6. The river that runs under
6
THE RIVER THAT RUNS UNDER
Naeron woke Anahrod from her sleeping, nudging the woman’s shoulder until she stirred.
“Your turn,” he whispered. “Watch.”
Ris remained asleep, even as the dragonrider held Anahrod close with an arm around her waist. So Anahrod had to disentangle herself from that, but eventually did so without waking the other woman. Sleeping next to Ris had been more comfortable than Anahrod would ever admit.
Naeron settled down on his own mantle, as Anahrod took her turn at watch. She found a rock outcropping overlooking the cave.
Was Naeron the one who’d made Scratch bleed out? Ris was guaranteed to possess magical abilities as a dragonrider, but controlling the sword would’ve taken up most of her attention. The simplest explanation was that Naeron was a Deeper sorcerer.
It’s just that a dragonrider should’ve had no tolerance for Deeper sorcerers. It was the blackest of heresies to use the gifts of Eannis—magic—for anything but service to a dragon. Deepers saw it differently, partly because they didn’t worship Eannis, but mostly because they needed sorcery to survive.
Ris didn’t seem to mind Naeron, however. It was just one of the woman’s many, many contradictions.
Anahrod felt a presence on the far side of the cave, recognized it as Gwydinion.
Who had wandered off all by himself, alone in the dark.
He wouldn’t be the first teenager to search for privacy at the cost of untenable risk, but he wasn’t alone.
Gwydinion had found an animal.
Curious, Anahrod picked her way through the forest of stalagmites, careful not to wake anyone. Also, careful to make enough noise for the boy to hear her coming.
He glanced up at her as her eyes adjusted to the light. The darkness wasn’t as immediate or total as she’d first suspected: the light inscription Kaibren had carved into a wall reached just far enough to limn the edges of Gwydinion’s expression. He was smiling at a small white serpent twined between his fingers.
“Isn’t he cute?” Gwydinion held up the snake. “I think he’s blind.”
“What need would an animal have for sight down here?” Anahrod didn’t recognize the species, but she knew it was too cold in the caves for the creature to actually be cold-blooded.
The snake was tiny and pale and—given the general trend of wildlife in the Deep—sublimely venomous. Fortunately, the creature was calm. Remarkably so.
Anahrod crouched down next to Gwydinion. “How’d you find him?”
“Oh, I…” The boy glanced at her like she’d caught him lying.
Anahrod hesitated. The boy had used magic. He just didn’t want to admit it. “Eannis blessed you?”
It changed everything.
A dragonrider and her crew venturing into the Deep jungles at the behest of some random child from Crystalspire stretched the bounds of believability. Helping a dragonrider candidate, on the other hand…
If the boy was already touched with magical talent, then he would become a dragonrider. By law, those children belonged to the dragons.
They were told it was an honor.
“I guess so,” he said.
“Your parents must be proud.” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. She didn’t think he noticed.
“My dad, sure, but my mom?” Gwydinion shook his head. “She hates it. She doesn’t want me to become a dragonrider at all. She says she doesn’t want to lose me.”
“Mothers can be protective.” She swallowed back dark memories.
“I guess,” he allowed, although his tone suggested he neither understood nor approved.
He gave her a furtive, quick glance. “Do you have any family?”
An innocent question. She didn’t let him see the wound it opened. “I used to,” she replied carefully.
“Do you miss them?”
She set her jaw hard against her neck, clenched her teeth. “No.”
His eyes widened. “No?”
“Why would I?” she said in a flat voice. “They abandoned me, betrayed me when I needed them most.” She shook her head. “I’ll spare you the details. Trust me when I say if I never see them again, it’ll be too soon.”
“Oh.” His voice sounded small.
“I’m sorry.” She gave him an imitation of a pleasant smile. “You must miss your family a great deal.”
Gwydinion swallowed. “I do, yes.”
“You’ll be home soon.”
The boy held up the snake, which had become agitated. “No, no, little one. Don’t be scared. We won’t hurt you.” That smile again, as he leaned toward Anahrod. “Truthfully, I’m pretty sure he thinks I’m a very weird rock.”
She pressed her tongue against the back side of her teeth. At least that explained why Overbite had been so quick to take to the boy. “Is that just an expression or can you tell what the snake’s thinking?”
