Django Wexler - The Shadow Throne

“Raes!” Cora shrieked.

Raesinia put her free hand on the parapet. “How much, Faro?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Faro took a step back, spun Raesinia around so they were face-to-face, then pushed her back against the wall, his hand still tight on her wrist. The pistol was pressed tight against her forehead. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

More or less. Raesinia smiled. “How much?”

“They had my family ,” Faro hissed through clenched teeth. He pressed harder, levering her out dangerously over the edge. “My parents. My sisters. He told me he’d send them to me in pieces if I didn’t go along. What in the name of the Savior was I supposed to do?”

He squeezed his eyes shut, blinking away tears. It was as good an opportunity as Raesinia thought she was likely to get.

She brought her free hand up and wrapped it around his wrist, feeling their shared center of balance rock against the parapet. At the same time, her knee came up, fast and hard, between his legs. The blow to his groin would curl him up, and she’d be able to force the pistol away from her head before he could fire.

That was the theory, anyway. Something felt wrong as soon as she started to move. Her knee got tangled against something hard between his thighs- the damned scabbard , it got twisted when he turned around-

The wooden sheath absorbed the force of her blow with a splintering crack. She got her hand on his wrist, but the pistol was jammed hard against her forehead, and she didn’t have the leverage to shift it. She saw his eyes open and blink again, as slowly as if in a dream, and his finger jerked on the trigger. The hammer fell, sparking into the pan, and then-

Raesinia had never been shot in the head before. She felt a violent tug, as though someone had grabbed hold of her hair and yanked backward hard. In the same instant, her whole body went numb and all her limbs tried to pull inward at once, like a child instinctively clapping a hand over a skinned knee. With her knee between Faro’s legs, caught on his scabbard, and one of his wrists in her hand, this had the effect of pulling him practically on top of her.

Something scraped against the small of her back. There was a high, thin scream- Cora -and Raesinia saw a dizzy, spinning view of the darkening sky. Something dropped out of the pit of her stomach, and then she was falling.

It was a long way to the rocky riverfront below. She had time to let go of Faro and push him away. Raesinia hoped, in the muzzy-headed way of one whose brain had largely been converted into a cloud of flying gore and splinters, that she’d gotten enough momentum to get away from the wall and hit the water, but as she spun the ground came into view and it became clear she wasn’t going to make it. The base of the wall was a jumble of rocks, rounded off by the river at the waterline but still jagged above it.

Oh dear. This is going to hurt.

It turned out Raesinia could lose consciousness. All it took was driving a pistol ball through her brain, then smashing it to a red paste in a hundred-foot fall onto unforgiving stone.

She’d always wanted to have one of those out-of-body experiences sometimes described by seamen who’d been rescued from drowning, hovering above her corporeal form while a celestial chorus beckoned. It would have answered certain key questions raised by her postmortal state. But either those poor sailors had been telling stories or there was no choir of angels waiting for Raesinia. No army of demons, either, though. Just. . nothing, a blank in her memory from the moment she’d hit the rocks. It was a little like waking suddenly from a deep sleep, but with none of the refreshed feeling from having rested.

The binding was still working furiously, pulling wounds closed and regrowing flesh to replace what was lost. It went about this process with a blind, idiot determination that reminded Raesinia of a swarm of ants, doggedly building and rebuilding their anthill every time some curious child kicked it over. There was no intention there, no thought, just the mindless response of an animal.

It couldn’t understand, for example, when circumstances were unfavorable. As best Raesinia could tell, she was stuck on the edge of the skirt of rocks at the bottom of the Vendre’s walls, with her head and shoulder underwater and her legs sticking up in a most unladylike fashion. Her lungs were full of muddy river water, and her heart was limp and still in her chest. But the binding had straightened the fractured bones of her arms, and she could move, after a fashion. When she brought her hands up to explore her face, she found a coin-sized patch on her forehead of smooth, freshly knitted bone, surrounded by a slowly closing knot of regenerated skin.

The most urgent problem was what she was stuck on . Her eyes weren’t in working order yet, but she explored it with her hands. A splintery column of rock, freshly exposed by some underwater cracking, had driven itself some distance into her abdomen and caught there, leaving her hanging like a speared fish. As the gentle currents of the river moved her, she could feel it grate against her bottom ribs. The binding worked feverishly to repair the damaged flesh around the intrusion but could do nothing to push her off it.

Well. I suppose it’s up to me, then. Raesinia flailed her legs for a few moments until she determined to her satisfaction that nothing could be accomplished with them. Her hands could reach the offending spike, but it was slippery and offered little purchase, and the angle was bad. Scrabbling and pushing at it earned her only torn skin on her palms, which the binding went to work repairing with-she liked to imagine-an exasperated sigh.

All right. Now what? She couldn’t just hang here forever . There were people who went about picking up corpses, weren’t there? Eventually someone would notice the upside-down body under the walls of the Vendre and send a boat out. They would discover the Princess Royal of Vordan, her arse in the air, impaled on a spiky rock. She wondered if whoever did it would die of shock on the spot.

A moot point, though. Sothe will get here first.

She hung motionless awhile longer. Her eyes were beginning to clear, but there wasn’t much to see, just the dark waters of the Vor. Her hair settled in long spiderweb patterns around her head, twitching this way and that in the weak currents. She felt a tug at her leg through a rent in her trousers. A scavenger, she assumed, and kicked her feet to indicate that she wasn’t dead yet. Or. . well, whatever.

Something splashed into the water nearby. Raesinia turned her head, but all she could see was a dark shadow in the murk, making its way along the rocks. A moment later it was beside her, a pair of hands groping gently along her body until they found the protruding chunk of stone. Whoever it was took hold of her, above and below the intrusion, and lifted. Dirty water flooded into the wound, and thick, dark blood flowed out. Raesinia pictured the binding sighing again, this time with relief, as it went to work knitting up the torn skein of her intestines.

Whoever it was pushed her away from the rocks, and someone else took hold of her hands and pulled. Between the two of them they managed to roll Raesinia over the low gunwale of a boat, to lie dripping and motionless on the bottom. She felt the boat rock as the figure who’d been in the water pulled itself back in.

This left Raesinia in something of a quandary. She could pretend to be dead for only so long. It might be Sothe, but it might not, and she dared not open her eyes to check. She opted to lie still, feeling her insides rebuilding themselves, and hoped that whoever they were, they would say something.