It had angered her so much that she did not speak to him again, not even when night fell and he complained endlessly of the dark, the chill, and the damp. He had a knack for making every discomfort her fault, or the fault of the Bingtown Traders or the Rain Wild Traders. She had grown tired of his whining. It was more annoying than the shrill humming of the tiny mosquitoes that discovered them as darkness fell and feasted upon their blood.
When dawn had finally come, she had tried to persuade herself that it brought hope. The lone board that she had to use as a paddle lasted less than half the morning. Her efforts to push them out of the main current of the river had been both exhausting and fruitless. It rotted away in her hands, eaten by the water. Now they sat in the boat, as helpless as children while the river carried them farther and farther from Trehaug. Like an uncomfortable and idle child, the Satrap picked at quarrels.
‘Why hasn’t anyone come to rescue us yet?’ he demanded suddenly.
She spoke over her shoulder. ‘Why would they look for us here?’ she asked dryly.
‘But you shouted at them as we floated past Trehaug. We all did.’
‘Shouting and being heard are two different things.’
‘What will become of us?’ Kekki’s words were so soft and thick that Malta could barely make them out. The Companion had opened her eyes and was looking at Malta. Malta wondered if her own eyes were as bloodshot as Kekki’s.
‘I’m not sure.’ Malta moved her mouth, trying to moisten her tongue enough to talk. ‘If we are fortunate, we may be carried to one side and caught in a shallows or backwater. If we are very lucky, we may encounter a liveship coming up the river. However, I doubt it. I heard they had all gone out to drive the Chalcedean ships away from Bingtown. Eventually, the river will carry us to the sea. Perhaps we will encounter other vessels there, and be rescued. If our boat holds together that long.’ If we live to see it, Malta added to herself.
‘We’ll likely die,’ the Satrap pointed out ponderously. ‘The tragedy of my dying so young will be vast. Many, many other deaths will follow mine. For when I am gone, there will be no one to keep peace among my nobles. No one will sit on the Pearl Throne after me, for I die in the flower of my youth, without heirs. All will mourn my passing. Chalced will no longer fear to challenge Jamaillia. The pirates will raid and burn unchecked. All of my vast and beautiful empire will fall into ruin. And all because of a foolish little girl, too ignorantly rustic to know when she was being offered the chance to better herself.’
Malta sat up so fast that the little boat rocked wildly. She ignored Kekki’s frightened moans to turn and face the Satrap Cosgo. He sat in the stern of the boat, his knees drawn up under his chin and his arms wrapped around his legs. He looked like a petulant ten-year-old. His pale skin, sheltered so long from the elements, was doubly ravaged by his exposure to the water and the wind. At the ball in Bingtown, his delicate features and pallid skin had seemed romantic and exotic to Malta. Now he merely looked like a sickly child. She fought a sudden and intense urge to push him overboard.
‘But for me, you’d already be dead,’ she declared flatly. ‘You were trapped in a room that was filling with mud and water. Or had you forgotten that?’
‘And how did I get there? By the machinations of your people. They assaulted and kidnapped me, and for all I know, they have already sent ransom notes.’ He halted abruptly, coughed, and then forced the parched words out. ‘I never should have come to your ratty little town. What did I discover? Not a place of wonder and wealth as Serilla had led me to believe, but a dirty little harbour town full of greedy merchants and their unmannered, pretentious daughters. Look at you! A moment of beauty, that is all you will ever have known. Any woman is beautiful for a month or so of her life. Well, you are past that brief flowering now, with your dried-up skin and that crusty split down your brow. You should have seized your chance to amuse me. Then I might have taken you back to Court, out of pity for you, and you would at least have been able to glimpse what it was like to live graciously. But no. You refused me, and so I was forced to stay overlong at your peasant dance and become a target for ruffians and robbers. All Jamaillia will falter and fall into ruin without me. And all because of your inflated view of yourself.’ He coughed again, and his tongue came out in a vain effort to wet his parched lips. ‘We’re going to die on this river.’ He sniffed. A tiny tear formed at the corner of his eyes and trickled down beside his nose.
Malta felt an instant of hatred purer than any emotion she had ever felt. ‘I hope you die first so I can watch,’ she croaked at him.
‘Traitor!’ Cosgo lifted a trembling finger and pointed at her. ‘Only a traitor could speak so to me! I am the Satrap of all Jamaillia. I condemn you to live-flaying and to be burnt afterwards. I swear that if we live, I will watch my sentence carried out on you.’ He looked past her at Kekki. ‘Companion. Witness my words. If I die and you survive, it is your duty to make my will known to others. See that bitch punished!’
Malta glared at him but said nothing. She tried to work moisture into her throat but found none. It galled her to let his words stand, but she had no choice. She turned her back on him.
Tintaglia sated her hunger with a foolish young boar. She had spotted him rooting at the edge of an oak grove. At the sight and scent of him, hunger had roared in her. The foolish pig had stood, staring at her curiously as she stooped down to him. At the last moment, he had brandished his tusks at her as if that would scare her off. She had devoured him in a matter of bites, leaving little more than blood-smeared leaves and detritus to show he had ever existed. Then she had taken off again.
Her voracity almost frightened her. For the rest of the afternoon, she flew low, hunting as she travelled, and killed twice more, a deer and another boar. They were sufficient to her hunger, but no more than that. The grumbling of her belly kept distracting her from her avowed intention. At one point, she lifted her eyes to scan the general lie of the land and was suddenly aware she had been paying no attention to where she was flying. She could no longer see the river.
She forced herself to stop thinking of her belly. Swiftly she soared across the wide swampy valley until she returned to the choked thread of the river. Here the trees encroached on the flow of water, and the swampy banks of the river spread wide beneath the forest canopy. Nothing promising here. Once more, she flew upstream, but this time she drove herself, flying as swiftly as ever she had, looking, always looking for a familiar landmark or a sign of Elderling occupation. Slowly the river widened again, the forest retreating. Soon it regained grassy banks as she followed its flow into foothills. The land around it was firmer here, more true forest than swamp. Then, with heart-stopping suddenness, she recognized where she was. On the horizon, in a bend of the river, she glimpsed the map-tower of Kelsingra. It glinted in the westering sun, and her heart lifted. It still stood, and her eyes picked out the detail of other familiar buildings around it. In the next instant, her heart sank. Her nose brought her no odours of chimney smoke or foundry and forge at work.
She flew toward the city. The closer she came, the more obvious became its death. The road was not only completely devoid of the lively traffic it had once sustained; at one point, a landslide had sheared the road away entirely. The memory stone still recalled blackly that it had been told to be a road. She could sense the trapped memories of the merchants and soldiers and nomadic traders who had once traversed it still humming in the stone. Grass and moss had not overcome it. The road still shone, black, straight and level as it made its businesslike way to the city. The road still recalled itself as a highway, but no one else in the world did.
She circled above the deserted city and looked down on its ancient destruction. The Elderlings had built the city for the ages, built it blithely assuming that they would always stroll its streets and inhabit its gracious homes. Now its emptiness mocked all such mortal illusions. Sometime in the past, a cataclysmic settling of the earth had riven the city in two. A huge cleft divided it, and the river had claimed that sunken piece for itself. She could glimpse the rubble of sunken buildings in the depths. Tintaglia blinked her eyes, forcing herself to see the city as