The Wrath of Rivers, page 1
The Wrath of Rivers
The Seven Isles
Book Three
A.R. Knight
Contents
1. The River City
2. The Frozen Road
3. Rooftop Ride
4. Adventure’s Call
5. Queen’s Guards
6. Into the Pits
7. The Unlikely Prisoner
8. Jungle Teeth
9. Spear Games
10. Savage Stones
11. The Night Whispers
12. Knives Among Friends
13. Vine Bite
14. Victor’s Price
15. Swamp Walk
16. Trick Truth
17. Shattered Rafts
18. Bug Bashing
19. Bubble
20. Cliff Deals
21. Foti’s Gift
22. Warlord’s Word
23. Floating Blades
24. Rock Run
25. Caught
26. The Beach Bait
27. Cause Lost, Cause Found
28. A Traitor’s Town
29. Whirlpool
30. Obsidian Fiends
31. Tracking Time
32. Tamas Turnabout
33. The River Skar
34. Tower Fall
35. Common Criminals
36. Grim Promise
37. Wet Rescue
38. Making Glass
39. Prisoners
40. To The Sea
41. Two Souls, Stitched
42. Cage Match
43. Call and Response
44. Below Deck
45. Gods and their Gifts
46. The Grand Bargain
47. After Shock
48. The Wild Life
49. Renewal’s Promise
An Excerpt from The Bonds of Stone
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chapter 1
The River City
Wax, Vis Renewal, potential world savior, was broke. His satchel hung empty from his shoulders, blowing in the occasional Rana wind, and his Guardians were little better. They sat, clad in the scratchy linen layers bought by trading their remaining Foti loot, around a gilded fountain. Six small jets spouting into the chill morning surrounded a larger geyser, labeled for its home isle. Sweeping alabaster buildings played with sharp angles, banners declaring family names and businesses flew in radiant splendor. The square around them seemed not the slightest bit concerned with their hero’s plight, the traders, workers, and families maximizing the dwindling days left until winter set on in full.
And that was the problem.
“Not a single one,” Torny said, the bandit pulling up her knees and wrapping them with her arms as she sat. “Asked all the drivers again this morning, and the few that even said they could cart our sorry butts up north demanded more than we’ve got.”
‘Even when you promised more later?’ Bliss signed, though the slapdash fingers suggested she knew the answer.
“Guess the Rana only believe in payment upfront.” Torny shrugged, sighed. “You have anything stashed away for lunch, Wax, or shall I . . . ?”
That fade played to a suggestion Torny had been making the last two days, once it became clear Wax’s not-so-merry band wouldn’t be getting a celebratory jaunt up to the Whirlpool, the eternal vortex where Rana’s skars, those mysterious stones, were held. The bandit hadn’t forgotten her former life when she’d joined up with Wax’s group, when he’d accepted her ask to become a Guardian, and now every need seemingly could be solved with a few light fingers, a few lifted purses.
“You know what the Rana do to thieves,” Quik, Wax’s older brother and the surly, muscle-bound member of their group, growled. “They’ll string you up or cast you into the sea without a question. As they should.”
“Only if they catch me. Bet they wouldn’t.”
“I’ll take that bet.”
“Nobody’s stealing a damn thing,” Wax said, cutting the argument. “We need to get north, and we can’t walk it.” That’d been the first sure thing they’d learned since the Foti galleon dropped them in Riroca four days back. Rana, the isle, ran on its omnipresent waterways, and while bridges existed, a hike to the Whirlpool would be both dangerous and long. “Which means we have to earn our passage the hard way.”
‘Which is what we’ve been doing,’ Bliss signed. ‘It’s never enough.’
True. The few jobs Rana offered to non-locals left them with little more than enough to buy shelter and food. Wax and Quik had burned days moving cargo on and off ships, and even after a successful shift, the Riroca dockmaster offered little more than pittance and no promise of work the next day. Begging for another round seemed an almost unbearable option, but what else did they have?
“No street fights for you this time?” Quik asked his younger sister, and Bliss shook her head.
‘None that I can find. Not that they let me into the places I’d think would have them.’
“This damn isle.” Quik smacked a flat hand on the cool gray stone. “We could trade our weapons?”
The Foti blade, Bliss’s staff, Quik’s gauntlets, and Torny’s daggers? Might be enough to get passage, but fiends were everywhere these days. Going on a journey with hands and feet seemed to be asking for a swift death.
Riroca knew it too. Rana’s curling avenues, thin and alternating with canals and their boats, had guards posted everywhere. Trios marched or rode in gondolas, two sabers and a crossbowman in each group. Their efforts hadn’t been all successful either: the port had lost three piers and two warehouses to fiend attacks, and during their walks, Wax had seen more damage along the city’s outskirts.
Little laughter hung on the air. A dry, inevitable fear clung to the place, despite the colors.
“Can’t do that,” Wax said.
