Heart beating darkly, Nadia’s words still ringing in his head, Gideon stepped to the mast of the ship. The bowline had come loose, and the sail sheets snapped wildly in wayward winds. The lull in the storm was rapidly disappearing. They were drifting out of control.
“Girl!” he called.
Rena loped to his side, eyeing him expectantly.
“Let’s do this.”
Together they caught the whipping lines and fastened them tightly. Rena, leaning dangerously over the side - Gideon held her steady - threaded a rope back through the sail’s clew, where it had come undone. Battered cloth billowed once more and surf surged past the dhow.
But the wind soon cast about and changed direction.
Setting his jaw, Gideon locked his stiff hands about cold, hard ropes and twisted the sail into place, tacking to catch the wind.
“There!” called Rena, “I can see him!”
Gideon stared at her, uncomprehending, until he followed her outstretched hand into the maw of the storm and saw, fast in the distant dark, a speck of wooden blackness against the dull waters.
“Jona!” Nadia sobbed with relief.
Glancing quickly at Nadia, Gideon felt his heart lurch. Was it all an act? Would you pretend to hate your lover… to save my life? He guided the dhow as Rena directed him.
The wind picked up, grew fierce again, howling with unnatural rage. Waves rose high and crashed over the gunwales. Nadia and Rena knelt down and scooped the water out, using anything they could find, their hands and a leaking bucket, which was all that had been stored in the dhow when Gideon purchased it. The miasma of the storm grew over them, cast its gloom over the world, until the hope that had been Jona’s coracle faded behind a wall of forbidding gray. The rain, beating down hard, raised a freezing mist from the boiling seas.
Struggling to keep the dhow moving forward in what he hoped was a straight line, Gideon still found himself stealing glances of Nadia, bowed over her work. So much has happened, so much time has passed. How can you… why would you choose… me?
The wind howled, tugging at the sail, turning the mast, trying to rip free the lines he gripped in a vice. He twisted the ropes around his sore, chaffed hands when his fingers became too numb, grinding his teeth against the pain.
I am coming for you, Jona. Why would she choose me over you? The father of her children?
At last, he loosened his grip on the ropes for a moment - thinking he would tie them securely instead, still refusing to pull in the sail completely. But a black wind swept over them right then, and the lines sprang loose from his hands, as tigers from a cage, whipping across the deck. Nadia screamed and fell as one of the snaking ropes lashed her back. The sail sprung loose, the lateen spinning free to the fury of the wind. Wood screamed and the mast arched as wind filled the sail from the wrong side, pushing and driving the dhow backwards and sideways.
Still staring in disbelief, Gideon felt the first glimmer of fear only when he felt the ship rising, leaning hard to starboard. He reached out to steady himself but the dhow did not rock back down again, but kept rising, rising - they were about to capsize.
“Nadia!” he howled, not knowing why or caring for a reason:
“Gideon!” she screamed, panicked, crouching low.
Then Rena, fleet-footed, squirrelled past the mast and with a quick flit of a deft hand cut loose the staylines. With a thunderous crack the mast sprung free, spinning around - the lateen revolving with it, raking the deck and almost pushing Rena overboard - again and then once more, until the scream of protesting wood split the air.
Instinctively, Gideon threw himself forward, with his body shielding Nadia’s, feeling the stinging bites of shrapnel bite into his flesh.
Splinters scattered across the ship. Ropes snapped. Cloth tore. With a great, shuddering moan the mast fell, splashing into water, dragging against the gunwale, shattering wood.
When it all had stopped, when all that remained was the howling of the wind, the slapping of water and the patter of rain, he opened his eyes and found himself staring into Nadia’s hazel depths. For a moment, he thought she was waiting for him to speak. Then he realized she was blind to everything but her own panic. He might as well have been part of the clouds.
He rolled away from her.
Stone-eyed he watched as the remains of the mast were swept away overboard, tugged away on the current.
Howling waves rode over the horizon, hungrily watching them, white-crested and foaming. Water pooled deeper in the dhow, but Rena - crouched at the fore, curled into herself - said nothing, did nothing.
Nadia lay unmoving. Now and then there was a mewling, hopeless moan, no more.
Weak. This is why I travel alone. This is why I should never have come back. Nazra. Bright Lord, what was I thinking?
