The Highest Tide

by Marian Perera

  She went on. “My parents weren’t the only ones. She gathered forty other people, and we all traveled north. We found a hidden valley, and it was as lush as anything you can imagine.”

  They were out of the trees by then, but although the ground was bare and rocky except for clumps of stunted grasses and patches of lichen, it sloped up, so the going was still slow. Her clothes were starting to dry in the sun.

  “I was seven, so it was a great adventure for me,” she said. “Cyndea said we should make our home there, and no one was going to argue with that. We called the village New Truth.” She glanced at Jason to see his reaction. “Go on, say it. Whatever you’re dying to say.”

  “Fine. I’m not even sure there was any Old Truth. But did any of you see the mysterious stone?”

  Lera shook her head. “The hills stretch for miles, so we didn’t expect to find it right away. The next spring, Cyndea went searching.”

  She paused before she went on, trying to remember the details correctly. “She was…different when she came back. She said she’d found the stone and finally read its runes right. The stone said what had fallen to Eden was only a herald, a harbinger of the real power. If we stayed there long enough, the real Unity would make itself known.”

  Jason nodded. “And by then, you’d all sacrificed so much you couldn’t simply leave. Besides, it’s easier to believe something preposterous when everyone around you believes the same thing.”

  It hadn’t seemed preposterous at the time, but Lera thought that was because they’d all accepted there was a Unity, a mysterious presence none of them had ever seen, but which existed and watched over Denalay. With such a foundation in place, building the idea of yet another kind of Unity hadn’t been too difficult.

  “Other than that, life was good,” she said as they climbed higher. “With luck we might have been left alone, because the place was so isolated. But we weren’t lucky.”

  “Probably because you’d vanished off the map without paying your taxes.”

  Lera couldn’t help smiling, because she liked that explanation so much more than the one she’d been given by the tribunal, which was that the Unity saw everything within Denalay. They reached the summit of the first hill, though her heart sank a little as she saw the plateau ahead dip down and then roll upward into more heights. She kept glancing around to make sure they weren’t being watched.

  “One day we found a man lying in a trail that led down into the valley,” she said. “He’d been beaten, and when he came around he told us he’d been waylaid by bandits.”

  “He was a spy from the Council, wasn’t he?”

  Lera supposed he must have been convincing to take everyone in. Though maybe they just hadn’t been skeptical enough—after all, how likely was it that a spy would be bruised and battered to the point where he couldn’t walk? Or pretended he couldn’t walk.

  She paused to get her bearings. They were only about three miles from the end of the cliffs, and to her left, the colony of seabirds muttered and shrieked. They nested on every crevice in the crags, and the noise they made would have covered the sound of anyone creeping up. She only hoped that would startle the birds into flight.

  Her stomach rumbled, and she found herself thinking of fried eggs sizzling in a pan. She went on, because even remembering the past was better than being so hungry.

  “We couldn’t spare anyone to take care of him,” she said, “so I was assigned to do it. I was fifteen, and he was the first outsider I’d ever seen. By the time he was able to rise from his bed, I was…” She hesitated, feeling awkward, because she wasn’t sure how Jason would react to that particular detail.

  “Infatuated?” he said.

  “I was going to say randy, but I do like your more elegant words.”

  “Benevolent Ones.” He seemed to be trying not to blush, but his brows came together when he looked at her again, and his voice was hard. “Wait, you were only fifteen. Did he take advantage of you?”

  “Well, when he asked how old I was, I asked, ‘How old do you think?’ He looked at my chest when he thought I didn’t notice, guessed nineteen and seemed quite happy when I let him believe he was right.”

  For a few moments there was no sound except for the birds, the sea and the occasional click of a dislodged pebble underfoot as the two of them trudged on. Lera kept searching for signs of recent excavation, of any indication something had been sunk into the rock beneath them, but the clifftops were blanketed with gravel and smooth pebbles.

  “Then you slept with him,” Jason said.

  “We didn’t do much sleeping. Except by then, he had sent word to the nearest city about our location and defenses. But Cyndea intercepted his last message. She had him tortured.”

  “Did he tell her about you?”

  “Yes. She had me brought in so I could see what was left of him, though she’d kept him alive somehow. Or maybe he was too stubborn to die. I broke down and my—my parents were horrified. But Cyndea knew what was happening better than any of us did. She was only too aware that the militia were approaching, that everything she’d worked for was going to be destroyed, and that even if I hadn’t known it at the time, I had helped the man responsible.”

  Jason stopped, turning to her as though he was seeing her for the first time, and when he spoke his voice was quiet. “She burned you.”

  Lera couldn’t quite meet his gaze. She stepped up on a rock the size of a melon, craning her head to catch a glimpse of Princeps. Odd, it was anchored where it had been the day before, during the battle—which meant if the cliff came down, that ship would be the first thing in the path of the wave.

  So either Jason’s theory was wrong or the ship was unable to move. She stepped back down.

