The Larion Senators

WRECKAGE

Steven watched Kellin’s horse reach the riverbank. She was shivering, blue with cold, and caught in the numbing throes of a panic attack, but she sat tall in the saddle, seemingly immune. Her soaking cloak dripped river-water, leaving a trail through the patchy snow. Her wet hair was matted against her head.

Garec followed a few paces behind Kellin, still in deep water. He had slipped off the saddle and was furiously trying to regain his seat, using his reins to tug and clawed his way astride the nervous horse. He’d managed to regain the saddle, however ungainly, when the shivering duo clambered onto dry land.

Steven clung to his own reins, his knuckles white with the effort, and tried hard not to look upriver. Unimaginable devastation was coming, but watching that wall of water and debris roll down on them would only distract him from his goal: reaching the riverbank.

But the need to know was unbearable, and Steven glanced west. There it was, a roiling, tumbling mountain of water, littered with corpses, rigging, bits of boats of all sorts, and pieces of houses, farms, barns, stables, whatever it had managed to scoop up on its way across Falkan. There was a deafening roar, like a perpetual thunderclap. Steven gripped the saddle-horn – the reins were no longer up to the challenge – and regretted ever looking back.

I’ll never make it. None of us will.

He felt the magic around him, warming the water to a comfortable bathtub temperature as it had in Meyers’ Vale. He tried to project some of that energy into the swirling current around Gilmour’s horse, but he couldn’t tell if it was effective; he was too distracted by the incoming tide and the thunder. Whilst he wouldn’t die of hypothermia, Steven didn’t have much hope that his power would be able to stave off the wave.

He leaned over and urged his horse, ‘Just a couple more feet, sweetie. C’mon, you can make it; swim, girl, swim!’

When the flood finally reached him, it didn’t strike with the force he’d been expecting. It didn’t shatter his bones, or break over him like an ocean wave, like one of those waves out at that beach Mark’s always talking about, Jones Beach. Instead, Steven felt himself lifted, gently at first, and carried on a burgeoning swell. It felt strangely like a roller-coaster ascent, slow and steady to start with, then careening downhill, unchecked. First he could see the top of the riverbank, then the tops of the trees in the distance, the naked branches stark against the slate grey of winter. He was still on his horse, still facing north and still swimming along in the warm-as-a-bath current, when he saw the wave swallow Garec and Kellin and their horses, all disappearing without even a splash. The world pitched perilously as he heard Gilmour shout something, then everything was brown, turbid, cold, and tumbling wildly, both in his mind and in reality.

Steven held his breath, summoned the magic and let it burst forth, a flailing explosion of self-preservation, but he had no idea if it helped at all, because he kept rolling, lost somewhere beneath the surface.

He tried to swim, but it was pointless. The wave was carrying him at better than forty miles an hour. He felt his horse slip from between his legs and go spinning off. For a few moments he gave up and let himself be carried. The muddy water reminded him strangely of the riverscapes of his life in Colorado; it was always the same, no matter which river, no matter what time of year: light brown, almost beige near the surface, giving way to murky brown, then black in the depths, and whether he was swimming, leaping from a rope swing or tumbling from a raft in whitewater, the underside of all rivers was the same, and this one, however huge and deadly, was no different.

Then he was hit A log, or maybe a heavy beam struck his leg just below the knee. He was sure it was broken, a compound fracture, skin and muscles shredded, the knee hyper-extended… he screamed, but he kept tumbling east towards Wellham Ridge.

Tibia and fibula again, he thought. I can’t believe I broke those fuckers again.

His lungs burned, and he grasped his magic and filled them. Thank Christ for that spell. He wouldn’t drown, not yet, anyway. Something hit him in the small of his back, not a bone-breaker this time, but a puncture by something thin and sharp. He cried out, swallowed a mouthful of muddy water and reached back to feel for the injury, but he couldn’t find it. Instead he clamped his mouth shut, biting his tongue when something hit him in the back of his head. That was a rock. His shoulder scraped against something rough, the ground perhaps; then he was following his feet, upside down but moving fast towards the surface and the lighter-coloured water. A foot broke free of the river; he could feel it jutting into the air, as dissociated from himself as the spinning bits of flotsam and jetsam pelting him from all sides.

Steven twisted onto his stomach, lifted his head and managed a real breath, then another. He managed to avoid being crushed by a skeleton of logs still lashed together, maybe the frame for a thatched roof, ripped from the top of a Falkan farmhouse.

