In fact, she had her mind focused on Sitha’s blessing as much as on what she said, which likely meant that the sarcasm came out a shade dreamier than she’d meant it to. The bridge was holding under their combined weight as they walked side by side, Darya alert for the prickling, itching sensation at the back of her spine that meant the ground ahead was unsafe, Amris peering down over the side of the bridge.
They didn’t go very far out before he put a hand on her arm to stop her. “Here,” he said, and pointed. “Mark you the stone one layer down, the one that’s almost a triangle?”
“I see it,” she said. It wasn’t the most damaged, but there were definitely pits enough in the surface and a deeper groove around it than the masons had intended. She checked the cords that held her sword in its sheath and tried not to look past the stone into the ravine. There was a river down at the bottom; she could see light on flowing water. It probably wouldn’t help. “Gods bless our endeavors, especially the ridiculous ones.”
She wiped her palms on her tunic before grabbing the knife out of her boot, and her pulse was loud in her throat and her ears. The feeling was familiar. It wasn’t even unpleasant, not to her. All the colors in the world were brighter at such times. She could hear every bird calling in the trees, and the laughter of the river below as water ran past the rocks.
This was being alive.
“Ready?” she asked both of her partners.
I can shield you at a moment’s notice, with all my strength,Gerant said.That will have to suffice.
“If you are,” said Amris.
Darya knelt, then dropped to her stomach, flattening herself on the stone. One wriggle took her chin out past the edge. Another brought the stone to her shoulders. Amris’s hands closed over her ankles: large, strong, solid, and warm through trousers and boots alike.
When the edge of the bridge hit her lowest rib, she started to lower herself down, clinging as best she could to the bridge for as long as she could. The smell of wet stone was strong in her nose, mingled with an acrid, chalky odor from whatever went into the mortar, which almost immediately got under her fingernails.
Amris was bearing more and more of her weight as Darya went down. Habit had her drawing breath to call and see if he was all right, but before she could speak, she realized that she knew he was. She felt, at a distance, the stance in which he’d braced his legs and the strain in his arms and back. It was present, but not overwhelming.
She crawled downward a little more, until the triangular stone was at her eye level. Amris’s hands around her ankles were the only thing holding her, and the blood had begun rushing to her head in earnest.
“I’m going to be dizzy as hell, if I survive this,” she said.
You could so easily have left off that last part.
“Have confidence in your old lover, hmm? He won’t let me fall.” Still, she braced herself against the bridge with one hand before she started digging at the mortar with her knife. Thrills were one thing; foolishness very different.
Mortar came away in chunks, crumbling beneath her knife and falling down to the river. Darya didn’t watch it, but worked fast, reaching as far back between the rocks as she could manage. When she was done, she’d dug a gap around the stone—only a little wider than her hands, but clear beyond the base of the stone where it met the rest of the bridge.
“Tell Amris I’m starting the next part,” she said, “and to get ready.”
The hands around her ankles tightened, which was good. The next step meant putting away the knife and taking out her rope, a series of maneuvers that shifted Darya’s weight back and forth so she felt briefly like a swinging pendulum.
Amris’s grip never wavered.
“Good man,” she muttered.
Very much so,said Gerant,although I admit this particular skill never came up between us.
“Don’t make me laugh right now, or we’ll all go into the river.”
Scraping layers of skin off her knuckles and working half-blind, she wrapped the rope around the stone, crossed it, threaded it underneath and behind, and brought it around to the front, where she tied three knots. That was as secure as the damn thing was likely to get—and she sensed that Amris’s strength was starting to give out.
They’d still need that strength for the next part of the plan.
“All right,” she told Gerant. “Time to leave.”
It was a moment before Amris started lifting her. During it, Darya stared down at the river, too tired for either fear or excitement. Her vision had started to blur from being upside down so long, and her hands had started to hurt with the irritating, insistent pain only minor wounds ever managed. She didn’t want to fall, but she couldn’t manage to care either. When she started moving upward again, she felt vague relief, but at a far distance.
She did rouse herself enough to take her weight as soon as she could, and the amount of strength she found surprised her. Where fear for her own life didn’t do the job, apparently fairness to a companion did. Traveling alone as much as she did, Darya thought, she might have missed a few things.
It was a disconcerting notion. She didn’t have much of her mind leftover to think on it, though, preoccupied as she was with finding handholds and balancing, relieving Amris of as much of his burden as she could without overbalancing herself. When she was half on the bridge, Darya’s mind had collapsed down to movement, and the world was a blur in front of her.
When she made it all the way up, the world went black.
* * *