His hands felt the sodden weave of the sack. Softly the vials clicked against one another.
Just to get me going. Someone needs to get us out of this mess.
One cold hand pulled out a vial, its dull gleam of metal shining in the dark. Another cold hand unstoppered it slowly, letting the cork fall softly into the waters below. And down a cold throat ran the sweet, cloying blood of spirits.
Closing his eyes, he leaned back.
Rain kissed his face. Wind caressed his cheeks.
When he opened his eyes once more, wildcats of smoke danced over the sky. Spirits sang in the wind, the rain their tears of laughter, the lightning their playful fireworks.
Calm, yet filled with determined energy, he rose and, grabbing a paddle in bleeding fists, set to pushing the dhow forward through the mounds of dead.
The Fields stretched out to the horizon, endless in every direction. He had first seen the Fields in Chakazia, and they had grown only wider since. The Fields of the helpless and ignored, naked and bare dead. Their flowery, rotten fragrance reached his nostrils and filled them, as a film covering his body.
Unconcerned, determined to move forward to his destination, Gideon wedged the paddle between two bodies to find purchase. Their pale flesh, darkening in purpling spots, moved softly, as if bobbing on the gentle swells of a pond. The dhow slipped over the corpses - some slick with blood - easily.
When the dhow’s momentum was spent, he set the paddle between a woman’s upraised arm and the torso of an old, frail man. Leaning forward and pushing back, he drove the dhow ahead. The faces of the dead, unblinking, passed below. Their flowery rot rose in waves.
Some of the dead he now recognized. There, an old woman - seeming small in death, deprived of the heaving shawls with which she had affected herself while still living. Hers had been the tent pitched next to his and Ilana’s. And there were others from that time also: men and women and children he had met, had spoken to, had buried with his own hands when the plague had consumed them all but left him untouched.
But soon they were gone, their blood-stippled lips and falling-off finger nails with them. More and more he saw men who wore the wounds of war on them, men burned in fires, men crushed under masonry. Men he had killed in combat, Samarii from the east, Falorans from the south. Men he had fought with. Men he had betrayed. Men who had betrayed him.
Patiently, he staked the dhow forward. Slowly he became aware of a distant rumbling and looked up.
There he saw that the smoking wildcats were transforming into towers, castles rising high and dark, clawing against the firmament, opened jaws becoming furnaces spitting ash and smoke into black clouds that ribbed together, forming a vast, turning plate of tarry blackness. But ahead there remained one opening where the sky yet winked blue and white in distant sunshine.
And there, translucently as if the sky was but her veil, she was waiting, smiling mouth parted, as though she had just spoken.
“What?” he asked, almost laughing, thinking himself foolish for not having heard her the first time.
“What?” he repeated, when her smile faded and her forehead creased in a frown.
But she did not speak, did not move, save the shivering glimmer in her eyes.
“Don’t cry,” he said, shoving the paddle down faster, ignoring the bruises blooming on the bodies below, pushing on quicker, looking away from the red smears he left behind - the blood rising, gathering together, growing into a dark lake where once pale hills had been. “I’m coming for you, just wait for me, just wait… I’m on my way-”
“Gideon!”
He opened his eyes.
“Arbiter above,” Nadia prayed beside him, breathing shallow, fluttering breaths, “protect us who abide the Common Law, shield us who… Gideon?”
On raw, stinging palms he steadied himself, rising ponderously to find uncertain footing. The ship rolled and bounded through great valleys of dark water. He was holding a paddle - a useless, frail thing. He looked up in dismay.
The storm was as nothing he had ever seen. The gale carried the thousand-throated fury of the a host in battle a hundred times over. The wind sent him staggering, scrambling for something to hold on to, and the rain struck as arrows, punching painfully against his shoulders, his brow, his outstretched hands. Heaving, hulking masses of clouds moved low, churning, revolving in unnatural, ingrown ways. Broad, glowering penumbras lit their blackness long after the threaded lightning had arced down to bridge earth to that nether plane.
When their hellish sheen winked out it left him blinded, barely discerning Nadia beside him, much less finding the slumped form of Rena, leaning against the wreckage of the mast. The paddle, forgotten, splashed into the foot-deep water in the dhow.