  “Ordered me burned.” There had already been a fire, for what was being done to him. She still remembered thinking it was all a horrible dream. The first man who’d ever touched her couldn’t have been a spy, and the woman she’d looked up to all her life hadn’t just given that order in a voice choked with fury and revulsion.

  But hands had gripped her arms, a fist had closed so tightly in her hair that strands had ripped loose, and she had known it was real. As were the lit coals and the screams—not all of them hers—and the pain.

  “I think she would have done worse if the sentry horns hadn’t started blowing a fanfare.” That was the part she’d hated for years. It was bad enough knowing that if not for the Council’s spy, she would never have been burned, without being aware that only the arrival of the Council-loyal militia had saved her from being killed. “But the horns fell silent almost at once. In the panic I got away and hid in a cellar. The militia found me there.”

  “What happened to everyone else?”

  She had never seen them again. “Probably executed.”

  Jason stopped. She thought he’d been startled by what she had said, before he knelt and picked up a round stone. When he straightened and showed it to her, he didn’t need to say anything. The drop of candle wax on the stone spoke for itself.

  They were only about two miles from the southern flank of the island now. He dropped the stone.

  “Your parents too?” he said.

  Lera hated to think about that, but it wouldn’t be much better to imagine her parents imprisoned for the rest of their lives, growing old in a cage. “They hadn’t done anything to redeem themselves before the Unity,” she said, and only realized after she spoke that she was repeating what the kindest of the judges had told her in some attempt at consolation. “The tribunal spared the children who had grown up in New Truth and couldn’t be expected to know better.” Though she wondered if the Council’s spy had survived and put in a good word for her, since she hadn’t exactly been a small child at the time.

  “And after that you started working on a ship?” Jason said.

  “I had to work somewhere.” Somewhere the condition
of her face wouldn’t matter as much as her tenacity and her physical strength…and her willingness to obey orders too. Besides, a ship was the only place she felt free of both her past and what the Council had done to destroy that past. A ship could sail so far the land might never have existed, and it was on a ship that she’d first felt safe and strong again.

  “It wasn’t like my parents left me an inheritance,” she said. “Anything they owned went to New Truth, and when that was razed, I guess whatever was remaining went to the Unity.” She shrugged. “I don’t think about it too often. About any of it.”

  She had never told anyone the whole story. Even her few friends had heard only the most necessary details—no, it wasn’t pirates who had burned her, it was someone she’d thought of as a friend, but thanks to the Unity’s mercy she’d survived with nothing worse—and she would never have dreamed of confiding the part about New Truth. It wasn’t safe for a captain in the navy to have that kind of unsavory, disreputable past.

  But she knew it made no difference to Jason. His gaze as it rested on her was soft without the slightest hint of pity, and although he wasn’t touching her, she felt almost as close to him as she’d done during the night.

  Then he did touch her, lifting a hand to smooth her hair back from her forehead and tuck it behind her ear, his fingertips a caress on smooth skin and roughened scar as his hand slid lower. In the next moment she was in his arms. She didn’t know which of them had moved first, and it didn’t matter, not when she leaned against the warm solidity of his body and felt the steady beat of his heart.

  “The scar doesn’t bother you, does it?” she said quietly, turning her good cheek to rest it against his shoulder.

  He took her shoulders and held her just far enough to look into her face. “I don’t like knowing you were hurt—hurt badly. But the scar doesn’t make you any less lovely. Besides, I have one leg shorter than the other, so what?”

  Lera looked down before she could think twice, and shoved him away as the corners of his mouth twitched. “All right, let’s keep looking,” she said, as she would have given orders on the quarterdeck of her ship. “We can’t waste any more time.”

  He nodded. “Maybe we should split up. Cover more ground.”

  That was good thinking, and if they were going to be ambushed, at least one of them might escape. “Stay within sight.”

  He moved away, watching the ground, but it was she who found the next dribble of congealed wax. Impossible to see if any digging had been done nearby, but on impulse she knelt and scooped away handfuls of pebbles and gravel.

  She worked carefully, because it might be easy to miss a thin string running beneath the ground, but what she found was thicker than her thumb. Of course, it was wrapped in layers and waxed against water. The end was out of sight, but given enough time she felt sure she and Jason could dig it up. She called to him.

  He turned, and as it had done on the half-a-boat, his gaze went to something behind her. Lera snatched her saber free and spun around.

  The man who rose up from a rock ten feet behind her held a longbow, an arrow already nocked and ready. “Drop it!”

  She froze. There was no way she could reach him before he loosed. Before she could think what to do, there was a scuffling noise and another man climbed up beside the first, drawing a longsword.

  The wind had picked up, but there seemed to be no other sound in the world. She didn’t dare glance back at Jason, because the slightest movement might startle the archer.

  If she didn’t drop the saber, she’d be shot—and probably killed. If they surrendered, they might be taken to Princeps, to live a little longer. She could imagine what might happen there, given what Richard Alth had done to Kovir, but she had no choice.

  The saber fell with a clink to the stones, and she raised her empty hands.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hour of the Wolf

  The rudder had been shot away.

