I awoke to the sound of thunder. No, to Kral’s deafening snores. Incredible I’d slept at all with that racket. He lay on his side between me and the door, massive back to me, shoulder blocking all but the glow of the lantern he’d left burning on low. Another dragging snore. Danu save me. I thumped Kral hard on that shoulder, and the noise cut off instantly as he erupted up, a knife in his hand. Half a moment later, he relaxed and fixed on me. Impressive reflexes.
“Here.” He reached to the floor and handed me a flask. “I’m to make you drink this when you awake.”
I took it, bemused by him. From dead asleep to the order of business within three heartbeats. I scooted up a bit—cautiously, though the severe head swimming from before didn’t arise nearly so viciously—and took a swallow. Still warm, the meaty broth flowed into my stomach, as comforting as Kral’s hand on my brow had been. If I hadn’t dreamed that.
The man himself, discharged of duty, lay back again and yawned mightily. “It’s a few hours until dawn still, so once you finish we’ll sleep again. You’re to drink it all, then another flask of water I have here—if your stomach is up to it.”
“And if it isn’t?” Said stomach had gone from vaguely queasy to voraciously hungry, but I knew well how easily it could go back in the other direction. I’d hate to foul Kral’s bed as well as his floor, if only because I didn’t want to have to lose its delicious soft comfort.
Kral turned his head on the pillow and grinned at me. “I have a basin for that. I’d offer to hold your hair while you puke, but you don’t have any.”
“I have hair.”
“Short as a servant’s.”
“Any longer and it becomes a fuzzy cloud. I look like an angry porcupine, only less tasty.”
“What is that?”
I’d used my home dialect for the animal and shrugged, finishing the broth and giving it a few moments to decide if it wanted to stay there. “Who knows if you have them? A smallish insect-and-berry eater.” I demonstrated with my hands. “With stiff fur that’s sharp, like thorns, and stands up when it’s threatened.”
“Aha! The hystrix.” He sounded enormously pleased, and I recalled he’d called me that before, just my luck. “The trick with those, as with all prickly creatures, is to flip it onto its back and address the soft underbelly.” He put a hand on my abdomen beneath my bare breasts where the blanket had fallen away, caressing what little skin I still possessed that wasn’t wounded.
“Address my soft belly all you like, Kral. You’re not getting anywhere with me again. My people have a saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me—”
“—twice, shame on me. Yes, yes. This is a Dasnarian wisdom. I have never tricked you.”
“I’m ready for the water.” I pointedly ignored his still-caressing hand and the arousing shivers it produced.
He rolled over, grabbed the flask off the floor, and handed it to me. “You needn’t fret. I would not take advantage of you in your wounded condition. You like a little pain with your sex, but that would be much even for you.”
“Such consideration.”
“I could say that Trond would have my balls if I jeopardized your recovery by using them on you, but this is for me. I want you hale and hearty before we go at it again.”
“No fun to spar with a pathetic wreck, huh? I heard you say so.”
“That.” He sighed and tucked his hands behind his head. “Also, I deeply regret that you were so gravely injured in my service. I—all my men—owe you a debt. Jens says he could never have stayed at the wheel without your protection.”
I finished the flask of water and handed it back, trying to find a non-sore spot to lie on. Given how much fluid I’d consumed, I’d have a severe need to piss eventually, but so far it seemed to be holding off. Becoming blood, probably. Also, I didn’t quite know what to make of Kral being nice to me. And grateful. “You don’t owe me a debt—it was in the interests of saving my own skin that I did it. Couldn’t stand by while the Hákyrling ground herself into sawdust against the barrier.” I’d gone for acerbic and uncaring, but it came out sleepy, and Kral chuckled.
“Ironically, it’s your skin that you forfeited. Such pretty skin, too, like svasshnut.”
“What’s that?” My turn to ask. Ouch, not that spot.
“Here.” Kral stretched out an arm, threaded it under me, and tucked me against his side, my head pillowed in the hollow of his shoulder. “Better?”
Surprisingly so. Skin to skin always soothed me, as did his male scent, faintly spiced with some foreign soap of his.
