The tumble seemed to take hours, giving him time to realize he was falling a long way, to wonder if hitting the river below would hurt much. He imagined being carried away to the sea and meeting up with scores of burned corpses and generations of dead Tiran, all sitting on the sea floor, grinning their bare grins, motioning for him with naked hands.
Then the water struck his gut, and he could not have breathed even if there had been air. He flailed, wishing a scream. The water seized him and pulled him down.
Razo thrashed his way up once. His face scraped the surface, and he sucked in air and water. Dasha was running on the bank above him, not quite keeping pace with the river, and yelling at him to swim to the lower bank on the other side. Now he wanted to laugh. As if he could swim two paces, let alone across a river.
His clothes, his sword, and his bag of stones were as heavy as the world. His head went under. The water sang in his ears.
As the dark and cold and confusion lulled him, rocked him, he thought to feel embarrassed to be dying so easily, and in front of a pretty girl no less. His arms and legs still wrestled with the deep, but his mind was falling asleep.
A sudden lift startled him to gasp. He was on his back staring at the gray sky, wrenching air into lungs, coughing out water. Then he noticed that he was not floating downstream but gliding toward the opposite shore, like the waterbirds that propel themselves with wide, flat feet. Razo glanced at his own feet and saw his toes peek through his sandals. At least he was not a duck.
He thought he saw Dasha swimming some distance off, but when he turned to look, water gushed over his face, so he kept his face up and focused on making certain he had plenty of that wonderful air.
His head bumped something hard, and he twisted around, somehow keeping afloat until his fingers grasped a tiled edge and he could pull himself up. The far bank of the river was built into a series of wide steps, so as the river rose and fell it would always meet an easy dock. Razo crawled away from the water and lay on a step, coughing his breath, his legs trembling. He could not quite believe he was alive.
A hand reached out of the water. Another. Dasha pulled herself up and sat where she was, her legs knee deep in the river. Her hair was straight and dripping, one tiny silver star clinging to a strand, the others washed away. She looked at him, her lips parted.
“Did you pull me?” Razo asked. “Is that how I made it across?”
Dasha did not answer. She turned to the river as if considering jumping back in.
A heavy gust wrapped around Razo’s face and warned of more than wind to come. Darker clouds pushed through the gray ones, swirling and undulating as though the sky mirrored the river’s waves.
“It’s going to storm soon.” Standing up, he felt like a newborn colt, shaking on unfamiliar legs. He searched for a bridge to take them back across the Rosewater and into the city, but no arch interrupted the slate water. When he started to climb the bank steps, Dasha did not follow. Now she was watching the sky.
“Come on, noble girl.” He put his arm around her waist to lift her to her feet. “We’ve got to get away from the river. If it rains much and this wind gets tougher, we could be swept away.”
She let him lead her. The wind grew more insistent, pushing them from behind. He scrambled up the steps and saw dark fields, the laborers absent for the feast day. A squarish shape in the distance was the only destination. Dasha’s steps seemed reluctant, so Razo put his arm around her shoulders and made her run.
It was a small hut, rattling in the wind like chattering teeth and likely to crumble in on itself any day, but it was empty and had a roof, so Razo tore the knotted rope off the door and pulled Dasha inside.
Lightning sliced the gray; thunder hurled itself across the sky. There was a pause, as if the world took a deep breath, and then rain struck. The thin metal roof shuddered, the walls groaned once, and Razo leaned toward the center of the room, uneasy with a storm that seemed intent on clawing its way inside.
He shrugged and chuckled at himself. It was just weather, nothing to get his boot straps tangled about. Then he looked at Dasha—pale, crouched on the floor. She was staring straight up. He could not help but follow her gaze, but nothing hung in the air above them.
“What ails you?” he asked.
“Did I do it?”
Razo’s heart seemed to fall a long way. It
was
her. She had killed those people. The question in her voice encouraged him somewhat that she was innocent, in a way. In the way that Enna had been during the war, in the way that Finn forgave Enna.
“Did you mean to do it?”
