“Maggie will be the head of the household, Reynald will be head of the household guard, and I will be the steward maid. I’ll be staying here. I won’t let my brothers die. The Hreban Family will not take anything else from me. And I owe Reynald and you a debt for saving us. I pay my debts. I will help save Matheo and destroy Ulmar Hreban. This is settled. Come, Kaiden.”
For once Kaiden didn’t argue. He jumped to his feet and followed her out.
Okay then. I looked at Reynald.
“You heard her. It’s settled,” he said.
The hell it was.
“I will do this with or without you, Maggie,” Reynald said. “I need to know if you have my back. If you don’t help me, I’ll have to change the future myself, and I have no idea what happens next. In or out?”
He’d remembered what I told him in the Knight Vanquisher Plaza almost word for word. Wow.
His lips curved.
“What about Matheo?”
“My son is safe for now. He will wait for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can bear to be separated from him for a few more months if it means he will grow up in a peaceful kingdom. Let me join you. Help me save my son from a future of suffering.”
I gave up. “Then I am in.”
“Good.” He stood up. “I’m going to drop off the bodies. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
I stood up, too. “I’ll help you.”
“It will be grisly work.”
“I said I was in. I’ll manage.”
I took a deep breath and followed him down the stairs, to a basement full of corpses we needed to load onto the boat.
Dead bodies were heavy as hell.
I knew this. It was one of those academic facts you learned from reading, never expecting to encounter it in real life, until you had to drag eleven corpses about a hundred feet through a stone passageway and then carry them over a grassy bank to a boat in the middle of the night.
In the fantasy books filling my shelves, heroes slung limp humans over their shoulders with a manly growl and then hauled them like they weighed nothing. The level of bullshit involved was criminal. Reynald was a lot stronger than me, and he grunted, strained, and took frequent breaks.
Finally, all the corpses were in. Reynald paused on the dock and held his hand out. I took it—it was rock steady—and he carefully helped me into the boat. He put his hand on the mooring line and stomped twice on the dock boards.
I glanced at him.
“For luck,” he said. “It’s tradition.”
This world or ours, sailors were superstitious everywhere.
Reynald freed the mooring line, climbed into the boat, and started tying and untying various ropes. The sail caught the wind, unfurled, and the boat slipped into the current, still slightly rough from the recent rain. Reynald secured the lines and moved to the big wooden rudder at the stern, about a foot from where I sat on my bench. The corpses, trussed up in canvas, lay on the bottom of the boat like cordwood.
We sat silently, watching the estates of Anchor Drop slide by, darker shadows in the night, marked by an occasional lantern. The sky above us was smudged with clouds.
When Reynald told me he’d bought a boat, I defaulted to one of those small fishing boats people towed behind their trucks all over Texas highways as soon as the summer heat started. Which was ridiculous, but that was where my brain went. What Reynald had purchased was nowhere near that.
The boat looked like something ancient Vikings might have taken upriver to raid the English monasteries. Except it was less of a dragon boat and more of a swan. It sat low in the water, a graceful, sleek wooden vessel about thirty feet long and seven feet wide with a single mast supporting a complex moss-green sail. Its sides curved from the raised stern, swooping low in the middle, then rising again at the bow, crowned with a small figurehead of a horned sea serpent. The serpent sported a mouth of scary teeth, and they weren’t wood. Someone had ripped those fangs out of the mouth of an actual marine monster and glued them in. You had to admire the dedication.
The boat sped down the river. We rounded a bend, and the current dumped us into the much wider, calmer Dokkon, the main river of Kair Toren. The cold breeze flung moisture and a hint of salt in my face.
