Page 434

SURVIVING

‘M AMA ? W E CAN see Bingtown harbour now.’

Keffria lifted her aching head from the pillow.

Selden stood in the doorway of the small stateroom they shared on the Kendry.

She had not truly been asleep. She had simply been curled around her misery, trying to find out how to live with it.

She looked at her son. His lips were chapped, his cheeks and brow reddened and chafed by the wind.

Ever since his misadventures in the buried city, there had been a distant look behind his eyes, as if he were in some way lost to her, even as he stood before her.

Selden was her last living child. That should have made her desperate to cherish him.

She should have wanted him by her side every moment.

Instead, it numbed her heart to him. Best not to love him too much.

Like the others, he could be taken from her at any time.

‘Are you coming to see? It looks really strange.’ Selden paused. ‘Some of the people on deck are crying.’

‘I’m coming,’ she said wearily. Time to face it.

All the way here, she had avoided speaking to Selden of what they might find.

She swung her feet out of bed. She pushed at her hair then gave it up.

A shawl would cover it. She found one, still damp from the last time she had been on deck, flung it about herself and followed him onto the deck.

It was a grey day and the rain was steady. That felt right. She joined the other passengers looking towards Bingtown. No one chattered or pointed: they stood and stared silently. Tears ran down some faces.

Bingtown harbour was a bone yard. The masts of ruined vessels stuck up from the water.

Kendry manoeuvred carefully around the sunken ships, heading not towards the liveships’ traditional dock but to one that was newly repaired.

The clean yellow lumber contrasted oddly with the weathered grey and scorched black of the rest. Men on the dock waited to welcome them. At least, she hoped it was welcome.

Selden leaned against her. Absently, she lifted a hand and set it on his shoulder. Whole sections of the city were black ruins, burnt skeletons of buildings glistening in the falling rain. The boy leaned against her more heavily. ‘Is Grandma all right?’ he asked in a muffled voice.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied wearily. She was so tired of telling him she didn’t know.

She didn’t know if his father was alive.

She didn’t know if his brother was alive.

She didn’t know what had happened to Malta.

The Kendry had searched down the Rain Wild River to its mouth and found nothing.

At Reyn’s frantic insistence, they had turned back and searched up the river all the way back to Trehaug.

They had found no sign of the small boat that Reyn claimed he had seen.

Keffria had never spoken it aloud, but she wondered if Reyn had not imagined it.

Perhaps he had wanted so badly for Malta to be alive that he had deceived himself.

Keffria knew what that was like. At Trehaug, Jani Khuprus had boarded the Kendry.

Before they departed the Rain Wild City, they sent a bird to Bingtown, informing the Council that they had not recovered the Satrap, but were continuing the search.

It was a foolish hope, but one that neither Keffria nor Reyn could abandon.

On this last trip down the Rain Wild River, Keffria had spent every evening on deck, staring out through the gathering dusk.

Time after time, she had been sure she glimpsed a tiny rowing boat on the river.

Once she had seen Malta standing up in it, one hand lifted in a plea for help, but it had only been a log, torn loose from the bank, a root upraised in despair as it floated past.

Even after the Kendry had left the river behind, she had kept her nightly vigils on the deck.

She could not trust the ship’s lookout to watch with a mother’s eyes.

Last night, through a chilling downpour, she had glimpsed a Chalcedean ship that the Kendry had easily outrun.

Last night’s Chalcedean vessel had been alone, but during their journey their lookout had sighted other galleys in groups of two or three, and two great Chalcedean sailing ships.

All had either ignored the Kendry, or given only token chase.

What, the captain had demanded, were the raiders waiting for?

Were they converging on the mouth of the Rain River?

On Bingtown? Were they part of a fleet that would take over the Cursed Shores?

Reyn and Jani had joined the captain in his useless debating, but Keffria saw no use in speculation.

Malta was gone. Keffria did not know if she had died in the sunken city or perished in the river.

