‘Hasn’t worked yet, has it?’
His eyes went wide and he had to resist hurling himself over the ledge in desperation to communicate with the suddenly talkative water. Such delusional hope lasted only a moment, as it always did, before sloughing off in great chunks to leave only twitching resentment in his scowl.
Teeth grating as he did, he turned to the creature sitting next to him with murder flashing in his scowl. She, however, merely regarded him with half-lidded green eyes and a disaffected frown. Her ears, two long and pointed things with three ragged notches running down each length, drooped beneath the feathers laced in her dirty blond hair.
‘Keep trying,’ Kataria sighed. She turned back to the same task she had been doing for the past three hours, running her fingers along the fletching of the same three arrows. ‘I’m sure it will talk back eventually.’
‘Zamanthras is as fickle as the waters she wards,’ Lenk replied, his voice like rusty door hinges. He looked at his sword thoughtfully before sheathing it on his back. ‘Maybe she needs a sacrifice to turn her favour toward us.’
‘Don’t let me stop you from hurling yourself in,’ she replied without looking up.
‘At least I’m doing something.’
‘Attempting to eviscerate the ocean?’ She tapped the head of an arrow against her chin thoughtfully. ‘That’s something insane, maybe. You’re just going to open your stitches doing that.’ Her ears twitched, as though they could hear the sinewy threads stretching in his leg. ‘How is your wound, anyway?’
He attempted to hide the wince of pain that shot up through his thigh at the mention of the wicked, sewn-up gash beneath his trousers. The agony of the injury itself was kept numb through occasional libations of what remained of their whisky, but every time he ran his fingers against the stitches, any time his companions inquired after his health, the visions would come flooding back.
Teeth. Darkness. Six golden eyes flashing in the gloom. Laughter echoing off stone, growing quiet under shrieking carnage and icicles hissing through his head. They would fade eventually, but they were always waiting, ready to come back the moment he closed his eyes.
‘It’s fine,’ he muttered.
Her ears twitched again, hearing the lie in his voice. He disregarded it, knowing she had only asked the question to deflect him. He drew in his breath through his teeth, tensing as he might for a battle. She heard this, too, and narrowed her eyes.
‘You should rest,’ she said.
‘I don’t want—’
‘In silence,’ she interrupted. ‘Talking doesn’t aid the healing process.’
‘What would a shict know of healing beyond chewing grass and drilling holes in skulls?’ he snapped, his ire giving his voice swiftness. ‘If you’re so damn smart—’
Her upper lip curled backwards in a sneer, the sudden exposure of her unnervingly prominent canines cutting him short. He cringed at the sight of her teeth that were as much a testament to her savage heritage as the feathers in her hair and the buckskin leathers she wore.
‘What I mean is you could be doing something other than counting your precious little arrows,’ he offered, attempting to sound remorseful and failing, if the scowl she wore was any indication. ‘You could use them to catch us a fish or something.’ Movement out over the sea caught his eye and he gestured toward it. ‘Or one of those.’
They had been following the vessel for the past day: many-legged insects that slid gracefully across the waters. Dredgespiders, he had heard them called – so named for the nets of wispy silk that trailed from their upraised, bulbous abdomens. Such a net would undoubtedly brim with shrimp and whatever hapless fish wound up under the arachnid’s surface-bound path, and the promise of such a bounty was more than enough to make mouths water at the sight of the grey-carapaced things.
They always drifted lazily out of reach, multiple eyes occasionally glancing over to the vessel and glistening with mocking smugness unbefitting a bug.
‘Not a chance,’ Kataria muttered, having seen that perverse pride in their eyes and having discounted the idea.
‘Well, pray for something else, then,’ he growled. ‘Pray to whatever savage little god sends your kind food.’
She turned a glower on him, her eyes seeming to glow with a malevolent green. ‘Riffid is a goddess that helps shicts who help themselves. The day She lifts a finger to help a whiny, weeping little round-ear is the day I renounce Her.’ She snorted derisively and turned back to her missiles. ‘And these are my last three arrows. I’m saving them for something special.’
‘What use could they possibly be?’
‘This one’ – she fingered her first arrow – ‘is for if I ever do see a fish that I would like to eat by myself. And this …’ She brushed the second one. ‘This one is for me to be buried with if I die.’
He glanced at the third arrow, its fletching ragged and its head jagged.
‘What about that one?’ Lenk asked.
Kataria eyed the missile, then turned a glance to Lenk. There was nothing behind her eyes that he could see: no hatred or irritation, no bemusement for his question. She merely stared at him with a fleeting, thoughtful glance as she let the feathered end slide between her thumb and forefinger.
‘Something special,’ she answered simply, then turned away.
Lenk narrowed his eyes through the silence hanging between them.
‘And what,’ he said softly, ‘is that supposed to mean?’
There was something more behind her eyes; there always was. And whatever it was usually came hurtling out of her mouth on sarcasm and spittle when he asked such questions of her.
Usually.
For the moment, she simply turned away, taking no note of his staring at her. He had rested his eyes upon her more frequently, taking in the scope of her slender body, the silvery hue pale skin left exposed by a short leather tunic took on through the moonlight. Each time he did, he expected her ears to twitch as she heard his eyes shifting in their sockets, and it would be his turn to look away as she stared at him curiously.
In the short year they had known each other, much of their rapport had come through staring and the awkward silences that followed. The silence she offered him now, however, was anything but awkward. It had purpose behind it, a solid wall of silence that she had painstakingly erected and that he was not about to tear down.
Not with his eyeballs alone, anyway.
‘Look,’ he said, sighing. ‘I don’t know what it is about me that’s got you so angry these days, but we’re not going to get past it if we keep—’
If her disinterested stare didn’t suggest that she wasn’t listening, the fact that the shict’s long ears suddenly and swiftly folded over themselves like blankets certainly did.
Lenk sighed, rubbing his temples. He could feel his skin begin to tighten around his skull and knew full well that a headache was brewing as surely as the rain in the air. Such pains were coming more frequently now; from the moment he woke they tormented him well into his futile attempts to sleep.
Unsurprisingly, his companions did little to help. No, he thought as he looked down the deck to the swaddled bundle underneath the rudder-seat at the boat’s rear, but I know what will help …
‘Pointless.’