Dasha looked at him. In the dim light, the blacks of her eyes nearly crowded out all the blue, giving her a startled expression. “Sometimes I do.” She returned her gaze upward, opening her face and neck to the sound of rain. “I want to, the desire pulls me, and I can’t help it … or I don’t want to help it. I love it, though I didn’t mean to do it this time.”
The room seemed to slant now. Razo was backing away. “What do you mean, you love it? You love killing people?”
“Killing people?”
“I thought that you…I can’t believe you enjoy it, I just didn’t think…” An icy shiver scratched at his back, like the warning before he went too far taunting his big brother Brun. “So, you going to kill me next?”
“Kill you next? Razo, what—”
“Those bodies, that one by the river, you burned them.”
“I did not! I found it there, just like you did.”
“You said you loved it, but you didn’t mean to—”
“I was talking about something else, just forget about it….”
“What was it, Dasha? What didn’t you mean to do?”
“The rain!” She stood up, her arms straight, her fingers straight. “I was talking about the rain.” Her voice went low, and she turned her back on him, resting her forehead against a shuddering wall. “Never mind.”
Razo was done with tiptoeing around slippery places. He grabbed her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Tell me.”
She blinked fast, as though she were battered by sharp rainfall; then the release of her shoulders spoke of defeat. She held up her hand, and her forefinger and thumb met, pinching the air. She put her finger out and showed a drop of water hanging from its tip. It got fatter and heavier, sagging until it dropped.
Razo gaped. “What’re you…?”
She did it again and again, plucking drops of water from the air like berries from a summer bush. Her expression was calm, rapt, pleased.
“My grandfather taught me this. He called it river fingers. After I got the hang of it, he taught me this, too.” She grabbed at the air, and water hung from all five of her fingers like long, luminous nails. She shook them off. “And this.” She cupped her hand around nothing. Her palm filled with water, and she sipped it dry.
“It’s easy on days like today, so much water in the air, not just the rain, but the invisible damp. The world is full of water we can’t see. But I can…
feel
it.” Dasha stared at her open hand as drops of water gathered on her fingertips and rolled into the cup of her palm.
“You know the language of water,” Razo whispered. “You can draw it to you, like some folk can with wind or fire. You got the river to carry me, didn’t you? Ho there, now, I just realized something—that day in the assembly! You made the stair wet so the assassin would slip.”
She nodded. “I try not to use it much, but I wanted to help. That was all I knew how to do from that distance.” She shrugged, the gesture a self-criticism.
“I’ll bet you could do more than that,” said Razo, remembering how Isi had once pushed back five goose thieves with the wind, how Enna…Enna had done a lot of things.
Dasha tilted her head, crinkling her nose without smiling. “On days like today, I can feel how heavy the clouds are. My skin aches, and I know if I just feel it, just close my eyes and hear the clouds release, the rain break apart, the world sigh in relief, it will happen. But I don’t.” She touched her breastbone. “There’s a funny tickling inside me when I’m near the ocean, near a river, itching me to leap in and try something more. What I did with you today in the river, I had never done before.”
“Well, I thank you, then. Your, uh, river fingers saved my life. My friend Isi would call it the gift of water-speaking.”
“It does not seem like a gift. It killed my grandfather.”
“What? Killed your…How?”
Dasha searched Razo’s eyes, and he straightened, tried to look as trustworthy as possible. The walls of the shack groaned again, a creak of wood as hard and distinct as a word. Dasha led Razo to the center of the room, sat beside him, and told her story.
“When I was six, after the death of my mother, I lived in the country under the care of my grandfather. That was the year he first told me about river fingers. He told me one had to be born to the talent in order to learn, and he sensed that, unlike my father, I had ability. His own mother had taught him; then before she died she forbade him to use it. He had obeyed her until he had a companion in the art.”
Dasha harvested another water drop from the air, and she watched it sadly, as if it were a dead thing. “Grandfather could touch the dry creek shore and call the water to flood the banks or on a cloudy day ask the rain to fall. How it used to make me laugh!”
Razo became conscious again of the torrent on the roof, like fingernails scratching metal.
