Vergun jammed the dagger into the top of Alfonso’s spine, right where it met his skull. The donkey whimpered once and then crashed onto the floor of the dock. Vergun spat on Alfonso’s corpse and then kicked the butt of the dagger deeper into the brown hide.
Bershad screamed. Tried to push himself up and felt the bones in his wrist snap—the pain blinding and hot. “No,” Bershad screamed into the wood. “Not him. Not…”
Vergun drew his sword again. “And now, my dear Silas, I think I’ll give you some of that mercy you asked for.” He took a step toward Bershad. “I’ll see you in whatever wretched afterlife waits for us.”
Bershad knew he’d fucked up. He knew he’d betrayed his promise to Ashlyn by getting himself killed. But in that moment, with the wrath boiling up to his eyes, this felt like the death he deserved.
“Wait!” Rowan called in a gruff voice that carried through the night. Everyone turned to him. There were tears in his eyes. A look of pure anguish on his face. “Just wait a second.”
“What is it, old man?” Vergun snapped.
“Put Silas’s debt on me. I’ll carry it.”
“No,” Bershad grunted. “I won’t let you—”
Vergun kicked Bershad in the stomach, silencing him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Vergun said, keeping his eyes on Bershad.
“There’s a way of doing things!” Rowan barked, loud enough for everyone to hear. He stepped forward. “Even for criminals. Even for monsters like you, there’s a way of doing things. I will stand for Silas Bershad.”
That got Vergun’s attention. He looked at Rowan.
“You weren’t in Glenlock Canyon, but I know who you are,” Vergun said. “Rowan, isn’t it? Leon Bershad’s man during the Balarian Invasion.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Even so. Silas obviously isn’t much with a sword, but I’ve heard different about you. Might be you’re thinking now that I’m a bit tired, you have a chance.”
“Might be I do. But do you see a sword in my hand, asshole?” Rowan growled. “I said I’ll carry the debt, not fight you.” He looked at Bershad. “Take my life instead of his, that’s the offer. Just swear you’ll give them the seals and let them go when it’s done.”
Vergun squinted at Rowan, as if he suspected a trick. “You sure about this, old man?”
“Yes.”
“Well.” Vergun glanced at Bershad. “Silas is dead anyway. Even the Flawless Bershad can’t come back from what I just did to him. This way he can die crippled, with the knowledge he got his friend killed, too. I like that idea. I like it very much. Almost makes up for Wormwrot Company.” Vergun raised his voice, speaking to everyone again. “This man is willing to stand for Silas Bershad’s defeat in the chalk circle tonight! All of you know that I’m not much for tradition, but I respect the old ways. I accept your offer, Rowan.”
Vergun patted the blade of his sword.
“Say when, old man.”
“Just give me a second with him,” Rowan said, stepping to the edge of the circle.
Vergun weighed that carefully, but eventually nodded. “Try anything stupid and everyone dies.”
The deck was silent as Rowan crossed the chalk outline and knelt next to Bershad.
“I’m sorry, Silas.”
“Don’t do this,” Bershad said. “Leave me. Just get Vera and Felgor out of here.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Saving them and saving you.”
“I’m already dead.”
“You’re not. And you know it.”
Bershad swallowed. His mouth filled with the metallic taste of adrenaline and blood. “I won’t keep going if you and Alfonso are gone. There’s no fucking point.”
“Of course there’s a point. You and me wandering around the wilderness for fourteen years killing dragons was the useless work. But what you’re doing now—what you’re going to do when you get to Burz-al-dun—that matters. I haven’t been looking after you all these years to see you piss away that chance. There’s greatness in you, Silas. You’ve been hiding it for years, but you can’t fool me.” Rowan smiled grimly. “Now let’s have that shell you’ve been saving.”
Bershad didn’t know what to do. Everything hurt. He opened his mouth to try and protest but choked up. Couldn’t get the words out.
Rowan put a hand on Bershad’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Silas.”
