TheKingsViper (3 page)

“Out.”

He pulled her. He wasn’t a particularly bulky man but he was
strong; she fell in his direction. At the same time two of her women grabbed at
her skirts. De Meynard adjusted his grip and aimed a solid kick at the woman
who’d nursed her through infancy and fever and nightmares. Old Edith squealed
in pain and let go. Eloise shrieked in anger, but de Meynard bundled her by
main force through the cabin door into the hatchway.

“Get upstairs!” he roared as saltwater spray crashed around
them. His fist knotted in her clothes and he thrust her up two steps of the
wooden ladder. She scrambled the rest of the way and onto the deck and into a
vision of hell. The ship wasn’t kicking and plunging beneath them anymore, but
it was listing badly. In the dark, little was visible but the white surge of
breakers bounding over the gunwales. Rain lashed down from above. Men blundered
past in every direction. Loose canvas and the ends of unsecured ropes whipped
about. And over everything, even the crash of the waves and the roar of the
wind in the masts, came the great horrible groan of a ship having its belly
torn open.

“We’re holed!” a man shouted, his voice faint in the tumult.

De Meynard, staggering onto the deck behind Eloise, pushed
her into the lee of a bulkhead. She clung to the wet and slippery wood. She
didn’t understand what he was up to, why he’d uncorked the small barrel and was
tipping the contents out onto their feet—the smell of brandy briefly pungent
before being whipped away in the storm—why he’d re-corked the barrel and thrust
it into her arms and was sawing at a length of stray rigging with his knife—not
until he started lashing the barrel to her with turn after turn of the rope. It
bit into her flesh.

“We’re going down?”

He tied off without answering and pulled her to the side of
the vessel. The deck was listing so much, and the boards so slippery, that it
was hard to keep their feet. He wrapped his arm round her and pulled her up
onto the boarding step, clinging to anything that would grant support. “Look!”
he shouted in her ear. “Dark water!”

She looked down. Most of the sea’s surface was running white
with foam, but there was a black patch that heaved like an evil heart. “Yes!”
she shouted back.

“That’s deep water, not rocks. You understand?”

She couldn’t reply this time, a blast of salt spray had
taken her breath away. She nodded wildly.

“Then jump!”

“Jump?” she shrieked.

He picked her up bodily, braced one foot on the side of the
ship, then cast her forward as he leapt outward.

* * * * *

Severin woke face-down with his muscles aching and his mouth
full of sand. He spat, tried to sit up, slumped back on his face with a groan,
and lay there quietly while he recovered his strength and focused his eyes. He
felt so weak he wasn’t sure he would be able to stand ever again.

There was a flap and a gull with yellow feet like heraldic
shields plopped down onto the sand near his head. For a moment Severin was only
distantly curious. It was a big bird with a gray back and a pale yellow beak.
He rather admired it. The creature was alive, and dry, and had a fine breast of
warm feathers. Even when it started strutting back and forth toward him he
didn’t react. Then the thought washed over him like a cold wave,
They go for
the eyes first.

He heaved onto his hands with a noise more like a groan than
a roar, but the gull took sufficient fright and hurried away. Once partly
upright he could collect his breath and his wits and look around him properly.

It was dawn, very shortly before sunrise by the looks of
things. The sea lay calm, the sky was a pearly white, and the sand between the
rocks of the shoreline was as smooth as the face of a blade—except where it was
broken by dark and tumbled jetsam. Gulls were patrolling the beach warily. He
looked both ways along the foreshore but there was no sign of any habitation,
just coarse grasses rising to scrub and low hills.

It took him a long time to get to his feet. He was wet
through, shivering with chill and parched by salt. But he was intact and,
except for bruising, uninjured. His boots were still laced to his feet, though
his sword-belt was missing and he had a confused memory of pulling at the belt
to loosen it as he fell through black water. Even the memory was enough to
bring a rush of bile to his throat, and he spat salt water. He wished he could
lie back down in the sand and sleep, and not have to face the task ahead of
him. But he stayed on his feet.

He had to find the King’s betrothed. That was his purpose
here.