Then he was beneath the surface again, tumbling backwards and waiting for the impact that would knock him senseless. Part of him continued to kick and thrash, fighting a madman’s battle, while the rest of him floated, fluid and graceful, watching the devastation unfold and witnessing the carnage in its wake. He didn’t know if the magic was somehow granting him a welcome feeling of distance from the nightmarish cyclone in the centre of the wave but he did summon enough clarity to regret that he had come so close to finding Hannah, only to die at his best friend’s hand.

He stretched out, arching his back and trying to knife through the water like a human surfboard. It was surprisingly effective, and in that moment’s grace, he folded his hands over his face, covering his head while waiting for the lights to shut off.

They didn’t. The tea colour of the surface water – bright enough to give him hope that he might kick hard with his good leg and get free – began to dim. He wasn’t sinking; the surfboard strategy was keeping him afloat, but it was growing dimmer… something was coming down on him. Steven didn’t know whether it was the crest of the wave, finally breaking, or part of the sailing vessel he had seen somersaulting along the watery ridge moments before, but it was large enough to cast a shadow over everything around him. If it was the ship, he would be broken, but if it was the wave itself, he would be dragged along the riverbed and his skin peeled away in an Eldarni version of what Mark liked to call macadam rash.

Gambling that the ship might not crush him to pieces in deeper water, Steven tried to bend his body into a makeshift rudder, to catch the current and force himself towards the bottom, and perhaps to safety. It didn’t work. The current was too unpredictable for him to do anything more than ride it out. He continued to slam into branches and rocks, felt stones and dirt pelt him in a hundred places at once: his face, hands, neck and back, as he waited for five tons of Falkan schooner to come slamming down on him from above.

He rolled into a ball, tucked his head down, filled his lungs and waited, wondering in a desultory manner if Garec and Kellin had survived, and if he would ever find Gilmour again.

It was some time later when he awakened.

What’s broken?

The world came into focus, as light and colour emerged from behind the curtain of hazy grey and blurry black. Eldarn repositioned itself around, under, above and beside Steven Taylor. He was lying in a shallow puddle of mud and cold river water. Fearing to exacerbate his injuries, he didn’t move.

Tibia and fibula, broken; they must be. Head hurts. What’s the head, anyway? Cranium. That’s it, your pointy little head, dummy. That feels broken, too, maybe a hairline crack. Shoulder’s badly scraped… a pound of flesh? Take two; they’re small… but intact, and my back’s all right.

He snaked a hand down his thigh. I can’t have broken this leg twice in four months; I just can’t. He pulled his hand back. Later. Check it later.

Now, what hurts?

That one was easy: everything.

Take your time; let’s see what you remember. What hurts? Ulna, radius, coccyx… that’s your arse, for everyone in the cheap seats, thank you very much… both clavicles, ribs on the left, ribs on the right, and the knee bone, the patella, feels like it is connected to the shoulder bone, which feels like it’s still connected to the grille of a passing garbage truck. That’s it. That’s all I know, good for probably a D+ on your average biology exam.

Lying still, he tried to focus on anything but the fact that he might have rebroken his leg. Without lifting his head, he endeavoured to take in as much of Eldarn as he could from his current vantage point beside what remained of the Medera River.

He could see a rock, as big a small truck, resting on the razed, muddy ground as if it had been deposited there by a fast-moving glacier. There were countless uprooted trees, lying in myriad ungainly positions throughout the clearing as if they’d been tossed about. If this was a clearing. It was probably a forest until five minutes ago.

The smell of decay found him, tickling the back of his throat. He didn’t want to vomit; he breathed heavily through his mouth for a few seconds, until he was more accustomed to the aroma of upside-down river. It was like autumn, the smell of death and decomposition, but autumn had a way of being delicate about it, of mixing its scents with more pleasant aromas: mulled wine, ripe fruit, mown hay, and wood smoke. This was just the opposite: the hegemonic smell of shit and rotting earth.

Mud and silt coated everything, as if the world had been hastily slathered in a quick coat of something muck-brown, foetid. It was cold now, despite the lingering effects of his warming spell, and he knew he would either need to concentrate enough to recast the magic, or get to his feet and find someplace to dry out.

He could hear the river trickling by somewhere behind him. He guessed he was facing north, lying perhaps two hundred feet from the riverbank. The sustained thunder had passed, even its echoes, and Steven closed his eyes and listened for a moment to the rhythmic babble as the Medera rediscovered its former self and wound its more familiar route towards Orindale. There was no sign of Garec, Kellin or Gilmour, no sign of any of the horses, and no sound of anyone shouting for help… just the river, and the same light breeze he had felt that morning.

