The troll sneered. He spat, a fat glob of phlegm that landed on the side of Kuura’s face. It was disgustingly thick, more like half-solidified oil—and it had the same greasy, yellow-ish sheen, as it dripped down Kuura’s cheek.
In Kuura’s place, Jasen was sure he would have vomited there and then.
Kuura, though, recoiled, eyes wide, then the disgust set in, and then, hot off the back of it, rage. A fury like none other crossed his face, as he lay pinned there in the post-dawn sunlight, a vast troll holding him down, a gaggle of blue-skinned Prenasians looking on with amused interest.
Kuura bellowed a great roar. Shoving himself clear of the troll’s fist, he rolled, chains clanking, out and onto his feet—
Jasen would never have thought the trolls, large as they were, could move very fast, but he had seen them mobilizing upon the rocky shoreline of Baraghosa’s isle. They were swifter than they ought to have been, and this one was no exception. Before Kuura had even righted himself, the troll was turning, bringing the cane around to strike. It whipped through the air, cutting it with a whistle—
Kuura caught it with his hands. The cane bent into an arch.
Then Kuura snatched it totally free. It slid from the troll’s fists—
Kuura bared his teeth. He brought the cane back, then swung—
The few Prenasians upon the deck were watching with greater curiosity now. Not one of them moved, even to step forward, let alone touch the hilts of the blades sheathed at their hips.
The cane streaked across the troll’s forearm.
Kuura drew it back—
The troll’s fist drove into his head.
Kuura reeled backward, pulling on the chains, dragging Chaka with him. Chaka cowered on the deck, eyes almost perfectly round. He scrambled clear as the troll, with no compunction for the feeble creatures at his feet, lumbered over him.
Kuura had hardly regained his footing when another meaty fist drove into him, this time from above. How the blow didn’t cave his head in, Jasen didn’t know.
Kuura took it—
Then he lashed out with the cane again, striking the troll’s legs, low, barely above the ankle.
“Oho,” chortled Rakon, drawing closer to the action upon his deck. “Now we have ourselves a show.”
Huanatha was stoic beside him. Features tight, she caught eyes with Jasen.
He pleaded with her—We need to stop this.
A minute shake of the head, so small he could have barely discerned it if they were an arm’s length apart, let alone across the war galley’s top deck. But saw it he did.
But Longwell, he thought.
Huanatha could not answer, could not hear it. She must have thought it, though, because she shook her head again, even more clearly this time.
The message was clear: she could not act, and nor should Jasen. They must wait for however long it took for Longwell to complete his work inside the war galley.
But waiting did not appear to be an option. As Kuura slashed with the cane again, the troll dodged it. Then he swung out a kick—a low one, which for a man of regular height would sail across the bottom of Kuura’s shins. The troll’s kick came in across Kuura’s knees though. He dropped, landing sideways—
There was a crack. For a second, Jasen believed the cane had finally snapped.
Then his brain untangled the fall. It had happened in a moment, but Kuura’s arm had twisted at an impossible angle, and the crack had come just as it gave, the forearm buckling as the bones there snapped.
Kuura loosed an agonized, throaty howl.
The Prenasians cackled.
Rakon joined them. Whatever conversation he’d been having with Huanatha was forgotten. She stood in tight-lipped silence at his side. Jasen could have sworn her hand twitched over the place where Tanukke had once been.
If it were still there, how easy it would have been to unsheathe it and to bury it in Rakon’s side now, while his attention was elsewhere. The stub of a blade would not penetrate far, but it would tear a hole in his gut, one not easily repaired. And should Huanatha drag it upward, opening a wider, more gaping crevasse of gore …
She could not, of course. No Tanukke to do it—and Longwell was still below.
Jasen urged him on. Please, he thought, be swift.
The troll was not done with Kuura. He snatched him up again, shaking him. The chains rattled, a chaotic wave running in either direction through them.
Kuura was drawn right up to the troll’s face.
It leered into him with a yellow-toothed sneer. Jasen could practically smell its breath, fetid and hot, rotten, the way a scourge smelled in the heat of high afternoon.
