Page 26

“Keep swimming!” I yelled. “We’re nearly to shore!”

Sunbeam paddled his legs furiously. There was no escaping the wave, though. It crashed over us, plunging us beneath the surface. Seawater forced itself up my nose and down my throat, stinging like nettles as it went.

It was quiet underwater. Curiously so after the noise and chaos above. Suffused light flashed overhead in brief bursts, but the thunder was muffled to inaudibility. If it weren’t for the agony in my sinuses and the desperate urge to hack up half a lung’s worth of salt water, it might have been almost peaceful.

Sunbeam’s head burst back into the air, pulling me up with him. I retched out as much water as I could while I had the chance. Twenty feet behind us, Yudit had her hands entangled in the mane of the dun mare, trying her hardest not to let go.

The horses were the only reason we hadn’t drowned when the boat capsized. Yudit and I knew how to swim, but we’d never have survived in a storm like this. The horses were stronger than we were. Even so, they were struggling, but the shoreline wasn’t far.

I kicked from my hips, trying to help, glad that we’d been wearing men’s clothes to get back in practice. The trousers allowed some freedom of movement. A soaking wet gown and petticoats would have been a death sentence, trapping my legs and dragging me down.

There was a change in Sunbeam’s movement beneath me, a shift from paddling to walking. His hooves had hit something solid. Panting with effort, he hauled us both onto the shore.

I use the word “shore” very loosely. We’d alighted on a tangle of tree roots, the waves washing through and past them. It was difficult to tell land from sea. Sunbeam picked his way a little farther up. I let go of his neck, slid to what passed for the ground, and braced myself against a tree trunk. The canopy overhead immediately blossomed with bell-shaped flowers. The wind ripped them off, and new ones grew to replace them, showering us with a never-ending torrent of wet yellow petals.

Yudit and her mare were splashing through the shallows. The mare stumbled with exhaustion, her ears dropped low, and Yudit didn’t look much better.

“Glad you’re—” I began, but then lightning struck a tree no farther than twenty feet away. It exploded, branches and bark scattering across the water. Yudit’s horse reared, screaming with fright. Its eyes were so wide the whites were visible.

“Easy there, Stinky,” Sunbeam said in a soothing tone, carefully making his way toward the mare. “It’s just a little weather. Nothing to be afraid of.”

Yudit collapsed next to me. I took her in an embrace and drew her close. The shower of petals stopped, the ones that clung to my clothes dissolving into a sticky ooze.

Sunbeam had reassured the mare somewhat, and was nuzzling her neck with his muzzle. She was trembling, but we were no longer in danger of having our skulls cracked open by her flailing hooves.

“You call her Stinky?” My voice was a rough croak. My throat still ached from producing the gems, and coughing up a few drams of seawater hadn’t done it any favors.

Sunbeam shrugged, a very unhorselike twitch of his shoulders. “Yeah. Because she is.” Which was a bit unfair, given his breath.

“What do we do now?” Yudit asked, speaking mostly to my armpit as she burrowed in closer. Neither of us was providing much warmth, but we both wanted the comfort of touch.

I didn’t have a good answer for her. Out in the churning waves, there was no longer any sign of our boat. With it had gone our armor, our weapons, and most of our supplies. Of course, if we had gone armed and armored on the boat, we’d have sunk straight to the bottom, too.

All we had left was whatever happened to be in Sunbeam’s saddlebags. Stinky the mare hadn’t worn a saddle on the boat—what would be the point?—but Sunbeam liked to have pockets. Any clothing in there would be as wet as what we were wearing. There might be a welcome bit of food tucked away, though. Probably not much. We hadn’t planned on a shipwreck. The more fools us.

The water around the tree roots was shallow enough to wade through until we reached someplace more solid. We sloshed onward until we found firmer ground beneath a stand of cypress trees, and we sheltered there while we took stock of our situation.

I dug through Sunbeam’s bags and found a wedge of hard cheese, a few carrots, two shirts, and a coil of rope—I’d been trying to keep some on hand ever since the fight at the abandoned keep—plus a soggy pack of playing cards that were roughly the consistency of shortbread dipped in tea, and were about as useful for card games.

“Well,” I said, “we’re completely fucked.”

“Maybe not completely,” my sister said. “I’ve been keeping a dagger hidden in my boot since we left Tailliz.” She drew it out and presented it for inspection.

“In that case, I revise my estimate from ‘completely fucked’ to ‘still pretty much fucked, honestly.’ ”

A single dagger wasn’t going to make a difference in the Swamp of Monsters.

The swamp was a vast territory, entirely devoid of human habitation. It would have been difficult to cross even if it contained only natural hazards; the swamp was notorious for quicksand, bogs, sinkholes, unstable ground, and other dangers to trap the unwary, as well as poisonous snakes, disease-bearing insects, and large hungry reptiles. But as you may have guessed from the name, the Swamp of Monsters was also the haunt of a variety of magical and unnatural creatures, many of whom considered human flesh a delicacy. And the rest were willing to give it a try if they didn’t have anything better to eat. Any sensible overland route from the northern kingdoms to the heart of the Red Empire curved hundreds of miles to the east to avoid getting anywhere near the swamp, adding weeks to the trip.

If our bearings had been taken correctly, we’d hit the coast about three quarters of the way down. We could have ended up in a far worse situation. From one point of view, we didn’t have all that far to go.

From another, more accurate point of view, we were pretty much fucked. I was having serious second thoughts about my longing for adventure. Third and fourth thoughts, too.

“As soon as the rain eases up, we’ll head inland,” I said, “until the water turns fresh. Then we’ll make our way out.” There really wasn’t any other option.

In the shadow of the trees, something hissed.

We stilled.