“Oh, um.” He scratched his neck. “This time, yes. I can’t always. It’s not reliable.”
Anahrod stared back toward the small camp, toward people she hardly knew and definitely didn’t trust.
Not everyone was sleeping.
Ris had woken. The dragonrider lay on her mantle, her head supported by one arm, watching them. Possibly listening, depending on how much magic she knew, and what kind.
Anahrod turned back to Gwydinion. “Release the snake and stop wandering off. In fact, go get some sleep.”
Gwydinion seemed about to protest.
“Don’t force the issue,” Anahrod warned. “I tie a mean knot.”
The boy let out a long-suffering sigh. He reached down to release the snake back into the wild.
Except he didn’t. Gwydinion had pantomimed doing so, trusting that his own body blocked Anahrod’s line of sight too much for her to notice what his hands were doing. He’d only moved the snake, not released it. The creature now curled up happily around one of the boy’s wrists, hidden under his sleeve.
Anahrod should’ve made a fuss. He was a child, and the snake was undoubtedly dangerous. Revealing that she knew, however, risked Gwydinion asking unwanted questions about how she knew.
Anahrod had little desire to let Ris or any of her friends know the full extent of her abilities. She’d already said too much, and she didn’t think Ris had missed her slip.
Trusting Sicaryon with that knowledge had proved a deadly mistake, hadn’t it?
Anahrod dragged Gwydinion back to camp and sent him to bed. She sat on a rock for the rest of her shift and brooded about what she’d discovered.
It was none of her business. She barely knew the boy.
She knew, logically, that her feelings were a reaction to his blessing, the one that allowed him to control creatures and tell what they were thinking. It was the same as hers, and while that wasn’t unknown, it was a weird coincidence.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she’d have felt that way at the idea of sending any child to Yagra’hai as a dragonrider candidate. Her lips curled into a sneer as she stared out into the dark. “Candidate” made it sound like it was an honor, some kind of reward. It didn’t begin to touch on what such children really were:
Sacrifices.
“What are we supposed to do now, huddle in the dark until the fire goes out?” Claw asked after breakfast the next morning.
“Wouldn’t recommend it,” Anahrod answered. “Fire will take a few weeks to die down.”
“And if Sicaryon orders his people to put out the fire?” Ris asked.
“Then subtract a few days, but assume he’ll have soldiers and sorcerers combing the swamp.”
Claw made a rude gesture at Anahrod. “You could’ve just said going back up was a shit idea.”
“Didn’t want to discourage you from contributing,” Anahrod said dryly.
Ris put a hand to her lips and choked back a laugh.
“With autumn a memory and winter at one’s back, spring’s only option is summer,” Kaibren said.
Anahrod squinted at him.
“In other words: no place to go but forward,” Claw translated.
Anahrod tugged the edge of Gwydinion’s borrowed shirt over her knees. “Ris, you said you only need enough space for your dragon to land.”
“Still true.”
“Could he grab us as he flew past?”
Ris looked taken aback. “He’d still need an open area. A large one.”
“Which he won’t have,” Claw pointed out.
“Would the ocean be open enough?” Anahrod asked. “There’s an underground river,” she explained. “Since it’s the dry season—”
“ This is the dry season?” Claw interrupted.
Anahrod ignored her. “—the river level should be low enough that water won’t flood the tunnels. There’d be enough air to breathe. Assuming we survive the rapids and assuming…” She scowled. There was no sense being coy about it. “The river empties halfway up the cliffside of the Bay of Bones. If it’s low tide, that’s a one-hundred-foot fall to our deaths. If the tide’s going out, we risk being dragged out into tidefisher nets. And if the tide’s coming in…”
“If the tide’s coming in,” Ris said sourly, “we’ll have the unique pleasure of finding out exactly why the Bay of Bones is called that as we watch a two-hundred-foot wall of water smash into us.”
“Wow,” Gwydinion said, eyes wide.
“You’ve been there?” Anahrod asked. Someone unfamiliar with the area might make the mistake of assuming Ris exaggerated the danger.
She didn’t.
“Of course,” Ris said sarcastically. “It’s where I keep my summer home.” Her mouth twisted. “If it’s high tide, we’ll exit the river underwater, but we can swim to the surface.”
