The Assassin's Curse (13 page)

  "Can't… hold this… Get to the river." Naji's voice was right in my ear.

  I didn't know if he meant he couldn't hold the protection spell or if he couldn't hold on to his life, but I wasn't taking no chances. I set the horse to running again.

  "How far are we?" I asked, shouting into the wind and the sand.

  Naji groaned and buried his face into my shoulder. Even through his armor I could tell that his body was hotter than normal.

  I rode the horse as hard as I could without having it collapse beneath us. Every time I slowed it down my hands shook and I made myself aware of Naji's breath, waiting for it to stop. But it never did.

  The sun set. The protection spell held on. And so did Naji.

  And then the landscape started to change. I didn't notice at first, in the gray twilight, but the shrubbery got more and more plentiful – it didn't look so much like a desert no more. The moon came out, full and heavy and fat in the sky, casting enough light to see. Naji's breath was thin, weak. The horse panted and trembled.

  I smelled water.

  Fresh, clean, sweet water. Then I heard it, babbling like voices, and I couldn't help it, I started to cry. I thought maybe I were imagining it, just cause I wanted it so bad.

  "Canyon," Naji said. His voice made me jump. "Stop."

  I slowed the horse down. The land dropped off not far from us, and I figured the river was down in the canyon, carving its way through the desert to the sea.

  "How are we gonna get down?" I asked.

  Naji didn't say anything, only gasped and choked and pressed up against me.

  "Stay here," I said, and I climbed off the horse. Naji slumped forward, his head lolling. I crept through the shrubbery till I came to the edge of the canyon. Then I crouched down on my knees and leaned over.

  The river was a line of starlight flowing through the darkness. The drop wasn't too far, but I couldn't risk jumping, not knowing the water's depth. And I had to concern myself with Naji and the horse, both of whom needed water. Fortunately the sides of the canyons sloped down pretty gently, and I figured the horse could probably climb down, assuming we did it slow.

  I knew I couldn't wait till morning.

  Naji was still slumped over the horse's back. His hands were dark with blood, and his blood soaked the back of my dress. I nudged him, and every second he didn't move, my chest got tighter. Then he rolled his head toward me.

  "We're climbing down to the river," I said. "You have to hold on. I'm going to lead the horse."

  He nodded and weakly threaded his hands through the horse's mane. I grabbed hold of the reins and tugged and the horse lurched forward. Its whole body was covered in white frothy sweat. I hoped it could make it down to the river.

  The climbing was slow but not as difficult as I had thought. Showers of stone and sand fell beneath our feet, shimmering on their way down. Every noise we made echoed through the darkness, and the desert night's chill laid over the sweat and heat of my exertion.

  At one point Naji nearly slid off the horse. I caught him and, with a burst of strength I shouldn't have had, shoved him back into place. I grabbed his wrist and checked for his pulse – still there, thank Kaol and her sacred starfish, even though it was faint, the whisper of a heartbeat.

  I let myself get in one round of curses and then moved us on our way. Eventually the sand and stone gave way to soft pale grasses, and as soon as we stepped onto flat ground, onto the riverbank, I let out a holler of victory that rang up and down the canyon walls. The horse trotted up to the water and took to drinking, Naji still slouched on his back. When the horse bent down, Naji swung back his head and twisted sideways and I ran up to catch him and let him down easy on the riverbed. I pulled the mask away, my hand brushing against his scarred skin. He stirred and moved toward my touch, but he already looked like a dead thing. Ashen skin, sunken eyes.

  While the horse slurped at the river, I scooped some water in my hand and dripped it across Naji's face, hoping to hell that he'd drink some of it. His lips, cracked and bleeding, parted a little, and I went back and forth, dribbling water a little at a time. Then I cracked open his armor, careful as I could. The inside was coated with blood, and the fabric of his robes was stiff to the touch.

  I pressed my hand against the side of his face. His eyelids fluttered. "Naji," I said. "Naji, I need you to wake up. I don't know how to treat you."

  He moaned something in his language, words like rose thorns.

