Ruc didn’t look at me, but after a moment he tossed his sword contemptuously aside.
“The rest of you, too,” Hoai said.
Kossal spat onto the dock. “Don’t have any weapons.”
“Which, at the moment,” Ela added thoughtfully, “is starting to look like an oversight.”
*
I caught a glimpse of the cell as Ruc’s renegade Greenshirts shoved us inside: a narrow box ten feet by ten feet, the floor and walls carved out of the island’s red-brown bedrock, ceiling built of cedar beams, each one nearly as thick as my waist. Not the perfect prison. Given a chisel, a stool to reach that ceiling, and an uninterrupted week in which to work, anyone with a brain and a little muscle could break out. Of course, no one had given us a chisel or a stool, and a week seemed optimistic. I was still scanning the space for another weakness when the door slammed shut behind us and darkness closed its unrelenting fist.
“I’ll admit I’m vexed,” Ela said after a few moments of silence. “I was looking forward to a bath, a bottle of plum wine, and one of those attractive young men from Anho’s Dance.”
“It was a mistake,” Kossal said, “putting us in the same cell.”
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Ela replied.
The old priest snorted. “We’re more dangerous together.”
“To whom?” I asked. My eyes had had time to adjust and I still could see nothing, not even shadows to attach to the various voices. “We might have made a play on the docks. Now that we’re in here, all they need to do is keep the door closed to kill us.”
“They’re not going to kill us.” Ruc’s voice, at the far end of the cell. In the momentary silence that followed, I could hear him dragging a hand along the rough wall. It was easy to imagine he wasn’t a man, but some animal, patient and dangerous, even caged. “They want us alive. Probably for some mockery of a trial.”
“I can understand why they want you,” Ela said. “Traitor to your home, your people, all that. I’m not sure what they’ll get out of putting Kossal and me on trial. He’s done nothing but sit around and gripe since we arrived in the city, and unless Dombang has some ridiculous archaic laws about who is allowed to put what inside whom, I can’t imagine I’ve done anything wrong.”
“You just put a knife in the chest of that Greenshirt on the dock,” I pointed out.
“Surely a woman can be forgiven the occasional indiscretion.”
“How did you know?” Ruc asked. He had paused in his circuit of the cell just behind my shoulder. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel him there, a strength in the darkness.
Kossal replied instead of Ela. “They were all looking at the wrong thing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Us,” the old priest went on. “They had their flatbows aimed at the river, but they were watching us.”
“We’d just returned from two days in the delta,” Ruc pointed out. “It could have been amazement. Curiosity.”
“Could have been,” Kossal said. “But it wasn’t.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” I asked.
“If I said something, one of you fools might have done something. They had flatbows on us, which meant dying, which is fine, but I’m still keen to put a knife into whatever’s out there in the delta.”
From the far corner of the cell, Chua spoke. She sounded older in the darkness, more tired. “You might still have the chance.”
“They’re not going to put us on trial,” I said, the whole thing blooming in my mind at once. “That’s not why they’re keeping us alive.” It only made sense once I saw it. “Trials aren’t native to Dombang. They’re Annurian. To anyone who worships the Three, justice and sacrifice are the same thing. Before the empire came, criminals weren’t tried by courts; they were given to the delta.”
No one spoke. The only sound was our breathing’s whispered polyphony.
“Well, that,” Ela said finally, “raises my spirits considerably. A trial sounded tedious.”
*
Lock most people in a hot, lightless cell with only the promise of a bloody, vicious death to look forward to, and they will stay awake all night, imagining the horrors of the future in a thousand different forms. Most minds will supply their own torture well before the executioner comes with his ax, before the sticks are piled around the stake, before the furious mob hurls the first stone. History is filled with tales of women and men locked in small rooms, sane on the day they entered, raving mad by the time they emerged to face their various fates.
Kossal and Ela were not like those people.
After establishing that there was no way out, that there was no point clawing at the walls, that, in all likelihood, we would be sacrificed to the delta—a positive development as far as both of them were concerned—they chose the smoothest spots they could find on the rough floor and went promptly to sleep, Kossal’s snoring the jagged bass line to Ela’s deep, steady breathing. Peace is one of Ananshael’s greatest gifts—when you have spent your whole life preparing to meet the god, his approach holds no terror.
Chua took longer.
“I knew this,” she said after Kossal and Ela had fallen asleep.
“Knew what?” I asked.
“That I would die here.”
Ruc was sitting next to me, his back to the cool rock wall. “We’re not dead yet,” he said.
“We will be.”
“You survived the delta once,” I pointed out. “Twelve days alone.”
“Ten days alone,” she said. “Tem was with me for the first two.”
I tried to find some shape in the blackness, some human form, then gave up and closed my eyes.
“What happened to him?” I asked. “How did he die?”
“I killed him.”
Ruc shifted at my side. I could imagine him, too, staring into that perfect black. For a long time, no one spoke.
“Why?” I asked finally.
“The knife seemed kind. More kind than spiders or crocs, jaguar or qirna. I did not expect to survive. Not him. Not me.”
The next question seemed wrong to ask, and I had no idea how to pose it, but I needed the answer.
“Did he know? That it was you?”
“I stabbed him as he slept. He woke, looked into my eyes, and died.”
“And you thought you could escape from that,” Ruc said, “with a few hundred pieces of gold?”
“I told myself I might.” Chua paused, then went on. “I knew I could not. The Given Land is inside me.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Ruc demanded. He sounded more tired than angry, despite the edge to his words.
“No one escapes. Even those who walk out walk out different. The Land makes them into something else.”
All over again I could feel the boa coiling around my eight-year-old body, could feel myself slamming the knife into the snake over and over and over, then later, days later, into the chest of my father as he slept, into my mother’s neck, the blood hot all over my hands, my own scream strangled in my throat.