by Megan Crane
But she didn’t care if she got wet, despite the cold. She was too busy staring at the strange, dead man.
His hair was black and thick and tightly-curled, woven into braids that streamed everywhere. She wanted to touch them. She wanted to bring him back to life to ask him why he wore his hair in such an odd and beautiful way that should have made him look feminine, but didn’t. His eyebrows were dark and shaped like wings, making his light brown brow look hard and defiant, even in stillness. His mouth looked tough even in repose, and something about it made her stomach feel odd. More black hair framed his full lips and covered his neck with a beard. All of that was crazy and should have looked wrong. Dirty. But somehow it didn’t, not on him. And the most astonishing thing about him wasn’t all that intriguing black hair in all the places men on the Raft were clean-shaven, but that he was broad and hard everywhere else—packed solid with muscle and power instead of rounded and soft. He was wrapped in thick woolens and furs as if he’d tried to fight off the winter. There were even blades strapped to his body as if he’d planned to battle it back that way.
She’d never seen a man who could rightly be called stunning before, but this one was that and then some. Even dead and still, he looked mighty. He let off a kind of brawny power she could feel deep in the pit of her belly and in the soles of her feet, and even between her legs. It made her feel fierce—and a bit sick, imagining what her House would make of him if she brought him back the way she knew she should. They’d strip him of all that wool and fur that warded off the cold. They’d cut the log he floated in down to pieces for the fires. Only then would they call the Council and announce they’d found a body floating in the sea.
Elenthea had never felt strongly about anything in her life. There’d never been any point. Life on the Raft was life on the Raft, no matter her thoughts on it and regardless of any feelings she might have about her circumstances. Nothing ever changed, nor would it. But something inside her shifted as she gazed down on a man so large he filled his vessel, so big she’d thought he was a fallen tree. And she knew—she knew—she couldn’t live with it if she let them strip him apart like that. Something inside of her she hardly recognized simply couldn’t bear it.
She decided, there and then, that she would give this huge, brawny man the high rank funeral she was sure he deserved. She would weight him herself even if she had to steal the stones and sew them into his clothes herself. She would keep him dressed in the clothes and blades of his station to aid him on the journey and deliver him into the deep. With the respect she was sure, somehow, he’d earned. Someone had to care about this man—she had to care—because no one else on the Raft would.
And if he was a surrogate for her and the funeral she somehow doubted she’d earn if she continued her current downward trajectory? That was just a bonus.
She got back up and wrapped the rope around her hands, feeling the icy sting of it through her thick wool mittens. She frowned back over her shoulder, then started walking. It would be easy enough to stash the dead man’s log in the outer boatyards, where no one ever went at this time of year. She could prepare the weights and take her time with the ritual, giving him the send-off he deserved instead of rushing through it so no one else would discover him.
Elenthea didn’t ask herself why she needed to do this. But she knew she had no other choice.
So she bent her shoulder into the wind and pulled. It was a long, wet, treacherous walk around the outside edge of the Raft to the boatyards that stood empty this time of year. The rope was wet, soaking through her mittens, and her hands stung, sore and chapped. Her arms ached from the pull of the log against the rope and her fight to keep it from yanking her into the surly water. The barrier pontoons were slippery and she lost her balance more than once, but she didn’t stop. Not even when she fell.
It didn’t occur to her to stop.
The afternoon was starting to look grey and sullen when she finally pulled him up to one of the launching docks the fishermen used in better weather. Inside the protected cove, the water was a bit calmer, if no warmer. It was easier to tie the log-boat up in an empty slip and make it secure. She climbed down into the log itself, stepping over the dead man’s legs and then crouching between them to test the last of her knots. She didn’t know what made her stop when she was testing the last of them. Some odd premonition. Some feeling she’d never had before in her whole life. She sucked in a breath and felt it shudder through her. Then she looked up.
To find that the stunning, massive man in the log wasn’t dead after all.
He was alive, furious by the looks of it, and aiming all that powerful rage straight at her.
With eyes far blacker and more intense than the dark of a winter night.
2.
Tait’s first thought was that he was fucking hallucinating, because if there was an afterworld he wouldn’t still be so damned cold.
He’d pretty much accepted the fact he was going to freeze his balls off and then die a lonely, pointless, little bitch’s death, swept out to sea like a pissant mainlander who didn’t know any better than to get in the way of the winter swells. Instead of the death he’d always imagined he’d die, at the point of an enemy’s blade in the midst of battle. The way a warrior brother of the raider clan should.
He still couldn’t believe it. He’d taken that watch a hundred times, huddled out in the shitty cabin on one of the barrier islands that clogged up the bay in front of the raider city and was the first defense against any intruders. He’d sat there in storms much pissier than the one that had crashed over the rocks and slammed into him, leaving him no choice but to hunker down in a bullshit canoe and hope for the best while it swept his ass away, far out to sea, where the eastern islands the raiders called home weren’t even a glimmer on the horizon.