  "Damn it, Naji, I don't know what that means!" I slammed my fist into the riverbed. Mud ran up between my fingers.

  He moaned again, lifted one hand, and then dropped it against his chest, dropped it down to his side. His blood glimmered in the moonlight.

  I sat back on my heels and stared at him and thought of wounds I'd treated back on Papa's ship, knife cuts and bullet shots, bruised faces and broken fingers. Ain't never anything done by magic. The rare occasion something like that came in, Mama took care of it.

  Mama. I wished she were here now, her and her magic, the magic of the sea, of water–

  The river.

  I crawled down to the river's edge. Everything was silver and light, cold and beautiful. The horse had wandered off, blending into the shadows. I'd never been able to talk to the water. But Mama had told me you got to want it, and maybe before I never wanted it enough, maybe before I never needed it.

  I crawled into the water. The cold cut right through me, made all my bones rattle. Silt drifted up around my bare legs. I closed my eyes, concentrated hard as I could.

  "River," I said. My voice ran up and down the walls of the canyon. It became a million voices at once. "River, I ask to speak with you."

  Those were the words Mama had told me a long time ago. And I waited, but the water just kept pushing past my waist, tugging on my dress.

  Then I remembered. Mama casting gifts into the ocean. I had to give a gift.

  The camel had run off with my money, so all I had left that belonged to me was the protection charm Naji made me and the knife I used to save his life. I threw the knife into the water. Mama always said the water knows the true value of things. And this was a trade, one way of saving his life for another.

  I said my request again, louder this time, filling my voice with meaning and purpose, with pain and sorrow. If I let Naji die, my voice said, not in words but in tone, I as good as killed him.

  The way I killed Tarrin of the Hariri.

  This time, the babble of the river fell quiet. The river kept moving, swirling past me, but I couldn't hear nothing. And I knew I had permission to ask my request.

  "Naji's dying," I said. "I need to know how I can fix him." I thought about it for a few seconds and then I added, "If there's anything in the river that can help him, please. I would appreciate it." Mama always told me to be polite when you're dealing with the spirits.

  A heaviness descended over the canyon, a stillness that made me feel like the last human in the whole world. Then the river began to rise, inching up above my waist to my chest, flooding over the bed, washing over Naji, then under him, buoying him up. From somewhere in the darkness, the horse whinnied.

  Then, quick as it flooded, the river retreated to normal.

  River nettle. The name came to me like I'd known it all along, even though there ain't no way I'd ever heard it before. I splashed toward the shore, slipping over the stones to get to the riverbed. Naji gasped and wheezed, droplets of water sparkling on his skin. I walked past him, stumbling out into the grasses, feeling around in the dark for something that grew low to the ground, in places where the river flooded during that time of heavy run-off from the mountains. It would be covered in stiff, spiny leaves, like a thistle–

  My hand closed around a thick stem, and my palm burned like it had been bitten by ants. This was it.

  I yanked the nettle out of the ground, flinging clods of damp dirt across the front of my dress. Then I stumbled back over to Naji, who was panting there in the mud. The sound wrapped guilt around my heart and squeezed so hard it hurt.

  "Hold on," I whispered to Naji, smoothing his hair back away from his face, wiping off the water that dripped into his eyes. "I got something to help you."

  He gasped and shuddered and I knew he was dying and I knew I had to do this fast.

  I used Naji's knife to cut his robes away from the wound. It wasn't like any wound I ever saw – it wasn't a cut or a burn, but a hole about the size of a fist in the center of his chest, like a well, a place of darkness and sorrow going all the way down to the center of the earth. I stared at it for a few seconds, and it seemed to get bigger and bigger, big enough to swallow me whole.

  And that part of me that knew what to do, that knowledge that came from the river, told me the wound was hypnotizing me, that it wasn't no hole at all, and I had to concentrate.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head and that dizzy feeling went away. When I opened my eyes again I made sure not to look directly at Naji's chest.

