The Farthest Shore (Eden Series Book 3) (2 page)

Miri found her voice. “Wil, I’m not them. I didn’t do anything to your family.”

“—and poured seawater down his throat till he died. You’re not them? Maybe not, but if we see one rat in a corner, we put bait down. Because even one is too many in a house.”

Unity
. Her mouth went dry, but she forced herself to get up. Should she leave the room and stay away till he calmed down? But if he was talking about his father’s murder, how long would that take?

Before she could say or do anything, Wilian headed for the washbasin. Miri sighed, allowing herself to relax. He was just going to splash some cold water on his face. She took her coat down and slipped her arms into the sleeves, thinking a long walk would still be most advisable, but at least he wasn’t talking crazy any more.

He turned and something in his hand gleamed. It was the straight razor he’d shaved with that morning.

“Wil?” She didn’t recognize her own voice. “What are you doing?”

He took a step towards her, the stropped-sharp blade still in hand.

“Are you mad?” She wanted to scream for help, but her throat felt so tight she could barely speak.

He closed the distance between them. She pulled a chair before her, but he pivoted and lashed a heel out. The kick struck the chair so hard that wood cracked, and the impact drove her against the wall. Wilian grabbed the chair with his free hand, yanking it away, and she had one glimpse of flashing steel as the razor came down.

Her arms flew up reflexively. Only that saved her from losing an eye. The edge of steel went through her coat sleeve, and a hot, biting pain exploded from her left arm. Blood spattered like red ink on the floor and across Wilian’s boots.

He wasn’t a hardened killer, though, and the sight halted him for the moment she needed to recover. All she could think of was what her aunt had told her to do to any man who threatened her. She drove her foot at his groin.

He saw it coming and twisted slightly so it was more of a glancing blow than the solid strike which would have left him curled on the floor. But it still sent him staggering back, and Miri darted through the doorway. Blood pulsed warm down her arm. She ran to the end of the landing.

“A Turean!” Wilian shouted as she bolted down the stairs. “Stop her!”

It was late enough that the inn’s common room was almost empty—from her vantage position she saw the fires had died down—but she knew everyone would rouse out of their beds. The Greater Horseshoe was first and foremost a military base, so to have a Turean in their midst would be a challenge to their security, to say the least. Wilian continued to yell, and doors flew open as people hurried out. She thought of joining in the hue and cry—
the Turean went that way!
—but blood had turned her sleeve to a red banner.

She took the last few stairs three at a time and collided with a maid carrying towels. The maid’s eyes went wide as she saw Miri’s arm. Her mouth widened too, in a shriek. Miri grabbed a towel and reached the door just as two men came out of the common room. She was out of the inn at once, feet almost slipping on wet stone steps that led into the street. Rain pattered down.

She ran across the street and ducked between two buildings, one of which smelled like a bakery. Crouching in the shadows, she wrapped the towel around her arm. It hurt fiercely, even if she didn’t move it at all.

Better than being dead.
She got to her feet.
All right, what now?

As she hesitated, the inn door burst open. So many footfalls thudded against the steps that she couldn’t count how many people there were, and their voices were muted in the rainfall. She slipped away in the opposite direction, thankful it was dark and that the blood traces she had left would be washed away.

Once the row of buildings hid her from sight, she broke into a run again, but soon had to slow down. The burst of panic that had given her strength had been momentary at best, and she was exhausted, not to mention soaked to the skin. Worse, she didn’t know where to hide. She was heading for the wall that surrounded the shipyards—it was the only route and the only place on the island she was at all familiar with, apart from the inn—but that wouldn’t offer any safety either. If she gave herself up to the guards, who was to say they wouldn’t kill her?

She had never been so afraid.

Fighting to stay calm, she felt in her pockets. Her identity papers were soaked but there. Her pen case wasn’t. It was in the room, the mahogany pen case her cousins had given her when she’d been hired by the
Beacon
. She did find two silver shrikes, enough for a meal and a bed, but not for passage away from the Horseshoe.

Stopping in another alley, she leaned against a damp wall, telling herself that she had lived through everything else, so she would survive tonight as well. She just needed a safe place to rest, and in the morning she would think of what to do.

