Jeryon puts his left foot on the bottom beneath the starboard oarlock. “The current is fifty miles wide,” he says, “a bit wider than my sandal in boat scale. It leaves the ocean here, runs up my left leg, around my back, and down my right leg into the sea here.” He plants his right foot under the larboard oarlock. “And we are here.” He puts his finger on the bottom between his knees, amidships, and too close to his crotch, in Everlyn’s opinion. “Do you see our problem?”
The poth had hated her loremasters. When she was twelve her father discovered that she was running away from them to tramp through the woods with a forest warden. The warden convinced him that Everlyn, whatever her talent for sums, had a real devotion to herb-lore and healing. So her father gave Everlyn to her for schooling. She broke her slate in joy.
“How fast does the current run?” she asks.
“Correct,” Jeryon says. “Six knots. The Comber could cross it in four or five hours under full sail and oar, entering the river north of Eryn Point and letting it carry the galley down to the mouth of the bay. If we had oars to reach it, we would cross more slowly and be carried much farther south. Hopefully we’d make it to Yness before being swept to sea.”
“But we have no oars,” she says.
“Or water, which makes the issue moot. We’ll be dead of thirst before we make it across.”
“So we have no chance?”
“Not according to my mates’ calculations,” Jeryon says.
2
* * *
“Which brings us,” Jeryon continues, “to the second thing you need to know. I will get you to Hanosh so you can testify against my crew.”
“I could write it down,” she says, “and save you the trouble of saving me too.”
“We don’t have anything to write with,” he says. Jeryon reads her like a manifest: “Smock. Boots. Presumably undergarments.” She scowls. “Those sticks in your hair, let me see them,” he says. She looks skeptical. He says, “I won’t run off,” and holds out his hand.
She draws the pair of long steel pins from her bun. Her hair unfurls. Her neck sweats. “Why do you need them?” she says.
He tests their points, which are oddly sharp, and taps them together. Their surfaces are mottled like flowing water. “Gift from one of your company ladies?” he says. “These aren’t cheap.”
“Not everything has a price,” she says.
“In Hanosh it does.” He crosses his right leg and with one of the pins worries the seam of his pant leg. He says, “I bet someone came to you for help and discovered afterward that she was also suffering from a touch of embarrassment. So she paid you with these. Her husband’s going to be very upset when he finds out. What did you palm while Solet was searching you?”
Startled, the poth says, “You saw that?”
“Never lose sight of a person’s hand,” he says. “That’s Solet’s weakness. He’s easily distracted.”
The poth reaches into her pocket and removes a purple phial. “For cuts and burns.”
“Handy, if we live long enough to be cut.” He looks at the sun. “We will be burned. Especially you.” Her upland skin is more golden than his, what the Hanoshi described in better times as “tea with honey” and now call “milky.”
“There we go.” A stitch pops and he yanks out the thread with the pin. He opens the seam and removes a steel blade, one edge straight, the other serrated, and a thin envelope the length of her pinky.
“Aren’t you full of surprises,” she says.
Jeryon has such a bland face, like dough too dry and hard to be pounded, that she’s shocked to see a bit of mischief dart through his eyes.
“Trust your sails, but not the wind,” Jeryon says. “And I’ve been thinking the wind was about to turn.”
“Do you have an aphorism for everything?” she says. “Any port in a storm? Nodding the head won’t row the boat?”
“Simple rules prevent complex problems,” he says.
She humphs. “What’s in the envelope?”
He unfolds it carefully. In it sits a bone needle and some red thread.
“What’s that for? Sutures?”
“Do I look like a surgeon?” he says. “It’s for fixing my pants. I can’t run around with my pants falling to pieces, can I?”
Everlyn stifles a laugh at his serious expression.
He threads the needle and goes to work. “While I do this,” he says, “crawl to the bow and untie the painter.” Everlyn looks confused. “The line. The rope.” Landlubber, he thinks.
She nods and slips past him. She doesn’t ask why he needs the rope and lets the mystery of it burnish the next five minutes of life adrift.
The knot is hard as steel, hammered by a thousand waves. She wonders if this is a test of patience. Her fingers are powerful from yanking roots and nimble from untangling vines, but the knot gives only the tiniest bit with each tug. She develops a rhythm after a while, which lets her look into the water.