The Winner's Kiss (The Winner's Trilogy, #3)(43)

“Arin is my friend,” Roshar told her. “I trust him with my life, and he trusts me with his. That’s rare. I won’t have it questioned by someone who, for all I can tell, has no love for him.” He knocked over his general: the gesture of surrender. The marble game piece rolled. “Go away, little ghost. Go haunt someone else.” But he was the one who left.

Rain tapped the panes. She went to draw the windows shut, then paused, seeing how the trees bent, lashed by wind blowing in from the sea. It smelled like a cut-open oyster.

Dear one, what do you care?

A small serpent of worry lifted its hooded head inside her.

Rain drove into Arin’s eyes. The deck heaved. It wasn’t a green storm, but just as bad. They’d seen the signs. They’d been warned against sailing by the Herrani captain who’d taken Arin east last winter.

“We must,” Arin had told Roshar. “The general holds Ithrya. He’ll use it to supply a strike at the mainland and can sustain that attack only if he’s able to supply his forces. He’s stockpiling Ithrya. We must break his supply lines with the Valorian capital. I’ll sail to the Empty Islands between our western shores and Valoria.”

“ You’re no sailor.”

Arin spoke as if he hadn’t heard. “A Herrani ship, with Herrani crew.”

“I’ll send Xash.”

Arin shook his head. “My people have recovered. They want to fight. As it is, your soldiers wonder when we’re going to pull our own weight.”

So Arin’s ship had set sail.

Now it quaked under each hit from a monstrous wave. The sea swelled into purple hills and valleys. The sails had been stowed lest they be shredded by the wind. The captain had set a drogue in the water to slow the ship and stabilize it, but its prow punctured wave after wave. The deck was slick. Arin struggled to keep his footing. He slid, hit the railing, and gripped it. Vomited.

“God of madness.” The captain seized Arin’s upper arm and hauled him upright. The captain was three times Arin’s age and growled with that lilt that Herrani sailors had had before the war. “Get below, boy. What good’re you on deck? You know nothing of the sea.” Then the captain’s attention darted away, and he was gone.

The captain was right. Arin was headed toward the bolt-hole, his face stinging with salt and rain, eyes burning, when it struck him that he was too seasick to be afraid. This made him remember his conversation with Kestrel as they’d ridden her horse, and how, if he’d had to touch her, he should have known better than to touch her where they had hurt her, even if he had wanted to say, without words, that he understood how they had hurt her.

His boots skidded. The world was a dizzy, wet blur. The ship shuddered and leaned on its side. Again, Arin tumbled against the railing. This time, he went over. He plunged into the seething water below.





Chapter 15

He punched to the surface. Broke it. Gasped. Was shoved under again by a swell of water. His lungs blazed.

This time, when he came up from the silence into the roaring air, he was smarter. He broke the laces of his boots with a savage yank, kicked the heavy things from his feet. He sucked in his breath, swam straight through the next wave, and struck out for the tempest-tossed ship, which wasn’t far. The water was blood-warm. It tugged at him. Dragged and pushed. His shoulders ached. He swam through another wave. He prayed. He was closer.

A rope? Could someone lower a rope from the deck?

Maybe . . . if anyone had even seen him go over.

He kicked harder. Don’t leave me, he prayed again to his god. Not like this.

There was no sound but the sea.

I’ ll serve you, Arin promised.

His god didn’t answer. Arin was close enough to see the barnacles on the ship’s hull. He looked up. No one looked down. He pushed forward.

How can I serve you, if I drown?

And now the fear. Weariness. His limbs felt as if they were plowing through mud. Salt in his throat. His lungs. His death wasn’t supposed to happen this way.

By the sword. Please.

Not like this.

Not alone.

Not yet.

A current sucked him away from the ship.

Arin almost surrendered himself to it. You can’t fight the will of the gods, and never this god.

A tattered desolation fluttered through him. Again: Not alone, not yet. But he was alone. He had been alone for a long time.

I wish, he thought, that I could hear your voice again. He wondered if he would, in the end.

The current still gripped him. But it turned on itself. It flung Arin forward, muscling him swiftly through the water until he slammed against the hull’s side.

He almost blacked out. Head ringing, vision weird, Arin went up and down. He swallowed water. Scrambled against the hull. His hands sought something, anything.

And hooked hard. Squeezed.

The hull ladder.

Arin looked up and saw the line of rusted rungs leading up the hull. For a moment, he couldn’t move. He was rapt with wonder.

In your name, Arin swore. I’ ll bring glory to you.

Shaking, grateful, he climbed.

The next day broke clean, like it had been spat on and polished to a shine.

The black powder stored in the magazine deep in the ship’s hold had stayed dry. Some sacks, though, had been kept at the ready on the gundecks. They were soaked. The sea had swamped the gunports before the sailors had hauled back the cannons and bolted the ports.