She wouldn’t have wanted to try to fly out, even if there hadn’t been the men to consider. It was as much as she could do to get enough height for a view of the island.
It spread out wider after the cliffs. The rough crescent stayed the same over all, but they’d certainly landed on the inner edge. The rest was a dark mass of forest. Occasionally, birds flew up above it—ravens and gulls, mostly, from what Toinette could see—but the trees were too dense for her to make out more life. They were too dense for her to try landing there too.
To her side, the sound of vast wings alerted her to Erik’s presence. She turned and saw him there, looking much as she remembered him from their youth: sky-blue, with eyes that glowed a bit like Saint Elmo’s fire as it normally appeared, and more square than sinuous. With her black scales nearby, as Moiread had observed once, they put an audience in mind of a summer thunderstorm.
He seemed to be having as much trouble staying aloft as she did, and showed no more inclination to land. Toinette wasn’t mean enough to find that satisfying, but she would admit that she would have felt worse if the wind hadn’t been giving him any trouble.
Drifting down toward the beach again, she did see that one end wound up the cliffs and into the forest. It wasn’t much of a path, but it would be better than trying to climb the cliffs themselves, and they would likely need to go up there. Repairing theHawkwould take more than driftwood; also, there might be food that wasn’t fish. In dragon form, Toinette didn’t see the appeal of vegetation, but she knew humans needed it.
She landed on the sand with a lightness that pleased her: the satisfaction of knowing her body still worked well, after she’d put it through a trial or five. The small pleasure sustained her through the next few minutes, when she shifted and walked up to rejoin the men. They were rising from around the fire and forming small groups under Marcus’s direction. Past them, theHawksat dark in the water, maimed and still. Toinette tried not to hear her sayYou failed.
“We’ll retrieve the bodies first,” she said, “then the supplies.”
* * *
“What are the usual rites? When someone dies at sea, that is?”
“You pick the best ways to make conversation.”
Erik shrugged. “I just didn’t know if I should be doing something. War—” He spread his hands. “When we had time and a priest, we might have buried the men where they lay, or taken them home if they were noble.”
Less than a hundred years back, it would have beenmos Teutonicusfor a good many noblemen: boiling the flesh off the bones, as a skeleton packed lighter and cleaner than a whole body. Cathal had told stories about seeing such things on Crusade, but one of the last few popes had forbidden the practice before Erik had been to war.
“Over the side for us, generally, and pay for masses later,” said Toinette. “You can’t keep a dead body on a ship. We’ve got enough land for burial here, but…” She shrugged. “No priest. Hard luck for them, but they won’t be the first, and if they go to Purgatory for it, they’ll have company enough.”
“Aye,” said Erik, “right you are.”
In the plague years, thousands had gone to Saint Peter unshriven and buried without rites, many without even their own plot to lie in. They’d died too fast for the priests—who’d been dying themselves. God would hopefully understand. Granted, God had presumably sent the plague in the first place, but Erik was no priest and that was not a road he wanted to go too far down.
Morbid thoughts weighed on a man’s mind. As he followed Toinette up theHawk’s gangplank, Erik thought it took more effort than it should have, as though the island was trying to tug him back down and he had to fight it with every step.
Don’t make a fuss, lad, he told himself.You’re weary, that’s all, and distressed.
The sight that met his eyes when he reached the deck hardly eased his mind. Gervase, or what was left of him, lay crushed under the broken mast. One arm was flung up and out to the side, as though he could have shielded himself. He had no face any longer, but the gold earring shone up from the red mess on the deck.
“Holy Mary, aid us,” said Toinette. She shook her head and closed her eyes.
Erik put a hand on her arm. “I’m truly sorry,” he said. “I know he’d been with you a long time.”
“Years, yes,” she said, and neither of them bothered specifyinglong for a mortal. Toinette spoke hoarsely. “They say worse things happen at sea. This is one of them.”
“That it is, lass.”
Toinette drew her thumb and forefinger across her closed eyelids, tracing the copper fans of her lashes before pinching the bridge of her nose. “We can make shrouds out of the sailcloth. There’s enough left whole, and spare below for getting back.”
Separating cloth from mast was a tiresome, sweaty business, and a grim one as well, as it meant working around Gervase’s body. Both Toinette and Erik were silent while they worked, and then while they carefully wrapped the shroud. Anything else would have seemed an affront to the dead man.
The cloth was almost an affront itself: damp, grimy, and clumsily cut at the edges, as belt daggers were not made for that sort of work. Itwasthick enough that the off-white didn’t turn red immediately, for which, Erik thought, God be praised.
Toinette worked quickly, with steady hands and set lips. Once Erik opened his mouth to say that she didn’t need to do this, that she could go back to shore and rest, but he stopped himself. The girl he’d known would have blackened his eye for such a suggestion. The woman had likely learned better manners, but even if she accepted, Erik doubted she’d do so happily.
Instead, when they’d tucked in every fold that they could, he straightened up and asked, “Would you rather take him back while I go below and get Yakob, or the other way ’round? I don’t think there’s any need for both of us.”
“No,” Toinette said slowly. “Best for one of us to stay up here while the other’s below. If the ship’s taken more damage than we can see from here, and the deck collapses, whoever’s below will want someone close at hand.”
“Ah,” said Erik, considering that prospect. “We could each likely scream loud enough to be heard from shore, but I take your point. Above or below, then?”
“I’ll wait here,” said Toinette.
