Shadows (20 page)

The sea.

“If you wouldn't mind keeping a lookout now . . . ?” Chell called. “Sing out if you see anything. Especially anything pointy and hard.”

“All right,” Mara called back. She made her way into the prow and crouched there on the floorboards, her erstwhile bed. She rested her head in her arms, folded on the curved timber, and peered forward across perhaps ten yards of gray, tossing water to an ever-receding wall of fog. Could the water really have blocked her nightmares, blunted the edge of the magic that plagued her?

Maybe. Why
did
only Aygrima have magic, after all? Korellia didn't have it. Stonefell had something else, called “cannons,” which sounded like a kind of magic but clearly wasn't. From what Chell had said of the days before the Great Plague sundered the trading networks of the world's scattered kingdoms, no one but Aygrima had had magic then, either. Something must have made Aygrima special, and she could think of only one possibility: black lodestone, the mysterious rock mined in the terrible labor camp from which she had—barely—escaped, where unMasked even now labored and died and were abused, the mysterious rock that drew magic to it from living things when they died. Pixot, one of the geologists the Autarch had sent out to the labor camp to find a new source of magic, and whom she had accompanied to a cavern in the mountains filled with it, had told her that black lodestone was unlike any other known stone. In the Palace, Shelra had told her that some speculated it had come from outside the world altogether, crashing down from the sky or pushing its way up from far beneath.

If it really had smashed into Aygrima from . . . somewhere else . . . might it not have . . . splashed, like water in a pond into which a rock was tossed? Perhaps all of Aygrima had been dusted with bits of black lodestone. Perhaps it had even affected those who lived there. Perhaps that was when the Gift arose, though it was now so long ago that as far as any historian of the Autarchy knew, the Gifted had always existed.

And if any of that were true, then perhaps by leaving Aygrima behind, she had also left behind the magic that infused its very soil and air . . . and
that
had somehow blunted the nightmares.

A lot of ifs. But the thought that, away from Aygrima, she might free herself of some of the horrors she had inflicted on herself through her use of magic, made the accompanying thought that she might sail away from the Autarchy forever in the company of the young man at the tiller suddenly more appealing than ever.

And then she frowned. The water ahead, just appearing through the fog, looked different . . . paler, somehow . . . and the waves were piling up on it in an odd way. Suddenly realizing what she was looking at, she jerked upright to yell a warning, but never got the chance.

With a grinding crunch, the boat ran aground.

The impact flung Mara half out of the boat. She caught herself just in time. The mast groaned, but held, but the sail came down with a run, the boom drooping over the side into the water.

Mara stared left and right. The shallows ran as far as she could see in either direction. She shot a look back at Chell. “I'm sorry!” she gasped. “I tried to yell as soon as I saw it, but . . .”

“We were closer in than I thought,” Chell said. “My mistake.” He shipped the rudder, then crawled forward and freed the oars. He handed one to Mara. “Let's see if we can push ourselves off.”

She nodded, and together they prodded at the bottom. It felt like soft mud studded with small stones. The oars sank into it but gave little purchase. After a few moments Chell hauled his dripping oar back aboard. “No good,” he panted. “If the wind changes, I might be able to back us off. Not sure where we are in the tides, either; if it's low tide, we may float off after a bit. But if it's high tide . . .” He shook his head. “Either way, we're stuck for now.”

Mara stared out at the fog. “But the Secret City . . .”

“I told you, I don't know these waters!” Chell snapped.

“I'm not blaming you,” Mara said. “It's just . . .” She shook her head. “I feel helpless. I put them in danger by my stupidity, and I can't do anything to help them.”

Chell opened his mouth, hesitated, then said at last, “What about magic? You blew down the city wall. You made the ground swallow those Watchers and their horses. Why can't you get us off a sandbar?”

She stared at him. Didn't he understand?

No
, she thought.
Of course he doesn't. How could he? He's not Gifted. He's not even from Aygrima.

“I don't have any magic out here,” she said. “Magic is carried in special urns of black stone.” She gestured at the boat. “You see anything like that?”

