Page 33 of The Salt King

On the far shore, hazy in the fog but silhouetted clearly enough by the sunrise, someone else was watching the man in the water. There was a rider on a horse, face hidden by a helmet, cloak heavy across the shoulders. When the horse breathed, the vapour cloud caught the fading sun and glowed. Whoever it was, was holding a crossbow, and sighting down the bolt.

“Is that someone from the Wolkvos dressed up?” Avelyn asked.

The look on Redspear’s face was enough to show that it wasn’t.

“For the King’s sake—hey!” she yelled at the man. “Get out of the water! Come back, now!”

The man just had time to stick his middle finger up at her before the knight fired, and a bolt with wicked black feathers slammed into his ribs. He collapsed backward with a shocked whoop, but there was already a dark stain in the water, and even from the shore, Avelyn could hear the wheeze from the wound as the man tried to breathe. People surged to the edge of the jetty, then jolted to stop as they all wondered what the range was.

Avelyn hung in one of those uncanny, without-time moments when he realized that he knew more than everyone else.

He had grown up hunting on the marsh, and he had only ever used a longbow,13 because crossbows were, frankly, garbage. The only reason people liked them was that a mechanism held the bowstring in place, not you, so you could aim for much longer without getting tired. But even someone skilled would only coax two shots per minute from the things, because reloading them was complicated, and the knight wasn’t reloading yet. In fact, it would be hard to do that at all on horseback. The ones Avelyn had seen, you needed to rest them on the ground to ratchet the string back.

Which meant there was time.

Do it just do it just do it just do it—

Before he could overthink it, he dropped the satchel of samples and his coat at Redspear’s feet, told her not to let anyone touch them, and dove into the water.

There was a film of ice on the surface. The second he was through it, he understood exactly why this gave people heart attacks. All his organs tried to lurch behind his spine. It hurt. Behind him somewhere, someone shouted to fetch the doctor, but he only heard it faintly through the roar of water. His nose and eyes stung straightaway: the water was so salty he could feel the buoyancy. It wasn’t far, though, before he could catch the back of the man’s shirt. He pulled hard—dead weight was so heavy—and by what felt like inches, dragged him back to the shore. Within seconds, Avelyn couldn’t feel his own hands. Like the man, his arms were just weights attached to him.

There was a surge of yelling from the jetty, and then . . .

He thought at first that the man had woken up and kicked him hard, straight in the thigh midway between his hip and his knee. The impact knocked him to the side. It didn’t hurt that much, though, and he didn’t give it a lot of thought, because he was straining to lift the man free of the water. It was only peripherally that part of his mind said: Hang on. He’s unconscious. Nobody kicked you.

Then people were lifting him out, pulling the other man out too, soaking, to leak red onto the frost and salt glittering on the jetty. After the water, the air felt warm.

It was Avelyn’s blood too. He sat still and put his hand over his face—Christ, there was ice forming in his hair already—and felt stupid. Yes, it took a long time to reload a crossbow, and so, if someone was well prepared, you could reasonably expect them to have . . . two.

The bolt had hit him at an angle, so it wasn’t buried deep, but it had carved a valley into him. He wondered if he ought to pull it out. Maybe . . . not? There were some important arteries there. Maybe he would bleed to death.

That would be even more stupid.

He was starting to feel spacey and strange, and the noise around him was swirling into a generalised roar of voices and steps, and then there was a thunk that might have been some Wolkvos guards forming a shield wall. All he could do was sit there thinking he had never been this cold before, that he was going to need to sew up the hole in his jeans and the cassock, and that he needed to learn not to be such a bloody smartarse that he thought it was a clever idea to dive into range of a crossbow. He thought distantly that he should have felt frightened, but he didn’t. Just stupid, and angry. It was amazing how angry it made you, being shot.

“Hello,” Jericho said, kneeling down next to him. He had a shoulder bag with him. Medical things. Yes, that was right: Jericho was the doctor.

“Hey,” said Avelyn gloomily. “You should look at him first.”

“I have,” Jericho said, and Avelyn thought, That’s interesting, time is passing in funny chunks. “That was unnecessarily Jesuity, I hope you understand?” Jericho added, as though Avelyn had done nothing more particularly idiotic than planting a dead banana in Fabian’s pocket. “Less of that in future?”

Avelyn nodded.

“How are you doing?”

“Furious,” he said, feeling more and more indignant about it. Usually he had a good grip on his own mind; testosterone was rarely in charge, but it was stomping around blowing up buildings now. “I want to fucking smash something.”

Jericho laughed. “Well, hold off for now. I’m going to take this out. It’s not going to hurt, and it hasn’t gone through anything important, so don’t worry, but you’ll feel it pull, all right?”

“Is he dead?” Avelyn asked, because some people were carrying away the man who had been shot, bundled up in a blanket. The blanket was covering his face.

“Yes. I didn’t get here in time.” Jericho touched the side of his neck to make him look around again. His hand was vividly warm after the ice. Avelyn jumped. Nobody ever touched him, so he felt it too much. “What happened?”

“There was a knight. With a crossbow . . .” He swayed, because Jericho had pulled out the bolt, but as he’d said, it didn’t hurt. What? Surely it ought to have hurt. “I thought it was someone dressed up. Redspear wouldn’t let anyone cross, because you can see Caer Halen. But the crossbow was real, and I jumped right in front of it like a fucking idiot.” He heard a whole choir of his teachers’ voices telling him not to swear and mentally mowed them all down with a combine harvester.

Jericho looked across at the other shore, his black eyes sharp. People were around them still, but different people, Hreoda, and the light was different. There was a shield wall at the end of the jetty now, blocking any more shots. Avelyn blinked twice, not liking being on the ground among everyone’s boots—heavy Hreod boots designed for the fen—even though everyone was being careful to give Jericho space. Someone with Balen tattoos was offering him a blanket. He remembered to say thank you, but couldn’t tell if it came out in the right language. Even that little failure made him angry.

Christ, calm down. Calm down. He breathed out slowly. The inside of his mind was full of razor spikes.