“Svasshnut is a dessert. Very creamy and sweet.”
“I’m not food, Kral.”
“Creamy and sweet,” he repeated, and kissed my brow. “Sleep, my hystrix, so your bristles may be sharp enough tomorrow to guard that soft underbelly.”
7
Trond was there when I woke late into the next morning, and I told myself I wasn’t the least disappointed that Kral had absented himself. The desperate need to pee had arrived as predicted. It took only the threat of letting loose in Kral’s bed to convince Trond to let me get up instead of using the basin he thought he’d foist on me.
Because I’d insisted so forcibly, I had to put on a considerable tough act to cover the dizziness and nausea that swamped me as I staggered to the chamber pot. I’d never hurt so much. Not that I could recall. Kral’s quip about me not having skin left wasn’t far off the mark.
“The stitches hurt the most,” I complained to Trond once I made it back into bed. “They pull. I think I’d be fine without them.”
“Oh sure, sure,” he said affably enough. “Just let me get a tarp so when all those wounds open up again and you bleed out, at least we can feed it to the fish-birds instead of staining the floor.”
I scowled at the shutters overhead, pretending it didn’t feel infinitely better to be lying down again. Trond handed me another flask of warm broth. “Ugh. Can’t I have real food?”
“If you keep this down, yes. If you rush yourself, it will only keep you abed longer.”
“We have magical healing in the Thirteen Kingdoms, you know. Goes much faster.”
“I envy those healers, then,” Trond replied, checking my bandages. “Lucky them to be rid of difficult patients so quickly. You’re worse than the general.”
Perversely, that pleased me. Top that, Kral. Though I felt a tinge of guilt. “I apologize, Trond. I know I’m a terrible patient. Never did master the knack of that particular skill.”
He patted my arm on a hand’s breadth of unscathed skin. “Bold spirits never do. It’s what keeps you fighting when a saner personality would retreat for cover. You were something to see, warrior, your blades moving so fast they seemed to be a lethal fog. I never saw your blades, only the green rain you made of the fish-birds.”
“You were on deck?”
“Briefly. Dragging men inside, those still living.”
“Kral said he lost five.”
“Seven. Two more died of their wounds.”
He did look weary. No surprise with tending all of us. “Go rest. I’ll be still and behave. No need to watch me.”
Trond nodded and rubbed palms briskly on his thighs. “I won’t refuse that offer. Can I have anything sent to you, or will you sleep?”
No way would I sleep—I hurt too much, though I wouldn’t say so to Trond. He’d heard enough of my complaints. At least Dafne had had her books, journals, and such to keep her occupied when she skinned her feet. I probably looked all over like her poor soles had. She always nagged that I wouldn’t sit still long enough to learn written Dasnarian. That was true, though I’d also figured I wouldn’t need it. Hlyti spitting in my face there. I supposed I could put my inactivity to good use.
“There’s a few scrolls, some ink, in my cabin. If you could have those sent?”
“Done. And solid food soon, if you swear you won’t touch it if you feel any stomach cramping or other illness.”
“Agreed.” I doubted I’d feel anything as prosaic as a
bellyache through the increasing shouting of my nerves at the painful pulling of the stitches. Some lethal cloud I’d produced, that allowed those beaks to get me everywhere, despite my fighting leathers. Thinking of which . . . “Trond—where are my leathers?”
He paused at the door and shook his head in regret. “Unsalvageable. Cut to ribbons, just as you were.”
Great. Just wonderful.
I must have been learning more about being aboard the Hákyrling than I realized, because I felt the shift in our direction toward evening. Maybe in the sound of the waves rocking the ship, the angle she leaned in. Headed back to the meeting place, no doubt. I tossed down the scroll I’d been painstakingly copying Dasnarian characters onto. Dafne said the best way to learn to read was to make myself write them. I’d hate to know what the worst way was.
Bootsteps in the hall caught my ear. Kral’s tread, if I didn’t miss my mark. I’d been playing that game all the long, dull afternoon, listening to the passing of Dasnarian feet, knowing none of them for his, occupying myself with cataloging activity and making mental notes of their routines. The door opened to admit Kral, and I pumped my fist in victory. Amazing what can be entertaining when you’re out of your mind with boredom.
