The Swan Riders by Erin Bow

Author:Erin Bow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books

Shortly after that, Francis Xavier tied Elián to the table.

The Swan Rider was protective, always, but he also was staggering and snarling with exhaustion, and there was so much to do. First and most urgently, I found the tissue knitter and managed the medically challenging process of running it on a half-healed wound, tearing Talis apart so I could put him back together. Talis attempted to keep quiet and still and succeeded at neither. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before he fainted, sinking limp into the feather ticking, lost in it like a corpse in the snow.

Meanwhile Francis brought the horses into the stable, rubbing them down, making them drink a little, giving them some of the oats from the refuge’s cache. He took off his prosthesis and its liner, put ointment on his blisters. He choked down a piece of jerky and a bit of water. And then he lay down on the cold stone floor, at Talis’s side, turning his face to the sleeping form and his back to the room.

I took two steps away and watched the pair of them.

Francis’s outflung hand was curled into a fist. He was awake. Breathing. Guarding us. But even as I watched, the hand softened and the breathing smoothed out. Four days breaking path in deep snow: the Swan Rider had walked clean off the outer edge of his endurance. I’d been spared that but still felt a heaviness in my bones, a chill in my torso. I was fatigued. But FX and Talis—they were exhausted.

I glanced at Elián, who was tied standing up. The thin strip fastening his wrist to the table looked fragile but was in fact smartplast with coded magnetic adhesion. He had no hope of breaking it. And only fingertip pulses—mine, Francis’s—could undo it.

Even if Elián’s plan was to stab me, even if I couldn’t wake FX in time, I was safe enough.

“Your hair’s growing out,” Elián said.

It had been sixteen days since Xie had clipped my hair back to the scalp so that I could be bolted to a table to die. If it had grown out, it was only enough to make me look like a mange victim. But Elián was smiling at me.

“I like it. I remember it being all carrots but it’s almost like honey.”

I wondered how long he had been at the refuge. If he had been lying in wait for us. If he was also shivering with fatigue, and if so how he might rest, tied like that.

“Greta?” he said. He reached toward me, and with the movement the scent of him hit me. “Please talk to me.”

I could smell him, and I remembered something: the metal table Elián was standing beside was also a kitchen. There were knives in the drawer. I took a step back. Elián tried to follow but the tie on his wrist brought him up short.

“Greta,” he said again.

“Would you really stab me?” I said. “What you did to Talis. Is that what you want to do to me?”

Elián tried to reach me.

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