That she would never know ate at her like a canker.

Would she ever find out what had become of Wintrow and Kyle?

She tried to hope that they still survived, but could not.

Hope was too steep a mountain to climb. She feared she would only fall into an abyss of despair when the hope proved futile.

She lived instead in a suspension of all feeling. Now was all there was.

Reyn Khuprus stood beside his mother. The rain soaked his veil.

When the wind stirred it, it slapped lightly against his face.

There was Bingtown, fully as damaged as he had expected it to be from the news the messenger-birds had brought to Trehaug.

He tried to find an emotion to fit to the sight, but none were left to him.

‘It’s worse than I feared,’ his mother muttered beside him. ‘How can I ask aid of the Bingtown Council when their own city is a shambles, and their coast menaced by Chalcedean ships?’

That was supposed to be part of their mission here.

Jani Khuprus had often represented the Rain Wild Traders to their kin in Bingtown, but seldom on so grave a mission.

After she had formally apologized to the Bingtown Council for the unfortunate loss of Satrap Cosgo and his Companion, she would ask for assistance for the Rain Wild Traders of Trehaug.

The destruction of the ancient Elderling city was almost complete.

With much careful work, parts of the city might eventually be reopened.

In the meantime, the Trader families who had depended on the strange and wonderful objects unearthed in the city for their commerce were left abruptly destitute.

Those families made up the backbone of Trehaug.

Without the Elderling city to plunder, there was no economic reason for Trehaug to exist. While Trehaug harvested some foods from the Rain Wild forest, they had no fields in which to grow grain or pasture cattle.

They had always bartered for food, supplying their needs through Bingtown.

The Chalcedean interruption of trade was already felt in Trehaug.

With winter coming, the situation would soon be desperate.

Reyn knew his mother’s deepest fear. She believed this latest disaster might destroy the Rain Wild folk.

Their population had dwindled in the last two generations.

Rain Wild children were often stillborn, or died in the first few months.

Even those who lived did not have as long a life span as ordinary folk.

Reyn himself did not expect to live much beyond his thirtieth year.

It was one reason the Rain Wild Traders often sought their mates among their Bingtown kin.

Such matches were more likely to be fecund, and the resulting children stronger.

But Bingtown folk, kin or no, had become less willing in the last two generations to come to the Rain Wilds.

Gifts for the family of a prospective spouse had risen in size and value and number.

Witness his own family’s willingness to forgive the debt on a liveship simply to assure Reyn a bride.

With Malta lost, Jani knew Reyn would never wed nor produce children for the Khuprus family.

The bride-gifts would have been in vain.

With the beggaring of Trehaug, other Rain Wild families would be sore pressed to feed the children they had, let alone negotiate for mates for them.

The Rain Wild folk might disappear altogether.

So Jani would come to Bingtown, to explain the loss of the Satrap and beg for aid.

The combination of the two errands was a deep affront to her pride.

Reyn felt sorry for his mother, but distanced by his own grief.

The loss of the Satrap could trigger a war that might mean the complete destruction of Bingtown.

The ancient Elderling city he loved was destroyed.

But these tragedies were now merely the backdrop to his agony at losing Malta.

He had caused her death. By bringing her to his city, he had put her on the path to her death.

The only creature he blamed more was Tintaglia, the dragon.

He despised himself for the way he had romanticized the dragon.

He had believed her capable of nobility and wisdom, had lionized her as the last of her glorious kind.

In reality, she was an ungrateful, selfish and egotistical beast. Surely, she could have saved Malta if she had only put her mind to the task.

For his mother’s sake, he tried to say something positive. ‘It looks as if some of the folk have begun rebuilding,’ he pointed out.

‘Yes. Barricades,’ she observed as the ship approached the dock. She was right. With a sinking heart, Reyn noted that the men on the dock were well armed. They were Traders, for he recognized several among them, and the captain of the Kendry was already roaring a greeting to them.