Jeryon grabs a branch, swinging it aside like a door on a hinge as two crabs fly past him. They and his spear plummet to the scree below. One foot follows them while the other scrambles for purchase. His hand slips down the branch. His knee finds the edge, he finds his balance on it, and his other spear comes up just in time to find the belly of a third leaping crab, catapulting it over his head. It slides off the spear, scrabbles at his shirt, caroms off his heel and falls.
The rest of the crabs spread out as he stands so he can’t escape. Their split mouths ruminate. One in the center darts at him. He jabs. It scuttles back. Two dart from either side. He swings the spear in an arc. They scuttle back. When three come, he has no good response. He jabs at the middle one, which lets the outside two get close enough to snip before he swings and they retreat. They missed, but hitting him wasn’t the point. Now four edge closer. The others click to goad them. One scrapes a pointed blue foot against the dirt. Then Jeryon hears something much larger crashing through the woods. He pictures the Crab King coming to finish him off.
A half-dozen crabs investigate. They disappear beyond a bamboo grove, where they’re met with cries of fury and steel clanking through shell. The bamboo waves. Only one returns to tell the tale. It scuttles toward the swarm, clicking frantically, the poth in pursuit, swinging a rusty broad sword with a cat’s head pommel. She cries again and hacks the crab in half, the creature running all the way to its comrades before it realizes that it’s dead, and its legs topple in opposite directions.
The blue crabs scatter. She starts to sheathe her sword in a steel sheath before thinking better of it.
Jeryon says, “How are you?”
“For one,” she says, “I’m sick of eating crab.”
Jeryon takes a step toward her, and a crab leaps from under the cliff’s edge onto his shoulder. Its broad claw bites into his arm. Its split mouth gnashes his head. Jeryon hollers and twists to get it off and stumbles toward the cliff’s edge.
Everlyn reaches out to him with the sword. He clutches the blade as his heels tip over the edge, which jerks her forward. Her sword opens his palm as he slowly topples backward, the crab riding him over the edge with its skinny claw raised in victory.
She rushes to the edge. The cliff isn’t perfectly vertical, and he slid for twenty feet before his sandals caught on a blade of rock. He’s pressed against the cliff face, clinging to cracks, while the crab worries his right arm. Blood seeps through his tattering sleeves.
She lies on her belly and swings her sword at the crab. She misses by a wide margin. The crab comes at her again, she swings again, and it turns aside to skitter along the cliff face. It disappears behind an outcrop.
She leaps up and faces the woods; the other crabs might come back. She holds her sword before her, sturdy but flexible, moving without moving, the way her father taught her when she was a girl. A trader has to be a duelist, he said, in case his guards are absent or traitorous. And swordsmanship offered a profitable worldview. Although she deplored the taking of life, he was right. Knowing intimately that every thrust could be her last had taught her anticipation, poise, intimidation, and planning. Still, her lessons would have been more interesting had she been armed with a cleaver like this broad sword instead of a foil.
The crab doesn’t appear, nor do the others. Is it waiting for her to reach for him and make herself vulnerable? Is it skulking through the bushes to flank her? Jeryon barks, “Poth.” She turns and flattens herself along the edge. He points to his right with his eyes. She swings. The sword sweeps the crab’s legs out from under it, and it falls. It skips off the cliff face, breaking off its legs and pieces of its shell.
“Hold on,” she says. She gets up and sees exactly what she needs near the edge: a thick vine dangling from a chinkapin. It’s lined with withering yellow flowers and small purple fruit like plums. She works it loose in stages and pushes it to Jeryon. He grabs hold and climbs it while she holds it over her shoulder, facing the roots to keep it from tearing out of the ground.
When he’s nearly up, she hears clicking in the brush. She left her sword by the chinkapin. Ten feet away, it feels like ten miles. “I have to drop the vine,” she says.
“No,” he says, “I’m almost there.”
The crabs come closer. “I’m going to try something,” she says. “Don’t let go.”
Everlyn hugs the vine tight and charges toward her sword and the crabs, drawing him up behind her. The crabs rush her. The vine goes slack. She hopes he’s on top of the cliff. She kneels to grab her sword and a crab flies at her. She comes up quickly to stab it between its eyes. Two more leap on her. Their claws have her hair and her smock, trying to find her arms. A third snips at her ankle, putting her into a fighting retreat, and she screams as she cuts through one claw, then the other.
She waves her sword in an arc to keep the rest at bay while Jeryon wrenches one crab off her back and tosses it over the cliff, then does the same to the other. Its broad claw comes off in his hand, and Jeryon shakes it at the other crabs.