He reached behind Bershad’s breastplate and took the blue-and-yellow seashell that Bershad had carried next to his heart for fourteen years. He thumbed it with his worn and scarred hand. “Alfonso is ahead of me, but I’ll catch up with him downriver. That donkey always was a slow swimmer.” He paused. Swallowed once. “When I get to the sea, I’ll find your father. We’ll wait for you there. But I better not see you again for a long time.”
Before Bershad could respond, Rowan stood up and walked across the circle.
“Get on with it,” he grunted to Vergun, then put the seashell into his mouth.
“Boss,” Liofa said, stepping forward with a sneer. “If the old man stands for the exile, there’s no need to bloody your sword with his life.”
“A fair point.” Vergun shrugged. “Devan, take care of this for me.”
Devan stepped forward and drew the massive sword from his back, smiling as he moved toward Rowan with a dirty grin. Rowan didn’t flinch. Just stood there, waiting.
Vera tried to stop it, but Felgor held her back with a surprising amount of strength. Bershad tried to get up again, felt his knees and feet snapping from the effort. He screamed. Fell again.
Bershad closed his eyes just before Devan’s sword connected. But he still heard the sound of steel hitting flesh. And everything after.
PART IV
28
VERA
Balaria, Lorong River
The Lorong River cut through the yellow sands of southern Balaria like a knife. Vallen Vergun’s cargo cruiser moved at a swift pace. Their captain—a drunkard named Borgon who had a jug of rice wine in his left hand at all times—explained that he’d been running boats up and down the Lorong for twenty years, and knew all her secrets.
Bershad was holed up in a cabin belowdecks. Wrapped in rough-spun bandages and alternating between sleeping, mumbling for rice wine, puking, and sleeping again. They’d been in Balaria four days. Getting past the checkpoint had seemed easy compared to the Razorbacks and Taggarstan. After the mess on the Black Fox, Vergun had set them free, as they’d agreed, and given them the three forged seals, which were metallic discs with physical descriptions etched on one side, and a series of small holes on the other. To add insult to injury, Vergun had offered them passage into Balaria with Devan and Liofa, who were making a smuggling run. Vera had figured that Vergun just wanted witnesses when Bershad died—or people to kill him if he managed to survive—but she wasn’t in a position to turn down a ride into Burz-al-dun. She needed to get to Kira as soon as possible.
When they reached the checkpoint, the border agents scrutinized the description of their faces and ran the discs through some kind of machine that she didn’t get a good look at, but everything checked out. Then the agents spent four hours inspecting and digging through their cargo, going so far as to lead three hounds through the holds, sniffing for contraband. They didn’t find anything.
Bershad used Yonmar’s seal. The agents had been suspicious of a man wrapped in bandages and seeping blood and pus. But it was easy to see by the exposed bones and splayed tendons in his leg that the wounds were real. Vera told them he was a minor lord from Ghalamar heading to Burz-al-dun for medical treatment of a contagious skin disease. That wasn’t quite enough to dissuade the agents from unwrapping the bandages on Bershad’s face, but Vera had spent two hours stitching bloody pigskin over his tattoos to hide them. The sight of his mangled face convinced them that her story was true.
Vera wondered if scaling the cliffs and traversing the desert would have been the easier path to Burz-al-dun after all. Bershad was crippled. Alfon
so and Rowan were dead. Vera hadn’t known the old Almiran for very long, but she’d liked him. He was loyal and fierce—protective of Bershad and Alfonso until the very end. She missed him already.
Vera watched the Lorong River for a few more moments, picking at the stump of her lost finger. The tip still itched somehow, even though the digit was up in the Razorback Mountains. Then she went belowdecks to check on Silas. His wounds were catastrophic—a normal man would never walk or hold so much as a cup again. But she knew how to heal him. Problem was, finding moss on a ship traveling through a desert had proved difficult. She was running out of time.