There was no sign of any ship out to sea, though loose spars
floated black against the gray water. A second study of the tide line revealed
the wreckage to be more spars and barrels and a broken crate. And there—down at
the waterline—the first obvious body.

In the end he walked that way along the beach because he had
to start with one of the bodies. This first corpse was that of a sailor very much
broken by the rocks, and the gulls were already busy at him. Severin shooed
them off, then took the man’s belt, which had a knife still strapped to it. It
was good working knife with a heavy single-edged blade that lay horizontally
across the small of the back when sheathed, in sailor’s style, so as not to
catch on ladder rungs.

The second man, who wore a leather jerkin that Severin took
to keep the wind from his wet skin, groaned and twitched when rolled over.
Severin slipped the new knife into his throat and sliced open his jugular with
a turn of his wrist. That was one less man to talk about where they had been
headed and with what passengers, to anyone who came to question survivors. And
somebody would come, most assuredly.

He wiped the blade clean on the man’s shirt, grimly.

His progress down the long shoreline was punctuated by very
few such necessities. Most of the bodies were beyond either use or slaughter.
He began to despair of finding the Vennish woman. Her damn dress, he told
himself, he should have taken the time to get her out of it. It had been of
heavy brocade with gilt thread and pearls sewn about the cuffs; she’d probably
sunk like a stone.

But in fact it was the dress that finally caught his eye;
that full skirt swollen like a bladder with trapped air, bobbing about in the
shallows. He broke into a shuffle to reach her where she lay right on the edge
of the water, half-buried in the sand, the barrel still roped to her chest. It
was only the barrel that convinced him it was her; with her ridiculous wriggly
hair flattened to a wet rag she was hardly recognizable. She was motionless,
but he rolled her onto her front over the barrel and, hugging her about the
waist like a man bent on buggery, squeezed her stomach until she vomited up
sea-water and began to cough. Quickly he cut the ropes. Her eyes fluttered open
then shut again, as gray as the wings of the gulls of Venn harbor. He took the
knife to the front of her dress, slicing down the line of elaborate tiny
buttons until he could peel her from her sodden brocade like a pale oyster from
its shell. The effort made him dizzy, but he lifted her in his arms.

She was a slight girl, and no taller than average. At any
other time her weight would have cost him nothing at all. Her skin was cold
against his and looked almost blue in the dawn light. The orbs of her breasts
pressed against the fine wet linen of her undershift, which had gone
transparent, but her flat nipples were colorless, and he observed this with far
less interest than he would normally have felt, little more than a pang of
anxiety. Her head lolled against his shoulder.

One last glance up and down the beach reassured him that
they were still unobserved. With his King’s betrothed in his embrace he struck
inland.

* * * * *

Eloise was dimly aware of the beach and of being carried,
but it took a long time for her mind to surface from the salt depths to which
it had been thrown, and as she rose she became confused, thinking that she was
being carried to bed as she had been as a child, exhausted from ceremonies she
did not understand. She couldn’t work out why her bed, when she reached it, was
so cold or so hard.

There was rock under her cheek.

When she finally opened her eyes, she saw Severin de Meynard
sitting near her, facing away, his head in his hands, his black hair all
knotted to rats’ tails and his dark shirt stained gray with salt. Beyond him
were trees, a hillside, a blue sky.

Eloise sat up, swallowing gummily. Her mouth was dry and
tasted metallic. She’d been laid out on a piece of rough ground under stunted
oleander trees, and she was barefoot. All she was wearing was her undershift, a
plain but thicker middle skirt, and a man’s leather jerkin, all of which were
damp.

Severin looked at her, his eyes widening. “Slept well?” he
asked, his voice hoarse.

“Did the ship go down?” It wasn’t the most incisive of
questions, but she was feeling horribly queasy.

“I imagine so. We jumped before the end.”

“Then where are we now?”

He rolled his head. “The coast of Mendea, somewhere.”

“Mendea!”

He didn’t answer that. Relations between Ystria and Mendea
had been one long scrabble for domination ever since the two kingdoms were
established. They shared religious practices, but that was about all they had
in common and it had never stopped them going to war with each other, on and
off, over the years. Mendea was the worst possible place for them to have
fetched up.