“Which means it’s what, business as usual?” Torny asked. “Because if we’re burning another day, best get on it. I want something tastier than soup tonight.”
“Steal it, then,” Quik added.
“If I do, I’ll eat it real slow in front of you. Savor every bite.”
Wax stood up. Went to scratch his shoulder and found the linens there. Getting used to wearing full clothing all the time took, well, time. He sighed. So much adventure.
“Quik and I will hit the docks again. Torny, you and Bliss see if you can’t grab a shift at an inn. Maybe the Angler’s Rest again?”
“If that cook makes another pass at me, Wax, I’ll gut him,” Torny said.
Wax grimaced, saw a simmering anger in Bliss’s eyes as she signed a similar accusation.
“Then a different one,” Wax replied. “We’ll figure something out. Meet back here at sunset.”
“You got it, boss.” Torny snapped up, Bliss right along with her, and the pair broke right, heading deeper into the city.
“Those two,” Quik muttered, watching them walk away. “Torny’s getting into her head.”
“With what?” Wax asked, starting off the walk down to the dock.
“Ideas.”
Wax laughed, “How’s that dangerous?”
“Don’t know, but Torny’s not one of us, Wax. She’s not from Vis.”
“Got that, thanks. When there’s something I need to worry about, Quik, tell me, okay?”
* * *
The docks hustled much like the city above. Riroca sprawled on a downward slope where rushing water met the ocean in a swirling delta, one overbuilt now with huge piers filled flush with ships from every isle save one: Whent.
Wax probably wouldn’t have noticed that except everything going wrong on these docks prompted a curse aimed at the bulky isle to the northeast. A rockbiter’s sneeze caused this crate to fall over, another one’s trip and fall pushed a boat a bit too far from its berth. If a Foti-forged seal failed, it was because some Whent had screwed it up first.
Wax and Quik learned to ignore the banter, even add to it when they had a chance, if only because it made the rest of the handlers look at them with a little less ire.
The brothers scored some luck when they hit the port, the dockmaster waving them over and pointing towards a massive Foti galleon stocked with fresh arms and armor, metals to be dyed Rana’s sea-green. Crate after crate needed moving, and the two Vis had earned the right to shift the biggest, worst packages from the galleon’s deepest holds.
“Lucky us,” Quik said.
“That’s right,” the dockmaster replied. “Get on it.”
Wax didn’t protest, held secret his own relief at the job. Simple labor had an added benefit now, one contingent on moving the same ways for hours. Lift, walk, climb ramps and set down near the carts that’d take the gear to Riroca artisans. Easy enough to do without much thought.
Which left Wax time to listen to the whispers in his head.
Two skars lay hidden on a necklace beneath his weathered gray tunic, a Vis emerald and a Foti ruby, though neither matched a true gem’s sedate beauty. Instead, they pulsed with life, warm to the touch, and they talked like they had stories to tell.
At first Wax found their whispers interchangeable, a flurry in his head like a rainstorm’s static sound. After days and nights, though, he’d teased out differences. The Foti skar meandered through its whispers, as if casting about and lunging for a phrase only to wait, muttering, till the next idea came into focus. Its Vis counterpart adopted a more pleasant buzz, a continual chatter looping back on itself, a stuttering repeat building, after hours, to a rapid chittering finale.
As to what any
But the skars gave Wax other clues, like the Vis one did right now, skittering as Wax strained to get this next crate up the last ramp to the dock. As it did, Wax felt his tired muscles pick up their energy, a surge like the one he’d felt when swinging through the trees on Vis. A rush, but what the skar provided wouldn’t cost him later. When he sat the crate down, the Vis skar receded to quiet, but his legs, arms, felt as strong as ever.
Quik, meanwhile, breathed hard, his arms coated in sweat. He looked Wax over as the Renewal stretched. “Careful. They’ll notice.”
Wax looked down at himself. The work’s smudges were there, but no scratches, little sweat, and certainly no listing exhaustion from a hard day’s labor.
“Sorry. It’s easy to forget,” Wax replied, affecting a slight limp as they went back in for the last crate.
Ever since bandits on Foti had taken Wax and his siblings hostage solely for the skar and its value, keeping the stone a secret had been a priority. The resulting Najahn raid on those same bandits made keeping his Renewal status secret an absolute.
Wax didn’t need more deaths on his conscience, no matter how deserved.
“Hey,” Quik said after they dropped the last crate near the cart. “Didn’t we see that ship when we left Foti?”
The Kance vessel Quik pointed to had an ethereal opulence, as if the ship deigned to dock, to touch the water. The massive intersecting sails caught wind in ways Wax couldn’t fathom, bringing the seas to heel as even the Rana couldn’t master. Yet, this far away from Kance, even their light ships were rare, an event big enough to draw stares from more than just Wax and his brother.
“The Kance Renewal,” Wax said. “She’s caught up to us.”
“Past you, I think.” Quik folded his arms as they watched the boat, the same guard-Renewal-guard order leading the disembarking, though this time a third soldier followed. All clad in regal, silver Kance armor. “She’s got to have the Kance skar already.”
