by Megan Crane
“Not all.” Elenthea considered. “There aren’t that many men. There are the unranked classes like the fishermen, but they’re shaped more like barrels. But you have to be born into the unranked classes. Otherwise, most men are Houses and Houses look the way Houses always look.”
Houses were people, apparently. Men. Rounded, hairless men. Tait filed that away.
He moved to his feet then, because he’d already spent more time sitting and lying down in the past ten days than in his entire previous life. He stood up slowly and then, when he was sure of his balance, jumped from the canoe to the dock beside him.
Everything worked. He was a little tight in weird places and wouldn’t have wanted to head into battle—or one of the war chief’s killer training exercises back home on the eastern islands, because Tyr was a sadistic fuck who exploited weakness for fun—but he was fine. Functional.
He was aware of Elenthea moving behind him, climbing up to stand on the dock with him, but he didn’t look at her directly. He was too busy looking around.
He was standing in a shipyard. A shipyard filled with all kinds of boats.
Elenthea had taken a raider to a shipyard, and given him food and drink. She might as well have handed him her people’s fleet and cut their throats herself.
She was either a dissident or she was clueless, and it was too early to tell which.
“What happened to your men?” he asked instead, casing the boats in slips all around him. None sleek and low like the glorious raider vessels that rightly owned the seas, but he hadn’t expected that. A bathtub of a boat might take longer to get him where he needed to go, but it would get him there. As long as he could steer it—unlike that damned paddle-less canoe—he was good.
“The Raft has always been divided into different houses,” Elenthea said from behind him.
“Different houses ruled by a man called a House.”
“Yes.” She made a soft sort of laughing sound. “You say that like it’s weird.”
When Tait turned, she was pulling that heavy blanket thing closer around her, as if the frigid wind was getting to her. But she still stood there, gazing back at him with her oddly intent blue gaze.
“The Raft has had the same houses as long as anyone can remember. Fathers pass them on to their sons. It’s very hard for a new house to rise. Partly because there are so few boys born and most of the ones that come around are related to an existing House, so they just take it over when their father dies. You know.”
Tait didn’t know. Raider kings took and held their thrones with their strength and cunning, not because of their fathers. The king of his clan was Wulf, the most dangerous of all the raiders, who had taken the throne when he was eighteen and had held it ever since. What was more, if Wulf ever had a son with similar ambitions, he’d expect him to take the throne from him the same way or do without it.
Passing thrones down to any old idiot because of bloodlines was stupid, in Tait’s opinion. It just encouraged weak-ass rulers, which in turn was pretty much begging for an invasion.
But Elenthea was explaining the Raft, and Tait needed to listen so he could plot out his strategy. Though the more she talked, the more Tait figured this place was stuffed full of a bunch of pansy-ass bitches who lounged around and let all the women wait on them as if they were the prize. Then they shuffled the ladies around come summer, so they could get a little strange on their dicks in the fall. They didn’t call it compliance. Elenthea didn’t mention a church like the one on the mainland that hung over all the foolishly pious people like a bullshit cloud of unsatisfying sex with a grim focus on procreation. The Raft wasn’t religious, but still, rotating women was just the way things were done here. And it wasn’t a bad life, he supposed, as lives went on this side of the end of the world.
After all, not everybody could live free like raiders did.
“What if you don’t want to have sex with some round, fat guy who sounds like a dick anyway?” he asked, his hands on his hips and his gaze maybe a little too narrow on Elenthea’s bright blue eyes.
She laughed. Then it seemed to occur to her that the question was a serious one, and she pressed her lips together. And frowned.
“I don’t think that anyone has ever asked that question,” she said after a moment. “Not around me, anyway. There’s no point. This is how things are.”
Tait grinned at that. “You’ve never met a raider before, have you?”
“Of course not.” Elenthea smiled again, something Tait figured it wouldn’t take him long at all to get addicted to, if she kept it up. “There’s no such thing. Everybody says. Like dragons and Australia.”
He wanted to touch her. Hell, he wanted a whole lot more than that. But even though he felt more like himself than he had in days, he still wasn’t back to even half his strength. He knew it. He could feel it, like he was wearing another, weaker man’s body. And the fact that his cock was perfectly happy to risk a suicide run just to get a taste of her didn’t mean that he had to listen. He’d stopped listening to that single-minded asshole when he was still a teenager. No need to backtrack on that shit now.
“So,” he said, studying her face. Committing it to memory, not that he wanted to admit that. “Elenthea. You found a raider washed up from the sea. What are you going to do with me?”
3.
Elenthea had never had a secret before.
Life on the Raft was out there in the open for everyone to see and judge and rank, right there as it happened. She’d never imagined there could be something like this—quiet moments snatched from her days to sneak food and drink and wool to a brooding, beautiful man who not only wanted to leave, but thought he actually could. And more, took steps to make that happen.
Elenthea had always believed that the only way off the Raft was over the side, to drown or get eaten by sharks. No one had ever simply chosen to leave. Not as long as she’d been around.
But her bold raider only laughed when she told him that.