  I stripped the leaves off the stem, going partially by moonlight and mostly by feel. I didn't fumble or hesitate – it was like I'd known how to do this all along. Then I stuck the leaves in my mouth and chewed on 'em till they got soft and mushy. They tasted like river water, steely and clean, and I spat 'em out in the palm of my hand and pressed the mush to Naji's chest. For a few seconds I was sure that my hand would plunge into the darkness, that I'd fall through that hole and wake up surrounded by evil.

  Naji's chest felt all wrong, spongy and decayed and hotter even than if he had a fever, but it was there, it wasn't no doorway to someplace else. I spread the river nettle over the wound. As I worked, I sang in a language I didn't know; the words sounded like the babble of water over stones, like rainfall pattering across the surface of a pond, like rapids rushing through a canyon.

  When I finished, all that knowledge evaporated out of my head. I fell backward on the mud and looked up at the stars. They blurred in and out of focus. I wanted to stay up, to watch over Naji to make sure the magic held fast, but I couldn't. I was so exhausted I slipped over into sleep, where I dreamed of water.

 
 
 

The sun woke me up the next day. It was as hot out there by the water as it had been in the desert, and when I sat up my skin hurt. Face, neck, legs: anything that hadn't been covered up was burned. At least the air felt clean. No threat of magic-sickness.

  Naji was gone.

  That got me to my feet fast, sunburn or not. There were a few faint footprints headed in the direction of the river. The water threw off flashes of white sunlight, nearly blinding me. But Naji was there, floating out in the middle of the river without no clothes.

  Now, I ain't normally a prude about things like that – most pirates are men so it wasn't nothing I hadn't seen before. And I'd had an encounter behind a saloon on a pirates' island in the west, with this boy Taj who sailed aboard the Uloi. But because this was Naji, my whole face flushed hot beneath the sunburn and I looked down at my feet. I wanted to go hide in the grasses until he came out and got dressed, but I was worried about him too, so I called out, "You alright?" without looking up.

  "You're awake," he called back, which didn't answer my question. I heard him splashing around in the water, and I kept my eyes trained down until he padded up to me barefoot, at which point I had no choice but to look at him.

  He'd tied his robes around his waist. His whole chest was covered in the same snaky tattoos as his arms. And though the wound had healed up as an angry red circle over his heart, he was still pale and weak-looking. I didn't think he should have been out there swimming, but I didn't say nothing.

  "Are you going to have a scar?" I asked. He didn't answer right away and I realized I'd forgotten about his face. "Um, I mean–"

  "Yes, it'll scar." Naji looked down at his chest, ran his fingers over the red, crumpled-up flesh. "I thought you couldn't do magic."

  He said it like he was accusing me of something, and I flailed around a bit, trying to find the words. "I asked the river. My mama taught me, or tried to teach me. With the sea. And it worked. It ain't never worked before, but it worked this time."

  "Oh, of course. I should have known. A pirate – you'd have an affinity with water." He stopped and squinted up at the lip of the canyon, like maybe he was expecting to see somebody. The Hariri clan maybe.

  "You saved my life again," he said, still looking up.

  "Yeah, hopefully I didn't just double the curse." The irony of me saving his life a second time hadn't been lost on me. I had killed Tarrin only to make a deal with the water to save Naji. The thought made my stomach twist around.

  "I doubt it works that way."

  "Well, if it does, then I'm sorry."

  He dropped his gaze and looked at me real hard, which made me shiver. "No," he said. "Don't apologize. I didn't mean–" He took a deep breath. "Thank you."

  I got a dizzy spell then, and I thought it was because he'd thanked me, even though I knew how silly that was. But Naji caught me by the arm and said, "The magic exhausted you. We'll rest here a day before we go on. You should eat."

  "What about you?" I said. "You were halfway to death last night, and you ain't looking too great this morning neither." My vision swam, the river turning into a swarm of light. The insects chittered out in the grasses, so loud it hurt.

  "You're right," Naji said. He guided me down to the riverbed. It was nice to sit down. My head cleared. Naji sat down beside me. "We both need to rest." He paused. "I only suggested that because I'm used to this kind of healing. I do it constantly. You, on the other hand…" His eyes kind of lit up like he was going to smile, but he didn't. "That was some very powerful magic you performed last night."