And he was lucky he’d had the canoe. Without it, he would have drowned by now. He could swim like a motherfucker, but even a warrior brother of the clan needed to sleep every now and then. Still, Tait figured that one of these times he’d close his eyes and not wake up again, canoe or no canoe.
Maybe that was what was happening now.
But if this was death at last, after ten days at sea, Tait was okay with it.
The girl crouched there between his legs in the bottom of his canoe, making complicated knots with her clever fingers, was beautiful. Slap-in-the-face beautiful, which made Tait’s cock happy, something he’d figured he’d never experience again when he’d been ripped away from the eastern islands in this stupid boat. In January. He would have been happy to see any human. He would probably have wanted to fuck any woman he encountered at this point, just to celebrate the fact he wasn’t a corpse being picked apart by ravenous seabirds.
It took him a minute to process the fact that she wasn’t just convenient and his apparent savior. It was more than that. She was the kind of pretty his dick didn’t know how to handle.
First of all, she didn’t look like a raider at all. Tait was clan born and clan raised. He was used to his people. Hardy, sturdy raiders, men and women alike. Capable and fierce. This girl seemed frail. Fragile. Her hair was a thick, dark brown that fell down past her shoulders, and he wanted to bury his hands in the mass of it. Her skin was a red brown color, a shade he’d never seen before, that seemed richer than his own light brown. He wanted to taste it. But it was her eyes that really got to him. They were a deep, fathomless blue. Piercing and inviting at once. She was wearing shit he didn’t understand. Layers of wool that wouldn’t allow for any quick movement, flowing this way and that. Clothes that made no sense to his raider sensibilities, because raiders were always ready for an attack—from their enemies, from the weather, whatever.
One more reason to think that he’d already died somewhere out there in the bitch Atlantic, and was making up stories to ease his passage into nothingness.
“Where did you come from?” he croaked out, his throat almost too dry to bear.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried to sit up,
but he did it now. And he must have looked like some weakling little bitch, because her eyes flew wide open and she threw out her hands as if she planned to catch him should he topple over.
Tait might have been insulted if he hadn’t felt so weak. Lightheaded. Nothing like himself at all.
“You’re the one who came from somewhere,” she said, and her voice was the best thing he’d ever heard. Soft and intense at once, with a kind of huskiness that made his cock even happier. “I’ve always been right here.”
She shrugged something off her shoulder and handed it to him, and Tait took it, still watching her. It took him a beat to realize she’d handed him a pouch of water. He grunted something like thanks—or praise—and sucked at it greedily.
Water. It had been days since he’d last had more than a drop or two of rainwater, caught in the bottom of the canoe or on his clothes. Much less a deep, full, satisfying drink. Tait thought he could love her for her water alone.
“I think you need to eat something,” she was saying, when he could focus on anything but the water and the glory of it on his tongue, then in his parched throat. “I have no idea how far away land is, but you can’t have eaten anytime recently. We’re nowhere near anything out here.” She shifted closer to him, putting her hands on his chest and gently pushing, as if she imagined she could move him somewhere he didn’t want to go. But the craziest thing was that he let her do it, lying back as if he routinely followed the commands of small, breakable females. Or anyone else outside the brotherhood, for that matter. “I don’t know why you’re alive.”
Tait smiled, yet another thing he’d imagined he’d never do again. “Too mean to kill, baby.”
He had said that before, in different contexts. He felt like a ghost, thinking of the life he was certain had ended or he wouldn’t be here now.
There was no question. He was fucking confused.
But he couldn’t really worry too much about that, because this fantasy vision in his head was right there with him, pressing cool hands to his forehead, then against his cheeks. She shifted back on her heels, and dug around the great blanket-like thing she wore wrapped around her.
It took Tait long moments realize it was a kind of coat.
And then he didn’t care, because she was pulling out food. Or what he thought was food.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Eat this.”
Tait didn’t ask what she was handing him. He didn’t care. It looked like little pellets, but it wasn’t until he popped a few in his mouth and chewed on them a while that he realized they were meat. Dried meat, or maybe fish. A salty, rich flavor on his tongue, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it all tasted like shit. He would have eaten anything at this point.
He practically cried for joy. The only thing that stopped him was the fact he wasn’t, despite all evidence to the contrary at the moment, a whining little bitch. No one needed to know how shaky he was and how close to the edge he’d been. Especially not pretty girls wearing weird clothes in some marina sort of place he’d never seen before in his life.
It was tempting to throw everything she given him into his mouth, gulping it down in three seconds, but he knew that if he did that he would only get sick.
And the last thing he wanted to do was puke his guts out in front of a pretty girl he’d much rather try to fuck, once he determined whether or not she was the sort who might try to kill him. Or hand him over to those who would.
Not that fucking her if she was deadly was off the table, it would just require a different approach.
He ate everything in the little package she’d given him and drank enough water to make him realize exactly how dangerously dry his throat had been, and then, finally, he sat up again.
