natural to be afraid before a wedding, to fear a new country and a new life. I’m willing to forget this, or, better yet, thank you for it!” He gestures to his friends with his free hand, his grin manic. “We haven’t had such fun in ages. So let me go, give the man what’s left of the coin in your belt, and let’s get off this stinking boat. Hmm?”
“So few of you,” she replies, her eyes darting over the noble faces leering at her. I suppose she knows them all. “And weaklings too. Barely worth the blood in their veins. Drunks and imbeciles. I’m surprised this is the best you could do, Orrian. I thought you a prince?”
“You strongarm bi—!”
With a growl, she twists her hand and snaps his wrist, the sound of bones breaking somehow louder than his resulting scream. He falls to his knees, clutching a hand now hanging off the joint, kept in place only by skin. The sight nearly makes me vomit, but I keep my bearings, moving the pistol from Lyrisa’s head to Orrian’s.
His nobles are already lunging, their weapons and abilities ready. Behind me, Big Ean flicks his lighter open, the clink of metal as warming as my mother’s voice.
I squeeze, blasting off a round.
But the gun jams.
“Shit,” I whisper.
Orrian’s eyes are like a hurricane at the Gates, ready to rip me apart. The river rises behind him, born of all his fury, a wall eager to crush me.
I’m sailing through the air before I can register what’s happening, hurtling for the deeper water off the bank. Then I realize: Lyrisa tossed me as easily as a doll. I barely have time to heave a breath before I crash into the water, narrowly missing a child’s raft. I learned to swim when I learned to walk, and I fight back to the surface easily, breaking through in time to see Big Ean, Riette, and Gill leap from the side of my keel, their bodies silhouetted against the spread of flame.
And I’m left to hope Lyrisa did the same, jumping into the water as the cargo hold filled with spilled oil and alcohol caught fire. She knew the plan. Well, almost all of it. I had to improvise a bit. I hope she’ll forgive me for holding a gun to her head.
The wave falls in on itself as the keel burns, signaling the end of Prince Orrian. Burned or torn apart by a strongarm or both. Screams rise with the smoke, impossible to decipher. I swim as fast as I can, legs kicking, arms pumping, to close distance.
On the river, other boats stop to watch, and one of the river kids is good enough to slow her raft next to me, letting me grab hold. She steers the small motor with one hand, lazy and at ease despite the pillar of smoke up ahead.
When I get close to the bank, the crew are already fighting out of the shallows, torn between triumph and defeat. We lost the keel, but we lived. Exhausted, I let the river girl pull me up to them, and Big Ean offers a hand, half dragging me to my feet.
We look back together at the now-crumbling hulk of my boat. It exploded quickly, faster than I anticipated. Anyone aboard would surely have been incinerated. A few yards away, one of the hounds bales mournfully, before the pair runs off together.
My chest tightens, a sharp pain springing to my eyes.
“Did she . . . ?” Gill murmurs, but Riette waves him off.
Together, we wait for one of the Silvers to fight their way out of the river. An enemy or a friend, we don’t know. I hope for Lyrisa, hope her luck was as good as mine. But the boat sinks and no one comes.
I wish I could have shown her the Gates.
SEVEN
Lyrisa
The river washes clean most of the blood. If not for the water, I would be soaked in it. Orrian’s, mostly. That tends to happen when you remove a head.
It doesn’t wash away the memory. I doubt anything ever will.
The river fumed behind him, rising like the wings of a predatory bird. On either side, his friends lunged at me, slowed by their drunken state. The worst of them was Helena, but she was at the far end. A strongarm like me, she would have been difficult to kill.
But I could only look at Orrian, screaming beneath me, trying to rise from his knees. There was fire in his