“I’m not staying on a fucking raft, baby,” Tait said, and there was something about the way his strong brown throat looked when he laughed. Something about the way his gaze settled on her and stayed there. It made her mouth feel dry. It made her head spin as if she was ill when she knew very well she wasn’t.
“Everyone else does. There’s nowhere else to go.”
She’d started racing through her usual morning chores instead of hoping they’d get done by someone else, all to claim a few extra moments out here with him. Her fascinating, beautiful secret.
“You don’t know what’s out there, Elenthea,” he said quietly. “I do. It’s a whole big world, ruined piece of shit that it is, and it doesn’t float around in the sea like a pile of garbage.”
It had never occurred to Elenthea to dream of bigger, better. Other. The notion pricked at her even as it scared her.
She’d been taught that there was only one kind of ambition, and it came in the form of the favor of round men who were always surrounded by other women who wanted the exact same thing from them. No one had ever even hinted at the possibility that there was anything else.
Here on the Raft, there wasn’t anything else.
Tait didn’t just hint at possibilities. He showed her. Because he didn’t just sit around, waiting for her to come to him the way the Houses would do. The way all the men she’d ever met did. Not this raider.
At first she didn’t understand what he was doing.
“You shouldn’t be in one of the fishing boats,” she said the first day she found him outside that little floating log of his that he called a canoe, messing around with one of the fishing boats tied up for the winter. “That’s a serious offense.”
“This is barely a fucking fishing boat,” he muttered, barely looking over his huge, hard shoulder as he worked on something in the rear of the vessel in question. “A block of wood would be faster.”
“No one can see you in the marina. No one can know you’re here.”
He looked at her and
his mouth moved, as if he was trying not to laugh. “Does anyone come out here? It looks deserted.”
“No,” she replied, almost against her will, as if he was demanding a difficult concession. “Not when it’s cold. The docks get busy again in the spring.”
Tait only smiled a little bit at that, and kept doing what he was doing. As if he’d never had a doubt.
It was still winter, which meant that only Elenthea snuck away from the protected pontoons. Everyone else stayed huddled inside. That meant there was no one to notice that there was unusual activity in the boatyards. Just as there was no one but Elenthea to see it when Tait stripped down to the waist every time he got hot, which seemed to be fairly often. She felt it would somehow be rude not to admire all those planes of hard muscle and fascinating ridges dug into his torso. To say nothing of the bold art that covered him. Marks and figures. Circles and words.
She’d never seen anything like it. It made her feel hot from her scalp to her knees. Hot and too loose, as if her body was doing things of its own volition, and shivering all the while.
Usually she had to sit down on the dock with her knees drawn up under her chin to deal with all that shivering.
And every time she did, she had the oddest notion that he knew why.
Tait was so active. That was as surprising as the stories he told. He talked of the cold islands he called home, to the west and north of where he suspected the Raft was, far across the sea. He talked of a childhood spent swimming and sailing no matter the weather, and fighting all the rest of the time. Learning bladecraft and battle the way Elenthea had learned to sew garments together to clothe the rest of the house, because that was the responsibility of all the ranked girls. Except the way Tait talked about his life, it all seemed so bright and captivating. Not like here. She had the distinct impression he enjoyed his life, a concept that baffled her.
And all the while he talked, he did things. He climbed all over the boats in the marina, taking parts and refashioning them on his favorite fishing boat. Sometimes he hung off the side of taller boats and then pulled himself up, over and over, without ever swinging his legs up to actually climb aboard, as if the pulling up was the point. Sometimes he threw himself on the ground and caught himself on his fists, then levered himself up and down, again and again, until his thick arms looked even wider and stronger.
All of it was mesmerizing. Elenthea had the notion that the man could sit silent and motionless and she would still find him almost too compelling to be real.
Every day she brought him food and drink, and her reward was getting to watch him do these odd—and oddly appealing—things all over the boatyard. She got to sit there as he made it clear that contrary to what everyone had always said with such authority here, there really was a whole world out there. Maybe a whole lot less of it than there was before the Storms ripped everything apart and reshaped it all, but still. Lives and people and places that had nothing to do with the Raft.
It sounded like heaven to Elenthea. Even the scary, upsetting parts that Tait seemed to find fun—like the raids he and the men he called his brothers went on, pouring over the walls of mainland encampments to fight and steal and win—fascinated her because it was all different. New. Exciting, somehow, even if it was a bit violent for her tastes.
Maybe it wasn’t that the violence bothered her. Tait looked like he could handle it, and easily. Maybe it was that this man was clearly alive in a way Elenthea hadn’t known was possible.
“You’ve actually been on the land?” she asked one afternoon, when it was finally clear which mainland he was talking about. The bigger one, that Elenthea knew of only in the vaguest terms as being near the Appalachian Mountains, and not the same as the smaller mainland clustered around the Alps. Both of which were stories her people told. She’d never seen either herself.
“Of course I’ve been on the land.”
“You say ‘of course,’” Elenthea murmured, “but I’ve never been off the Raft. No one leaves the Raft by choice.”
“Why not?” He laughed when she stared at him. “It clearly sucks here. Why stay?”