“I didn't see anything like that when you blew down the City Wall, either,” Chell said stubbornly. “Or when you made the ground swallow our pursuers.”

“That magic came from the people around me,” Mara said in a low voice.
What difference does it make if he knows the truth now?
“I sucked magic right out of those Watchers and used it to destroy them. And in the city, the magic came from my father when he died, and then from all those Watchers who watched him die. There's nobody out here to get magic from.”
Even if I dared
.

Chell cocked his head to one side. “There's me.”

“You don't know what you're suggesting,” Mara said. “It could kill you.” She didn't tell him the other reason: that every time she used magic in that fashion, she drew one step nearer to madness.

“Has it killed anyone yet?”

“Not that I know of,” Mara said. “But I don't know for certain.”

“Have you talked to anyone you drew magic from?”

“Keltan,” Mara said reluctantly.

“He seems unharmed.”

“But he wasn't,” she said. “It knocked him out. And he was . . . odd . . . for days. Distant. Withdrawn. As though a part of him had gone missing.” She shook her head. “I can't risk it. Even if there's enough magic in you to do the job, and I don't know that there is, what if it knocks you out? What if it . . . weakens your mind? I can't sail the boat. I don't know where your ships are. I need you intact. I can't take magic from you.”

As much as I want to
, she thought, for having him close there beside her in the bow, his body pressed up against hers, she was aware of the magic inside him more strongly than ever, and talking about it made her want it.

And maybe there was another kind of want figured in there, too, that had nothing to do with magic but everything to do with bodies . . . and in some ways that scared her even more.

Chell sighed. “All right,” he said. “Then I guess we wait.”

He left her there and went back toward the stern, and in his absence, she suddenly felt colder than ever. She was about to turn around and join him when she blinked. Something had changed. She could see farther than she'd been able to just a moment before. And a moment after that she could see farther still.

Like a white blanket being lifted from a bed, the fog rose from the surface of the water, thinning as it went. Suddenly she could see twice as far, and then thrice, the circle of water around them widening more and more. Directly ahead, the fog grew darker and darker. A steep, stony shore appeared, and beyond it, a forest of dripping pine trees.

Mara had never been to sea, but she'd read a few stories. She knew the right words. “Land ho!” she shouted.

“I see it,” Chell said. “Not that it does us any good.”

Mara kept squinting at the shoreline. “There's something in the trees. You see it?”

Chell peered forward. “Where?”

“Just to the right of that dead tree, the white one.”

Chell shifted his gaze. “It's the roof of a hut!”

“That's what I thought,” Mara said. “And there's smoke coming from the chimney.”

“And we're stuck like flies in flypaper,” Chell said bitterly.

Mara said nothing.

They waited for the wind to change, or the sea to rise, or someone to come out of the hut and look down into the bay. By the time the sun reached the zenith, the sky was blue, the sea stretched unbroken out to the distant horizon . . . and nothing else had changed, except the smoke had quit rising from the hut's chimney. No one had appeared, and Mara allowed herself to hope that whoever had been in the hut had left it and gone inland without ever looking in their direction.

The wind continued to blow from the sea, pushing them onto the mud. The tide had risen, but not enough, and now was receding again. And they were both a lot thirstier.

“I'm going to have to swim for it,” Chell said at last.

Mara glanced at him. “This water is like ice!”

“It's not that far,” he said. “And once I'm ashore, there's shelter. With a fire, or the remnants of one.” He pointed at that tantalizing rooftop. “I'll either get help or get rope. And if I can't get either, then you'll have to swim for it, too.”

“I'm not much of a swimmer,” Mara said uneasily.

Chell gave her a scandalized look.

“Tamita is a landlocked city!” she protested.

Chell held up his hands. “All right, all right. We'll figure something out. I can rig a raft or something.” He glanced out at sea. “We're lucky with the weather. The waves are small. If a storm blew in . . . stuck like this, this boat would be smashed to flinders in no time.” He stood. “Well, no time like the present,” he said, and began taking off his clothes.

