“North,” she whispers, her eyebrows lifted with regret, “I will be my people’s goddess until I die.”
“I know.” Slowly, making certain she has plenty of time to see me move, I stretch a hand out between us. Her eyes track the movement and then flick to meet mine, a question in her gaze as her head twitches back a fraction.
I pause, hand outstretched. I want to ask her if she trusts me, but the words stick. We’ve only known each other a few days, and it’s no easy thing I’m asking, for her to accept that I mean her—and her divinity—no harm. But as her gaze moves across my face, she smiles a little, and tilts her head back toward me.
So I reach out, bit by bit, and let my hand hover a breath away from her cheekbone, where I long to trace my fingers. Her eyes are on mine, and after a moment they widen.
“I can feel you,” she breathes.
My own skin tingling at her closeness, I move my fingertips close to the planes of her cheeks, forehead, chin. Her eyelashes dip, brow furrowing, as if she wishes to concentrate every bit of herself on this moment. I move slowly, to make certain I don’t touch her skin, but the slowness seems to affect us both. As I move the pad of my thumb over her lips, they part, and she lets out a quaking breath and opens her eyes.
Earlier, when she looked at me, her gaze was full of questions—lost, lonely, yearning. Now, her brown eyes are lit like embers, and my own breath stops in my throat at the sudden heat there.
She shifts away, then lifts herself up on her elbow so that her face is close to mine, a smile playing about her mouth—and then she leans forward, trusting me, now, to hold still.
Her lips are close enough to my ear that when she speaks, her breath stirs my hair.
“And you claim you cannot work magic?”
Robbed of breath, I search for words.
Then with a deafening crash of thunder the heavens open, and torrential rain begins to fall.
With a yelp, she scrambles to her feet, and I follow. Laughing, we gather up the pillows and blankets and make for shelter belowdecks.
This is what I want for her—just this small moment to laugh and run from the rain.
Even if one moment is all we get.
TWENTY-THREE
NIMH
In my dream, I am a child again, walking the byways of the floating market with my mother. She is inspecting a piece of fruit while I gaze hungrily at the vendor across the way, who is frying dough and heating honey. I want to taste it so badly I’m trembling. I am about to ask my mother if she will buy me a sweet when the barge below us gives a great shudder, nearly knocking me over. I run to my mother, but she recoils, just out of reach no matter how hard I try.
No, Nimh, she tells me. I cannot hold your hand.
The floor quakes again, and then begins to crumble away all around me like shale in an earthquake, until I am on a floating island, alone. Then that too fractures and disappears, and I’m falling, falling—
I wake midair, disoriented and uncertain how long I’ve been falling. My body gives a loud thud when I hit the floor, my head reeling as I turn to look up at the hanging berth I fell from in confusion. The sound of breathing, a faint snore, and then a mumble, makes my gaze swing over to the other side of the room—North. He is still asleep, curled up in a ball on his side, and the bindle cat sits with perfect composure and dignity on his hip, looking down at me.
The riverstrider’s boat. The rain. The moments just before …
Still dazed, I sit up, my pulse speeding from the fall—but as I look at North, my heartbeat settles into something steadier.
I feel my face heating, the night flooding back to me in a wild rush. It’s like his hand is there again, drawing the blood to my cheeks and my lips as if his fingers were a lodestone. I find myself touching my own cheek as I watch him sleep. Looking at him is like gazing at a map to a land I only ever walked in a dream—I’m utterly lost, and utterly certain I know exactly where I am, all at once.
His thick curls have tumbled down over his brow in his sleep, and my hand itches with the unbearable urge to touch them. To touch his hair would not be to touch him, surely. I find my hand outstretched before I’ve decided one way or the other, and so I linger there, fingers hovering.
Would I know? If I touched his hair, and that was enough to drive the divinity from me, would I feel it? I don’t remember when the divinity settled on me—I was so young I might have dismissed it as a passing fever or an imagined sensation. Would I know?
I try to imagine what it would have been like for Jezara. To give up everything she knew, everything her people needed her to be, for a moment like this one. Did she feel the divinity leave her?
Did she regret her choice?
The barge gives a sudden lurch, and I grab for the ring where North’s berth is strung up before I can tumble on top of him.
The shaking ground in my dream was no dream at all—the barge is moving, and it’s just struck something hard enough to make my bones ache.
I stumble upright, heart pounding though I cannot think what could be happening, and make it to the ladder up to the deck.
Early morning has dawned gray and wet, the diffuse light still enough to make me squint after the dark inside of the barge. The rain has slowed, but the river is swollen and quick, and the mooring lines …
Are gone.
“North!” I croak, stumbling back inside. “Wake up!”
“You wake up,” he mumbles, curling into a tighter ball.
I suck in a steadying breath and lean a little closer. “North, I cannot shake you—you must wake up! The river has swept us downstream, and I need your help.”
The urgency in my voice gets him moving, and all it takes is one look at my face in the dim gray light and he’s scrambling free of his berth.
He’s close on my heels as I emerge on deck. The barge has been caught against a mud bank, the coursing river pushing it over at an angle, which explains why I fell out of my berth. For once, we don’t stop to argue or converse, but work in simple, easy harmony—I shout at North to grab the starboard bow line, and he jumps down knee-deep in mud and water without hesitation. I do the same with the line at the stern, and together we haul back against the weight of the barge.
Slowly, it begins to shift, carving deep troughs in the mud of the bank until it hits firmer ground and will move no more. I gesture with one shaking arm for North to tie off his line at the trees, and when I can manage it, I do the same.
Panting, North stumbles back over toward me and then bends forward, bracing his arms on his knees. It’s a few moments before he has breath enough to speak, but when he does, his voice is amused. “Next time maybe arrange for a more pleasant wake-up call.”
I’m still breathing hard myself, and I lean an arm against the tree at my side. “Wake-up call?”
“It’s when—you know what? Never mind.” North grins, taking any possible sting out of the words, and then straightens up again. He inspects his clothes, plucking at the wet fabric and grimacing. We’re both soaked to the shoulder by our efforts, but he’s still wearing the heavier black fabric of the outfit he wore to the feast.
After a hopeless attempt to squeeze the water out of the hem of the shirt, he gives up and hauls it off over his head, baring a lean, brown torso and wide shoulders, and an inked tattoo along one of his ribs. For a moment, watching him wring out his shirt in his hands, I forget about my exhaustion; I forget about the rushing river and the fact that we’ve been swept into unknown territory; I even forget, for a blissful handful of seconds, about what happened last night at the feast.