“Thank you,” I said to him from my seat on the horse, looking at him over her head, my eyes trying to communicate that he was too close to my friend, no matter his good intention. “But we can manage.”
He stepped back, crestfallen.
Showing him her back, Helena placed her left leg in the stirrup and pushed her right over the horse’s hindquarters, falling into position behind me. She buried her face in my hair. I had braided it overnight and taken it out in the morning with the intention of making a neater braid for the day, but had forgotten.
I smiled politely, but dismissively, at Thatcher and he returned my smile, sadly.
18. Pikestully
Alric rode past, pulling up to the front, calling for us to begin the last day of our journey, and our cavalcade of soldiers and prisoners of war made its way down the dust road. As the sun rose, the road seemed to go on forever, past farms and pastures, fields of husbanded vegetation, houses and barns dotting the landscape, standing closer and closer together until we rode through an actual village. All the while, a brine scented the air. We were nearing the sea. It was a sight most dwellers of this continent had not seen unless they had journeyed to Tintar, owners of all the civilized coastline. Unless one survived a trek through the hinterlands of the Helmsmen clans in the Hintercliff mountains to the north or dared travel past Tintar’s southernmost borders to the marshes and as yet unclaimed wastelands, some lands no living man had explored, the sea and all of its shores belonged to Tintar.
I confessed to myself that this intrigued me. I wanted to see the ocean.
Riding back down the line, after we had passed through a second village, Alric spoke to a few of the soldiers, eyes passing over his captives appraisingly. He looked at me in a startled manner as his Maggie cantered past our gray.
I noted the dried blood on his left hand. It had been him at the tree line this morning, praying and kneeling. To which god did he petition and for what?
After a time, Maggie and her rider returned to trot next to us.
Checking that Helena truly slept against me, he asked, his tone hushed, “She ate the paste?” Again, as the morning after her rape, when he had asked how Helena fared, his tone was nearly gentle.
I wanted to fight. I wanted to turn to him and hurl accusations about binding our hands in the mist. But my own guilt at dismissing Maureen’s observations stopped me. I looked at him, taking in how he sat up straight now in his saddle, his form upright, not the penitent I had seen hours before.
I said, “She did. Again, I thank you and your man for that. And all the clean clothes.”
He nodded, his eyes flicking below my face and then away.
We rode side by side, quiet, for hours. In my limited vision, on my left side, I sensed his study, his body seated with all the gravity and dignity that belied his rank, but his eyes were restless, returning to his right, to me, over and over.
I pondered what could have caused his interest. What had I done now? In what new way I had earned his ire or his inspection? Or was he sympathetic to Helena’s state? Was he wondering why a priestess would gladly abandon her order’s robes on a barn floor, no matter how bedraggled? A bloom stole over my face and my chest as I understood. My figure was now easier to make out in this too-tight, rust-colored dress with its square neckline.
He was looking at me and my initial sense of him seeing me as a man sees a woman he wants returned. Perhaps, I had not been wrong.
At first, I was briefly flattered. Though not as traditionally handsome as some, he was a fine figure of a man, fit and masculine. And I was not immune to the heady awareness one has when an inscrutable beholder wants to behold you. Then I was repulsed by my own neediness. One man’s attention and all of my outrage was gone. I resolved to pretend he was not there.
The dust road soon had a sandier, rockier soil and its path reached the sea and turned upwards to gargantuan bluffs that hung over that endless expanse of green-gray. Our horses fell into a single file and went more slowly up the stony incline. The bluffs were made of dark gray rock, like blocks of coal, a bluish green scrub grass clinging to the surface. When our mounts had reached the flatter top, we again grouped into two riders aside each other, but the boy called Luka had replaced Alric in line and the pinkness on my bosom faded.
The waves below crashed again and again against the impervious bluffs. My eyes drank in the sea, its frothing muted blues and greens roiling beneath me on my right side. I could have stared for days on end and my awe would have not dulled. I searched the horizon where the crisp blue of a spring day in Tintar met the swirl of this churning, magical beast. I should have let her sleep, but I woke Helena with one hand reaching up to stroke her hair and I spoke her name.
“Look,” I said, a catch in my throat. “Look at that, kindred.”
“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh, Edie.”
“I know. I never thought I would see it in my entire life.”
“I can smell the salts of Vyggia,” she murmured. “Or is that just the sea?”
I could not tell if she jested. I reached down to where her hands were clasped at my stomach and squeezed.
Down the line, I heard the muffled wonderment of the other women.
Well past the dinner hour, we reached Pikestully. I had seen drawings of what Pikestully was supposed to look like. They were poor renderings. It was a majestic sight. I had lived in Apollon, the capital of wealthy Perpatane and in Eccleston, the only state on the continent governed by voting citizens and learned men, with its spires and universities. They were stick and brick compared to this.
The city of the Shark King was built into the bluffs along the coast. Gray-stoned keeps and temples all abutted the coal-black rock, sitting out below us on our left. Below them, as if game pieces lined up by a tidy god, a crosshatching of streets and buildings spread out, a territory without end, it seemed.
What truly took my breath away were the spikes of black and gray rock jutting out of the ocean to my right. Each one was ten times the height of the tallest ash tree and as broad as an Eccleston city block. I counted five of them dotting the horizon.
“The stone drakes,” Helena said.
