“Would you shut up?” Dariel shouted, jerking his oars in frustration.
Listening to the jibes the others tossed around him, Dariel wondered if he needed to harden his demeanor. He imagined returning the taunts with fierce expressions of disapproval. Or sharp reprimands. Invocations of his name. No, not his name. Of his status as the Rhuin Fa! That’s what mattered here. Just look at his forehead! Of course, he got that status because of who he was in the Known World, not in this one. He had not done much worthy of a title yet. He still had no idea just how he would lead the People.
Other than that he could speak languages he had never learned, he could not say he felt any different having part of Na Gamen’s true soul in him. He knew that he was heading toward a clan gathering in which he would be presented to all the people of Avina, but nobody asked him what he would say or told him what he should say. Perhaps because of that, he had dreams each night in which he held long conversations with different people. In them, he listened to them, learned about their fears and worries. In them, he argued against the league’s vision for Ushen Brae. He encouraged the People to unite, to find strength together, and to reject the league’s enticements. Maybe, if he dreamed about it long enough, he would find the right words.
By the time he gave up on rowing, his face was wet with sweat and his shirt plastered to his chest. The other shells were far ahead, a few out of sight around a distant river bend. He nearly voiced a suspicion that the basic dynamics covering rowing were somehow reversed in Ushen Brae, but he knew a lame excuse when he heard one. He kept it to himself. He handed the oars back to Harlen, the captain of his shell, who had watched the entire show while chewing on a twig of sweet branch. He took the oars without comment and made up the time Dariel had lost in a few minutes, humming as he rowed.
When this brought new bursts of taunts from the distant shells, Dariel flipped his frustration over and gave in to it himself. Why not? He could not change who he was to them, even if he was mostly a walking invitation for mirth. He did not even want to, when it came down to it. If he was to be the hero these people needed, it could not be shaped by pretense. It had to flow from who he was, who they were, and what they could do together. As odd as it was to feel himself a constant source of humor, there was something he actually liked about it. A playfulness. A camaraderie that felt close to what he had experienced as an Outer Isle brigand.
“That can’t be a bad thing,” he said. He decided to build on it, to let it grow.
The rowing. The dou worms and tales of frekete nightmares, gagging on plee-berry juice, tripping in the whirling chaos that was Bashar and Cashen at play on the riverbank each evening: these were not the only things that kept the group laughing at the Rhuin Fa’s expense during the trip downstream.
O n the first day they confronted whitewater, he fell out of the boat at the very top of a long rapid. He had stood to take in the view, and a sudden rocking of the vessel threw him off balance. The minute he hit the water, he knew he was going to swim the entire long tumult of the rapid. He did. Had there not been a calm pool at the end of it, he might have drowned. Instead, he was able to crawl up on a rock in the slack current, panting, exhausted, fearful to the last moment that some creature was going to clamp its jaws down on his ankle and pull him back in.
He was the butt of jokes for the rest of that day. Did he really dislike the shells that much? Would he swim all the rapids, or was it only the largest ones that tempted him? Just what was it that he had dropped that made him so keen to go river diving? By the time he reached camp that evening, he was sure he had heard every variation of the earnest, perplexed questions his companions could possibly think of. He hadn’t. They were still at it the next morning. Was it true that the little people with gills lived in tiny houses along the river bottom…?
One section of the canyon was so narrow and the gradient so steep that the shells ran a gauntlet of whitewater rapids. Dariel sprawled atop the supplies and clung to the web of ropes that secured them as Harlen made the shell do things that defied reason.
Near the end of the torrent, a flume of water collided with a solid stone wall at a sudden turn in the river. It created a raging maw of a whirlpool that Dariel was certain would gnaw them to death and then spit them out in pieces. He screamed the madness of it when Harlen steered the shell right down the flume, catching the water feeding into the upstream edge of the whirlpool. The shell rode upon the pillow of water, plastered vertically along the stone. Instead of dropping down into the whitewater just below them and being devoured, the craft rode the pillow of frothing water. It skimmed along above the growling mouth of the whirlpool, to be deposited on the other side of it, downstream. The maneuver seemed so improbable that Dariel turned to share his amazement with Harlen. But the other man just smiled and stuffed a mint leaf in his mouth, as if there had been nothing remotely dramatic about the moment.
At least he could say he had not squealed at any point during the rapids. The same could not be said of the first time he saw the slick side of a scale-leech. He did not actually notice when it happened, for the writhing in the water all around the shells drew all his attention. Long, thick eel-like things slithered beneath them, bumping against the shell and almost tipping Dariel in. Their heads, when he saw one gnawing along the rim of the shell, were entirely mouth, teeth, and sucking lips that were instantly the most horrible sight Dariel ever recalled having seen.
The others jumped into motion. The rowers took up oars and went to work. Passengers stayed low. Harlen shouted for Dariel to draw the river knife sheathed on the wooden rowing frame. Dariel twisted one wrist painfully in the rigging ropes. He had no intention of falling into the water now. Clutching the weapon with his free hand, the prince snapped his head from side to side each time one of the creatures appeared. Awkwardly off balance because of the rhythmic surging of the rowing, he fought to see past Bashar and Cashen, who darted around him, barking madly. He stabbed several of the leeches. They squirmed away all the faster when cut.
“That’s… the only problem… with the shells,” Harlen said, panting hard as he pulled. “The scale leeches… remember how tasty… their old owners… were.”
When the creatures finally left off their thrashing, Harlen explained that they lived in territorial groups. They had only to row through their territory to gain a reprieve before they passed into another group’s region, and then the same again. Despite the real danger of them, after that first encounter it was his squeal that the group most focused on, not the creatures themselves. He was not at all sure he had made any alarmed sound at all, and would not accept Birke’s effeminate imitation as accurate, but it was no use protesting.
Nor could he get any traction out of pointing out that Tam and Anira both took unintentional underwater excursions. Nor that two shells flipped over during the voyage. Nor that one of the young men passed too close to a flowering plant that made him break out in hives that, with his wolfish shivith spots, made him look truly bizarre. Nor that a couple, unfortunate in the spot they chose for their clandestine lovemaking, sprouted full-body rashes caused by the weeds they had bedded down in. None of that carried the humor of the frightened squeal Dariel doubted had ever escaped him.
Through it all Dariel came to laugh more easily at himself, with others, at the bizarreness of the world, and with a joy of discovery that shoved aside the burden of responsibility every now and then. He knew even as the days passed that the things he saw along the river would be lasting memories in his mind ever after. And he knew that the time spent with that small company would, someday, be just as precious to him as his days at Palishdock and sailing the Outer Isles.
So he laughed his way down the Sheeven Lek to the coast. He kept it up right until the river split into myriad channels of its delta. They floated through water growing brackish, patrolled by armored crabs, and leaping with prawns. They landed at a point not far from where he had watched the soul vessel go up in flames. They pulled the shells well up the bank, and stripped down their supplies for overland travel, and flipped them over. They hiked into the undulating ridgeline of sand dunes that hid the ocean. Reaching one of the heights, Birke, who was in the lead, stopped and crouched down. He motioned that there was something to see. Dariel sprinted with the others. He dropped flat on the sand as the wind coming over the peak mussed his hair and smacked blood into his cheeks. He saw then what Birke had seen.
Out there past the breakers, which curled in long, massive waves, stretched a rough sea dotted with vessels. League brigs, fast clippers, several of the sleek soul vessels. There went his enemy. Against them, his war was about to resume.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Corinn stared. Eaters, she thought. That’s what they were. Flesh eaters. Little monsters with teeth ringed