“Happy to see me?” He pulled off his helm, ran his fingers through sweaty hair. A man of certain rituals, my Kral.
“Congratulating myself for correctly pinning the sound of your footsteps. Though you have a certain unmistakable aggressive cadence, so it wasn’t much of a challenge.”
To my surprise, he smiled easily at that, stripping off the armor with quick efficiency. “Tired of recuperation?”
“About ready to gnaw my way through the hull,” I admitted.
He picked up the scroll I’d been laboriously copying. “Your handwriting is atrocious. My five-year-old nephew can do better.”
“Oh, yeah? Let’s see how your Common Tongue looks. Or, hey, how about your written Nahanaun!”
“Bah.” He tossed the scroll back onto the bed, much as I had. “That language makes no sense. It gives me a headache to even think about it. How can going ‘OO-ay’ mean something totally different than ‘oo-AY’? A madman constructed that language.”
I laughed, a welcome feeling after bored misery. It pulled my stitches, however, so ended on a kind of embarrassing wheeze of pain.
“It’s the serration of the beaks.” Kral showed me one of his own healing wounds in sympathy. “Trond had to pull the stitches tighter than usual, because the edges of the wounds weren’t even. Want some mjed?”
“Drinking with you did not turn out so well last time,” I made myself say, though the prospect of lightening some of the pain made my mouth water.
He gave me a long look, contemplating. “I know you value your independence, and I’m trying to understand that about you, but everyone needs help sometimes. Let me take care of you that much.”
“You won’t try to use it against me?”
Suppressing a smile, he held up a hand. “I promise not to reengage our game until you feel better.”
Always games with him. Easy to be fooled by those layers of bluster. “Unfortunately, I think we polished off your stash of mjed.”
That mischievous little-boy grin lit Kral’s face. “I have several stashes. An effective warrior maintains his own supply chain.”
“More Dasnarian wisdom?”
“Always.” He crossed to the far wall, crouched, and opened yet another hidden cabinet, with a number of the mjed kegs in it. A man after my own heart.
“In one of the northern kingdoms, Branli, they brew a whiskey twice as strong as your mjed,” I told him, “though not nearly as smooth on the tongue. I bartered for a case of that stuff and packed it around for the better part of a year.”
“And you haven’t shared it with me? Cruel woman.”
“Finished the last bottle with Dafne and Zynda on the way here,” I told him with quite a bit of rue. No more replenishing my supply anytime in the near future, either. I accepted the full mug from him as he sat on the edge of the bed and tapped it to his. “To carrying around the weight of the good stuff.”
He raised a brow at me. “Is that an oblique reference to my grievance with my brother not carrying what I call important?”
“Make of it what you will.” The mjed burned delightfully into my blood, taking the worst edge off my jangling nerves.
“I hadn’t credited you with subtlety,” Kral noted with a thoughtful frown.
“To be perfectly clear, you haven’t credited me with much.”
“That’s not true.” He surveyed me, though I had the blanket modestly tucked over my breasts. Not that I’d be all that tempting—or tempted—in my current condition. I likely looked like one of Illyria’s reanimated dead. A more gruesome sight I’d never before encountered and never hoped to again. “You’re the best lover I’ve had the pleasure to bed. You’re smart, beautiful, beyond skilled with a blade, with a body equally adept at fighting and fucking.”
“Why, Kral. You charmer. And here I thought you didn’t care.”
“Too bad that smart mouth of yours ruins all the rest,” he commented, in that fake philosophical tone he liked to pull out.
“Ha-ha.” We sat quietly for a bit, both savoring the mjed, me trying to pace myself, lest my churning stomach hurl it back up and blow our little secret. The solid food Trond had promised had been a child’s portion of bread and dried meat. Not much joy there. “Feels like we’re headed back toward the meeting spot?”
“Yes. With a storm twixt that and us.”
“Why do you sound so happy about that?”