“When I was ten, my father brought me to Ingridan, where I was always afraid someone would guess what I could do. Even then, I sensed the wisdom in Grandfather’s insistence on secrecy. Three years later, I returned to the country to find Grandfather looking haggard. At first I thought he was simply sad because he missed me.” Dasha’s laugh was bitter. Her fingers plucked at her skirt.
“One morning I sat at my window and saw Grandfather sneak away toward the creek. I thought he was off for a bit of fun!” Her voice cracked.
“So I followed…” She cleared her throat. “I followed him. Quietly, in bare feet. I stayed behind a bush, excited to catch him at some new river fingers trick. I remember he was sweating, or at least his face and arms were drenched, and he was muttering, ‘Coming, I’m coming….’ He did not hesitate, just walked right into the creek and let himself fall. Not like he was going swimming, more like he was going to bed. The current pulled him down.
“I chased after him, Razo, I did, and when I couldn’t find him, I ran into the water to listen—it sparked images in my mind of an otter upstream, of fish and crawfish and grubs, and trees that bowed themselves into the creek. No whisper of Grandfather. At the time I didn’t understand. Now, I believe the river could no longer detect a difference between him and water.”
Razo put his arm around her shoulder. She leaned in to him, her head resting against his neck. It made him sigh in relief—he did not like listening to someone else’s pain without doing something to make it better. “Did you ever find him?”
“Downstream,” she said blankly. “His body had washed ashore, drowned. The water had lied. He had sought to join it completely, but dead, he was still just a man.”
Razo listened to the rain trying to find a way in. “Could that happen to you?”
“Yes.”
“Soon?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what happened to Grandfather. Maybe he used his talent too much, so I avoid it. But I want to use it, all the time, and it feels so natural when I do. A relief. But I’m afraid, too.” She sat up so she could see Razo’s face. “I know it’s Enna, Razo.”
Cold rushed from his belly up into his face. It was hard to play casual there in that scrap of a shelter with the storm tearing at the roof, Dasha’s story still slumping around their shoulders, sad and strange, a tired ghost.
“What’s Enna?” he asked.
“Enna is the fire-witch. I’d hoped your fire-witch might come with the Bayern, and so I volunteered to be the liaison. When I get close enough to touch, the water in the air can tell me who has a peculiar heat swirling about. I wanted… Please, Razo, don’t think ill of me, I can see that little frown between your brows and your thoughts full of doubt now…. I wanted to meet the fire-witch, I thought she might give me a chance. Am I a fool?”
That was not a question Razo was eager to answer. Dasha sighed.
“My grandfather collected books with any mention of river fingers. I’ve been studying them and found out about the fire worshippers in Yasid, people who could spark fire from air. One author believed they could also call rain down.”
The parchment in her room,
he thought.
“They lived without struggling against the call of water, in harmony with water and fire. I thought if Enna could teach me…”
“You want Enna to teach you fire?” He did not try to deny it anymore.
“These past months, I have been hoping to make her friendship. I try to be where she will be, but I also fear that she will sense in me the river fingers as I sensed the fire in her. It’s funny, I feel at ease addressing the assembly, but around Enna I am all shaking knees and dry mouth. It’s easier when you’re around. You make people relax, you know that?”
“Really?”
First Talone tells him that he has the keen eye of a spy, then he is the best slinger Finn ever saw, and now he makes people relax. Why did everyone take so long to tell him these things? The best any of his brothers ever said was that he did not stink as sour as their third oldest brother, Thein, who after a day chopping wood reeked like a twice dead skunk.
“I was so happy when she came on that beach ride with us, but I guess…” Dasha shrugged. “For many, the war is hard to forget.”
“So what
were
you doing by the river today?”
“Following Tumas. One night when I was trying to get up the courage to go to Enna’s room and talk to her, I saw him climbing a tree, peering into her window. I fetched a palace guard, but when we returned he was gone. His intent might have been pure lechery, but I was afraid he might know what I know. I daydreamed that if I could figure out what Tumas knew and was able to tell Enna, then she might be grateful, she would think me …” Dasha shrugged, shy. “I was in the heart today and saw him heading down a side street alone. I’d lost him and was walking back up the Rosewater when I came upon you. Did Tumas kill that person?”