CHAPTER 11 #2
It occurred to Slate, a few minutes later, that she was clinging to a knight in the middle of a rainstorm, her cheek full of wet chainmail, which wasn’t very comfortable, and that she appeared to be sobbing uncontrollably.
She wasn’t actually sure. It was too wet to tell if there were tears. She might have been laughing instead.
Caliban was holding her upright. He still had his sword in one hand, and the pommel was digging painfully into her shoulder, but she didn’t care, because she wasn’t dead.
He was saying something, over and over, that she couldn’t make out—it might even have been the demon muttering, for all she knew—but the rumble in his chest was soothing.
The thunder rattled. She was glad of it, because it meant he couldn’t hear her, either. She had a horrible suspicion that what she was saying, over and over, was, “Oh my god, I don’t want to die.”
She wrestled herself under control at last, partly out of pride, and partly because the horses were moving restlessly and bumping into them both. She finally got her feet under her.
Carefully, possibly even reluctantly, Caliban released his hold and stepped back. She looked up. Rain sluiced down both their faces. Was he crying too? How could you tell?
He leaned down, and shouted, next to her ear, “We have to get out of here before it floods!”
Ah. Good thinking. Now that Slate looked down, the water did seem to be swirling perilously close to the tops of her feet. She nodded to Caliban, who took the tangle of reins in one hand and Slate’s hand in the other and led them all squelching upstream, looking for a place to climb out.
The rain was still coming down in hard sheets.
Visibility was nonexistent. But they found one at last, on the opposite bank, and none too soon.
The water was threatening to come in over the tops of Slate’s boots.
The horses, already panicky and exhausted, were slipping and snorting and pulling at the reins.
She let go of his hand and dragged herself up the slope. The knight and the horses followed.
Her vision was better than his in the dark, and once they were under the trees, she took the lead. There wasn’t a great deal of cover, but she found a fallen tree at last. It had crashed through the canopy and been overgrown by a spreading pine tree.
It formed a wall on two sides and at least a suggestion of ceiling, and the ground underneath was damp rather than sodden.
It’ll do.
There was no real point in trying to start a fire. She crawled into the hollow and pulled her knees up to her chest.
Caliban tied the horses, draping their saddle blankets over them as best he could, then crawled in after Slate.
It was pitch black under the tree. Slate could just see make out the outline of the horses, black against grey, and that was all.
Squish. Squish.
What the hell …?
In the next flash of lightning, she caught a glimpse of Caliban trying to wring out his cloak.
“Well,” he said, after a minute, “it’s not dry, but it’s what we’ve got.”
With some grumbling and a few curses, and the removal of some armor and his sword, they managed to huddle together under the cloak. It stank of wet horse, but it was wool, so it held warmth in, and that made up for a lot of wet horse.
She sneezed anyway.
His sigh seemed to come from his toes.
“Sorry,” she muttered, and sneezed again. The smell of rosemary was threaded in and around the wet horse.
He dug into a pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.
Slate started laughing. She couldn’t help it.
It caught like a sob in her throat. She was going to cry again. Her hair hung in her face in damp strings, and she shoved at it futilely. Why am I crying?
I’m cold and exhausted and I don’t want to die, and someone just handed me a handkerchief.
These seemed like excellent reasons.
Caliban wrapped his arms around her and rested his chin on top of her head, murmuring all the meaningless things that people murmur to console the weeping. As any paladin could have told her, the words didn’t matter nearly so much as the voice.
The spate of tears passed off quickly. She was too tired to keep it up for long. She lay quietly, feeling his arms around her in the dark.
It was about the only way to keep them both under the cloak, and there was rather more metal that she liked, but she wouldn’t swear she didn’t enjoy it.
You’re just giddy from being near death, that’s all. You figured out you don’t want to die. It doesn’t mean anything. You’d feel the same way no matter who was in here with you.
Well…possibly not the Learned Edmund.
Still.
Her heart ached, and her head ached, and her sinuses…
well, they always ached. She snuffled into the handkerchief.
She tried to think of something clever to say, to deflect the fact that she was shortly going to be quite embarrassed for crying, and couldn’t find anything.
Her voice, when it came out, sounded thin in her own ears.
“Caliban?”
“Mmm?”
“I don’t think I want to die.”
He chuckled. Chain clinked under her ear. “That’s good.”
“But we’re going to die.”
“Let’s try not to.”
“Okay, then.”
There was a lot more that she wanted to say, about Anuket City and what was waiting for her there.
But it was all horribly complicated, and she would have had to explain what she had done and who wanted her dead, and about the Shadow Market and the Grey Church and the crow-cages.
And she was very tired and the city was very far away.
The wet wool of his tabard was beginning to dry under her cheek. He’d unbuckled both shoulder guards and his gloves and either she was cold or his skin was as hot as a brand against hers.
She rather hoped he’d make a move of some sort. Hell, Brenner would have been smoking a post-coital cigarette by now, if she’d been curled up in his lap like this.
She could have used…well…something.
But Caliban was a former knight-champion, once sworn to temple service, and that meant either that he did not take advantage of mildly hysterical women who had just been dragged back from the brink of death or that he was incapable of recognizing a hint when it crawled into his lap.
One of the two, anyway.
Nothing ventured…
She stretched up a hand and touched his face in the dark. A day worth of beard stubble rasped under her fingertips.
She traced the long line of his jaw downward, then across. Her finger lay across his lower lip. She could feel his breath against her skin, sharply indrawn, and then released.
He folded his hand very gently around hers and drew it down, to lie loosely on his chest. And then, a moment later, he patted her hand, and withdrew his.
Or he’s completely uninterested. Son of a bitch.
Slate’s face burned in the dark.
She was too drained to be angry for long. She wanted to be furious and embarrassed but that would take energy and she had so little left to spare. It was dark under the tree, and very warm under the wet wool. She was either comfortable or too exhausted to feel physical discomfort.
The rain dragged on. They existed in a small, warm place outside of time. Slate dozed off with her hand clenched in an undyed tabard that was by now very much the worse for wear.
Knight-Champion Caliban—who had indeed been known to recognize hints, and who was clinging to what was left of his vows by will alone—leaned his head back against the damp wood of the tree stump and waited for the rain to pass.