Chains rattled.
He finally stopped, shoulders heaving as he forced shallow breath from his lungs.“Matka mesiac, chyt ma za ruku,”he said, voice muffled against his own arm.“Vezmite ma do Perpetska.”
Stale breath slithered against my ear. Hands wrenched my knees apart.
I stopped just beyond his jaw.
Two eyes fought to remain aimed at me, one of them ghostly white.“Teplé pláže a cistá voda.”
“Not to worry,” I murmured, aiming Kye’s sword along the pirate’s neck. “I will make it fast.”
I listened to the steady rhythm of hooves.
“Are you awake?” Kye’s voice sounded at my ear.
“Yes.”
He shifted away to look down at me. “Talk to me.”
I’d tripped over my own feet to return to him after robbing Burian of life. Whatever focus that had commanded my limbs ended with Burian’s beating heart, and I was even more tired now than I’d been standing across from him in the grass.
“What about?”
“About how handsome I am,” Kye answered, craning his neck at a passing sign. Written in Rivean, I didn’t even try to read it.
“Not much to say there,” I answered, leaning into him. He was warm under my cheek, and soft tendrils of sleep curled around me, cocooning me in.
Kye jostled me softly. “How grateful you are that we met.”
I ignored him. My mind drifted somewhere peaceful and quiet, where the cadence of hooves and trees fell away, and only the steady throb of a heartbeat against my ear filled my consciousness, safe and familiar as the pounding waves of the sea.
“Leihani,” a voice rang distantly in my ears.
I dropped into sweet, endless seas.
I never felt the thunder of a dappled gray horse as he shot over the landscape like fire, nor the anxious neighs of the black mare who followed behind him.
I didn’t smell the sour tinge of fear in the air, the smoke of chimneys as the four of us broke through the tree line and onto the road, stark little cabins on either side.
I didn’t hear Kye’s voice. Nor did I hear his words, though if I had, I’d have recognized them. They were the same words spoken by my heart an hour earlier as I begged him to stand up.
But I heard nothing.
34
Kye
The sorry bastard that founded this town built its only inn as far from the fucking road as he could. It sat on the left, the last structure before the trees dissolved into hills. The Sylus Mountains loomed just beyond, titanic peaks dusted with snow, disappearing into the mist above.
We were mere days from Calder. Just over those mountains, and we’d be out of Rivea.
Faces lifted as Sero’s hooves slammed against the dirt path. We sailed through the square, the townspeople still cleaning up their own festival from days before, coal paint lingering in the cracks and wrinkles of the men’s faces. In front of the inn door, I pulled Sero into a stop, not bothering to secure him to the hitching post at his shoulder.
A woman crouching in the vegetable garden sprung to her feet. Radishes bulged from her apron pockets, her hands and nails encrusted with soil. “Yasha, run to the doctor’s house,” she commanded in Rivean. A ginger-haired boy peeked from behind a vined wall of winter-dead cucumbers, then rushed down the road and out of sight.
I’d already left Sero behind and was halfway to her front door when she bounded inside. “Havel!” she shouted, inviting a man to steer around the corner with a small honey cake in hand, his cheeks round as he chewed. His eyes widened at the sight of Maren, naked but for the blood-soaked wrappings I’d wound across her body, limp in my arms.
“Come with me,” Havel said, tossing his unfinished honey cake to a scruffy dog beside him and turning on his heel. I hitched Maren against my shoulder and followed him up the stairs and into a room, laying her down over a patched quilt. Through the open door came the clatter of pans in a kitchen, and Havel’s wife appeared, carrying a steaming pot of water. Shetskedme aside, peeling the wrapping at Maren’s hip to find the slice underneath. Heavily caked in dried blood.
