Chapter Nineteen. On Matters of Fish.
Nineteen
On Matters of Fish.
“It’s time.”
I must have fallen asleep at some point because I wake up to find Merc standing over me.
He’s wet again, so I guess he’s done a little more exploration, and in the dwindling torchlight, the sheath that cleaves to his torso like a second skin gives me quite a show—especially as he picks up his mesh armor and straps it on.
With every movement, his muscles contract and release, the power in him as transfixing as flame. And I grow warm.
At least until he continues talking.
“We have to do it now.” He nods toward the pool as he begins strapping on his weapons. “We need to get you away from the village before it’s broad daylight, and there’s just enough sunrise for me to navigate the collapse—”
“I can’t swim.”
That shuts him up sure as if I’ve slapped him. “What do you mean you can’t—”
“I tried a couple of times when I was younger.” I’m flushing again, but this time, it’s with embarrassment. “I can’t do it.”
“Of course you can’t,” he mutters as he pulls on his leather coat and his pack. “How is this possible?”
“I sink—”
Merc slashes an impatient hand and then goes digging into his pack. “It’s as if I knew—and that’s why I brought this. Stand up.”
He holds out a rope, and when I just stare at the thing as if I’ve never seen one before, he pulls me to my feet. Stepping in close, he reaches around my waist with the twist of fibers—
The scent of him washes over me and I breathe in deep. How can he always smell so good? This is the only thing I’m thinking of as the band tightens across the small of my back, and I nearly take a step forward just to keep us together.
“I’ll do the swimming.” My body tugs back and forth as he ties things in a tight knot. “You just need to hold your breath and not fight me.”
His strong, sure hands test the tie at my belly button one last time. “You have your knife?”
“There. By the pack.”
“Tuck it into your waistband. You’re going to need your hands free.”
On reflex, I bend down for my cloak.
“You’re not wearing that. It will drown you.”
“But I have to bring my—”
“That thing is going to absorb enough water weight to equal two of you. I’m not dragging it through the currents as well.”
As I stare down at the folds of ugly brown wool, I wonder how many more parts of myself I’ll have to jettison during this journey. The idea of leaving the thing behind makes me sad in the same way I feel when I think of my nook beneath the stairs.
“You’re not actually going to argue with me, are you.”
I shake my head. “I’m just thinking about how habit will turn even a hovel into a home, and a rough cloak like that into comfort.”
“You’re going to do so much better in this world, as soon as you drop the sentimentality.”
“I’ll keep my emotions, thank you very much.”
Looking at the pack, I decide to leave it behind.
After thinking things over before I fell asleep, I’ve decided nothing that Mr. Lewis told me made any sense, and I’m not heading off on any quest just because he tossed a bunch of lore around.
I’m going to try to hide and survive in a town of outlaws under the theory that there’s a kind of safety in numbers, especially with people who have good survival instincts.
Surely that’s a better option than being alone in a landscape where demons are escaping the Fulcrum.
Or some half-cocked story spit out at me by a man trying to save his business—by making sure I leave his establishment and do him the kindness of either getting myself killed, or at the very least, never, ever darkening his door again.
This was why I didn’t bother to look in the satchel or the box. I don’t care what’s inside either of them—
“Hold on.” I glance up to Merc’s chest level. “Do you have a compass?”
“No. Why?”
“How—ah, how sure are you that you know the way to the Badlands?” Although it isn’t as though we have a map—
“I know the way.”
And what if we get separated? I think. Or something happens where I have to go on my own? I’ve heard it’s to the south and west. How will I know which directions they’re in if I get turned around, or it’s at night?
Glancing down, I decide I could use a compass. And even if I don’t need the thing for navigating, I could maybe use it to barter.
Grabbing the pack, I slip the straps on my shoulders, and before he can argue, I flash my palms at him. “Hands free.”
I just hope the water doesn’t destroy the mechanism of the instrument.