“This was a bad idea,” Anahrod said. “Forget I mentioned it.”
“When seas devoid of creatures flow, the bright fish becomes a curio,” Kaibren said with a shrug.
“Nobody’s had any better ideas—or any other ideas at all.” Claw growled out the translation with obvious reluctance. “Do you even know how to swim, kid?” she asked Gwydinion.
“Do you?” he asked with such false innocence that Anahrod had to swallow a snicker. “I’ve been swimming the Illgwuel River since I was five.”
Claw scratched her jaw. “I’m supposed to believe your mummy would let you anywhere near a river that dangerous?”
“You don’t know my mother,” Gwydinion pointed out. “I’m also licensed to pilot racing flyers and know how to use a wingsuit. If she could’ve paid someone to bring me down here and give me wilderness survival lessons, I’d know how to do that, too.”
Claw laughed, the sound riding on the edge of hysterical. “Fuck me with razor blades. This’ll be great .”
“Do you know how to use a sword?” Anahrod asked the boy. It was mostly curiosity.
Nobody in the Skylands used swords. She glanced at Ris and corrected herself. Almost nobody. Dragonriders did, but that was status and boredom, not need. In the Deep, swords were necessary—at least until creatures like rock wyrms and titan drakes entered the fray. In the Skylands? Relics. Even the city guards used halberds and crossbows, not swords.
Gwydinion gave Anahrod and her own visible sword an embarrassed glance. “I do,” he admitted, “but Ris said I shouldn’t bring my sword with me.”
Ris didn’t deny it. “Someone might’ve expected you to use it.”
That was the right call. Even if Gwydinion had been training since he was a baby, the Deepers down here attended a far tougher sort of school. They’d tear him apart in a serious fight.
“Can we get back to the part about dying by raging river, waterfall, tidal wave, or sea monster?” Claw asked sarcastically, although she settled down a little—a little—when Kaibren gave her a scolding look.
“No dying,” Naeron said. “I know tides.”
“What was that?” Anahrod focused on the man. He had contributed nothing to the conversation, but he’d been listening.
“I know tides,” Naeron repeated. He started to say something else, grimaced, and then switched to Sumulye. That didn’t seem to be his native tongue either, but he was more fluent in it than speaking Haudan. “Tides are like the body, like blood . They have patterns, rhythms, beats . Once the tide comes in, we have four hours of safety before the tide retreats. That’s our window. Twice a day—once in sunlight, once at night.”
“None of us want to do this at night, ” Anahrod confessed. “You can make sure we time it to hit the bay safely?”
He held up a hand and wiggled it. “Maybe. How far is it from here to the ocean? How fast is the river? Does that speed change?”
Gwydinion leaned over to Ris. “What are they saying?”
She responded, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
Anahrod rubbed her chin as she stared out at the blank stone wall. “It’s a day’s walk from that targrove swamp to the beach,” she told Naeron. “A day’s walk for a human on foot. Not a day’s walk for Overbite. Not sure how fast the river is. Won’t know until we find it.”
Naeron looked thoughtful.
“Would someone please tell us what the hell these two are saying?” Claw threw up her hands.
“We’re saying that riding the river down to the bay might work,” Anahrod said. “If it doesn’t, at least our deaths will be quick.”
“Garbage!” Claw spat. When Kaibren tried to quiet her, she turned on the man. “You cannot expect me to go along with a plan that might work, but will probably just kill us.”
Kaibren nodded grimly and said, “In shadows deep, by hunger’s mournful tune, our souls grow weak, as darkness claims its boon.”
“Ugh!” The woman all but gnashed her teeth.
“It is a stupid plan,” Anahrod said.
Claw’s mouth fell open. “What was that?”
“You think I mind if you call it a stupid plan?” Anahrod shrugged. “It’s a stupid plan. Risky. My preference is that we search for a tunnel leading to an exit outside the targrove swamp, sneak out past any Scarsea, and hike to the highlands—the original plan. But that will take days, if not weeks. Do we have enough food?”
Everyone turned to Kaibren, who shook his head.
“I don’t see a better option,” Ris said.
No one said a word, but then, no one needed to. Because Ris was right. They had no other options.
They were doing this.