He clenched his fists.
“Vermin,” the troll growled.
Jasen was caught off guard at the word spoken in Luukessian—
Then Kuura spat a fat wad of phlegm into the troll’s eyes.
“Payback, you son of a bitch,” Kuura grunted back.
It was as though the scene came back in a reversed echo. For a moment, the troll was stupefied. Then his face twisted with disgust—and rage.
Kuura looked victorious—
And then the troll screamed, a cry like no sound Jasen had ever heard in his life, except for perhaps the mountain that loomed over Terreas when it finally split asunder and spilled its contents in a devastating rain.
The troll grasped the chain that dangled from Kuura’s ankle cuff. Then it pulled—and the chain snapped clean off the cuff.
It threw them down and then strode past the Lady Vizolans, Kuura held in his fists, across the deck—
Jasen had a moment to begin thinking, Where—?
He realized the answer barely before that first word had formed.
The troll was taking him to the edge.
Like Hamisi before him, he would throw Kuura in.
Jasen’s heart rate spiked. He stared in dawning horror.
His eyes found Huanatha.
She, too, watched. Her bottom jaw had fallen. It was the first time Jasen had seen her look shocked.
She didn’t meet Jasen’s eyes. He, like Rakon and the other Prenasians, and in fact everything aboard the ship except for the troll and Kuura—all of it was forgotten. Huanatha could only stare—and so Jasen had no answers, not the first clue of what to do—except his instinct.
He turned back to the troll and Kuura. They were almost at the deck’s edge now. The troll seemed to be moving slow. It couldn’t be, of course it could not—that was the adrenaline. Jasen was suddenly filled with it. It flooded his veins, coming in waves but not in them too, so it surged and rose but did not recede with each pulse. It filled him, moved him—
He was running.
Across the deck he moved, picking up speed.
The Lady Vizolans did not see him until he was past. Nor did the Prenasians—their focus was entirely on the troll and Kuura as they neared the edge of the boat.
Huanatha—she did see. She turned her head, and Jasen saw it, somehow, in the corner of his eye as he barreled forward, the lone white boy against an onyx-black deck, covered in men with skin almost as dark, tattooed blue men, and this grotesque, behemoth troll, the color of a filthy daisy—
“PUT HIM DOWN!” he bellowed.
The troll twisted.
Kuura came around with him, enclosed in two massive fists. Face bloody, greasy with the remnants of the troll’s spit, his eyes widened in surprise at Jasen, tiny Jasen, hurtling toward them—
The troll dropped Kuura, who hit the deck, hard.
Then Jasen realized that the troll had the cane again.
He’d picked it up at some point during the fight and shoved it into the fabric around his waist. Now it came out in a blur—and how it would hurt, streaking across his chest, his face—
Jasen hadn’t the time to think of it. He was carried by momentum, no time to arrest his sprint, or to dodge, as it blurred through the air toward him—
Kuura grasped the troll’s leg and yanked.
The trol
l gasped. True shock registered on its face now. He stumbled, for Kuura had latched hold of his rear leg, supporting rather than fully bracing him as he swung for Jasen—and the cane snapped backward, missing Jasen by inches. He felt the whipping motion, felt the air streak past his face, heard it whine as it cut the air in two—
Then he leapt, hurtling forward with all the energy he could muster—
He hit the troll in the chest.
Its yellowed eyes widened.
Jasen seemed to hang there for a moment before rebounding. Face to face with the beast, he could see every awful thing about it—the way its skin was gnarled and thick, like animal hide. How yellow those teeth were. And how broad and sharp they were, narrowing to points designed for ripping through flesh and pulverizing bone.
He could feel its breath upon him, just as rancid and hot as he had imagined.
Then he rebounded—and the troll teetered, back, back, back—
Kuura pulled his leg hard, with both his good arm and the broken one—The troll's leg came out from under it. Now its arms were spinning, wheeling in the air as it tilted farther, over the section of the ship's side where no railing existed—
And then it fell beyond the edge of the ship with a splash like a rock dropped into a pool of water.
