Page 7 of Coiled By the Naga

Far off, under the white roar of it, her body starts to labor for air. The pits hand it to me as warmth and I cannot make my coils answer. I am sealed inside my own rut watching the one thing in the world I would die before harming run out of breath, and my body will not unclench, and I cannot reach the part of myself that decides.

Then her hand moves. She is gone, I can read that much, her mind washed out past speaking, past thinking, nothing left in her that could form a plan. And her hand moves anyway. One arm free to the elbow, pinned everywhere else, and it drags up the length of my throat to my jaw and presses her wrist flat to the pits, and I know she did not decide it, because there is no one home in her to decide. Her body did it without her. It has read me so many times it no longer waits to be told.

And the pits find her.

Her pulse gone thin and fast, the air not reaching the bottom of her, the single thing I need and could not feel handed to me through the one sense I cannot shut. Too far. You’ve gone too far.

I find the edge. Not by feeling it in myself. By feeling it in her. And I open the coils.

The air goes into her in a rush I feel through every loop, and she sobs with it, and I would give the whole garrison to take the last minute back. I have her. I did not end her. The distance between those two was her hand on my jaw and nothing else.

The lock keeps the rest of us. That much I can’t open, and would not if I could, my body sealing what it has spent into her with a finality I feel settle through us both. This is the part that does not come undone. Under the fear and the relief, the thing my body has climbed toward since the day they set her on my dock closes and sets, low and certain and permanent.

Mine. Not the word this time. The fact. The claim is made, and I made it, my body did, in a lock she had to save her own life to live through, and that is the truth of what I am that I carry now. I claimed her. She has claimed nothing. She gave me her pulse to keep from dying, not to keep me, and I won’t pretend the one was the other.

She lies in my coils with my breeding sealed in her and her hand still open on my jaw, breathing, alive, claimed, and not mine as I would sell the rest of my life to be hers. The pits read her, warm, spent, frightened, and under it the cycle already turning toward catching. I can taste it starting in her, the change that has not finished happening yet.

She gave me her pulse to keep from dying. She did not give me the rest, and I will not take the one for the other. So I hold her, claimed and not keeping me, and I keep the watch I have always kept, except now it is on the one breathing body in my coils, and I do not let the relief talk me into believing I have earned her.

SARN

She is at the water when the north face goes.

I am on the wall above the land side, where I have made myself stand every grey hour since the breeding, because the grey hour is when she goes down to the dock, and I have learned that if I keep my eyes on the rot I cannot keep them on her, and not watching her is the only way I leave her the water. So I am facing the land, the way a commander should, when the land tries to kill us all.

It does not come the way the small breaches come, a seam opening, a handful of crawlers to put down before they spread. The whole shored span of the north face lets go at once, three seasons of held cliff sliding down into the sea with a roar I feel come up through the stone under me, and the corruption pours into the gap behind it, black and wet and moving, more of it in one push than I have seen since the war was young.

Every soldier I have goes to it, because that is the drill and it is the right drill. The land side is where we die if we die. I am the heaviest thing on this wall and the first into the gap, and the rut has left me slow, a half-beat of lag in everything, and I make myself faster than I am and throw the whole length of myself into the breach, and holding it takes all of us, every eye and every hand, turned inland, toward the rot.

Which is why no one is watching the sea when they come for her.

I taste her fear before I understand it. The pits should not reach this far, not through the roar of the breach and the reek of the corruption, not across the whole garrison to the waterline. They reach her anyway. Whatever the lock set in me that night tuned the whole of me to the one body I sealed, and now she is the single thread I will always catch no matter what else is burning, hers, spiked with a terror I have never read off her, not the first morning on the dock, not in the lock. It cuts through everything else there is.

I am pouring off the breach before my mind has the shape of it, the gap behind me screaming for the weight I am pulling out of it, and I do not care, and that is the first time in three winters I have turned my back on the line.

They knew. The thought comes cold and clear as I throw myself down the stair toward the water. They knew to come now. Raiders work this coast, and a coast learns its garrisons, and any crew that has watched us long enough knows a forward post turns its whole face inland when the rot surges and leaves the sea to mind itself. They did not find an open door. They waited for the rot to open it. The breach was not their luck. It was their signal, and we rang it for them ourselves.

I come out onto the dock the way a flood comes, and I am too late.

The boat is already off the planks, already past the kelp line, a low dark hull with the sail going up and the oars out, driving for open water on the east current, and she is in it. I see her once. They have her down against the thwart with a man’s weight on her and her hands bound behind her and her head wrenched back toward the cliff, toward me, and the pits reach her across the widening water, fear and fury and, under them, steady, the thing she carries. Mine. Both of them mine, going out on my own water while I stand on the dock I left her.

I have told her, with my body if never in the words, that I would crush anything that put a hand on her. I built the whole of my claim on it. And the first morning it is true, the first time something has its hands on her in earnest, I am a length of useless muscle on an empty dock, watching the sea carry her off, too slow, too late, beaten by the one dawn the rot and the raiders agreed on between them.

I go into the water. I can swim; every serpent can. The skiffs are drawn up the far stair and every hand that could launch one is in the breach, so it is the water or it is nothing, and nothing is not a choice I can make with her on a boat. But the sea this far north is cold, and I am not. My kind run hot or we run slow, and the cold closes over my head and reaches straight into the muscle and starts pulling the speed out of it, stroke by stroke.

I drive after the hull anyway. The current is hers and not mine, running for them and against me, and the cold is in me now, heavy, dragging, my own body going sluggish and stupid the longer it holds me. I lose a length to the cold for every length I gain on the boat.

Out there on water she has read since she was a child, with no help coming and my child in her, she is on her own. And the one creature on this coast that swore to reach her is the one the sea is built to kill, losing to it stroke by stroke, and still not turning back.

AUDE

They make three mistakes before the boat clears the kelp line, and I count all of them, because counting is the only thing my hands can do with my wrists lashed behind me.

The first is that they came for me on the water. The second is that they do not know this water. The third is that they think a bred omega with her hands tied is cargo, that I am a thing already landed, and they have stopped watching me the way you stop watching a fish in the bottom of the boat.

That first day on the dock I felt like the catch. I have spent this whole season being handed from one set of hands to the next like a thing with a price on it. I am done being the catch. And these men do not know yet that the woman they have tied in the bottom of their boat has been reading the thing that is about to kill them since before any of them could swim.

There are five of them. Hard, scarred, a crew that does this for its living, and they handle the boat well enough for deep water and not at all for mine. The east current runs fast under us, faster than they understand, carrying us toward the open sea, and the kelp beds are coming up to the south where the current bends, and behind the kelp sits the drowned rock.