Steven closed his eyes. Despite the cold, he might have slept for a few minutes, until the slurp, drag and slurp sounds of something large and broken being dragged through the mud finally roused him. He rolled, with surprising ease, onto his back and lifted his head. It took a moment for everything to make sense; the land looked like it had been bombed. Then, across the mudscape, he saw the grettan, a big female – not nearly as large as the creature that had attacked him in the Blackstones, but a muscular and dangerous animal, nevertheless. She had sustained a serious injury to her back during the floodtide and was dragging her hind legs, grunting as if in pain. The creature’s fur was matted, covered with mud. She bared her teeth with each step, but it was more a show of pain than any real hostility.

‘You planning to eat me?’ Steven pushed himself up. ‘Huh? Eat me and then rest somewhere while you heal?’

The grettan growled something threatening; she hadn’t expected Steven to be alive, never mind capable of mounting a defence.

‘I have bad news for you, sister,’ Steven said. ‘You’re screwed. That’s not going to get better; you’ve got maybe a day or two left, and I wouldn’t recommend any dancing in your condition. So what happened, Dorothy? Someone drop a house on you? I think they dropped a ship on me.’ Steven focused his thoughts inward and brought the magic forth in a tightly woven spell. He thought about just stinging her, driving her off somewhere to die on her own, but that would take time. If there were healthy grettans about, the end for her would be ugly. Instead, he decided to finish her here. ‘Sorry about this, my dear, but it’s for the best.’

He lashed out at a spot between the grettan’s forelegs. The spell slammed into the creature, ripping her apart in a hailstorm of bloody fur and sinew. Steven watched as the animal’s tongue lolled from what was left of its mouth, poking its pink tip into the mud.

‘Nicely done.’

Gilmour. Sonofabitch.

‘I’m glad to see you’re feeling up to a bit of magic. You must be relatively whole, and if you’re not entirely ready for the winter chain-ball tournaments, you’re at least strong enough to sit up and work a spell or two. That’s a relief.’ He pointed towards the grettan’s remains. ‘She was planning on an early lunch, wasn’t she?’

Dragging a leg himself, a bloody piece of cloth over one eye, Gilmour, masquerading for the moment as a Malakasian soldier, made his way across the mud.

‘You’ve got nine lives, old man.’

‘Pissing demons, I’ve got more than nine, Steven. I must’ve used nine up since I met you.’

‘I’ll try to take that as a compliment.’

‘Are you broken and battered?’

‘Am I?’ Steven shrugged. ‘The verdict isn’t in on that yet, but so far, I think I need a new head, new leg, new arse, a new set of tyres and a couple of gallons of paint.’

‘Oh, good. Is that all? I was worried.’ He sat with a sustained groan. ‘Actually, I think there’s a place just up the road where we can get all those things.’

Steven suppressed a chuckle. ‘Don’t make me laugh; my ribs hurt.’

‘Sorry.’

‘How about you?’

‘Cuts, scrapes, abrasions in embarrassing places and some damage to my hip, but I’m betting you can fix that.’

‘I’ll need a box of Band-Aids and a couple of quarts of hydrogen peroxide. Any broken bones?’

‘A dislocated finger, but I took care of that before I came to find you.’ Gilmour held up the swollen knuckle. ‘Let me see your leg.’

Steven indicated his calf, the same leg that had been nearly bitten off in the Blackstones, the same leg that had tripped him up in the landfill outside Idaho Springs, where Lessek’s key had been buried. ‘It’s numb. The cold helps.’ He ran his hands along either side of his knee and down. ‘Actually, it doesn’t feel…’ He stopped, then tried to bend it. It complied, with only a twinge of muscle cramp. ‘Holy shit!’ he cried, looking enormously surprised.

Gilmour smiled. ‘You used the magic?’

‘No, not here, not since I woke up here – oh, I did! It was right as the wave was swallowing me up; I just let fly with whatever I had inside me. I called it up and it blasted out into the water. I didn’t think it did-’

Gilmour finished his thought. ‘It did. That’s good. It kept you relatively safe.’

‘I don’t feel relatively safe.’ He rubbed one of several lumps that had welled up on the back of his head.

‘Imagine where you would be right now without it,’ Gilmour said.

‘You’re right,’ Steven agreed, ‘my leg would have been broken, at the very least, and I suppose I would have ended up drowning… oh, shit, what about Garec and Kellin?’

‘I haven’t seen them,’ Gilmour said quietly.

Ignoring his aches and pains, Steven pulled himself to his feet, then helped Gilmour. ‘We need to look for them; they could be lying anywhere, injured badly, dying-’

‘We’ll look for a day or two,’ Gilmour sighed, ‘but then we’ll have to move on. We can’t forget where we’re going, or why.’

