“I don’t need instruction on how to die in the jaws of an oversized lizard.”
“Not for you, you old goat, for Pyrre.” She nodded toward the long-haired man, who’d managed somehow to get his footing in the deep, treacherous mud. “That,” she said, smiling contentedly, “is love.”
“Stupidity,” Kossal grumbled.
Ela shrugged. “It’s a fine line, sometimes, between the two.”
If it was a fine line, the painters and sculptors down through the ages had managed to stay on one side of it. Artistic depictions of love tended to focus on softer subjects: lush lips, rumpled beds, the curve of a naked hip. Fewer crocodiles, certainly. Far less screaming.
“Would you fight a crocodile,” Ela pressed, elbowing Kossal again, “to save me?”
“You are a priestess of Ananshael,” Kossal observed tartly. “When the beast comes, I expect you to embrace it.”
“Doesn’t seem to be working for him,” Ela pointed out.
Vo, too, had landed badly. While he seemed unbroken, the twin pieces of wood he’d used to hold off the beasts had disappeared. The nearest of the two creatures was bearing down on the injured woman. No weapon to hand, a scream of defiance hot in his throat, the man leaped. He landed on the croc’s back, somehow avoiding those massive, snapping jaws. The beast thrashed, churning the muddy water to a froth with its tail, while Vo clung on, arms wrapped around the crocodile’s neck, face pressed against the wet, glistening hide.
“That’s how they do it in the fights,” I said. “Get behind the thing, get on its back. Get an arm around the neck, then go to work with the knife.”
“He doesn’t have a knife,” Ela pointed out.
Bin had managed to tear herself free of the mud, to drag herself a few feet along the channel’s bank, away from both the churning fury of the crocodile and the causeway itself. Beside me, her companions were screaming.
“I’m going to give him one,” I said, slipping a blade from the sheath on my thigh.
“Waste of a good knife,” Kossal said.
“I’ve got others.”
The knife landed with a wet thwock in the mud, blade down, well within reach of the desperate man. Locked in his battle with the croc, he didn’t notice. Afternoon sun gleamed off the steel, but his eyes were squeezed shut. Bin, blind with terror, blundered into the water. In fact, no one at all had noticed my throw. All eyes were fixed on the struggle below.
“I take it back,” Kossal said.
Ela broke into a wide smile. “That might be a first!” Then she narrowed her eyes. “Just what is it, exactly, that you’re taking back?”
Kossal gestured to the man as the croc thrashed back into the water and rolled. “It is excellent instruction in the ways of love.”
“Love,” Ela explained patiently, “was in the jumping off the causeway to protect the woman.”
“Love,” Kossal countered, “is hurling yourself onto a deadly creature, then realizing once you get hold there’s no way to let go. Either you die, or it does.”
He didn’t look at the woman as he spoke, but Ela threaded her arm through his. “Surely I’m a good deal more attractive and obliging than a crocodile.”
“Marginally.”
The creature stayed below for three heartbeats, five, ten. The water roiled where it had disappeared, as though someone had kindled a great fire below the surface. A few feet away, Bin stumbled to her knees, then her screams broke into an entirely new range. A moment later, a red stain bled through the mud-brown water around her.
The crocodile rolled upright, hurling the man from his back onto the bank. He was obviously exhausted, bleeding from his scalp and shoulder, his shirt half torn away, but he hadn’t given up.
“I’m coming,” he shouted, gesturing to the woman. “Just get to the causeway and you’ll be all right.”
“No,” she screamed. “They have me. They have me.”
I shook my head. “I’m ending it.”
Kossal turned to study me. “The beasts of the land and of the water were the god’s servants long before our order.”
“And this is the Trial,” Ela reminded me. “There are rules to observe.”
Both my blades were in the air before she finished speaking. One took the woman square in the chest. The other sliced through the man’s throat before splashing into the water beyond.
Kossal turned to me, old face grave. “The offerings of the Trial are prescribed by the song. To go outside of them is to fail.”
I shook my head, pointing. “She said they had her: One who is right. He said he was coming: One who is wrong.”
Kossal raised an eyebrow. Ela just started laughing.
“I expect this will prove a delightful trip.”
Staring down into the blood and mud, listening to the screams shaking the air around me, hearing my own pulse thudding in my ears, remembering all the old feelings I’d thought long banished or forgotten, I wasn’t sure I agreed.
2
“I consider the whole episode a blessing,” Ela announced as we made our way south through the chaos on the causeway.
Kossal nodded. “The god’s ways are strange.”
“I’m not talking about the god,” Ela replied, then glanced over at me slyly. “I’m talking about Pyrre’s fashion sense.”
“In that case, leave me out,” the priest said, not breaking stride despite the press of human bodies churning around us.
Some people were shoving frantically toward the site of the disaster, shouting the names of loved ones over and over. Others were just as eager to get away, to get off the causeway entirely. Kossal moved through the throng as though he were alone, sliding through the gaps, moving aside troublesome bodies with the occasional well-placed blow to the knee or rib. Faced with one particularly vexing scrum, he toppled a man over the railing, ignored the scream, then moved smoothly through the newly vacated space. We were gone, dissolved into the crowd, before anyone understood what had happened.
“Don’t be coy,” Ela said, narrowing her eyes at the priest. “You’re just as eager for her to find love as I am.”
“What I am eager for,” Kossal replied, dropping a screaming woman with a quick blow of his wooden flute, then stepping over her body, “is a quiet room and a strong drink. Panic gives me a headache.”
Ela shook her head, turned back to me. “He’s hopeless,” she confided. “Wouldn’t know romance if it slipped a warm finger up his ass. But you can trust me when I tell you that this”—she gestured the length of my body as though showing me off to the crowd—“is a massive improvement on those baggy trousers you were wearing earlier.”
“I’m pantsless,” I replied, “and covered in mud.”