Mara watched as he took off his boots and put them aside, then removed his cloak and coat and vest. When he took off the shirt, revealing a lean body and the strange tattoo on the left side of his chest, she felt her face flush a little, but she didn't look away. Then he put his hand on the belt of his trousers, and she swallowed and suddenly discovered that the cleat to which the forestay was attached was the most interesting thing she had ever seen.

She heard the rustle of more clothing, and then Chell said cheerfully. “You can look, you know. I'm not naked.”

She glanced up, and saw that, technically, he was telling the truth, although the thin drawers he wore didn't exactly match her definition of modest. He was in the process of tying one end of a length of rope around his middle. “All right,” he said. “I think there's enough rope here to reach the shore. I'll swim it over. If it looks like I'm in trouble, you can pull me back. And if I make it, the rope might give me a way to pull the boat in to shore, as well, or to shift supplies over to it.” He took a deep breath. “Here goes.”

He lowered himself into the water while still hanging onto the boat, gasping as his bare feet and legs touched the sea. “Not so bad,” he said through chattering teeth. He turned toward the shore and waded toward it, the waves quickly soaking him from the waist down . . . and turning those thin drawers all-but-transparent, Mara couldn't help noticing.

She didn't look away, though. After all, she had to be ready to pull him back if he ran into trouble.

The sandspit seemed to end after only a few yards. Chell suddenly launched himself into the water, landing with a splash, and struck out strongly for the shore. A few minutes later he hauled himself out of the water, visibly shivering, onto the stony beach. She watched as he undid the rope and tied it around a broken tree trunk, then began climbing the steep slope to the hut. When he reached it, he pressed himself against the wall, and then edged to the corner. He took a quick glance around it, then another, longer, look, and then disappeared from sight.

She waited, barely breathing. One minute, two . . . and then she heaved a sigh of relief as she saw him again. He had a green blanket draped around his shoulders. He waved and shouted, though she couldn't hear what he said above the noise of the low surf on the sandbar, then began picking his way back down the slope to the shore. Once he was there he shouted again, and this time she understood. “Nobody there! But there's food and water and it's warm. You need to come ashore.”

“What about the boat?”

“Once we're both out of it, we may be able to drag it over the sandbar!” Chell shouted. “I think there's a channel down there we could get out through!” He pointed to his right.

Mara swallowed. The fifty feet of water between them looked as wide as the ocean. “But I told you, I can barely swim!”

“You won't have to!” he called. “I'm going to pull the rope taut. All you have to do is follow it.”

Mara shivered. “Should I . . . should I take off my clothes?”

He nodded. “Tie them in a bundle if you can, hang them around your neck. You might be able to keep them above water. And bring mine, too.”

Mara nodded again. She turned her back and stripped down to her underwear, and used her cloak, mud-spattered and tattered after their ride across country, to make a kind of awkward bag into which she placed her boots, stockings, coat, tunic and trousers. Then she shoved in the bundle Chell had made of his clothes before he left the boat and tied the whole awkward mass around her neck. Feeling self-conscious, she turned around again to face Chell. While she'd been disrobing, he'd been wrapping extra loops of rope around the broken tree stump, so that the rope now stretched reasonably taut from the bow of the boat to the shore, though it dipped into the water halfway. He looked up and saw her. “All right!” he called. “Come into the water.”

The air, chill against her mostly bare skin, had raised goose bumps all over her, but the water did more than chill her; it hurt, drawing a gasp from her the moment she lowered herself into it. Shivering seized her almost instantly, but there was no turning back; she gripped the rope in both hands and began to pull herself along it.

At first she had the stone-studded surface of the sandbar beneath her bare feet, but that fell away almost at once, and she gasped again as the rope sagged and the water rose to her breasts. She knew the bundle of their clothes had to be getting wet, but she couldn't do anything about it. Keeping the rope under her right arm, she pulled herself along it as quickly as she could, the water sucking all heat from her, the pain giving way to a frightening numbness. Her arms felt heavy and wooden, clumsy and hard to flex, but she kept moving, and almost to her surprise suddenly found ground under her feet again.