She blinked at him. “Where else is there to go?”
Tait eyed her as he carved a piece of wood with one of his many wicked blades, that curve to his mouth that made her heart careen about unevenly in her chest. Today his braids were tied back in a messy knot and he was wearing that shirt he called a thermal that she knew he washed out and rewore often. On brighter, drier days she’d seen him hang things out to dry in the weak winter sun.
She had no idea why she found every last thing this man did so fascinating. More than fascinating. It was as if it might hurt her—physically—if she didn’t bear witness to every move he made.
Maybe she was as crazy as everyone had always told her she was.
“Anywhere,” he replied, low and rough and compelling. “Everywhere. A home is a prison if you don’t see enough of the world to appreciate it.”
And as the days passed, Elenthea got a little bit lost in him. The way he moved. The low hum of his voice. That bold laugh of his that made her flash hot with a kind of fierce joy. The things he did with his hands, like rebuilding a boat that had looked perfectly decent to her because he saw something else in it. Something better.
He was so much stronger than when she’d found him in that log he called a canoe. He’d filled out a bit, which only served to make her realize that he’d been gaunt when she’d first seen him. When she’d thought he was the most beautiful dead man she’d ever laid eyes on.
Also the only dead man she’d ever seen up close, though she didn’t share that with him. She had the suspicion that he wouldn’t appreciate the stories of most Raft funerals, where people were either weighted and tossed overboard to drown, or simply taken away in the night and slid overboard, leaving nothing behind, not even a ripple.
Rituals were for the highly-ranked alone.
Tait was telling her a story about some or other great battle and the king he called Wulf one afternoon when he stopped, tilting his head slightly to one side, his whole big, tough body going on alert.
Elenthea held her breath, She didn’t even know why. But she couldn’t bring herself to look away from him.
“Why do they blow those horns?” he asked. “I hear them all the time.”
Elenthea jolted, then scrambled to her feet. How had she lost track of the hour? But she knew how. He was lounging there in the cabin of the boat he’d claimed as his, kicked back on the bunk. She’d been perched there at his feet the way she often was, wanting nothing more than to investigate every facet of him. Like the way his battered old boot fit his shockingly large foot. Or the way his trousers clung to his legs, showing her muscles in places she’d had no idea could be anything at all but soft flesh.
“It’s the afternoon call,” she said nervously when he did nothing but settle that dark gaze of his on her, still half-reclining in that way of his. She felt breathless and slippery, and this time she wasn’t holding her breath. This time she couldn’t quite catch it. “I have to get back.”
“Or they’ll start looking for you?”
Her hands shook, but she couldn’t tell if it was because of the horns when she should have been back already, or because of the thick, sharp thing that seemed to crowd the air in the cabin. Elenthea wrapped her long length of wool around her like a cloak and tugged it tight, as if that was an answer. Or a kind of armor, anyway.
“Everyone is expected to be in their proper place in their houses at nightfall,” she said when she was reasonably sure she wouldn’t stutter. Or sound as knocked-back as she felt. “The House Mistresses do a count then and again at dawn. Otherwise people might get swept overboard and no one would know.”
He studied her, then rose, and that was . . . worse? Better? Dangerous? Elenthea didn’t know, and then he was right there. Standing over her. So close she could almost feel the heat he gave off. So close she could smell him, a kind of salt mixed with the fresh scent of the sea, but w
armer, somehow. It made her mouth water. It made her feel things she couldn’t possibly name.
And he was so much bigger when he was closer. So much taller and more . . . everything, something in her whispered. More of everything. Everything and then some.
He took up the whole of the cabin. But Elenthea knew it wasn’t because the cabin was small. If they were outside, he’d block out the sky. That was what Tait did.
“Why do you look afraid, baby?” His voice wasn’t exactly soft. It was low, but there were hints of those darker things in him that he seemed to embrace. It made her wish she had darker things in her, too. It made her want to hum like an ember, hot and bright and deep, the way he did.
Or just be near him while he did it. Either one worked.
“I’m not afraid.” She made herself smile. “I don’t want them to start paying too much attention to me, and they will if I miss checking in at the call. I don’t want them to notice the food I take from the kitchens or how quickly I rush through things so I can—”
There was no reason for her to stop herself then, but she did. As if she was confessing something rather than telling him a simple truth. Why did she feel as if she was?
“And if they catch you?”
His gaze was so dark. That full, mesmerizing mouth of his a line. And all she wanted to do was touch it.
“That would not be good. Let’s hope they don’t.”
“What’s the penalty if they do?” he asked, and there was no reason she should be standing there, rooted to the floor beneath her as if her feet wouldn’t work until he was ready for them to move.
She needed to leave. She should have left an hour ago. But all she did was stare back at him as if she was nothing more than the wood he worked with and made do as he pleased. Exactly as he pleased.
Oh, how she wanted to please this man.
“The Council would be called to make a recommendation about my fate, but there isn’t much wiggle room.” She smiled again, but she didn’t think she was fooling him. She could feel the strain in her cheeks. “All citizens must earn their place here or they’re set adrift.”
