Cithrin considered the ship with a skeptical eye. “How much below does this thing have?”
“Enough,” Barriath said. “She’s a fast boat. If there’s trouble, we’ll outrun it. My plan is to find a cove on the north coast about halfway between Asinport and Estinport. There’s a stretch there with no dragon’s roads at all. Then south and west from there until we reach Rivenhalm and Lehrer Palliako. I can act as guide. I haven’t been there myself, but I know the land well enough.”
“That’s your plan,” Cary said. “Mine’s to get my damned Orcus back.”
“What about the others?” Cithrin said.
“They’re below already,” Cary said.
A soft voice rose up from a thin hatch at Cary’s feet. Sandr’s voice. “And we’re stacked like fucking cordwood, I don’t mind saying.”
“We’ll reprovision along the way,” Barriath said. “This is going to be faster than a smuggler’s run if I can manage it.”
Cithrin turned, looking up at the vast cliff face above her. She half expected to see wings silhouetted against the clouds, but there were only gulls and terns. The dragon was elsewhere.
“We should go,” she said. “Before I change my mind about the whole errand.”
Cithrin thought, after her escape from Suddapal to Porte Oliva and then north to Carse, that she’d come to understand the sensations of being aboard ship. She was mistaken. With the sails lifted to catch the winter wind, Barriath’s little boat flew until it almost seemed to rise up from the water, skipping on it like a stone. The dock and Carse and Inys fell away behind them more swiftly than she’d imagined possible, and by morning on the next day, they could see the mouth of the river Wod and the fishing boats that haunted its estuary.
She slept below decks fully clothed, with Hornet and Mikel, Charlit Soon and Sandr, Cary and Lak. Barriath took the days on deck, and Yardem the nights. It felt less like voyaging across the sea than being snowbound in a cabin too small for the people living in it. There were parts of the salt quarter in Porte Oliva where people had lived more densely than this, but they’d had the streets of the city to retreat into. She had nothing. The days were cold, the nights colder. The air belowdecks stank of tar and bodies and grew stale until it seemed like every breath was stolen out of someone else’s mouth.
She should have hated it. She didn’t.
On the third night, the coast to their south began to roughen. Rises became hills. Hills became mountains. Rude, rocky islands rose from the waves like rotting teeth. Cithrin looked for the little winged lizards she remembered from her first voyage to Antea, a lifetime ago it seemed, but there were none. The cold had dropped them into torpor or killed them. She had no way to know which.
After night fell, she stood on the moonlit deck with Yardem as he measured the stars and adjusted the sails. In other circumstances, they would have stopped for the nights and sailed in the safety of day. Instead, their wake glowed behind them, as if the mirror of the aurora shimmering in the northern sky. Cithrin shivered, her fingers and face numbed, and still she was unwilling to leave. Not yet.
“Komme said you saw the shape of my soul,” she said.
“I said so.”
“Was it true?”
“No,” Yardem said. “I lied. He was looking for a reason to hope, and…” the Tralgu shrugged. “It may not have been the right thing, but it seemed wise at the time. Or kind. But since I expected you would do the thing regardless, it seemed better than he have reasons to agree.”
“And you came because you promised Captain Wester.”
“He’d have wanted me to.”
The sea rushed against the wood of the boat. The canvas sails thudded and barked. Sea travel had a way of making everything sound like a whisper and a shout at the same time. Cithrin leaned against the rail and watched the lights shimmer in the vast air above them.
“I’m impressed with how devoted Cary is to Master Kit,” Cithrin said. “All of them, really. It’s a deeper loyalty than I’m used to seeing. But I suppose they’re like family to each other.”
Yardem coughed once.
“What?” Cithrin said.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“Tell me.”
“They came for your sake, not Kit’s.”
“Oh.”
Cithrin laughed once in disbelief, then again in embarrassment. She turned to look at the dark water she’d led them to, and the spray hid her tears.
Clara
They trekked through the pass, mountains rising black against the snow and towering above their desperation. Somewhere under the snow a thread of dragon’s jade snaked unseen. Clara couldn’t guess how deep they would have had to dig down under blue ice and hardpack to find it. The winds that the land channeled down upon them bit in the mornings and killed in the night. They did their best, building block huts at the end of each day small enough that the heat of their bodies made a crust of clear ice on the walls and floors. They melted handfuls of snow for fresh water and ate what little hardtack and salted meat remained. Every morning, fewer rose up than had lain down.
Marcus Wester had taken to accompanying Jorey when he reviewed the troops, and though the bank’s mercenary still wore the costume of a servant, his wisdom and confidence lent him stature both in Jorey’s eyes and those of his men. Somewhere along the plodding, freezing, ice-haunted march, they had stopped being the army of Imperial Antea and become merely participants in a shared nightmare.
Clara’s horse died on the fourth day. Forging through a drift of snow deeper than its knees, the animal paused, sighed a weary sigh, hunkered down, and refused to rise. It was the last, and with it gone, there was nothing but to walk or else lie down beside the dead animal and follow its lead. The carts had long been abandoned. Men were even leaving behind their weapons as their strength waned and failed them. There was nothing to fight in these passes. What was bringing them all low couldn’t be cut and wouldn’t bleed.
Clara, for her part, lost herself in the physical misery. At the head of the column, a few men broke the trail, forcing a path through snow light enough to be pushed aside or dense enough to be walked on. It was the hardest, most punishing work of the trail, and which unfortunate was called on changed ten or fifteen times a day. Clara was never called, but Vincen was. And Marcus. And even Kit, their tame priest. The rest of the army followed in that path, two or three walking abreast through an aisle of snow. It made the passage easier, not fighting against a fresh drift with every step.
Time thinned as she walked in a way she’d come to recognize and associate with living on the road. Her numbed feet felt like balancing on stumps. The joints in her hands and hips ached. And still she hauled her trailing foot forward, shifted her weight to it, and began the process again. At first, she heard her own voice in her head saying, One more step. One more step. You can do one more. Just keep doing one more for long enough, and you’ll have made it. The voice quieted in time, but by then her body had the habit of it, and the soldiers drew her along like a living stream. She had neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything but be carried along by it.
Twice, she passed men who had stopped. Both had the vague and confused expression of someone lost despite there being only one path before them and only one direction in which to go. The first she prodded into taking a few steps that seemed to reorient him. With the second, intervening didn’t occur to her at all until she was well past him. She hoped that someone farther back in the line had helped him. That her own exhaustion hadn’t condemned the man to death.