Lila tucked her bruised face against his bare chest. “Yes, I believe it is helping.”
As they lay together, the sound and rocking of the waves soothed them like a lullaby. For a while, Bannon forgot that they were lost, and he fell asleep in Lila’s arms.
The next morning he awoke to hear an odd and unexpected sound, a distant rushing and roaring. He blinked and sat up, disentangling himself from Lila. The morazeth snapped awake and sat up next to him.
“What is that sound?” she asked, as if they might be under attack.
The fog had thinned, leaving only a grayish veil that began to dissipate as the sun rose. Even before Bannon saw the coastline, he recognized the sound of waves crashing against a shore. “That’s it! We found land.” He stood up so quickly he rocked the boat. “I don’t know how, but we found the coast. It’s a miracle.”
“It won’t be a miracle unless we make it to land,” Lila said.
Together they raised the sail and tacked into the breezes that drove them closer to the shore. He remembered being similarly lost and adrift in a small boat off of Chiriya long ago, the fog bank?.?.?.
He gazed back out to sea, away from the shoreline. When he shaded his eyes in the bright morning light, he saw a flicker of humanlike figures on the waves, smooth heads with slitted eyes and wide fang-filled mouths. A flash of fear struck through him. If the selka attacked now, he and Lila could never fight them off!
But he realized that the selka wouldn’t attack. They had saved him and Lila. Sometime during the night, the sea people must have taken the boat and dragged it close to shore.
Lila was too focused on the land to notice the selka. She sat on the gunwale and grabbed the oars, pulling as hard as she could. When Bannon glanced back again, the selka had disappeared beneath the waves.
As they approached the coast, Bannon saw the mouth of a river, a bay, and the buildings of a large town, as well as numerous fishing boats heading out into the morning. Bannon yelled and waved, though the harbor was still far away. “We’re saved!”
Lila kept pulling on the oars. “We don’t know where we are, but those people will help us. We will warn them about the Norukai fleet that is sure to come soon.”
Bannon continued to watch the boats sailing out of the harbor, then scrutinized the buildings in the town. He saw the bridge that crossed the river to span the small bay. A flash of recognition suddenly struck him. “I know where we are, Lila.”
Already one of the fishing boats had spotted them, and Bannon could see tiny figures waving. She pulled harder on the oars as the boat headed in their direction.
“That is Renda Bay,” he said.
CHAPTER 60
The raucous festivities continued while the raiders prepared for full-scale war, but Chalk was dead. King Grieve sat on his imposing throne surrounded by wild Norukai, but he walled himself off with anger and grief.
Chalk was dead!
Lars kept feasting, drinking, and boasting, as if the success of his raids meant that he had been forgiven, but Grieve was not in a forgiving mood. As the revelry continued and the feasting tables were piled high with fish, bread, cliff tubers, and even hams and sausages brought in by recent raids, Grieve barely ate a morsel. His only movement was to clench and unclench his fists, feeling the squares of iron fused onto his knuckles. The scars on his cheeks rippled as he clenched his jaws. He exhaled a long hiss like the serpent god, but no one noticed the sound amid the pounding fists, laughter, and shouts.
Chalk was dead! His shaman, his advisor, his friend?.?.?.
The repaired serpent ships had returned from Ildakar, fifty-one vessels remaining out of the hundred that had initially sailed, but they were as threatening as ever. Those ships, along with Lars’s raiding fleet and more than seventy new ships, gave the Norukai a powerful navy. If his ally General Utros fulfilled his promise with his vast army marching to the coast, the two forces would dominate the Old World. The Norukai people, having been driven off the mainland by Emperor Sulachan thousands of years ago, would now have the world again. Grieve’s people would rip a gaping wound along the coast.
In normal times, he would have relished the thought of blood and violence, but Chalk was dead.
When the rage reached a boiling point, he lurched to his feet and let out a wordless roar that echoed across the room and brought the shouting and revelry to a stuttering halt. The rest of the Norukai looked at him, stunned; then Lars raised his fist and let out a similar roar, as did the other raiders, until the walls of the Bastion shook with their enthusiasm.