The bark of a dog chopped through the rainfall.

She jolted upright. Another dog bayed, and she knew it wasn’t someone’s pet scratching to be let into the house. They were tracking her.

Even if the rain washed her traces away completely, she couldn’t take the risk of staying there. She hurried towards the perimeter wall in the distance.
Worst comes to worst
, she thought bitterly,
I’ll throw myself into the harbor
. Better to drown than be beaten or bitten to death.

A thick blanket of clouds hid everything from view and made the moon nothing more than a smudged glow, so she didn’t see the perimeter wall until she all but ran into it. She stopped, panting. Behind, the barks grew louder.

She looked up at the wall. Just at that moment, the clouds parted and water-thin moonlight shone off sharp iron. Miri’s head went back until her neck cricked. She’d forgotten about the spikes that topped the wall, each as long as her handspan, and the wall itself was twelve feet tall. There were no handholds at all.

What now?
There was nothing she could use to climb over it.
Unless…

She tore off her coat, careless of the fresh pain in her arm as she did so, flung the garment down and emptied the pockets. The paper and coins went into her shoes, and she straightened, holding one cuff of her coat. She whirled the rest of it around her head to build up as much momentum as possible. The coat’s wool was soaked and heavy, but she set her teeth and flung it up. It landed with a soggy thump over the iron spikes.

Please let them be sharp
, Miri thought and jerked the coat down hard. Cloth tore and abruptly there was resistance on the other end. The rest of it wasn’t coming down, and she knew the spikes had driven through the coat near its hem.

Gripping the sleeves, she let them take her weight while she put the soles of her shoes to the wall’s surface and began to climb. Over the barking of the dogs, she heard the coat rip, and if it hadn’t been so thick, she guessed it would have torn away completely.

She felt as though she was inching her way up. Each time she shifted her grip on the sleeves and braced her feet against the wall to do so, her heart choked her throat with terror that she would slip. Her arm throbbed. She knew she was sweating, but the rain washed that away too.

The coat ripped again, but she was almost at the top of the wall by then. Her makeshift rope gave way, and she grabbed a spike. The coat sagged against her as her fingers tightened around iron. Teeth clenched, she forced her arms to bend and one leg to lift.

The sinews in her thigh burned, but she swung her leg over the top of the wall. Shaking, she clambered up and pulled her coat free. She didn’t have time to carefully ease herself off the other side and the surface was too narrow to permit such a maneuver anyway, so she just dropped. A stab drove through an ankle, and for a moment she could only curl up in the mud, her eyes closed. Her hair had come loose as well, and it trailed heavy and wet over her face.

With an effort she forced herself up, holding on to the wall for support. If they were going to find her, she would be on her feet when they did. Her ankle wasn’t broken. She could rest a little of her weight on it. She could still move.

Which she did, away from the wall as the dogs barked and scratched at its other side. Her coat was too heavy to carry any longer, and she left the torn sodden mass at the base of the wall. She limped to the docks. The clouds had shifted again, shutting out the moonlight more securely than closed doors, but the sea murmured just ahead, and the ships sported night-lanterns that glowed through the gloom and the rain.

Ships. That was an idea. Now that she came to think about it, with Turean blood she could probably drink saltwater. She’d never tested that out, because drinking water straight from the sea was something normal people just didn’t do. But that ability might mean she could row away from the Horseshoe without supplies, if she found a boat. Of course, she would be starving by the time she reached the mainland, but dying of thirst seemed much less a possibility.

The water smelled foul—a mixture of rotting scraps, human wastes, salt and fresh paint—but she ignored that as her fingers brushed the wet surface of a mooring post. Whiskery ropes coarse as sandpaper under her fingers were tied to it, but even in the poor light she saw that all the ropes led to ships. The only boats were held fast to the sides of the ships, out of reach.

A shout far to the right transfixed her. Two lanterns made cat’s eyes in the dark, perhaps fifty feet away but drawing closer. She hurried away, wincing with every step until her knee hit something and she went down.