Steven grudgingly agreed. ‘We keep to our schedule: twelve days from now, we need to be on the Ravenian Sea, off the mouth of that fjord. I watched them get swept up by the wave, but they were much further north than I was; they might have tumbled around for a bit and come out just fine.’

Gilmour didn’t seem hopeful. ‘We’ll attempt a crossing in Mark’s skiff if they’ll don’t manage to meet us with a vessel.’

‘But that will mean using-’

‘I know.’

‘But he’ll sense us coming-’

‘I know.’ Gilmour frowned. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’

‘Shit.’ Steven opened his tunic and checked his shoulder. It was deeply scraped and bloody, but once clean, it would heal over.

‘You saw the remains of that schooner riding the wave before it crashed over us?’ Gilmour asked. ‘It was too big for this river, certainly this far east.’

Steven paled. ‘You mean it came all the way from Orindale? But that would mean that Mark…’

‘Right again,’ Gilmour said. ‘Even if Garec and Kellin reach the city, they may not find much in the way of seagoing transportation available.’

Steven wiped his eyes and swept the wet hair off his forehead. ‘So it may be just you and me. Where’s the spell book and the portal?’

‘I hope they’re still tied to my saddle. I caught a whiff of them from over there.’ He pointed, then added, ‘I don’t think it’s very far. I was on my way when I stumbled on you and your ladyfriend.’

‘All right,’ Steven said, ‘let’s go.’

‘First,’ Gilmour said, grabbing hold of him, ‘I need you to think about fixing my hip.’

‘I don’t know anything about hips, Gilmour.’

‘Sure you do,’ he replied, ‘you fixed Garec’s lung, didn’t you? You kept your own bones from breaking.’

Steven was confused. ‘But they were moments of- well, heightened emotion, really. I just took what I knew about physiology and infused it with-’

‘Exactly,’ Gilmour said. ‘Where do you think new spells come from? Why do you think we spent all that time in your world? Collected all those books? Sponsored research and medical teams from Sandcliff for all those Twinmoons?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Think about the magic you’ve done, the crafty spells, not the bombastic stuff.’

‘Yes, I remember, “Explosions aren’t magic”.’

‘Good. You’ve been paying attention. But think about how you managed to heal Garec, to neutralise the acid-cloud, to find and defeat the almor, to keep yourself warm beneath the water, to keep yourself free from the need for oxygen for so long. There is a common denominator for all those spells, Steven.’

‘What’s that? Knowledge?’

‘Of course. The knowledge and experience you have of anything, human lungs for example, impacts the power you bring. It’s how we used to generate common phrase spells, the complex spells called via a series of common phrases in their incantations. Those spells weren’t constructed because their incantations were similar; their incantations were derived because their etiologies, their origins and impacts overlapped: they had common effects, because they were based on overlapping fields of knowledge or research.’

‘But I’ve tried to operate out of compassion…’

‘And your magic is powerful when you’re compassionate,’ Gilmour assured him, ‘far more powerful than anything I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been at this for some Twinmoons. Remember what happened when you handed the hickory staff to Nerak; even I doubted you.’

Steven sighed. ‘All right, I’ll try it. Let me see your hip.’

‘That’s the spirit, my boy. Fix me up; I might have a race to run later today.’

‘Wait a moment.’ Steven looked up at his friend. ‘Why don’t you fix it?’

‘I don’t know how to.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Maybe.’ Gilmour smiled. ‘I want to see you do it. You’re the sorcerer, Steven. I’m just an old teacher, and we still don’t know if Mark can detect your power. Nerak certainly couldn’t.’

‘Grand, a physiology test.’

‘Don’t think about it that way.’

‘How should I think about it? As a Larion magic test? At least I passed physiology!’

Gilmour laughed and Steven scolded him to hold still. He examined the injury, then asked, ‘So Nerak was the one who put all the common phrase spells together?’

‘Many of them, yes.’

‘I would have thought it was Lessek who did that.’

‘Well, Lessek built the foundations which Nerak – all of us – were able to build on, that’s true, and Lessek summoned and created magic. He called all the magic in the known universe into the spell table; it was an impressive and powerful feat. What Nerak did was to refine and enrich the Larion magic, to expand it through research and knowledge – just like you’re doing now.’

And he did it through common phrase spells?’

‘Amongst other things, yes.’

‘The same spells he eventually used to destroy the Larion Senate?’ Steven felt around Gilmour’s hip joint with his fingertips.

‘Some of them, yes. But for a long time, Nerak’s resources went beyond hatred and destruction. He was a powerful asset to the Senate. How’s it going?’

