Rob Scott - The Larion Senators

Kellin promised she would, but they needed rest first. She wrapped him in their cloaks, though they were still soaking wet, and tried to drag him up the bank, but it was no use; her ribs and collarbone protested too much. The pain was overwhelming, and Kellin fell in the muck, weeping quietly, shivering and wishing that Steven and Gilmour would find them somehow. As wary as she had been of the two sorcerers and their fantastic abilities, she longed for one of Steven’s campfires right now.

But they were alone and injured. They’d have to do this themselves. ‘We’re farmers,’ she rehearsed, ‘farmers from outside the city. We were hurt badly when the wave came through. Can you help us, please?’

She found a spare tunic in her pack and with her good hand clumsily tied a loop in the end of each sleeve. She pulled the sleeves around herself from behind, then tucked a short stick through the loops and twisted it, tighter and tighter, until she cried out, screaming from the pain in her shoulder.

‘We’re farmers!’ she shouted, cranking the stick another half turn and pulling the tunic splint close around her injured arm and ribs. ‘We’re farmers from outside the city. We were hurt when the wave came through, hurt badly. Can you help us, please?’ She tucked one end of the stick into her leggings. Her shoulder was immobile and her ribs braced; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do for now.

Kellin rested her forehead in the mud. The cold felt good on her face. ‘Just a moment’s rest,’ she said. ‘I need a moment; then I’ll find a horse. I promise.’

It was nearly dark when she woke; at least an aven had passed. Shivering and confused, she sat up with a start. Garec was sleeping, but he looked as if he had been cast deep beneath the shadow of death. She wondered if he had already started the lonely journey to the Northern Forest.

In between the mud and dried blood Garec’s skin was pasty-white. He was shivering as well, and an inhuman humming sound came from the back of his throat: death’s drone. Kellin shook him, slapped him hard, then shouted his name, trying to call him back from the forest path.

Garec murmured, opened his eyes briefly and then slumped back into unconsciousness. He wouldn’t live through the aven, not like this, wet and unsheltered.

‘I’ve got to make a fire,’ Kellin said out loud. ‘I need flint and tinder, and something dry.’ She looked around. Everything was wet. ‘North, away from the river, it’ll be dry there.’ She ground her teeth together until her jaw hurt. ‘Stay awake, you bastard,’ she murmured as she staggered into the brush. ‘Stay awake. Make a fire.’

Garec had a flint in his pack. She had heard his horse – I hope it was his horse – die in the bushes off to her left. If she could get the flint, and find some dry wood outside the waves’ wreckage area, she might be able to light a small fire and warm herself for a few stolen moments, and then she’d come back for Garec. ‘But he’ll have to wake up,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll have to help me; I’ll never be able to drag him that far. But first things first…’

She found the horse, and Garec had been right: it had a splintered branch protruding from its chest. The flint was in the saddlebag, but it was another twenty-five paces before Kellin reached a dry area of the forest. If she was glad for anything, Kellin thought, it was that the flood had thrown them north. They hadn’t been inside that roiling nightmare very long; had it cast them south, or carried them further east, they would both be dead already.

Igniting the fire took longer than she had planned, but she finally captured a small spark in the handful of dry tinder she had scraped together, then generously heaped winter brush on the determined little flame. ‘Who cares?’ she said, ‘I’d be happy to have the whole rutting forest on fire. You need to find us, Steven? Well, that’ll be easy; just look for the big orange glow in the sky.’ Kellin laughed for the first time all day, then winced. ‘All right, no laughing,’ she told herself firmly, a smile still on her face.

With a hearty blaze crackling, Kellin added several logs. She knew it would take time to drag Garec – if he’s still alive – through the forest, so she was trying to ensure there’d be at least some smouldering coals when she returned. She stood close to the flames, feeling the heat on her face and watching tendrils of steam rise from her clothing. She captured the feeling and secured it inside her mind: a warm place, a summer place, where no one ever found themselves washed two hundred paces through the woods by a rogue wave as big as a small mountain. Then she went back for Garec.

She was feeling better for a bit of heat and moved faster, determined to find reserves of strength to heave the Ronan bowman back to the campfire, but once outside its peripheral glow, she felt the chill creep back into her bones. Her clothes were still wet and her skin rose in dimpled gooseflesh. She started shivering, great quaking spasms. She couldn’t do this…

When the mule brayed, Kellin pissed her leggings. She couldn’t see anything, and hadn’t heard it moving through the brush. She thanked the gods that the animal was not a squad of armed Malakasians; they would have had her gutted, sewn up and gutted again before she’d even realised they were there. If she hadn’t been so cold and in so much pain, it would have been hideously embarrassing – but there was no one to witness her discomposure, so she tried to recover herself and hurried to find the animal, lost but otherwise healthy, munching bits of brown vegetation poking through the patches of snow as it wandered in the general direction of home.

‘Well, aren’t you a surprise?’ Kellin said, hoping to sweet-talk the mule into carrying her and Garec to the nearest healer’s doorstep. ‘Would you like an apple?’ The mule didn’t answer; it didn’t appear to care one whit that Kellin was there at all. ‘No? How about a crate of apples?’ she said softly, approaching the animal. ‘Come on, we have a little job tonight, and then Kellin will get you all the dry grass and thistles you can eat, agreed?’

The mule was wearing a rope bridle and had the remains of a pink ribbon tied into its mane: it was obviously a child’s pet.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked as she took hold of the bridle; the mule didn’t care, and when she tugged, surprisingly, the mule complied without complaint, plodding happily alongside her until they found Garec, looking worse, barely breathing, still wrapped in the damp cloaks.

‘Mule,’ Kellin said, patting the animal gently, ‘I need you to wait right here while I help Garec up. Will you do that?’

Again, nothing.

‘Fine, I didn’t expect you to answer,’ she told it. ‘You’re not much of a conversationalist; I can respect that in a beast of burden, but I need you to understand that if you run off, I’m going to find you, kill you, eat you and then make a nice pair of winter pants out of your miserable hide. Understand?’

The mule twitched an ear. Kellin knelt in the mud and pressed her cheek against Garec’s forehead. Panic struck hard: he was too cold.

‘Oh, no, no, no, please no,’ she cried, shaking again. She moved her hands back and forth between Garec’s hands, cold and stiff in his lap, and his ivory face, marked with a roadmap of dried blood. She put her cheek near his mouth, felt nothing and moved closer, pressed her skin against his lips, blue-black in the moonlight. Still nothing.

Kellin blamed the cold: she was too cold to feel his breath. He was breathing; of course he was. She was simply too cold to feel it. She rocked back on her haunches, hoping something would come to her. She was too cold, too tired and too injured to lift him herself; as determined as she wanted to be, Garec was too heavy, a deadweight. ‘Think, think, think of something. Think,’ she chanted, rocking back and forth, ‘it’s too cold. I can’t believe it’s come to this…’