Merc is muttering as he ropes his own waist, straps his broadsword onto his back, and slaps at various places on his body, all of which have some kind of weapon secured by some kind of belt or holster. Then he nods as if he’s both his own master and protégé, and this is part of his training.
“Well, come on. Let’s get this over with.”
As he turns away, I grab his forearm. His head snaps toward me, and I open my mouth. Except what is there to say?
“I don’t know,” he drawls with a shrug. “Maybe we make it, maybe we don’t. But I’d rather die trying, wouldn’t you.”
“I’d rather not have to do this at all.”
“Talk to the crescent moon, then. Destiny and its exigencies are far, far above anything that has to do with me.”
Merc wades into the pool, bending his prodigious height until he can proceed no farther without going under the surface.
As I measure the taut rope that connects us, my lungs start to pump and then I shift my eyes to the black water.
I look back at the torch. It’s almost out of reed to consume.
Soon, there’ll be nothing but darkness, rats, and the moon knows what else in here.
“I’m not waiting for you much longer,” he says impatiently.
One foot in and I feel as if I’m being consumed already, the cold wetness chewing through my soft-soled slippers and going right for my flesh. Something about the way the fetid, viscous tide rises up my calves without my going a step farther makes me want to scream.
“I can’t do this—”
“No choice, remember.” Merc holds out his hand. “And I’ll be with you all the way. I’m not going to leave you in there.”
As if to prove the point, he tugs on the rope that links us. “No more wasting time, though. This is not getting any easier, the longer we stay here. You’re just going to get more and more afraid.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I mumble.
When I still don’t move, he pulls me forward, and the tunnel floor takes a sharp decline that makes me wobble and splash. No doubt it’s dropping under the moat.
When the water is up to my thighs, I’m by his side. I don’t have to bend as he does, and I’m grabbing at the air in jerks of my rib cage, like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
“We’re going to take three deep breaths together.”
His voice is so calm, I feel like the only one who’s stuck in a tunnel and having to swim through balas to safety is me—
“One.”
My nose burns as I inhale. And when he exhales, I do the same, focusing on that wide chest of his as it deflates.
“Two.”
I repeat the draw again, until my lungs sting from the stretching, and my sternum feels as if it’ll break open. I glance back at the carcass and remember the fight.
Countless more of them are waiting for us.
“Three—”
At the height of the final inhale, things happen fast. Merc sinks beneath the water level on a lithe dive, and before I can even approximate what he’s done, I’m yanked under by the waist. The shock of the cold water swallowing me whole causes all the air in my lungs to explode out of my nose and lips.
I lose every bit of it. And then I gasp—
The moat enters my mouth in an icy fist. Flailing around, I try to cough out the water while I fight the rope, my brain telling me we have to go back and try again after a resurface.
Merc is going incredibly fast, though, and I grab on to the tether that binds us and attempt to pull on it, in hopes of signaling that drowning is already happening.
He just keeps swimming, his powerful strokes dragging me along.
My eyes bulge in the watery darkness, and I close my mouth so at least I don’t get more down my throat.
As my arms and legs become useless, my mind tangles and spins, my thoughts like the rushing in my ears, all noise, no meaning.
I bump along the sharply descending angle of the tunnel’s ceiling, well aware I’m going to lose consciousness yet again, the wholly unfamiliar buoyancy terrifying me—
Suddenly, my head stings with that familiar, sharp pain, and a vision bursts through the cold, midnight void:
The ocean.
The beautiful ocean at sunrise.
And I’m spearing into the salty, warm waves.
Under I go, but there is no fear. There’s only joy and surety, my arms cleaving out and pulling back, my legs frogging at the heels and kicking in propulsion, my coordination as natural and comfortable as drawing a breath.
Again and again, I stroke through the sea’s sweet, surging body, my heart singing.
I swim without needing air, for I am one with Anathos’s best natural barrier, that which has protected us from sieges and helped us to thrive for millennia, not isolated, but safe, from whatever is past the horizon.
I swim as a fish does.
Perfectly.