Biting back a groan, she pulled herself to a sitting position and stretched out a hand, wondering what she had run into. It was flat and smooth, bound with ropes… A crate, she realized. Several of them, stacked on the side of the dock.

Miri grabbed the corner of one and pulled herself up again. She couldn’t run any farther, but if the crates were there to be loaded on a ship, she could be off the Horseshoe before long.

And if the crates had just been offloaded and were to be taken to a warehouse in the morning—no, she wasn’t going to think about that. The lanterns came a little closer, though the guards seemed cautious rather than running ahead in the dark and the rain to confront anyone. That gave her a few moments more.

She ran her fingertips over the flat heads of nails hammered flush into the wood, but the next crate was only bound with rope, and she felt grooves where the lid had been slid into place. If only she had something to cut the rope with—

No, cutting it would show someone had tried to get in. She forced herself to work it free, pulling at a knot she couldn’t see, but it came loose as the lanterns began to move again. Her hands shook as she pushed the lid open.

The scent of limes and straw rose into the air. She scooped out handfuls of the fruit and flung them over the side, relieved the rain muffled the splashing sounds. No time to make any more space for herself. She climbed in, pressing down on the limes, drew her knees up and pulled the lid back over her head, leaving only the narrowest of gaps. It was like being in a coffin, closed and dark about her.

She forced herself to breathe shallowly, ignoring the dusty straw that tickled the inside of her nose. Over the echoing patter of rain on the crate’s surface, she heard the guards speaking in low voices.
Unity, don’t let them find me
, she thought, but on the heels of that came a cynical suspicion that the Unity felt the same way about half-Tureans as everyone else in Denalay did.

Footsteps moved away. Miri lay in the stifling darkness. Her limbs were cramped and being out of the rain made no difference either, because her clothes couldn’t dry when she was curled up in such a small space. Spasmodic tremors shook her. She thought her arm was continuing to bleed, though she couldn’t be certain, and she couldn’t even move her other hand to feel for it.

She would slip out again once the search was over, though she was too tired to walk another step. Despite herself, her eyes closed.
I’ll just lie here…a few more…

It was a bad sign, Jash Morender knew, that her captains had requested a meeting on her war galley. Yes, they had a good reason; they wanted to hear how the Denalait mainlanders had seized the island of Crypthouse. But Enthow Caith’s account of that loss had been devastating enough that she wished she’d heard it alone—yet she couldn’t risk losing any more of her captains by refusing them.

The worst part was the gift the survivors had apparently prepared for her. Silently, Enthow handed it to her across the table, a rolled-up parchment so long it could only be a map.

She didn’t want to open it. No good would come of it, not when the ships of the flotilla she commanded had been unable to reach Crypthouse before the Denalaits had burned it.

She couldn’t even lead her forces into battle, much as she longed to do so. Against warships able to move faster and outmaneuver them, it would be suicide, but the survivors weren’t likely to understand that. Enthow’s eyes were so empty he might have been dead himself; he had been born on Crypthouse, so no wonder he’d been chosen to deliver the gift.

The parchment rustled beneath her fingers, and it was the only sound in the room as her captains watched. Jash told herself she would not be afraid of anything, and unrolled it.

It was a beautifully drawn map showing the Denalait coastline and the Iron Ocean extending beyond that into the limitless east. A compass rose filled the top corner. There were no islands at all.

The Turean Archipelago, completely destroyed. A stone lodged in Jash’s throat. She wanted to crumple the parchment, crush it under her feet, burn it.

Instead she made herself roll it up and thank Enthow—a little curtly, but with none of the bitterness and pain showing in her voice. “More wine,” she said, and her aide hastened to fill the goblets.

Hewl Rornay drained his in a gulp as Jash set her gift aside. “Anthracite is gone too. They’re mining it down to its bones with slave labor.”

“For the coal.” Arudle Vates steepled her fingers, watching Jash over the top of them. Her war galley,
Surran’s Skin
, was the largest in the Turean flotilla after Jash’s own
Dreadnaught
, but Arudle was so heavily pregnant Jash doubted she could do more than watch while her officers ran the ship. “I’ve heard they need it for their new steam-driven ships.”