Then another man jumped into the hold with Kip, giving the imprisoned men a foot up to climb out. And then another came to help keep the chain from getting tangled. And others arrived, pulling the dead from the water.
The whole line was still bound together, so if any part was dragged underwater, at least half the men would be pulled down with it.
There was a sharp crack, and water gushed into the boat, but the men didn’t feel it, even as the deck bucked beneath their feet.
The healthy heaved on the chain, and the chained made it to shore.
A few exhausted minutes later, Kip and everyone else had been dragged onto the bank. Nine men couldn’t be revived and several others had died in the initial blasts or in their own escape attempts—at least two lay facedown on the riverbank having cut off their own arms to escape their shackles, only to bleed to death in cold freedom.
The pale Cwn y Wawr commander, the short, gap-toothed, black-haired man named Derwyn Aleph, had tried to use his barge’s key on the still-chained men’s locks. It hadn’t worked.
He looked at the corpses bound to his men, and he looked to the forest, from which reinforcements might come at any time. He turned to Kip, who was seated on the riverbank, barely able to move.
“By your traditions, you can’t defile the dead, nor can you leave them behind,” Tisis said. Kip had no idea when she’d arrived. “But your men can’t possibly carry them through the forest with the speed you need to move if you’re to escape.”
The man gave a stiff nod.
“Tell your men to look away,” she said. “Ferkudi, Big Leo, if I’m to lead these people, I can’t be ritually unclean in their eyes. Cut these men free of the chains, and put their bodies on our skimmer.”
She walked around so the commander could look at her rather than seeing what Ferkudi and Big Leo did. And to their credit, the Mighty did it quickly and without question or complaint, quickly lopping off hands and feet and freeing the dead from the chains that still bound them to the living. To Kip, it was a sudden synecdoche of all that warriors do: the stomach-turning, soul-scarring butchery that society asks for the safety and squeamishness of its soft souled.
Tisis said, “We’ll lay them out on Fechín Island at the Black River confluence. Burial is yours, though.”
Derwyn looked overwhelmed with gratitude. He pointed at Kip with his chin. “Who is he?”
“Does it matter?” Tisis asked.
“Only to spread the tales,” Derwyn said. “A hero’s due.”
“Then he is Kip Guile, leader of these Mighty, who call him Breaker. Perhaps he is the Luíseach, perhaps he is the Diakoptês, though he claims neither. He is my husband. Even were he not, he is the man I would follow to the ends of the earth.”
Derwyn looked into the wood, deep in thought or merely peering for approaching enemies, and then turned to Kip, who sat on a stump, wrung out and wet, feeling anything but heroic.
Kip’s thoughts were running in the opposite direction: Wow, that was really dumb. I never should have done that. Why can’t I think before I do anything? Cruxer’s gonna kill me.
As his men sat or stood or stretched or bound up each other’s wounds, they all watched, and the Forester said, “These names tell me that you are a great man. I have seen great men. The chains you lifted from my wrists tell me that you are a strong man. I have known strong men. But you didn’t dive into that water to save us so that we might be your weapons. You knew we’d sought a coward’s peace. Most men would leave us to the hell we deserve for our faithlessness. The lives you have saved this day will testify unto eternity that you are a good man. A man who risks his life to save strangers testifies not to their worth but to his own. I have never seen or known a man to be great and strong and good as well. I will see you in three days with any who will join me. I care not what others call you; if you will have me, I will call you lord.”
Unable to quite process so much kindness at once, looking for some way to shrug it off and make a joke, Kip glanced over to find Cruxer glowering somewhere.
But Cruxer wasn’t glowering. He beamed. The rest of the Mighty ranged from Winsen’s expression of ‘Of course we’re awesome’ to Big Leo’s stolid approval to Ferkudi’s huge smile. Ben-hadad was had already processed whatever he was feeling and was back to fixing something.
Last Kip looked at Tisis, but even she didn’t give him some humorous out. Her eyes shone with tears of pride. It was as if all of them were reflecting back a different man than Kip had ever thought he was. What if the story I’ve been telling myself about who I am has been wrong?
And a chunk of his self-loathing broke and faded away. Kip straightened his back. “I look forward to seeing you and whoever joins you at Fechín Island,” he told Derwyn Aleph. No joke. No self-deprecatory smile.
Then, having taken all the gear and weapons and provisions they could carry from the first barge, they scuttled it. And far more readily than two hundred men carrying a hundred paces of heavy chain should have been able to, the Cwn y Wawr disappeared into the forest.
Chapter 36
“You cannot go this long without seeing me. Not ever again. Understand? I forbid it. Forbid!”
Karris had given in to the temptation to abuse her powers and decided that she was entitled to the services of the Blackguard’s physicker/masseuse, Rhoda. She’d decided it was acceptable as long as she didn’t take either of them away from their duties. Unfortunately, that meant they were meeting two hours before dawn.
The Chromeria was home to all sorts of strong personalities from all over the world, and with that came idiosyncratic styles of dress and cosmetics use, but even here, Rhoda stood out. Of Tyrean and Parian lineage, she had dusky skin and wavy hair that she wore in a topknot, the explosion of hair above it woven with colored beads. When outside, she wore a broad-brimmed petasos with a hole cut in it for her topknot. Of slim build, except for a round soft belly that made her look perpetually pregnant, she wore more, and more garish, face paint than anyone Karris had ever seen, but no perfume—“That’s for whores,” she said—but once she put her hands on your muscles, nothing else mattered.
Rhoda knew Karris’s body like no one else in the world. She started with a quick examination of Karris’s body—checking the mobility of that left ankle she’d sprained so long ago, testing how far and how evenly her limbs moved. She clucked and pulled and tweaked. She found aches Karris hadn’t even been aware of, and old injuries Karris barely remembered.