17
Nonnus slept more soundly than anyone else Sharina had met, and her duties at the inn had given her more experience with sleeping men than most properly raised girls could claim. The hermit had made a joke of it: "I sleep like a seal," he'd said, but that was the truth. Danger might awaken him, but the cold sea splashing over the dugout's bows did not.
The moon hadn't risen yet; it would be in its last quarter when it did. Occasionally stars showed between the columns of thin stratus clouds, but they gave no light.
The sea, thick with phosphorescent plankton, was a bright swelling wasteland beneath the dark sky. Sharina looked north and saw nothing but shifting hills vaster than anything in the landscape of Barca's Hamlet. Nothing but water, all the way to the Ice Capes . . .
Sharina pulled her cloak closer about her and wished she could stop shivering. The fitful, contrary breeze wasn't that cold; she wouldn't have bothered with a wrap if she'd been back home, back on land once more.
A fish jumped. Sharina's eyes caught the motion rather than a form: a twisting silhouette against the glowing water, a splash, and a momentary blotch which filled as tiny multilegged swimmers returned to the point from which they'd been disturbed.
The hook and line had already caught several fish. Nonnus had been right: there wasn't the slightest chance that the four of them would starve, no matter how long they drifted.
Except during brief moments when a fish broke surface, the dugout was alone in a sea more vast than Sharina could have dreamed when she looked down on its pleasant expanse from the bluffs north of Barca's Hamlet. The hermit sighed faintly in his sleep.
The sail, furled beneath its lowered spar, lay crossways over the gunwales. When the passengers were hunched in the belly of the dugout the rolled canvas was a barrier between those in the bow and stern. Meder was on duty at the steering oar; Asera was with him. When Nonnus or Sharina was on watch, the nobles went forward together. The groups acknowledged one another's presence by the briefest nods, existing in parallel but without contact as if they were adjacent buildings.
Nonnus hadn't set the sail since the dugout tore through the reefs of Tegma, gaining freedom and the clean, crisp air of the natural world for the folk aboard her. Nothing in the world was more natural than death, nor cleaner than the Ice Capes.
If Sharina listened carefully she could hear the drone of Meder's voice between gusts of the southeast breeze. Sickly red light flickered above the dugout's stern and stained the nearby swell. The hermit sighed again; he slept in a tight ball with his arms curled around his shins.
Sharina turned her face forward and focused her eyes on the northern horizon. She wished she could sleep; she wished a lot of things.
But the sea was so vast . . .