“You’re saying I’m slow?”
“I’m saying you’re on your way to better future than she is.”
Collect all the skars first, win your short life’s imprisonment on Noctia. The Aegis, guarding the land from fiends until they shriveled up. An honor for your isle, for you, though Wax wasn’t sure any Aegis would feel proud at the end.
“Maybe,” Wax muttered, rubbing his chin and watching the imperious Renewal make her way up the dock. “Or maybe I just need to do some catching up.”
“Hard to do that when you can’t afford a boat.”
The Kance Renewal had a certain grace as the sun set, her loose, silver-blue robes catching a glinting fire as the sky diamonds in their hems embraced the fading orange light. The woman didn’t seem to notice, her mouth set straight, her eyes ahead, hands at her sides and tight with poised purpose.
Kance, a land of two Queens. One, so the rumor went, was always chosen for the Renewal. The one, so the rumor continued, who wanted for power, for influence.
“Quik, I bet she’s rich,” Wax said.
“Not a bet I’m taking, brother.”
“No, but one we might be able to use anyway.”
Quik shook his head, turned to visit the dockmaster, collect their meager pay in the form of potatoes, grains stacked in sacks behind the man.
From the first, this quest had rewarded ingenuity, risk, invention. Wax had those, and he had a new idea.
As the Vis Renewal took off after the Kance Queen, the Foti skar snapped and churned its whispers in Wax’s head. Approving, or so he thought.
Chapter 2
The Frozen Road
Maena, Rana captain, commander of her own ship and leader of sailors by the dozen, wiped her nose on a dirt-covered sleeve as the Whent wind whipped her dry, stringy hair into her face. The rest of her wasn’t much better off, the weeks in the caves clinging to her as hard as the ropes binding her wrists, her ankles to metal loops on the rolling wagon.
She shared the rumbling trek across Whent’s choppy tundra with the ones who’d followed her down into the Dark Below, or at least the last few who’d remained till the end: Svarde, the hulking Foti Guardian and his loyal Ferrite sat in ponderous thought toward’s the wagon’s front. Near them, Rasslebeck and Pennifer, two Rana fighters who belonged slitting Whent throats instead of being held by the rockbiters, sat across from one another spitting old stories. Dire laughter seemed their default mode on this fourth day crossing Whent’s massive isle.
Several nameless prisoners filled the benches, ones Maena hadn’t spoken to, and they shared her lack of interest, spending their time instead picking at lice and lost in their own half-frozen minds.
At least they likely had only one.
Maena shifted her gaze right, out the wagon’s scant back. The Whent prison train continued, another four wagons following them and five more in front, all heading towards that Whent dungeon known as the Pits.
Then again, Maena might not even know when she arrived, seeing as she spent so much time locked in a struggle with her own head.
The fiend in the Dark Below had shredded her memory, siphoned away Maena’s past like she might eat a snack. What’d been left behind built, in the short time it existed, a version of her. One it fought to keep alive even when Svarde had smashed the original Maena back into being.
Why won’t you die?
Because I barely had a chance to live.
The conversations pattered endless through the minutes, the hours, the days. Every thought Maena had would prompt an interjection from her other self, an opinion, a suggestion, a demand.
You’ll never take me back.
It happened once. It can happen again. I’ll wait.
Maena sniffed. Wiped her nose a second time. Blinked wind-bitten tears away. She wasn’t a crier, but with her skin chapped, without shelter from the cutting gales, the occasional snowy blusters, her body adopted other measures.
Can we live with each other?
Not with you at the till.
That was a laugh. A till. Maena had agreed with all the other sailors to give up that life with the expedition, an agreement that frayed soon after the dark grew too deep, the fiend cries too loud. She’d given up what she loved only to fail at what she wanted.
I didn’t even have a chance at that.
Roars harkened their arrival before the wagon slowed, the echoes rising over the plains like a waterfall’s wail. Soon enough the landscape followed suit, the wagon rolling through a palisade gate, one with the wood stakes pointing inward, the guards in watchtowers angling their eyes the wrong way.
Before the gate, tents sprouted across the landscape, their pitched sites offering fire pits and cheerful fur-clad Whents enjoying their days after the harvest season. Some raised flagons to toast the coming wagons, others raised jeers.
On the gate’s other side came what good trading could get you. Real buildings, stacked with Whent logs and buttressed by the rocky isle’s stone. Smoke rose high from a hundred chimneys, but the air held none of Foti’s mining stink. Maena saw shops, butchers, inns, and restaurants aplenty, all supported by roving livestock and hardy vegetable gardens, most now fallow for winter.
The wagons drew more cheers from passersby as they rolled along. Maena could only shiver in response, the glee in those stares a manic violence justifying all the Rana raids she’d pitted against the Whent barbarians. These people loved their bloodsport, so long as they could watch from their rocky mantels.
