Medicine for the Dead by Arianne Thompson

Author:Arianne Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

CHAPTER TWELVE

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN

THEY’D LEFT HER.

Shea drifted motionless in the water, silent, camouflaged – but everything in her was screaming. You’re going to die, her oldest, most primitive instincts shouted at her. You’re alone and crippled and soon you’ll starve or freeze or be eaten. Hide – wait – be still.

So she did. She floated along like a river-colored corpse, seeping distress until no mereau even five miles downstream could have failed to smell it.

But her thinking mind knew that there were no mereaux downstream – that that was the direction she’d just come from – and that the cohort from the House of Losange had gone upriver without her. She had not gotten lost: she had been abandoned, and none of her kin knew where she was, and none of the strangers she’d taken up with were coming back for her. She was going to die.

That was a hard thing to accept. She had been so close! It might have been all right to fall out of a window or get run over by a clay-cart three days ago, when she’d spent twenty years looking for Yashu-Diiwa with nothing to show for it. But now, to have looked him in his ridiculous spotted eye, smelled his fetid sweaty hide, and to float along knowing that the bastard prince of the Ara-Naure was out there, ignorant and helpless and closer to death every minute... oh, it was beyond enduring.

Even if he was bigger than any Ara-Naure ought to be.

Even if he didn’t have their marks.

Even if she’d been wrong about those others.

No, this Elim was the right one; she was sure of it this time. Whether she would live long enough to prove it, on the other hand...

Not for the first time, Shea was consumed by a vicious wish to be anyone but herself – to have any body but hers. If she could go back two days, before her virgin lungs were so rudely deflowered by that bullet – ten years, before she’d scorched her eyes looking for that wretched boy – thirty years, before the hot knife had taken her tail and toes... if just one essential part of her would work the way it used to, she would gladly compensate for all the rest.

But no magical fire-spirit bubbled up to grant her any wishes, and Shea was trapped in the floating wreck of her own present self, drifting aimlessly toward an anonymous, dismal ending.

Maybe her next life would be better.

She was roused from her torpor by a sudden disturbance in the water. Her water-sense knew at once that it wasn’t the movement of fish: this was something big and splashy, coming from the edge of the western bank. Two somethings, actually – one smaller and relatively calm, the other broad and turbulent. When she did not dare come any closer, Shea finally risked surfacing. She emerged from the water slowly, and only far enough to expose her eyes and ear-holes.

A man and a horse were stooped at the shoreline – one taking a drink, the other washing his face.

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