“But…oh God.” For a second, panic was worse than the ache of
her body. She ground her teeth together until the moment passed, her eyes
searching the upland hill slopes. “Where’s everyone else? The coast?”

“There were no other survivors that I saw. I brought you
away from the beach before any of the locals turned up for salvage. We’re lucky
we hit the rocks at night and weren’t seen—otherwise we’d both have had our
throats cut by now.”

“Oh.” She knew the line between shipwreck victims and
captured pirates was generally considered an unclear one. She thought of her
womenservants and flinched from the guilt. For a while she stared at her hands,
which were stiff with salt. “Do we surrender ourselves to the local lord?”

“No.”

She took a deeper breath. “Why not?”

“You might risk it if you were a man,” said Severin evenly.
“But supposing you could convince him that you are who you are, and worth
ransoming, I think the chances of any Mendean resisting the temptation to
humiliate the King of Ystria in a most…personal manner…are slim. That would
mean war, whether you were handed over in the end or not. And I’m not in the
business of starting wars.”

Eloise hadn’t thought she could feel worse, but now
discovered there were depths of emotional nausea she had not plumbed.

“Besides,” he added, “
I
won’t be worth nearly as much
in ransom as I am to their spymasters. I suspect it might take them many, many
months to kill me. I’d prefer to avoid that.” His eyes glittered.

He’s making it a joke
, she thought, astonished. She
tried to lick her lips, but her tongue was like a piece of felt wadding. “Then
what do we do?”

He pointed to a crease in the hillside. “We find water first
of all, in there somewhere. We have to drink. Then…we head home.”

“To Ystria? On
foot?
”

“If we head north far enough we can hardly miss the border,
I’d have thought.”

She opened her mouth to protest that it was impossible, then
shut it again, struggling to think. She wanted to shout at him, but what good
would that do? This dark, ragged-looking man was the only thing that stood
between her and abandonment. She’d found him far from likable until this
moment, but he was the last remaining bit of Ystria, the only link back to all
that was familiar. His presence was the nearest thing she had to hope. She knew
with a vertiginous clarity that she needed him. “I see. All right then.”

He heaved himself to his feet, swaying just a little, and
held out his hand to her. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good.” The look in his eye said more than his words.

She wasn’t sure if she’d been telling the truth, but once
he’d pulled her upright her legs proved just about strong enough to support her
weight. “I feel sick,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

“You’ve swallowed a lot of salt. Come on. Let’s walk.”

* * * * *

They found water eventually—a narrow iron-red trickle in a
rocky valley—which allowed them to slake their thirsts and wash the salt from
their face and hands. They sat in the sunshine and Severin laid their assets
out upon a stone—the knife, a pouch with flint and steel, a purse. They’d all
come from bodies on the shoreline, but he wasn’t telling her that. He fluffed
the linen tow out, hoping it would dry enough to eventually take a spark.

“We have some money then,” she ventured.

“It’s from the Ystrian mint. Not safe to spend around here
without drawing attention.”

The girl put her hand over her mouth and was silent. He
wondered if she was going to cry, but when a moment’s wait had brought no tears
he relented a little and expounded on his plan. “We’re going to head inland.”
The farther they were away from the coast, the less obvious it would be that
their presence in this country was accidental. “We’ll hit a road eventually,
and if we find a road we’ll find houses of some sort. I’d rather keep out of
sight, but we’ve no food. We have to have food and shelter. It’s summer still,
but—” He glanced around them at the heath. “The nights won’t be that warm.”

She nodded, her eyes wide and serious. “Can you really get
us home?”

“I’m the King’s man, Lady of Venn. I will do everything in
my power to get you home to him. That I promise.”

She smiled. “Then I believe you.”

He was touched by her easy faith, and ever so slightly
dismayed. He changed the subject. “We need a cover story. I think we will be
Boscian saffron merchants, robbed and abandoned by our hired guards. We’re
trying to make it north to Rounay on the border, where I have credit at my
guildhouse that I can draw upon. Don’t worry; I can talk the saffron trade
confidently. And Severus is a good Boscian name.”