The next moment, too, seemed to last far longer than it could have. Shocked silence draped the deck like a smothering blanket. The Lady Vizolans stared. The Prenasians stared. Huanatha, too, stared, as did Rakon, whose mouth hung open.
Then—
The Lady Vizolans roared a battle cry. They rose, chains clanking about them.
The Prenasians pressed inward, drawing swords—
Huanatha rounded on Rakon, screaming her own battle cry as she grabbed for his sword before his hand could fly to it—
And the mutiny began.
13
The Prenasians drew swords and flung themselves at the Lady Vizola’s men. They were outmatched four to one but far better positioned—they had swords, for one thing. For another, they were not clamped together with chains.
But the chains around their ankles were not enough to completely hobble the crew—and even if they had been, the men of the Lady Vizola had finally reached their breaking point. The Prenasians surged forward, swords drawn high, ready to cut the Lady Vizolans down, but the men who served Shipmaster Burund were furious and determined. They threw themselves into the battle, clutching at whatever was nearest, brooms, a pail of water—even the chains themselves, bunched into a heavy steel loop and clasped between wide hands, so they could be swung like a hammer.
The first of the Prenasians, one of the captains who’d come to the isle of Baraghosa, with inky black tattoos resembling the wings of a bird across his shaved temples, met them. He swept with his sword—
Jasen saw a streak of red as it found its target.
But where this Lady Vizolan fell, another took his place. Medleigh shrieked a war cry as he barreled forward, chain tight in his hands. He swung out with it, the steel python snaking through the air—
It slammed the Prenasian captain across the mouth.
The blow exploded both of his lips in a shower. His head was jerked backward—
His sword fell from his grasp.
The man he’d cut still had enough wits about him to snatch the sword up from where he lay. His side had been split open, a pool of deepest red rapidly spilling out around him—but he grabbed at the sword’s hilt nevertheless, gripping it in fingers coated in his own blood—and he drove it into the Prenasian’s leg, right behind his kneecap.
“Dogs!”
Rakon’s cry cut over the chaos suddenly unfurling upon the deck. It had been—how many seconds now? A dozen? No more than that, surely, since the troll fell over the edge of the boat. Huanatha had grabbed at him, and though Jasen did not know what had happened in the moments since, he saw them now: Huanatha two arm-lengths away from Rakon, circling with him slowly. Her teeth were bared. Crouched low, she was ready to spring. He, like a bear, pivoted too.
His blade was in his hand, clasped so tightly that his knuckles were almost the same pale blue of Huanatha’s armor.
“Aligning yourself with low-lives,” Rakon growled. “You have fallen far, queen.” He spat her former title. “I should have thrown you into the waters the moment we were on the sea—you and that bastard Lord Longwell. He is with you on this, is he not?”
“More than with me,” Huanatha growled. “He is slitting the throats of your men below deck as we speak.”
An enraged panic spread across Rakon’s face. For a moment, he seemed uncertain of whether to fly at her—or do as he did, which was to turn to one of the Prenasians doing battle with the Lady Vizolans on the lower deck.
“Santos! Dué—”
Huanatha sprang at him.
Rakon slashed—
A roar from beside him twisted Jasen’s neck.
Kuura was up on his feet. Cradling his broken arm close to his midriff, he grasped for Jasen by the shoulder. “Get away!”
“What was—?”
“The troll! His feet tangled in the nets!”
Jasen’s eyes drew wide with panic. “Is he climbing?”
Kuura did not know. But his own panicked look was enough of an answer: if the troll hadn’t gone into the sea, if it was still lashed to the war galley, it could, given time, clamber back aboard.
Against this small cluster of Prenasians, the men of the Lady Vizola stood a chance. But if the troll were to clamber back on board, or worse, if somehow the lower decks were to hear of the mutiny and come to help before Longwell had finished subduing them, the Lady Vizolans would quickly find themselves beaten.
Jasen shot a panicked look across the deck.