Vera waited until everyone’s attention was elsewhere, then slipped into the cargo hold. The belly of the cargo cruiser was far larger than Vera had thought possible for a river craft. The ship had four big cargo chambers. It had taken Vera three days to search them, mostly because she had to do it when nobody was paying attention to her. All she’d found was wheat, mushrooms, and salted pork. Useless. Vera had been about to give up on finding anything that would heal Bershad when she noticed a finger-sized hole in the far corner of the chamber. When she stuck her finger inside and lifted, it revealed a trapdoor that led to a secret compartment filled with oak casks. Vera had wanted to explore it right away, but Liofa had come down into the hold and she’d been forced to sneak away.
But now she was alone, and this was her last chance. She took a breath, opened the trapdoor, and ducked inside.
She crawled to the closest cask and pried it open with one of her daggers. Then she smiled in the dim light of the secret hold.
The top of the cask was packed with a thick layer of wet moss. She scooped it away to reveal dozens of opium vials beneath. They must use the moss to hide the scent of the opium from the hounds. Perfect.
* * *
Bershad’s quarters smelled like a septic pit. Full of infection and rot and shit. Vera had removed the pigskin from his face and arms on the first day, but he didn’t look much better for it. When she entered, he opened one eye, which was rimmed with a yellowish crust.
“Wine…” he muttered. “Wine or just … fucking … kill me.”
Those had been his only requests since he regained consciousness.
Vera closed the door, then set down the opium cask she’d stolen and pried it open.
“Fuck your wine. And fuck an easy death, too.”
She started removing the spoiled bandages from the worst of his wounds. His crushed legs and arms. His broken ribs. The shattered collarbone that broke through his skin in three places. She cleaned each wound with boiled water, then started caking them with the moss.
“This is all I could find,” she said.
Bershad tried to struggle when he realized what she was doing, but he was too weak to stop her.
“I don’t want it, not again,” he muttered. “Let me die.”
“I need you alive,” Vera said as she pressed a wet lump of moss into his ribs. A long ribbon of black, infected blood spurted out. “And life’s full of disappointments, remember?”
Vera needed another killer when they got to Burz-al-dun if she was to have any hope of getting to the princess. Vergun had given them the seals and told his men not to harm her or Felgor, but Vera didn’t expect them to listen. She had a fight coming.
She wasn’t sure the moss would be enough to fix this—it was far worse than the arrow wound in his thigh. So, she made up for it with quantity, packing each wound with a thick layer of moss and wrapping it in a fresh silk bandage.
“Wine, at least,” Bershad muttered when Vera was finished. “Please.”
She hesitated, but eventually placed another clay bottle of rice wine next to his cot and left. Bershad took it with shaking hands and drank deep.
* * *
Back on the deck, Liofa and Devan sat together near the stern, roasting a small quail over a fire pit and watching her. As always, Devan kept his massive two-handed sword within arm’s reach.
“Had a change of heart, Papyrian?” Liofa called.
They’d spent the majority of the four-day journey asking to fuck her. Liofa had insisted that there was no pleasure like having two men inside of her at the same time. It had been a large struggle not to kill him. But now wasn’t the time.
“Where’s Felgor?” Vera asked.
Liofa squinted at her. Smiled. There was a piece of meat that had been stuck in his crooked teeth for two days. The silence dragged on—the two idiots probably thought it was filled with sexual tension—and then Devan gave in. Jerked his head toward the bow of the ship.
Felgor was perched on the back rail, whittling a piece of wood. The shape wasn’t anything Vera recognized. Like a deformed ox-horn.
“Still working at that?”
“Will be for some time,” Felgor said without looking up. He’d been sullen and angry since Taggarstan.
“But you won’t tell me what it is?”
“I did tell you. It’s a key to the palace.”
Vera leaned out over the gunwale and watched the river. She could see the shadows of two large pike tracking them down the river.
“He gonna die?” Felgor asked, interrupting Vera’s thoughts.
“I’m not sure.”
“What happens if he does?”
Vera paused. “Getting to Kira is still the priority.”
Felgor finished shaping a curve in the wood, then lowered the carving. He stared at the water.
“That bald bastard killed Rowan.” He turned to Vera, and she could see tears in his eyes. “You aren’t going to do anything about that?”