This time, his head didn’t spin. His stomach felt like an unpleasant, bloated rock, but that was only to be expected after the length of his fast. Ten brutal days. His food—a few battle rations the warrior brothers who protected the clan always carried with them, because there was no telling when they’d find themselves in need—had run out a few days ago. If the usual grim and terrible winter hadn’t kept raining down on him, Tait would have died. Or maybe he had died, but now that his head fell a little bit clearer, he found that he really, really, didn’t want that to be true.
Because the woman in front of him had the kind of wide, generous mouth that made Tait remember that he was more than just a body washed out to sea in a fucking canoe. That he’d had a whole life before that bastard wave had slammed over the tiny island where he’d been overseeing some younger, prospective brothers on that miserable watch and tossed him—and the stupid canoe he’d taken shelter in, which he knew had saved him despite its seeming uselessness in all other things—out of the bay that hid the raider city.
A whole life that had included many, many ways to take advantage of a mouth like that.
“Tell me where I am.” He sounded gruff. Maybe gruffer than he intended.
But it didn’t seem to faze this woman at all. “The raft.”
“A raft?”
“The Raft,” she said, with an emphasis on the first word that he heard, but didn’t quite understand. “That’s its name. It’s a floating city,” she explained, after searching his gaze for a moment and clearly not seeing what she expected. “Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“Sure, I’ve heard of a floating city,” Tait replied. He had. It was always there on the maps raiders used to sail the seas. An arrow toward the Atlantic and to Floating City written beneath it. But like so many things in this ruined world so long after the Storms had kicked the earth’s ass, all that meant was that mapmakers had been told too many old stories. “I’ve also heard of dragons. And water snakes. And fucking Australia. Doesn’t make any of it real.”
“Well, the Raft is real,” she told him. She wrinkled up her nose and looked up and to the right, as if she was looking at something more than the much bigger boat docked beside them—a fishing vessel, as far as Tait could tell. “Unfortunately.”
He couldn’t remember what he’d heard about the floating city. What legends or stories he’d been told as a kid. Was it another one of those compliant places? Like the better part of the mainland, where everybody was terribly concerned about repopulating the earth—especially when it meant they got a new woman to bang all winter long in the name of doing their part for humanity. It was all such bullshit. Pussy was about pussy, and Tait had never understood how so many compliant people convinced themselves otherwise.
But then again, maybe he wasn’t meant to understand. He was a raider, blood and bone. His father was a shipbuilder and his mother worked in the clan nursery, raising the children of those in the clan who had other demands on their time, like the brothers. Tait had grown up in the raider city, right there where he could be awed daily by all those fierce, inspiring brothers, the warriors who fought for the clan, conducted all the raids, and acted as its first line of defense. He’d discovered what to do with his cock at the summer festivals on the eastern islands, which was when the raiders—already wholly unfazed about sex—let loose. Compliants had always seemed like yet another fairy tale to him, like fire breathing dragons and cities that floated out on the sea and never hit land.
But if the city was real—and he figured it had to be or this dream he thought he was having would’ve changed shape by now, and certainly would have gotten a whole lot more naked with a woman as beautiful as this one in front of him—he needed to figure out what sort of society he’d landed in.
Because if there was one thing compliants didn’t like, it was raiders.
“Tell me your name.” He didn’t pretend that wasn’t an order, but the girl before him didn’t so much as blink.
“My name is Elenthea.” She smiled when she said it, taking her flask back and securing it somewhere beneath that blanket thing she wore. Then she said something unintelligible about houses, of all things. And kept smiling at him.
“You keep smiling at me like I’m nice,” he murmured, which wa
s maybe a clue that he wasn’t back to full capacity. That ten days of waiting for his death out at sea was taking its toll whether he liked it or not.
“I’ve never seen a man who looks like you before,” she said, without a shred of guile or flirtation on her face. She didn’t even wait for Tait to respond. “Though I don’t expect you to be nice, of course. What man is nice? Meaning no disrespect.”
And she laughed as she said that, as if the very idea was outrageous. So silly it hardly bore mentioning. There was no particular reason should lodge itself inside Tait the way it did, as if it was a personal insult when he knew very well it couldn’t be.
“What do men look like here?”
Elenthea blinked at that. “Well, you know . . . Like men.” When he only gazed back at her, she blew out a breath. She held her arms away from her, indicating something wide. Very wide. “Big and round, and very smooth.”
“Do you mean fat?”
“Sure. Fat, I guess.” She dropped her arms. “I never really thought about it like that, but I guess that’s the right word.”
“All your men are fat?” Tait hadn’t seen a lot of fat people in his life. Oh sure, some raiders were thicker and some were thinner, but big and round and smooth? As wide as her arms had gone? That sounded like something completely different.
Something that a well-trained brother like himself could exploit, because there was no way a bunch of fat, plucked men could defend themselves against a raider. No way in hell. He might as well be his own, private army.