Steven said, ‘You dislocated the joint, similar to your finger, but this joint is much bigger and a dislocation here involves a good deal more tissue damage. The bones are back where they belong; that probably happened when you were tumbling about, it popped out and then popped right back in. But the damage is to the muscles and connective tissue holding the whole works together. You can’t play sports for twenty years and not see a few of these, so you’re in luck this time. Just don’t come to me with a case of lung cancer or anything.’

‘Not to worry.’

‘The way you smoke, you might surprise yourself.’

‘Just heal me so we can be on our way, please.’ As he felt the familiar tingle and itch of magic at work beneath his skin he closed his eyes and tried to remain still.

Steven went back to his previous subject. ‘So how long before the fall of the Larion Senate was Nerak generating the spells that eventually became his undoing?’

Gilmour stared at a spot in the distance. He answered quietly, ‘I have no idea, Steven, but I fear it was a long time.’

‘So he might have found critical bits of what he needed while visiting Earth?’

‘I’m almost certain he did.’

‘And he might have experimented with spells to desecrate or destroy long before he brought them to bear against his own brotherhood?’

‘Again, I’m sure he did.’

‘Why didn’t he kill you earlier?’

‘He didn’t kill me at all; I’m standing here right now.’

Steven laughed, and a bit of magic slipped from his finger to lance through Gilmour’s thigh. As he winced, Steven apologised. ‘Sorry, sorry. I was distracted. Sorry.’

He went on, ‘What I meant was why – if you and Kantu were the only real threats to him and his work – why didn’t Nerak arrange for your death and then take over the Senate at his leisure?’

Gilmour drew a breath as if to respond, then he paused and, as if thinking to himself, said, ‘Honestly? I don’t know. But your question has some merit; why wouldn’t he have tried to kill me? I was his equal; he couldn’t do anything radical, new, dangerous or different without consulting me. Perhaps he did try. I don’t know.’

‘Hmm,’ Steven said. All right. How’s that?’

Gilmour tested the leg. ‘Much better, thanks.’

‘Don’t mention it, just leave your insurance card with my receptionist on your way out, and don’t take more than one lollipop.’

‘Agreed.’ Gilmour stretched, and started across the mud.

Steven brushed as much of the filth from his clothes as he could and joined him. After a few paces in shared silence, he asked, ‘So where is Lessek now?’

‘He’s dead.’

‘Is that why we only get to see him in dreams and memories?’

‘And on Seer’s Peak,’ Gilmour added.

‘How’d he die?’

Again Gilmour paused. ‘I don’t know. It’s my understanding that in the earliest Twinmoons of the Larion Senate, there were not as many regulations and policies governing the transport of foreign objects and substances back and forth through the far portals.’

‘Ah, drug-runners, even way back then. The Coast Guard must have had a hell of a time tracking them down.’

‘Not drugs so much as trinkets, innovations, a few get-rich schemes.’

‘What’s that have to do with Lessek?’

‘Well, this is all legend, mind you, but we have been led to believe that a Senator, perhaps Lessek himself, came back through the portal with something deadly.’

Steven slowed, his boots sinking to the heels in silt. ‘What was it? A weapon? Poison? Explosives?’

‘A virus.’

‘No shit,’ Steven frowned. ‘An unfamiliar viral infection with nothing in your immune system to battle it, I bet you lost thousands.’

‘And Lessek was killed.’

‘He died in disgrace? After all that he did for Eldarn?’ He looked at Gilmour, who shrugged. ‘But since then history has recalled his greatness and elevated him back to an appropriate position in Eldarni memory?’

‘It has,’ Gilmour agreed, ‘but what good is that to Lessek now?’

‘Just press down on it, rutting whores!’ Kellin said. ‘I’ll stitch it up, but we have to stop the bleeding.’

‘It’s not stopping, Kellin.’ Garec tried not to sound nervous. With his chin pressed against his chest and both hands pushing down on a broad flap of scalp that had been peeled back over part of his skull, it was difficult to do. ‘It’s been bleeding like this since I landed here.’

‘Just keep pressure on it; I need a moment to get some clean thread. If we use dirty thread, it’ll get infected, and we’ll just have to rip it out and start again.’

‘Fine, that’s fine with me.’ He took a deep breath. He could feel the blood running over his head, behind his ears, down the back of his neck, along his cheeks and even across his forehead into his eyes, and he could smell it too. ‘Demonshit, Kellin, just stitch it up with anything you’ve got. We’ll let it clot and then do it with clean thread tomorrow.’

‘You’ll be all right.’

‘I’m going to bleed to death!’