Vera bit her lip, remembering the image of Devan standing over Rowan’s body and smiling.
“We need them to get into Burz-al-dun.”
“So we do it then?”
“There’s no ‘we’ involved.”
“I can help you,” Felgor pressed. “I can fight.”
“I’ve seen you in a fight, remember? You’ll just get in my way.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m serious, Felgor. Stay out of this. I need you alive to get into the palace.”
Felgor dropped his head. Started whittling again. “I miss the old man and that donkey. Rowan said he’d teach me how to use that rabbit bow of his. I was…” He swallowed. “I was looking forward to that.”
“I miss them, too,” Vera said. They sat in silence for a while. She looked at the sun—it was late afternoon. “I need to talk to the captain. Find out where we are.”
* * *
The captain’s cabin was built near the bow of the ship, where it was easy to see the river ahead through a dirty window. Captain Borgon only left his cabin to get more rice wine. His cabin reeked of alcohol and piss. There wasn’t a door, but Vera knocked on the wall beside the opening before coming inside. Borgon was leaning back in a chair, sleeping. He cracked a jaundiced eye at the sound of fist on wood.
“Told you not to come in here,” he growled.
“How long until Burz-al-dun?”
“By Aeternita, you are a pest.” Borgon woke up a little more. Rubbed a hand through his mangled, dirty beard. He was one of those men who looked like he’d seen seventy summers, even though the reality was probably closer to forty. His skin was sallow and blotchy, fingernails yellow and cracked. He burped constantly.
“Do not make me ask you again.” Vera crossed her arms.
He licked his lips and scratched his beard some more. Borgon was an asshole. But he was smart enough to use caution around a Papyrian widow.
“A fortnight, I’d say.”
“That long?”
Borgon sighed. “You dig an answer out of me, then fuss about the quality. If you don’t like what I have to say, feel free to chart your own course.” He motioned to the wrinkled and stained charts on a table in the corner of the cabin. “I am happy to abide. Always wanted to ground a ship in the middle of the desert. Dying of thirst sounds fun.”
Borgon leaned back in his chair again and closed his eyes.
&n
bsp; Vera glared at him, but the captain started snoring lightly in an almost unbelievably short period of time. She left the cabin and jumped down to the prow, where there was a small subdeck meant for one person to sit and fish when the boat wasn’t moving. It was a good spot—anyone approaching from behind pressed on some loose boards and created a squeak that warned of their approach. Vera stayed there until the sun was just an orange sliver over her right shoulder.
As dusk settled in, she noticed a large group of dragons winging their way east. It was too dark to make out the type, but she figured it was a fully grown female leading her juveniles to the warrens in the east. Vera had never had the time to take much interest in the dragons of Terra, but everyone knew about the Great Migration that occurred every five years. Soon this entire sky would be filled with dragons.
Once it got dark, Vera went belowdecks and checked on Bershad. When she opened the door, the putrid smell of rot was gone. Replaced by the rich, loamy scent of earth and forest. The air was sticky and hot. Bershad was awake—his eyes clear and glowing bright green in the dim candlelight of the cabin.
Vera untied the bandage around his collarbone. Moved the moss out of the way. The wound was still open, but the snapped bone had started knitting itself back together. All evidence of infection had disappeared.
“Black skies,” she whispered.
Bershad looked at her with burning eyes that Vera didn’t recognize.
“You should have let me die,” he said.
29
BERSHAD
Balaria, Lorong River
The moss did its work, but the labor of healing was not gentle or fast. Bershad ground his teeth and gulped rice wine while his body knit bone and flesh back together one fiber at a time.
For days, every moment was a blurry mess of pain and nightmares. His only relief was the few precious seconds each time he woke up when he didn’t remember what had happened. His first instinct was to look around for Alfonso and pat his muzzle. Find out what Rowan was cooking for breakfast. Then the memories of their dead bodies on that deck came flooding back to him, and he sank into a thick and miserable darkness.
Blood of an Exile Page 33