  Richard wasn’t a sailor, but he’d been on Pelican and then Princeps long enough to pick up some knowledge of a ship, so he knew that without a rudder, there was no steering. They needed that to maintain a course to the cove on the other side of the island where the unfortunate Pelican had once been moored, a sheltered place to protect them from the shock when the cliff came down.

  The solution was simple—jury-rig a rudder. Except when he sent carpenters down from the stern on ropes, a shark leaped from the water and its teeth closed on one man’s legs. The beast’s weight snapped the rope and the carpenter was gone from sight at once.

  The rest of the men had scrambled back to safety, one of them dropping his hammer in his haste, but while their fear quickly spread through the crew, Richard was suspicious instead. He’d sent three boats to pick up survivors earlier, but as the loaded boats had made their way back to Princeps, something below the water had tipped two of them over. As the sailors struggled back to the surface—those who could, anyway—the boats had been dragged down. What surfaced was mainly wreckage.

  But one of the men had been sharp enough to bring a piece of the wreckage back to Princeps, and Richard found a triangular tooth embedded in the wood. That was sharp too.

  It would have been strange enough for the island’s waters to become a shark hunting-ground overnight without the shark being so intelligent into the bargain. He’d had harpooners stationed on Princeps because he’d feared the Council might send divers to sabotage his ship, but now he told them to shoot if they saw any large shapes moving in the water, and to drop nets as well.

  Most of the crew was still terrified. Richard increased their pay threefold—he had the chest of gold from the Council—but the men muttered together when they thought he couldn’t hear, and a few resentful looks were directed his way too.

  “You think they’re planning mutiny?” he said to Voyjole when they were alone in the former captain’s cabin.

  Voyjole shook his head. “I doubt they’ll turn against you. They have nowhere else to go.”

  That wasn’t quite true, Richard thought. Compared to him, the men in his crew were nameless, faceless people in whom the Council would have little if any interest, so they could sneak back to Dagre and slip into the population like cards into a pack.

  “And if they try…” Voyjole touched the hilt of his sword. “They’ll have to get past me.”

  Richard felt better. Voyjole had been one of the few steady, trustworthy presences in his life after his father’s death, and although Richard was not sure exactly when the man had shifted from the role of family retainer into a personal protector as close as his own shadow, he liked that too. The kings of the past had had elite bodyguards, after all.

  “Not to worry, my lord.” Voyjole went to the windows. Since the captain’s cabin, set at the stern, was the largest on the ship, the windows were wide enough for both of them to see the ropes hanging down outside, where the surviving carpenters were at work. The harpooners and nets were in place, and Richard had made it clear the sharks weren’t the only things which would get four feet of barbed steel through their guts if the rudder wasn’t repaired.

  Running footsteps outside grew louder and stopped at the door. Voyjole turned swiftly and went to stand beside the door, his back to the wall.

  “Come in,” Richard called loudly, so whoever it was wouldn’t be warned by Voyjole’s voice, which would sound closer to the door. But the man who stood outside was one of his own, a guard off the Alth estate.

  “M’lord, there’s a boat from the island,” he said. “They have prisoners.”

  Richard was up at once. His greatest fear had been that the Council would discover where the explosives were and target the island instead of Princeps, so he’d hired mercenaries to guard the island. Money never better spent, he thought as he followed Voyjole up to the deck.

  It was noon by then, so when someone handed him a telescope, the prisoners in the boat were onl
y too easy to make out. He didn’t recognize the man, whose back was to him, but the woman’s hair blazing in the sun was unmistakable. As was the dark scar covering half her face.

  He felt a smile stretch his mouth as he handed the telescope to Voyjole. “See her?”

  Voyjole’s fractional nod was answer enough. “What do you want done with them, my lord?”

  “Make sure they’re unarmed and bound, then bring them to my cabin. Oh, and I’ll have my lunch there too.”

  He went back down, where he didn’t have long to wait before the door opened. Voyjole came in, holding the woman’s arm to push her ahead of him. Before Richard had time to look more closely at her, a deckhand brought the man in.

  Richard needed a moment or two to recognize him, because at first all he felt was a nagging sense of familiarity and an odd coiling in his belly, as though he had swallowed a snake. Then he knew. Jason Remerley. Older, with faint lines at the corners of his eyes, but looking as unpleasantly scruffy as he had in a classroom seventeen years ago—unshaven and dressed in worn, stained clothes. He might still have had the dirt of the hogpen under his nails, except since his hands were tied behind his back, Richard couldn’t see.

  As Voyjole shoved both of them into chairs, a prudent distance from each other, Richard wondered what in the world Remerley was doing here. Could he have found work as a sailor after he’d been sent packing? Unlikely. Richard’s tutor had once told him how Remerley’s father had wanted him to have a good profession, to be a man of letters. That didn’t exactly jibe with a sailor’s trade.

  Still, he had plenty of time to find out.

  “The cook’s grilling some crayfish, my lord.” Voyjole dismissed the deckhand, shut the door and stood with his back to it. “They were digging up a fuse when they got caught.”