‘You’ll be all right.’ Her hands shook as she rifled through her pack. Her horse was dead, his head crushed against a tree on the riverbank, but her saddlebags and pack were still lashed to the corpse. Her ribs flared with pain and one collarbone throbbed as she searched for a clean needle and a length of sturdy thread, preferably a piece that hadn’t been stained brown with filthy river water so she could stitch up Garec’s scalp – it’s going to be a lot of stitches, great rutting Pragans! – and then see to her own injuries. From the way one arm was dangling numb and useless at her side, she feared she had broken her collarbone. As soon as her adrenalin waned it would start hurting; she knew that much. And the pain in her ribs could only mean that she had cracked at least one, if not more.

‘I’ve got it!’ she called and hustled back. ‘Now, I need you to let go for a moment. I’ve got to lift it up and make sure everything is cleaned out of there. If there’s any dirt left, it’ll get infected and you’ll be dead before we can get you to a healer. Do you understand?’

Garec whimpered a little. Now he was frightened.

Kellin took both Garec’s hands in her own, squeezed them tightly and guided them gently into his lap. ‘It’ll just take a moment, then we’ll get to stitching it up.’

‘Grand,’ Garec said. ‘It’s just that… it’s just a lot of blood, Kellin.’

‘It’s not that much,’ she lied; he looked as though someone had emptied a bucket of blood over his head, and the wound was still bleeding. She took a calming breath and wiped his forehead with the cleanest cloth she’d been able to find. ‘I don’t want you to worry; you’ll be in one piece again in no time.’

A hoarse cough followed by a prolonged wet wheeze reached them from somewhere in the underbrush. The sound was unmistakable: a death rattle.

‘What was that?’ Kellin asked.

‘I’m guessing that was my horse,’ Garec said sadly. ‘She took a branch in the chest; I guess it went into her lungs. It was just a matter of time.’

‘Great grettan shit,’ Kellin muttered.

‘No matter,’ Garec said, his voice wavering. ‘If I pass out – I’m about to; I can feel it coming – I want you to bind my head, tie it up tight, then go find a horse. With all this devastation, there’ll be plenty of them running about – I’d think a lot of the farms around here will have been destroyed, buildings damaged, topsoil stripped… find a horse, Kellin, and get us to Orindale. Are you hurt?’

‘Shut it, Garec,’ she ordered. ‘I know what I’m doing, but I need you to shut yourself up right quick; I’m trying to work.’

‘Find a horse, Kellin,’ Garec’s voice was weaker now, a whisper. ‘Bring my bow and quivers and Steven’s silver…’ His head slumped forward; his hands slipped from his lap into the mud.

Kellin was horribly nervous, working alone and against time. She tried to relax and focus on her work, muttering to herself, ‘There’s no need to rush, no need to hurry. He’s fine; he’s sleeping, that’s all. It’s better this way, he won’t be complaining and squirming around. Just clean the wound and sew it up. You have to find a horse and then clean water, but first things first – how does it go? Well begun and… some rutting thing.’ She peeled back Garec’s scalp to expose the layer of bloody muscle beneath.

The bleeding was astonishing, even for a head wound, but when she’d finished cleaning it, she couldn’t find see any evidence that the skull had been cracked. She’d never seen anything like this before, and had nothing with which to compare it. Were any major blood vessels severed? Were there any there? Yes, at least one, across the top of the head – but would the bleeding be even worse if an important vein or artery had been cut? Would it close up on its own, or should she try to cauterise it somehow, maybe in some sort of makeshift branding ceremony? But she didn’t even know where it was, never mind how to cauterise it. She supposed she could heat up an iron and singe the spots that were bleeding the worst, but she had no dry tinder, nothing to burn and no iron to hand for the task.

She sighed. ‘Forget it,’ she told herself, ‘just stitch him up and run like mad for Orindale. Keep him full of water and, hopefully, he’ll sleep the whole way.’

She rinsed the wound several times with the cleanest water she had been able to find, then, trying to keep the flap of skin in place by leaning on it with her numb arm, she stitched the wound closed as quickly and carefully as she could. Garec twitched and groaned each time she pushed the needle through his flesh, but she closed her ears to his cries and concentrated on making her stitches as small and neat as possible, thanking the gods of the Northern Forest it was the other arm that was damaged.

Several stitches along, Kellin realised that she was closing the half-moon tear crookedly. ‘Mother of a whore-!’ she growled, and thought about pulling out of the thread and beginning again. Garec moved restlessly. ‘No, toss it all,’ she decided, ‘I’ll just squish a bit of it up there in a small wrinkle. He’ll never notice.’ And pulling a tiny pinch of skin into a small fold, she aligned the rest of the injury perfectly and finished the job with deft alacrity, despite shaking hands.