The first captain was down. Whether dead, or just out of action, Jasen could not be sure. There was a lot of blood, he was certain of that—but it was not all his. At least two of the Lady Vizolans were down too, bleeding heavily.
The other Prenasians were taking more careful steps. They hung back, out of reach, swiping with their swords at hands or brooms or pails or the single stolen sword, taken from that first Prenasian casualty. With the Lady Vizolans in shackles, they could keep their distance; the captured men had little agility, only brutish violence and thirst for vengeance to their advantage—besides, of course, their numbers.
One of the Prenasians had broken from the rest. Streaking past, he ran for the door leading into the ship.
“He’s going to warn the others!” Jasen cried, pointing.
Kuura followed. Then he nodded. Releasing Jasen, he snatched up the cane and hurtled across the deck.
The Prenasian turned just in time to see a glimpse of Kuura, and no more, for the man leapt at him—and collided, sending the two of them tumbling in a blur of black and blue skin.
And then there was a jolt, just shy of Jasen’s heel.
He turned—
The troll had clambered back up. Its ugly head reared over the side of the ship, one long arm stretching onto the deck. Its fingers were curved into claws and were gouging long canyons into the deck, sending onyx splinters flying, as it found its hold.
“Boy!” it growled.
Jasen shook his head. “Get off this ship!” And he stamped down hard, digging his heel into the troll’s fist.
It rumbled a hiss, drawing its hand back—
Only it was not pulling back, as Jasen first thought—it was reaching for him. Its fingers wrapped about his ankle—and he was pulled, the world twisting sideways—
“BOY!”
“GET OFF OF ME!” Jasen roared back.
But it dragged him hard and fast. He yelped, the deck spinning, then his head slammed the gouges the troll had ripped in the deck. He saw stars—felt splinters—only those stars were actually white spots, and there were so many of the damned things, all clouding his vision like spores from mushrooms—
He grabbed wildly, raking with claws of his own—
They found something hot and wet.
The troll gasped and let go.
The moment the pressure on his ankle left him, Jasen rolled free.
The hand swiped out for him again—he saw it coming, a streak of ugly yellow, but he threw himself clear of it.
Scrambling back to his feet, he had one single moment to assess what was happening on deck—Huanatha dodged a swing of the sword from Rakon, twisting her body at an angle that her armor could barely allow; Kuura and his Prenasian foe grappled for a sword sunk into the deck a few feet from them; and the Lady Vizolans were spreading around the Prenasians, using the chain binding them to herd the blue-skinned men into tighter and tighter quarters—
Then he was eye to eye with the troll again.
Eye to one eye. His fingers had dug into the troll’s left eye. It was screwed up and bloody; deep crimson liquid glued his eyelids together.
Looking down at his hand, he saw that it was covered to the knuckles.
He took a moment to thank his ancestors that he hadn’t seen it happen, then he steeled himself to push in again.
“SCUM BOY,” the troll roared. “LOW, NOTHING BOY!”
“I said,” Jasen began—“get off this ship!” And he surged forward, swinging a boot—right into the troll’s flat, swollen nose.
It roared back, swing blindly for him.
Jasen ducked and rolled clear this time, then
he was back up on his feet.
But he was tiring—tiring so quickly. His breaths came hard and fast. Damn, he hadn’t even exerted himself that much.
One dying boy.
Baraghosa’s words came back to him, but he locked them out. However close he was to the veil between this world and the next, however exhausted he felt as that skulking darkness came closer and closer, he had to fight here and now. He could not let this troll back onto the deck, onto the ship. It would be the death of all of them.
Steeling himself, he surged in again, ducking another fist. The second came down, the cane streaking with it—
Jasen grabbed for it.
It struck him across both palms—and it was more painful than he could have imagined. One instant he had his hands open, fingers splayed; the next he hissed as white hot pain erupted, jolting through his arms, so strong that it blocked out everything else. All he knew, for long seconds, was the screaming agony that had once been his hands, a huge cloud of pain that stretched outside of him, so he could not free himself from it.
A Home in the Hills Page 10