But Chalk was still dead.
Grieve trudged down the stone steps from his throne to meet the shouting Norukai. Misinterpreting his mood, some clapped him on the shoulder, pounded his back, but the king ignored them. At another time he might have punched them senseless, but now he did not consider them worth his time or his ire.
Two slaves brought in another roast goat, a scrawny one this time, because most of the island’s flock had already been killed. Grieve didn’t like goat anyway.
He needed to find a target for his annoyance, but he didn’t know where to start. Prancing at his side, Chalk would have issued quirky and cryptic pronouncements, but why hadn’t the shaman foreseen his own death? He could have saved himself! How could he not have envisioned the attack of the selka, how could he not have known their slimy queen would tear him open? He was a poor shaman not to have predicted something so vital!
Or had he seen something after all? Grieve remembered Chalk chattering during the sacrifice of the slave on the day before the selka attack: “Serpent god will save some of us. But I won’t tell which ones!”
Had he known after all? Why hadn’t he warned anyone?
Grieve wanted to smash a face. He realized that what he really wanted was to gut one of the slaves, so he could watch the victim writhe in agony in a pool of blood, just the way Chalk had died.
Looking up, he saw old Emmett, the wrinkled old man who had been a fixture at the Bastion even before Grieve had killed his own father. Chalk had encouraged him to slay King Stern and take the crown. The albino had foreseen it in a vision, and he had helped Grieve choose the perfect timing.
Why hadn’t Chalk been able to avoid his own death?
The axe cleaves the wood. The sword cleaves the bone. What did his pronouncements even mean? Could anyone make sense of them?
When Emmett presented a braided pastry filled with chopped nuts, Grieve realized that the limping old man seemed more frightened than usual, probably because he and his slaves had been bullied by so many visiting Norukai. Grieve glanced around the dining hall, still looking for a victim who could alleviate his sadness. He saw neither Bannon nor the morazeth Lila, and he realized he hadn’t seen them for several days during the busy preparations for war.
He was surprised that Atta hadn’t killed her supposed female rival by now. Grieve had no sexual interest in the scrawny morazeth, since he would certainly break her fragile body if he used her roughly, but now that sounded like a good idea. Yes, he would eviscerat
e Bannon, then knock Lila down onto the banquet table and have her there, right in front of all of his men. He could strangle her when he was finished, and that would also please Atta. Maybe that would finally cure him of his malaise.
He looked around at the serving slaves, but he didn’t see them.
Old Emmett obsequiously offered the nut-filled pastry for him to eat. “You will find it delicious, my Grieve, a specialty of the kitchens for this celebration of your impending conquest.”
The king knocked the tray out of the slave’s hands and grabbed him by the long ponytail as if it were a leash, yanking Emmett’s head back. “Where are Bannon and Lila? I want them here now.”
The old man paled. “They are?.?.?.?they are on other duties, I’m sure, my Grieve.”
Atta had been fawning over Lars, no doubt to make Grieve jealous, and now she shoved the disgraced captain aside and took her place next to King Grieve. “Yes, where is the skinny bitch? I fancy drowning her in a piss bucket after all these men have filled it.” She let out a loud laugh.
“Bring them,” Grieve demanded of Emmett. “Now!”
The old slave limped off like an injured deer fleeing an oncoming wildfire. He hid for the better part of an hour, but the impatient king sent several Norukai to drag him back into the banquet hall.
Bannon and Lila were nowhere to be found. Guards searched the Bastion and returned to the king with the infuriating report that they had interrogated every slave, but those two had not been seen in some time.
“I-I know nothing about it, my Grieve,” Emmett whined, and the obvious terror on the man’s face turned his words into a lie.
Grieve threw the crippled slave down on the table, flat on his back among the platters. Emmett’s struggles inflamed the Norukai king’s dominance, and he slammed the old man’s head against the wood. With his right hand, he snatched the dagger at his waist and plunged it through the tendons of Emmett’s shoulder, skewering him to the table. The wrinkled slave gasped with pain. “I don’t know, my Grieve! I don’t know.”