A quarter-aven later, Kellin had managed to get Garec to drink nearly half a water-skin. It wasn’t the cleanest of water, and she was pretty sure he’d suffer for it later, but right now it was more important to get as much water into Garec’s body as possible. She prayed to the gods of the Northern Forest that she wasn’t killing him – dehydration and disease had accounted for more casualties than any war ever could.

Garec half-awakened, enough to repeat his orders to find a horse and get them both to Orindale.

Kellin promised she would, but they needed rest first. She wrapped him in their cloaks, though they were still soaking wet, and tried to drag him up the bank, but it was no use; her ribs and collarbone protested too much. The pain was overwhelming, and Kellin fell in the muck, weeping quietly, shivering and wishing that Steven and Gilmour would find them somehow. As wary as she had been of the two sorcerers and their fantastic abilities, she longed for one of Steven’s campfires right now.

But they were alone and injured. They’d have to do this themselves. ‘We’re farmers,’ she rehearsed, ‘farmers from outside the city. We were hurt badly when the wave came through. Can you help us, please?’

She found a spare tunic in her pack and with her good hand clumsily tied a loop in the end of each sleeve. She pulled the sleeves around herself from behind, then tucked a short stick through the loops and twisted it, tighter and tighter, until she cried out, screaming from the pain in her shoulder.

‘We’re farmers!’ she shouted, cranking the stick another half turn and pulling the tunic splint close around her injured arm and ribs. ‘We’re farmers from outside the city. We were hurt when the wave came through, hurt badly. Can you help us, please?’ She tucked one end of the stick into her leggings. Her shoulder was immobile and her ribs braced; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now.

Kellin rested her forehead in the mud. The cold felt good on her face. ‘Just a moment’s rest,’ she said. ‘I need a moment; then I’ll find a horse. I promise.’

It was nearly dark when she woke; at least an aven had passed. Shivering and confused, she sat up with a start. Garec was sleeping, but he looked as if he had been cast deep beneath the shadow of death. She wondered if he had already started the lonely journey to the Northern Forest.

In between the mud and dried blood Garec’s skin was pasty-white. He was shivering as well, and an inhuman humming sound came from the back of his throat: death’s drone. Kellin shook him, slapped him hard, then shouted his name, trying to call him back from the forest path.

Garec murmured, opened his eyes briefly and then slumped back into unconsciousness. He wouldn’t live through the aven, not like this, wet and unsheltered.

‘I’ve got to make a fire,’ Kellin said out loud. ‘I need flint and tinder, and something dry.’ She looked around. Everything was wet. ‘North, away from the river, it’ll be dry there.’ She ground her teeth together until her jaw hurt. ‘Stay awake, you bastard,’ she murmured as she staggered into the brush. ‘Stay awake. Make a fire.’

Garec had a flint in his pack. She had heard his horse – I hope it was his horse – die in the bushes off to her left. If she could get the flint, and find some dry wood outside the waves’ wreckage area, she might be able to light a small fire and warm herself for a few stolen moments, and then she’d come back for Garec. ‘But he’ll have to wake up,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll have to help me; I’ll never be able to drag him that far. But first things first…’

She found the horse, and Garec had been right: it had a splintered branch protruding from its chest. The flint was in the saddlebag, but it was another twenty-five paces before Kellin reached a dry area of the forest. If she was glad for anything, Kellin thought, it was that the flood had thrown them north. They hadn’t been inside that roiling nightmare very long; had it cast them south, or carried them further east, they would both be dead already.

Igniting the fire took longer than she had planned, but she finally captured a small spark in the handful of dry tinder she had scraped together, then generously heaped winter brush on the determined little flame. ‘Who cares?’ she said, ‘I’d be happy to have the whole rutting forest on fire. You need to find us, Steven? Well, that’ll be easy; just look for the big orange glow in the sky.’ Kellin laughed for the first time all day, then winced. ‘All right, no laughing,’ she told herself firmly, a smile still on her face.

With a hearty blaze crackling, Kellin added several logs. She knew it would take time to drag Garec – if he’s still alive – through the forest, so she was trying to ensure there’d be at least some smouldering coals when she returned. She stood close to the flames, feeling the heat on her face and watching tendrils of steam rise from her clothing. She captured the feeling and secured it inside her mind: a warm place, a summer place, where no one ever found themselves washed two hundred paces through the woods by a rogue wave as big as a small mountain. Then she went back for Garec.