“What...”
“Gideon!” Nadia called again, “Gideon, thank the Arbiter you are awake!”
“I…” he said, staring at her dumbly, but there was no time to speak.
The dhow crested a white-foamed rise and, with stomach-turning deliberateness, tipped forward into the next deep through of the sea: plummeting into a cataract ten feet deep, sending its passengers tumbling as dolls.
They fell, clasping one another close, shouting wordlessly. Rena’s scream of panic - the child’s voice piercing even that cacophony - came moments before the fore plowed deep into the ocean, washing over the entire ship.
Gideon was still coughing out water when Nadia tore loose and through rolling veils of black water raced to the fore. There she found Rena, still twisted around the mast, drenched and bruised, weeping. She swept the girl into her embrace and, with effortless, graceful steps carried her through the heaving storm back to Gideon.
Together, the three of them sat down, shoulder to shoulder leaned against the side of the ship. Nadia held on to Rena in a tight embrace, stroking her hair and mumbling comforting, meaningless sounds until she stopped trembling.
“I’m sorry,” Gideon muttered at last. “I should have listened to you."
Nadia sighed.
“Arbiter above,” she muttered, “just let this be over! Please! This storm, this boat… it feels like we’ve been here forever. I can’t believe it was just this morning those templars came to our house and… but that doesn’t matter.”
Gideon glanced away, still politely ignoring the tears streaming down her face, still refusing to reach out and touch her warm skin. Instead he watched the cold gleam of the vials, waiting for him, just out of reach-
“But what of the children,” Nadia whispered. “What will happen to them, when...”
Another great wave struck the ship - briny foam washed over them, and the dhow lurched, tossing them sideways. They clung to one another, desperately strong.
“It might not even be Jona,” Gideon muttered. “Never even saw who that bastard out there is. I’ll bet you Jona’s back on land, warm before the hearth with the rest of your family, safe and sound…”
Nadia laughed. Helpless, shaking with laughter, she laughed: the loving, living, wild woman he had loved revealed beneath the layers of years that had been hiding her. Soon, Rena was laughing, and he joined them.
It felt good.
Too soon, the storm quieted them. The dhow continued alone, adrift, helpless.
“Jona”, Nadia begun, hesitating, pausing. “You know… I never meant for it - we - to go on for as long as we did. But Jona means well. He was a good husband. I know he went out, on that coracle of his. He wouldn’t break his promise. But I...“
The wind whipped away her words, so that he leaned in close to hear her, to read her lips. Limned in lightning one moment, a blackened silhouette the next, he stared spell-bound.
“Live,” he rasped without thinking. “You were meant to live. Free.”
Ilana...
Nadia bowed over Rena’s hunched form, distant-eyed, absent-mindedly running her fingers through the girl’s knotted hair.
“We said we’d see the world together, didn’t we? All the wonders of… Havsgard, the Holy City… whatever it was. But you were gone for so long. And I had to stay, I had...”
“The boy,” Gideon filled in when the silence stretched on. “Aron. He’s mine, isn’t he? His age, his eyes… it’s why you didn’t follow us like you said you would. Ilana thought you’d abandoned her but I, I told her, you would have followed us if you could...”
Nadia looked up, meeting his eyes, her own wide and red-rimmed. She blinked once, twice, thrice and when their lips met it was as if all the years that had passed had been only a dream, a nightmare of death and loneliness and dissolution. And as they kissed her warmth flowed into him, and his warmth in turn passed into her, and he found himself believing for the first time in a very long time, that all would be well, that the Archons at last had seen fit to give him a chance for happiness and to give happiness in return, to live a life that was good and just and beautiful.
And, little by little, the dhow seemed to be rocked less violently by the waves, and the wind, imperceptibly at first, lessened its bite. Still the rain crashed down, and still the storm raged, but Gideon knew that they would live. Together, they would make it.
There was a soft splash behind him, and when he looked he saw Rena crouched by the stern.
“What are you doing over there?” he asked.
Rena shook her head and sat down next to him, a shy, furtive grin on her face. Together they embraced and waited to weather the storm.
But beside him Nadia stiffened.
When he turned to ask her what was wrong, he saw Jona, floating on his coracle.
