Broken Throne (Red Queen #4.5)(67)

“You strongarm bi—!”

With a growl, she twists her hand and snaps his wrist, the sound of bones breaking somehow louder than his resulting scream. He falls to his knees, clutching a hand now hanging off the joint, kept in place only by skin. The sight nearly makes me vomit, but I keep my bearings, moving the pistol from Lyrisa’s head to Orrian’s.

His nobles are already lunging, their weapons and abilities ready. Behind me, Big Ean flicks his lighter open, the clink of metal as warming as my mother’s voice.

I squeeze, blasting off a round.

But the gun jams.

“Shit,” I whisper.

Orrian’s eyes are like a hurricane at the Gates, ready to rip me apart. The river rises behind him, born of all his fury, a wall eager to crush me.

I’m sailing through the air before I can register what’s happening, hurtling for the deeper water off the bank. Then I realize: Lyrisa tossed me as easily as a doll. I barely have time to heave a breath before I crash into the water, narrowly missing a child’s raft. I learned to swim when I learned to walk, and I fight back to the surface easily, breaking through in time to see Big Ean, Riette, and Gill leap from the side of my keel, their bodies silhouetted against the spread of flame.

And I’m left to hope Lyrisa did the same, jumping into the water as the cargo hold filled with spilled oil and alcohol caught fire. She knew the plan. Well, almost all of it. I had to improvise a bit. I hope she’ll forgive me for holding a gun to her head.

The wave falls in on itself as the keel burns, signaling the end of Prince Orrian. Burned or torn apart by a strongarm or both. Screams rise with the smoke, impossible to decipher. I swim as fast as I can, legs kicking, arms pumping, to close distance.

On the river, other boats stop to watch, and one of the river kids is good enough to slow her raft next to me, letting me grab hold. She steers the small motor with one hand, lazy and at ease despite the pillar of smoke up ahead.

When I get close to the bank, the crew are already fighting out of the shallows, torn between triumph and defeat. We lost the keel, but we lived. Exhausted, I let the river girl pull me up to them, and Big Ean offers a hand, half dragging me to my feet.

We look back together at the now-crumbling hulk of my boat. It exploded quickly, faster than I anticipated. Anyone aboard would surely have been incinerated. A few yards away, one of the hounds bales mournfully, before the pair runs off together.

My chest tightens, a sharp pain springing to my eyes.

“Did she . . . ?” Gill murmurs, but Riette waves him off.

Together, we wait for one of the Silvers to fight their way out of the river. An enemy or a friend, we don’t know. I hope for Lyrisa, hope her luck was as good as mine. But the boat sinks and no one comes.

I wish I could have shown her the Gates.





SEVEN

Lyrisa

The river washes clean most of the blood. If not for the water, I would be soaked in it. Orrian’s, mostly. That tends to happen when you remove a head.

It doesn’t wash away the memory. I doubt anything ever will.

The river fumed behind him, rising like the wings of a predatory bird. On either side, his friends lunged at me, slowed by their drunken state. The worst of them was Helena, but she was at the far end. A strongarm like me, she would have been difficult to kill.

But I could only look at Orrian, screaming beneath me, trying to rise from his knees. There was fire in his eyes. No, that was the ship, the cargo hold catching alight, exploding from either end.

“You will be mine,” he hissed, even as my hands closed on either side of his head. In that moment, I saw my life as it could have been, as so many had lived before me. Resigned to a crown, unhappy and spreading that unhappiness. Miserable in my strength and power. Inflicting my pain on everyone around me, and my children after me.

I would not have that life for myself, not even if the alternative was to die.

I felt the spray of the river as it trembled over us, claws reaching for my throat. I grabbed and pulled. I don’t know what I expected to happen. For him to die, certainly. Perhaps for his skull to break before his spine. Instead his neck tore clean, like I was removing the top from a jar. I didn’t know a body could do that.

I didn’t know there could still be so much blood, a heart still beating even without a head.

Strange, his water saved me. It crashed as soon as he died, falling upon us both even as the ship burned. I dove as fast as I could, my wet clothes reluctant to catch fire. Even so, I felt the searing pain of the flames behind me, consuming everything and everyone still left on the ship.

I feel them now, hot and angry. They’ll need tending, but I doubt I’ll find a skin healer at the confluence. In Memphia, maybe. For now I’ll have to make do with what I can cobble together from the market town.

It was the right thing to do. Keep low in the water, watch the bank. Wait for Ashe and his crew to move on. Let them think I died with Orrian. Let no whisper of me travel down this river. Let no one else follow my trail.

It’s the only way to get away properly. Leave no trace.

I’ll have to be more judicious with my coin. Luckily, the pouch on my belt survived the explosion and the river. It should be enough, if I spend it wisely.

First things first, I manage to trade my Lakelander uniform, soaked as it is, for better-fitting clothes. The coveralls stink, but they’ll do, and I’m eager to get out of a dead woman’s clothes. The market town is larger than I anticipated, with hundreds of stalls spread out across dirt streets and the docks. Keels, ferries, and even larger boats crowd the riverbank, loading and unloading cargo and passengers. It won’t be difficult to book passage to the Gates. It won’t be hard to leave this world behind, as I have so many others.