She was feeling better for a bit of heat and moved faster, determined to find reserves of strength to heave the Ronan bowman back to the campfire, but once outside its peripheral glow, she felt the chill creep back into her bones. Her clothes were still wet and her skin rose in dimpled gooseflesh. She started shivering, great quaking spasms. She couldn’t do this…

When the mule brayed, Kellin pissed her leggings. She couldn’t see anything, and hadn’t heard it moving through the brush. She thanked the gods that the animal was not a squad of armed Malakasians; they would have had her gutted, sewn up and gutted again before she’d even realised they were there. If she hadn’t been so cold and in so much pain, it would have been hideously embarrassing – but there was no one to witness her discomposure, so she tried to recover herself and hurried to find the animal, lost but otherwise healthy, munching bits of brown vegetation poking through the patches of snow as it wandered in the general direction of home.

‘Well, aren’t you a surprise?’ Kellin said, hoping to sweet-talk the mule into carrying her and Garec to the nearest healer’s doorstep. ‘Would you like an apple?’ The mule didn’t answer; it didn’t appear to care one whit that Kellin was there at all. ‘No? How about a crate of apples?’ she said softly, approaching the animal. ‘Come on, we have a little job tonight, and then Kellin will get you all the dry grass and thistles you can eat, agreed?’

The mule was wearing a rope bridle and had the remains of a pink ribbon tied into its mane: it was obviously a child’s pet.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked as she took hold of the bridle; the mule didn’t care, and when she tugged, surprisingly, the mule complied without complaint, plodding happily alongside her until they found Garec, looking worse, barely breathing, still wrapped in the damp cloaks.

‘Mule,’ Kellin said, patting the animal gently, ‘I need you to wait right here while I help Garec up. Will you do that?’

Again, nothing.

‘Fine, I didn’t expect you to answer,’ she told it. ‘You’re not much of a conversationalist; I can respect that in a beast of burden, but I need you to understand that if you run off, I’m going to find you, kill you, eat you and then make a nice pair of winter pants out of your miserable hide. Understand?’

The mule twitched an ear. Kellin knelt in the mud and pressed her cheek against Garec’s forehead. Panic struck hard: he was too cold.

‘Oh, no, no, no, please no,’ she cried, shaking again. She moved her hands back and forth between Garec’s hands, cold and stiff in his lap, and his ivory face, marked with a roadmap of dried blood. She put her cheek near his mouth, felt nothing and moved closer, pressed her skin against his lips, blue-black in the moonlight. Still nothing.

Kellin blamed the cold: she was too cold to feel his breath. He was breathing; of course he was. She was simply too cold to feel it. She rocked back on her haunches, hoping something would come to her. She was too cold, too tired and too injured to lift him herself; as determined as she wanted to be, Garec was too heavy, a deadweight. ‘Think, think, think of something. Think,’ she chanted, rocking back and forth, ‘it’s too cold. I can’t believe it’s come to this…’

The rope bridle.

Kellin slashed through one end of the mule’s reins and hastily tugged the free end across Garec’s chest and beneath his armpits. He didn’t stir at all; there was no sign that he was still alive. Now Kellin longed to see a bit of blood seep from the wound on his head, just a few drops, that was all, just to confirm that his heart was still beating.

With the rope knotted as tightly as she could with one functional hand, Kellin took hold of the bridle and tugged the mule towards the fire. After a moment, the animal followed docilely, dragging Garec through the hardening mud.

At the campfire, Kellin threw her arms around the mule’s neck and buried her face in its musty fur. The beast nuzzled the crook of her arm and offered a derisive snort that said, ‘Touching, but how about my apples?’ She managed a faint grin and set about untying Garec, making sure to link the rope around a tree when she was done.

She managed to untangle their wet cloaks and spread them over low-hanging branches, as near to the fire as she could get them without setting them alight. They started steaming almost immediately as she pushed Garec close to the fire.

She spent a few moments gathering a big pile of logs, then returned and sat herself, cradling Garec’s head in her lap, willing the heat to restore him to her, whole and unharmed, save for the crooked needlework ringing his scalp.

‘Rest on me,’ she whispered, tossing another log onto the fire. ‘I’ll stay awake and keep the fire going; you rest on me.’ Her ribs blazed; the shattered ends of her collarbone scraped against one another and a cold sweat chilled her face. She was sick, exhausted, but she had done it; she had done everything she could to save him. Whether or not he lived through the night was now up to the gods. She stroked his face, then massaged his legs and arms as well as she could with just one hand, willing his blood to start circulating into his extremities.

Rocking him this way in her lap, she passed the night and saw dawn begin to whiten the eastern sky. Shortly before sun-up, Kellin finally fell asleep, Garec’s head resting across her thighs.