage. I tried to put on an appropriately Kettralish expression of stern regret mixed with just a touch of fury. It was hard to say if I was succeeding, but it hardly mattered; Ruc had turned away from me once more to shake his soldiers from their horror.
“Truc,” he growled. “I want a dozen men on each rail, eyes on the banks. Hu, find me the pilot and helmsman, but do not move their bodies. Mah, divide the rest into teams of four. Search for survivors first. Check every pulse, I don’t care how dead the poor bastard looks. Anyone left alive might tell us … VOC TAN!” He hacked that last name through the rest of what he’d been saying like an ax.
One of the Greenshirts—he looked almost as green as his shirt—spun around, eyes wide and glazed. He’d half drawn his sword.
“Sheathe that blade,” Ruc said quietly. “The next man I see with bared steel is swimming back.”
“But the…” The young soldier trailed off, gesturing to the carnage on the deck.
Ruc crossed to the soldier, put a hand on his arm. “They’re gone. Whoever did this is gone. Put your blade away and get to work.”
Only when the Greenshirts had scattered over the deck did he turn back to me.
“All this talk of traps,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re not demanding they have their weapons out.”
Ruc shook his head, lowered his voice. “They’re not Kettral.”
“More reason to be ready.”
“A weapon doesn’t make a man ready. They’re strung so tight right now they’re more likely to put those blades into their friends than any of the nonexistent enemy.”