His stomach turned to stone, his knees to mud. He put his hand on the damp wall to steady himself.
And what would Hyrryai have done, glancing up from her sad little supper to meet the shadowed, harrowed eyes of her sister’s killer?
She would not have thought to grab her weapons. Or even her coat. Look, there it was, a well-oiled sealskin, draped over the camp stool. Her fork was on the floor there by the bedroll, but her dinner knife was missing.
Shursta bolted from the cave, into the rain.
The wind tore strips from the shroud of the sky. Moonlight splintered through, fanged like an anglerfish and as cold. Shursta slipped and slid around the first wall of boulders and began to clamber back up the stone steps to the sea road. He clutched at clumps of marram grass, which slicked through his fingers like seaweed. Wet sand and crumbled rock shifted beneath his feet. Gasping and drenched as he was, he clung to his claw-holds, knowing that if he fell, he’d have to do it all over again. He’d almost attained the headland, had slapped first his left hand onto the blessedly flat surface, was following it by his right, meaning to beach himself from the cliff face onto the road in one great heave and lie there awhile, catching his breath, when a hand grasped his and hauled him up the rest of the way.
“Domo Blodestone!” gasped Myrar Yaspir. “You must help me. Your wife is hunting me.”
The first time Shursta had seen Yaspir, he had looked like a man turned to stone and forgotten. The second time, his eyes had been livid as enraged wounds. Now he seemed scoured, nervous and alive, wet as Shursta. He wore an enormous rucksack and carried a walking stick that Shursta eyed speculatively. It had a smooth, blunt end, well polished from age and handling.
“Is that how you killed Kuista Blodestone?” he blurted.
Myrar Yaspir followed his gaze. “This?” he asked, blankly. “No, it was a stone. I threw it into the sea, after.” He grasped Shursta’s collar and hefted. Myrar Yaspir was a ropy, long-limbed man whose bones seemed to poke right through his skin, but rather than attenuated, he seemed vigorously condensed, and his strength was enormous, almost electrical. Hauled to his feet, Shursta felt as though a piece of mortal-shaped lightning had smote down upon the Last Isle just to manhandle him. “Come,” he commanded Shursta. “We must keep moving. She is circling us like a bone shark, closer, ever closer. Come, Domo Blodestone,” he said again, blinking back rain from his burning eyes. “You must help me.”
Shursta disengaged himself, though he felt little shocks go through him when his wrists knocked Myrar Yaspir’s fists aside. “I already helped you, child-killer. I gave you three days to turn yourself in to the Astrion Council. I am done with you.”
Myrar Yaspir glanced at him, then shook his head. “You are not listening to me,” he said with exasperated patience. “Your wife is hunting me. I will be safe nowhere on this island. Not here and not in Droon cowering in some straw cage built by those doddering bitches of the council.” He bent his head close to Shursta’s and whispered, “No, you must take me to Sif where you live. Word is you are sailing from this cursed place on a boat the size of a city. I will work for my passage. I work hard. I have worked all my life.” He opened his hands as if to show the calluses there; as if, even empty, they had always been enough.
Shursta felt his voice go gentle, and could not prevent it, although he knew Myrar Yaspir would think him weakening.
“The Grimgramal is the size, maybe, of a large house, and we who will sail on it are family. You, Domo Yaspir, are no one’s family.”
“My wife is on that boat!” Myrar flashed, his fist grasping the sodden cloth at Shursta’s throat. His expression flickered from whetted volatility to bleak cobweb-clung despair, and after that, it seemed, he could express nothing because he no longer had a face. His was merely a sandblasted and sun-bleached skull, dripping dark rain. The skull whispered, “My Adularia.”
Shursta was afraid. He had only been so afraid once in his entire life, and that was last year, out on the open ocean, in that breathless half-second before he jumped in after Gulak’s young son, realizing even as he leapt that he would rather by far spool out the remainder of his days taunted and disliked and respected by none than dive into that particular death, where the boy floundered and the shark danced.
Now the words came with no stutter or click. “You have no wife.”
The skull opened its mouth and screamed. It shrieked, raw and wordless, right into Shursta’s face. Its fists closed again on the collar of Shursta’s coat, twisted in a chokehold and jerked, lifting him off his feet as though he had been a small child. Shursta’s legs dangled. and his vision blackened, and he struck out with his fists, but it was like pummeling a waterspout. Myrar was still screaming, but the sound soon floated off to a faraway keening. Shursta, weightless between sky and sea, began to believe that Myrar had always been screaming, since the first time Shursta had beheld him sitting in the tavern, or maybe even before. Maybe he had been screaming since killing Kuista, the child he could not give his wife, and who, though a child, had all the esteem, joy of status, wealth, and hope for the future that Myrar Yaspir, a man in his prime and a citizen of proud Droon, lacked.
Is it any wonder he screamed? Shursta thought. This was followed by another thought, further away: I am dying.
The moment he could breathe again was the moment his breath was knocked out of him. Myrar had released his chokehold on Shursta, but Shursta, barely conscious, had no time to find his feet before the ground leapt up to grapple him. He tried to groan, but all sound was sucked from the pit of his stomach into the sky. Rain splattered on his face. The wind ripped over everything but did not move back into his lungs.
By and by, he remembered how to breathe, and soon could do so without volunteering the effort. His mouth tasted coppery. His tongue was sore. Something had been bitten that probably should not have been. Shursta’s hands closed over stones, trying to find one jagged enough to fend off further advances from a screaming, skull-faced murderer. Where was his mesh-gift, the black knife Hyrryai had given him? Back in Sif, of course, in a box with his gemmaja, and the pressed petals of a purple hyacinth that had fallen from her hair that night she left him. All his fingers found now were pebbles and blades of grass, and he could not seem to properly grip any of them. Shursta sat up.
Sometime between his falling and landing the awful scream had stopped. There was only sobbing now: convulsive, curt, wretched, interrupted by bitter gasps for breath and short, saw-toothed cries of rage. Muffled, moist thumps punctuated each cry. Shursta had barely registered that it could not be Myrar Yaspir who wept—his tears had turned to dust long ago—when the thumps and sobs stopped. For a few minutes it was just rain and wind. Shursta blinked his eyes back into focus and took in the moon-battered, rain-silvered scene before him. His heart crashed in his chest like a fog-bell.
Hyrryai Blodestone crouched over the crumpled body of Myrar Yaspir. She grasped a large stone in her dominant hand. Myrar’s bloody hair was tangled in her other. Her dinner knife was clamped between her teeth. As he watched, she let the head fall—another pulpy thump—tossed the dripping stone to one side, and spat her knife into her hand. Her movements ragged and impatient, she sliced Myrar’s shirt down the middle and laid her hand against his chest. She seemed startled by what she felt there—the last echoes of a heartbeat or the fact there was none, Shursta did not know.