“I like a good storm at sea almost as much as I like a troublesome vixen in my bed.” He slanted me a wickedly sexy smile, some rare, real joy in his eyes. Goddesses save us all, he meant it. I squelched the impulse to ask what made him so unhappy most of the time. We weren’t friends like that. “And,” he continued, “we are hopeful it will drive the fish-birds underwater long enough to lose our trail.”
“A storm. Have I ever mentioned I can’t swim?”
“Then I advise you to stay aboard.”
The storm did indeed hit during the night, waking me from a dead—okay, drunken—slumber into full alertness, my knives in my hands.
“Will you slay the sea herself?” Kral muttered sleepily.
“Excellent idea. I’ll get right on that. And least then she’d lie still.” The Hákyrling pitched up, then down, as if she’d slid down one side of a gulch on fresh snow and rocketed up the other again.
Kral snaked an arm around me and nestled me against his side. “Don’t worry, hystrix, I’ll protect you against the big, bad rain. Put your gnat stickers away.”
“It’s not the rain, you lunkhead.” But I slipped the knives back under the pillow. Even I had to admit they’d do me no good against the angry goddess of the ocean. Probably fell to Moranu, with all her mysterious, dark depths and trickster nature. One moment all aqua serenity and the next a raging sorceress. The ship pitched again, even more steeply, and I would have rolled into the curving wall if Kral hadn’t held me in place. “Shouldn’t you be up there, making sure the ship isn’t . . .” going to break into pieces and drown us all. “Is okay?”
“They’ll alert me if I’m needed. This is but a minor squall. Only a landlubber would be awakened by such a small bit of bumping.”
“So mean.”
“I know. So are you. This is why we suit so well. Go back to sleep.” He put his other arm over me, holding me in the circle of them. “I won’t let you wash overboard.”
Normally I liked to sleep clear of other bodies, as I’m told I kick around in my dreaming, but for once—probably due to the unfamiliar instability of my new world—I liked being held inside those strong arms. Didn’t mean anything. Any wounded animal would do the same. My version of denning up and letting the healthier herd members drive off the wolves.
Everyone needs help sometimes. Let me take care of you that much.
Tr
ond let me out of bed the next day, even removing some of the bandages, bringing me a fresh basin of water to sponge bathe with and a fresh change of clothes. Not my favored, now forever lost, best fighting leathers, but at least they were mine. Trond mentioned that Kral had left female garb for me, but I elected not to heap misery upon agony just yet.
“The general says you may come up on deck, if I judge you steady enough,” Trond said. “No sight of the fish-birds since the storm cleared. Though I’m to tell you that if they reappear and you don’t immediately take cover, the general will toss you overboard.”
This would be his new favorite threat. Should never have told him I couldn’t swim. “That would hardly save me, as the fish-birds also swim,” I commented, hoping a bit of misdirection might keep my weakness from being obvious.
Trond smiled knowingly anyway. “True. He said something about keeping his cabin floor clean.”
Sweet talker. However, it felt incredibly good to walk through that doorway onto the deck of the ship again. As I’d promised myself, I savored going through it at a leisurely pace instead of diving through headlong, vicious fish-birds slicing me to bloody bits. The storm had washed the air clean of the thick humidity that tended to lay over the calmer seas around the Nahanaun archipelago, and I took a deep lungful of its freshness, giving Danu thanks for all sorts of things. Kral spotted me and strode over.
“I’d hoped you’d have something more attractive to wear,” he said, raking me with a doubtful eye, “having forfeited your usual garb.”
“Nope.” I cocked a hip jauntily, though it pained me. Totally worth it to present the right attitude. “I make a point of only wearing horribly ugly things, if only to enjoy that lemon-eating look on your face.”
“Aha. Verification that you have been waiting for me all your life, if you put such planning into it.” He flashed a grin at scoring the point and turned to face the prow of the ship.
“Any sighting of the barrier?”
“Not yet. Two of Ove’s crows were lost to the fish-birds.” Kral scowled for that. He took every loss of life so personally. But then, all the best leaders did. “So we have only one left for looking. Jens estimates we’re close to the same waters, but no sign of another ship.”
The Edge of the Blade Page 9
