“She took a risk,” said Helena. “But it was effective.”
“Thank gods,” said Quinn. “My scalp is filthy.”
“Mine too,” I groaned.
“Your turn,” said Alric, stepping up to our chain, his own close-cropped hair damp from his bathing, nodding towards me and Quinn. He tossed a bar of soap at me as Nash moved down the line and unlocked first Quinn’s and then my shackles.
His voice lowered for only my ears, Alric said, “Do not try me, priestess. I am at my limit with you. If you plan flight, you plan your death.”
I ignored him, rubbing my wrist and leaning down to fish the soap out from the grass.
He herded us past the water trees and to a less steep path down the bank. We stood on a large outcropping of rock just above the surface. Alric stood with his hands on hips, watching us.
“How deep is it?” I asked, untying my shoes with one hand, the other holding soap.
He waited a second to reply. “Your waist,” he said, gaze on my midriff as I stood up.
I turned to Quinn and held up my right hand. We took a giddy half-jump down into the cool water, which while it was flowing was not a strong current. Our feet easily found purchase on the glittering rocks below. Our white priest robes billowed out around us.
“Oh my gods,” I crowed, twirling in the water. “This feels like kissing your lover for the first time.”
I heard Alric shift from his position up on the rock, taking steps away from us.
Quinn gave a strangled laugh. I guessed she was not one to laugh regularly.
I smiled at her and put my head under, feeling days of grime and sweat dissolve. When I surfaced I said, voice under the bubble of the water, “I’m going to take my scribe’s dress off under my robes. You should take yours off. It’ll be easier to clean our bodies.”
“I’m too nervous,” she replied. “But I do need to clean this serge.”
I handed her the soap and started rubbing the lavender between my hands and all over my neck and scalp. Walking to the water trees, I grasped on their leaves, crumbling them in my hands. Maureen was right. They were slimy with a paste-like sap that smelled like citrus and salt. I took the remaining lavender and made a paste which I worked through my hair, the waves tangling into tighter and tighter knots. I both dreamed of and dreaded a hairbrush. But the dirty feeling on my head was gone. Under the priest robe, I had pulled my arms inside and undone the ties down the front of my scribe dress, taking it off entirely and leaving my shift and stays on. I thoroughly scrubbed the dress in the water with the soap once Quinn had finished with it. Then I squeezed the water out of it and slapped it up against the rock, Alric was standing on. I could put it on under my robe later. For now, I wanted to be as naked in this water as I could be. I began to use the soap on myself and my underthings, vigorously as Quinn also took Maureen’s advice with the water tree leaves. Both of us were starting to smell human again, that sour rankness leaving our bodies. Between the stars above, which had not been out the last three nights, the phosphorous moss, the river’s cleanness and the scents of all the forest’s growth, I was lulled into a pocket of peace. I was alive. I was, still, somehow, alive.
The water was deeper than Alric said, closer to my chest and I let myself float a little, my eyes on the sky above.
“Do you smell mint?” Quinn asked, walking through the current back from under the water trees. “Something has a mint smell.”
“I think some clematis can smell like that.”
“Reminds me of home,” she said, almost to herself.
I sat up in the water. “You’re from Perpatane?” Mint grew all over my birth country.
She stopped her approach. “Are you?”
“Yes! I— well, I left about ten winters ago.”
“Fourteen winters for me,” she said, mystified. “What are the odds?”
I laughed. “Best choice I ever made.”
“It was the most miserable thirty winters of my life,” she grumbled.
I laughed again. “Not a follower of Rodwin?”
Her mouth grew tight. “No. I am not one to believe one’s happiness should be denied to avoid an afterlife in a make believe hell. Sorry,” she said, when she saw me grow serious. “I truly did hate it there.”
“It was surely the least happy twenty-eight winters of my life,” I offered. I tilted my head. “I noticed you said, ‘I left’ not ‘we left.’ River didn’t come with you at first?”
Her gaze flicked to mine. “So you know?”
