The wind gusts harder. A gale is moving in, strange for this season. The Great Gibbet twists, while the tide bursts over the pier. Its spray wails with the prisoners’ despair. Jeryon bathes in it, and he feels beautiful.
He turns to ask the Trust where the poth is, and he finds himself staring at the gibbet again with the Trust behind him. He turns the other way. The world turns with him. He can’t face the Trust. He can’t see their faces. He can hear them laughing.
Then he’s in the dinghy, filthy and contorted, clutching the tiller against a heaving sea. He closes his eyes again.
Something smacks his face. His eyes grind open. The poth holds a heavy bulb of smock above his lips. A wave makes her fall, and the bulb dives into his mouth. He sucks. Rainwater flows into the cracks in his tongue. It’s warm and sweet, and he’s drowning in it. He spits out the cloth and water. She sops more water from the bottom of the boat with her hem, braces herself, and wrings the water into his mouth. His head droops over the transom so the rain can fall down his throat while she sops up a third drink.
This time he grabs the bulb and takes it into his mouth himself. She tugs the bulb free, touches it to his lips, and squeezes. “Slowly,” she says.
As she resops, so slowly, a frenzy takes him. Shaking, he works free the crosspiece guide and hauls in the rudder. It splashes in nearly an inch of water. It can’t all be fresh, but enough is, and the rain is picking up. He wrenches his shirt off, mops it across the bottom, and squeezes the water over his face. Still too slow. He flings himself down and drinks directly from the dinghy. He slurps and waits for her to pull him away, except she’s beside him on all fours now, lapping and gagging, the frenzy in her too. Once the boat is empty, he will suck her long hair dry.
The rain falls in great fans faster than they can drink it, and the sea rises high enough to stuff it back into the clouds. Only the drops lancing their skin let them know which way is up.
A wave nearly jounces them from the boat. Jeryon yells in the poth’s ear, “Blade!” She stares at him. He yells again. She searches through her pockets for it. Did she lose it? Jeryon feels around in the boat. She finds it in the pocket behind her smock’s brocade and gives it to him. He saws through the strand attaching his wrist to the rudder, pockets the blade, and ties the strand to her left wrist with a child’s knot. “Float,” he says.
He notices something odd on his left wrist. A tiny cut seeps blood. A bruise blooms around it. He wonders how it got there.
A wave rolls the dinghy mere seconds from the righting moment, pushing her on top of him, before it settles back. She grabs his wrists. A wave flips them the other way. Another gushes over the gunwale, half filling the dinghy. Jeryon slips under the poth so she can keep her head above the water. The rudder floats beside them, clacking against the remaining pieces of her paddle.
Something scrapes the hull, the dinghy shudders, and a strake cracks. Water spits through the hull then disappears as more waves fill the boat, and the poth lets go of his wrists. Splashing for purchase, she floats away from him. The rudder is tossed overboard, dragging her half over the gunwale. He grabs her collar and hauls her back in. She hooks her free arm around his neck. He folds her smock’s brocade into his fist and tucks her against his body. They’re more afloat than the dinghy. He wraps a leg around her thigh to weigh her down. A huge wave rises astern, dawning black above the transom.
His eyes tell her what’s coming. Hers plead, Don’t die. His say, You can’t.
A mat of fresh palm leaves sloshes by and vanishes. In disbelief they look around for it, and obligingly it returns to moor in the lagoon between their chests. A tiny white horned crab shakes its claws at them and scuttles off its raft into the dinghy. The wave crest bubbles white and reaches for them.
The dinghy rises slowly, stern first. Jeryon throws out his feet to catch his sandals on the boat’s ribs. Water pours over the bow, pulling them forward toward the sea. The remains of the poth’s paddle slide past them and disappear into the sea. The toes of Jeryon’s sandals slip to the next rib, then the next.
The crest curls over them like his father’s hand. It rises, strikes, holds them inside its fist, squeezes, and shoots the dinghy through its foamy fingers across the sea.
Everlyn screams because she knows they’re going to live until the bow is stoved in. Water blasts through it like a gout of dragon flame. It slices her from Jeryon’s grasp, and the boat pitches over their heads. The last thing Everlyn sees is him reaching for her as they soar into a sky of water.
CHAPTER THREE
The Beach
1
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