Black Sun (Between Earth and Sky, #1)(63)

She felt the canoe change course during the first night, the shift in wave pattern making a different sound against the hull. Too subtle for most sailors to notice, but she was Teek and had napped in tidepools as an infant. She guessed they were following the sun by day and under a clear sky, navigating by the brightest north star. Blunt, unsophisticated, but likely to get them to shore if they weren’t picky about where they landed. Nowhere near the mouth of the Tovasheh, that was for sure, unless by foolish luck.

By her count they were down to nine days. Nine days to get Serapio to Tova. Which for her had become a lesser worry than simply keeping herself and Serapio alive.

Serapio himself didn’t seem concerned with their course. She thought he would, but after that initial amusement at finding out Patu wanted him dead, he didn’t mention it. He seemed tolerant of his confinement, as if this state was not unfamiliar to him. And, to be fair, it was not wholly unfamiliar to her, jail being an old but unwelcome friend. But she had never been imprisoned for this long and in quite this close quarters.

On the third day, as they shared a single corn cake someone had shoved under the door, Serapio snapped to attention.

“What is it?” she asked, sensing the danger.

He held up a hand, listening. Made his way to the wall and pressed an ear against the wood.

“Patu’s dead.”

She stared at him. “Did you…?” She wasn’t sure he could do such a thing while locked in this room, but she remembered how casually he had agreed that she should have let Baat drown.

“No,” he said, a small smile lifting his lips. “As much as it would have pleased me. Callo believes it was the illness he carried.”

“Shit.”

Perhaps Serapio did not understand the dangers of illness on a ship, but she did. She was on her feet, stuffing the last of her breakfast into her mouth. She hurried to the corner and pressed an ear to the wall. She’d found this was the best place for eavesdropping, although all she ever caught was a word here or there. But she had learned to identify voices without seeing their speakers, and that helped some.

Cries and a great splash.

“They’ve thrown his body overboard,” Serapio narrated.

“I got that much.”

“He had a…” He shook his head. “I’m not sure of the Cuecolan word. A rough knot? A rough… bump? All over his body.”

“A rash.” Her voice was tight. “Callo should have never let him on the ship.”

“Will it spread? Kill everyone?”

So he did understand. She listened some more, but the voices were too jumbled to decipher. “Maybe,” she said, voice grim and bitter. “We can always hope.”

“You assume we would be immune.”

She glanced over at him. “If it’s catching, no doubt we all already have it. At least those bastards will go down with us.” She sauntered over to the bench and sat in the spot she now thought of as her own.

“You seem pleased,” he said. “Tell me why.”

She had long given up on how exactly he could tell such things. Could he hear the shift in her gait? Smell the satisfaction rolling off her like a perfume? She had no idea, but he was right. She was pleased.

“I give it a half hour and they’ll be coming to us, asking for help.”

“Help?”

“People like us are always hated until they need us—isn’t that always the way?”

He tilted his head to the side as he sometimes did, as if it helped him hear. “Not a half hour. They’re coming for you now.”

He said it in a rush and then pulled his leather pouch free, dipped a finger in, and stuck it in his mouth, sucking the delicate crystal powder off his skin. He’d done it twice before, once every day while they’d been in here together, and she’d not asked him what it was, but now she did.

“What is that stuff? Medicine?”

“Medicine,” he agreed, repeating her word. “After a fashion.”

“It is for your eyes?”

“Yes. Again, not the way you mean it, though.”

He pressed his back against the wall, and she knew he was going to do that thing again, where he seemed to go into a trance. She had thought it a nightmare the first time she saw him but understood it now as more like a willing unconsciousness, a time when his mind went somewhere else far from this room. But to what end, she still didn’t know.

“When they take you, Xiala, stall them. Help is on the way.”

“You misunderstand, Serapio,” she said, confident. “They need my help now. They won’t hurt me.”

But he was already gone to wherever he went when he ate that powder that resembled broken moonlight on the open water.

The door banged open, and she turned, grinning. Three men crowded into the room, two grabbing her arms and one sticking a cloth down her throat.

“Hey, careful,” she mumbled around the filthy fabric.

They dragged her out onto the deck into weak watery daylight. A wall of gray clouds as big as an island hid the sun, and below the clouds, a mirror of seawater so flat she could skip a stone across it. She took it all in with a glance. The water was too still, the sky too unreadable. They’d cut too far south and hit the early-winter doldrums.

Land fuckers, she thought to herself. Rank amateurs. Novices, fucking farmers, indwellers. She laughed around her rag.