Sarn
She is at the water when the north face goes.
I am on the wall above the land side, where I have made myself stand every grey hour since the breeding, because the grey hour is when she goes down to the dock, and I have learned that if I keep my eyes on the rot I cannot keep them on her, and not watching her is the only way I leave her the water.
So I am facing the land, the way a commander should, when the land tries to kill us all.
It does not come the way the small breaches come, a seam opening, a handful of crawlers to put down before they spread.
The whole shored span of the north face lets go at once, three seasons of held cliff sliding down into the sea with a roar I feel come up through the stone under me, and the corruption pours into the gap behind it, black and wet and moving, more of it in one push than I have seen since the war was young.
Every soldier I have goes to it, because that is the drill and it is the right drill.
The land side is where we die if we die.
I am the heaviest thing on this wall and the first into the gap, and the rut has left me slow, a half-beat of lag in everything, and I make myself faster than I am and throw the whole length of myself into the breach, and holding it takes all of us, every eye and every hand, turned inland, toward the rot.
Which is why no one is watching the sea when they come for her.
I taste her fear before I understand it.
The pits should not reach this far, not through the roar of the breach and the reek of the corruption, not across the whole garrison to the waterline.
They reach her anyway. Whatever the lock set in me that night tuned the whole of me to the one body I sealed, and now she is the single thread I will always catch no matter what else is burning, hers, spiked with a terror I have never read off her, not the first morning on the dock, not in the lock.
It cuts through everything else there is.
I am pouring off the breach before my mind has the shape of it, the gap behind me screaming for the weight I am pulling out of it, and I do not care, and that is the first time in three winters I have turned my back on the line.
They knew. The thought comes cold and clear as I throw myself down the stair toward the water.
They knew to come now. Raiders work this coast, and a coast learns its garrisons, and any crew that has watched us long enough knows a forward post turns its whole face inland when the rot surges and leaves the sea to mind itself.
They did not find an open door. They waited for the rot to open it.
The breach was not their luck. It was their signal, and we rang it for them ourselves.
I come out onto the dock the way a flood comes, and I am too late.
The boat is already off the planks, already past the kelp line, a low dark hull with the sail going up and the oars out, driving for open water on the east current, and she is in it.
I see her once. They have her down against the thwart with a man’s weight on her and her hands bound behind her and her head wrenched back toward the cliff, toward me, and the pits reach her across the widening water, fear and fury and, under them, steady, the thing she carries.
Mine. Both of them mine, going out on my own water while I stand on the dock I left her.
I have told her, with my body if never in the words, that I would crush anything that put a hand on her.
I built the whole of my claim on it. And the first morning it is true, the first time something has its hands on her in earnest, I am a length of useless muscle on an empty dock, watching the sea carry her off, too slow, too late, beaten by the one dawn the rot and the raiders agreed on between them.
I go into the water. I can swim; every serpent can.
The skiffs are drawn up the far stair and every hand that could launch one is in the breach, so it is the water or it is nothing, and nothing is not a choice I can make with her on a boat.
But the sea this far north is cold, and I am not.
My kind run hot or we run slow, and the cold closes over my head and reaches straight into the muscle and starts pulling the speed out of it, stroke by stroke.
I drive after the hull anyway. The current is hers and not mine, running for them and against me, and the cold is in me now, heavy, dragging, my own body going sluggish and stupid the longer it holds me. I lose a length to the cold for every length I gain on the boat.
Out there on water she has read since she was a child, with no help coming and my child in her, she is on her own. And the one creature on this coast that swore to reach her is the one the sea is built to kill, losing to it stroke by stroke, and still not turning back.