Fighting, petite, fierce, and underestimated—the girl reminded him of Karris when they’d first fallen in love. It was intolerable that anyone should—

“You with me?” Gavin asked his oarmates.

He didn’t have time to see if they were. The young woman ran past, running for a hole where the traders’ galley had been stove in. Gavin and Fukkelot pushed on the oar. Orholam guided it. It caught the pursuing pirate in the jaw. He flopped down, twisting, in a spray of sweat and teeth.

The young woman ran past. A sailor appeared out of nowhere as she headed for the gap, and the sea. She didn’t slow, didn’t dodge. Instead, she accelerated right into the skinny man. They collided and her momentum carried them both into the water. And out of sight.

Gavin looked to Orholam. He craned his head out as far as he could, but then shrugged. He couldn’t see anything.

The fighting continued for a few more minutes, but it seemed their part was done. The fight was confined to the other galley, and the exhausted rowers on the Bitter Cob began collapsing to their benches. Some vomited. Gavin looked for Strap. There was nothing but blood, and an entire bench of slaves blown to pieces on the port side, along with one slave across the aisle, and a hole in the starboard side where the cannonball had exited. He saw a tattooed arm that might have been Strap’s.

The hunched form of Leonus limped over toward the splattered remains. “The gods are kind,” he said. He chuckled. “To some of us.” He leaned over painfully and picked up something. It was Strap’s whip, with her hand still clamped on it in death. Leonus pried her grip open and tossed her tattooed arm into the sea. “Looks like you pretty boys have a new foreman. Unless you want to follow the old one?”

Chapter 15

Kip dulled the edge of sharp hours with drafting. The emotional rush of drafting different colors as the sun limped to the top of heaven’s dome distracted him for a while. A few hours. A day. But hunger is sharper than luxin.

Will is a knife of lead. In the end, the body always wins.

That second day with no food, he drafted only what was necessary. He’d already fixed his pack, fixed his boots, drafted a shade for his sun-scorched skin after deciding he couldn’t figure out how to draft luxin clothing.

On the third day, he had to stop following the beach as he reached a rocky point of crags and cliffs. He cut through the jungle. Climbing over mounds of roots, angling up hills, trying to compensate for compensations made hours earlier, he got lost, the canopy blocking out the sun, his own stupidity and heat exhaustion keeping him from doing much but finding a stream and lying down in it.

He woke to the brush of something on his hand. A tiny black-and-orange frog sat there. His skin burned where its stomach rested against skin, acidic slime scorching him. He flinched and it hopped away. Then he looked down, his vision following his gaze like a slow landslide.

He was covered in leeches. Dozens of leeches. He was dizzy. He rolled to all fours and vomited water and stomach acid all over his hands. He stood and staggered into the jungle, gear forgotten, tearing off his trousers, falling. The world was hot fog. He puked again. Lost himself, not unconscious, but unaware, animal, a beast.

Found himself some time later, naked, sitting in a shifting patch of sunlight. He was staring at the cloudless, merciless sky. Couldn’t bear to look at himself, couldn’t bear to see those wriggling fat black leeches attached to him, sucking his blood into their bloated bellies. Drafting his blood for their blood magic.

Shhhhhh, the wind blew through the branches. Shhh.

He sucked in blue light, the blue blood of creation. Light is life. He sipped blue until it filled him, until he was only thought.

His racing heart slowed. He closed his eyes and let the blue course through him. It filled him with awareness. Thirty-one pairs of jaws, attached at the front and back of the leeches’ bloated bodies to his skin. Four singles who’d had one half or the other knocked free of Kip’s skin by his movement. With the blue in him, Kip remembered some long-forgotten advice on how to remove leeches. Not with fire or alcohol or the juice of lemons, else they’d retract angrily, vomiting foulness back into their bites as they recoiled. Instead, a fingernail to break the seal of their mouth on your skin, front and back. A fingernail and patience.

Kip’s gorge rose once more, but he stared at the sky again until his mind was a placid, still pond. He couldn’t bear it. Not sixty-some times. He lost the blue completely and was almost a beast again, trapped, trapped in his skin with leeches like he was trapped in a closet full of rats—

Like this.

Calm. Gentle. He took in blue, and more blue. He barely had the will to open himself, barely understood what the swirling color was doing almost of its own accord. It filled his body, found every tooth, every Y-shaped incision.

Gather your will.

He had no will. He reached toward sub-red for passion, toward green for wildness.

No, your will. Luxin is your tool; you are not its tool. Stand.

Kip still hadn’t gathered any will, but he stood, feeling persecuted. He knew what to do, but knowing what to do here was like knowing that all you had to do to climb a mountain is to walk. Orholam give me strength.

He already has. Use it.

Arms and legs outstretched, Kip clenched his fists, bowed his head. The power didn’t course through him in a scream of rage and omnipotence, but instead in drops of silent tears. It followed his blood, finding tiny mouths, shutting them, rejecting them, sealing the poisoned blood away from him, and forcing it out, too.

One by one, the leeches dropped off. Dropped off his arms. Dropped off his legs. Dropped off his chest. Dropped off his back. Dropped off his butt. Dear Orholam—dropped off his groin. Dropped off his face.

Kip was streaming blood from sixty-two tiny wounds. The leeches’ poison made blood run free. Kip wondered how much blood he’d lost. Several of the leeches nuzzled his feet, looking for a new spot to feed. He stepped away. He had no revulsion left. There were only problems, and fixing them.

Oh, simple. He drafted blue caps over every cut. As soon as he took a step, he dislodged a quarter of the blue caps. Of course. Blue was too stiff; if he moved, he would lose his bandages.

He leaned against a tree, sat, drafted a blue cocoon around himself, sealed it, sealed his wounds, and slept.

He woke twice to vomit, wasn’t sure if he remembered to draft his bandages or his cage anew.

He dreamt or he had visions or he did things barely aware. A quietly weeping woman, in the gray morning light, hair in a great kinky halo. “Why are you crying?” Kip heard the voice asking, only realized it was his own after the words were out.

“I weep because you suffer, and only the second sons of Am are entitled to feel pity without passion. And even then, not in life.” She stood and her aspect changed suddenly, flickering between this dignified woman and something entirely other. “Sleep,” she said, quietly radiant. “You won’t die on my watch.”

All faded into fever and nightmares and sweat and shivering cold and thunder and cool water. He heard the sounds of birds screeching, monkeys howling, something like a dog barking at him, but all of it fast, too fast, skipping along the surface of time as if he were in his father’s skimmer, light flashing across his face and disappearing like it was happening in seconds, when he knew it must be days. He had some recollection of holding a broad leaf to his face, funneling water to his lips as a mighty downpour shook heaven and earth.