“Search . . . ?” Ryan’s voice hadn’t cracked for years, but the thought of Gearing’s reaction broke it. He might have thought the same thing, but he would never have said it out loud. And they wouldn’t find the bits of the chronicles edited out in Gearing’s satchel. “We can’t. He’s a scholar!”

  “And you’re the Heir of Marsan.”

  “Scholars are beyond politics. Their allegiance is to knowledge alone.” That was the first lesson every child of Marsan learned. With smaller words, Ryan admitted, but Captain Yansav had come to Marsan as an adult.

  She shook her head. “Scholars are people, my lord, and people have been known to acquire knowledge without finding wisdom.”

  * * *

  “What are you doing?” Ryan demanded. Keetin was standing on one of the destroyed wharf’s thick stone support posts, six posts out from shore, stripped down to shirt and trousers. No vest, no helm, no boots.

  “I’m trying to get a look at where we’re heading,” Keetin called back, a hand up to block the sun. “I checked for fog first.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m worried about. Get in here!”

  “Not yet. I can see a small building at the water level. Can’t see the way down to it, but there must be stairs. Unless you get there by mage-craft.”

  “Or a boat.” The sun was warm on Ryan’s face, a breeze off the water keeping it from growing uncomfortably hot. He could hear the low murmur of voices behind him, the hum of insects broken by the louder buzz of a fat bee moving between the bell-shaped purple blossoms dusted over the bushes that grew up from between the stones. “I wonder if this water’s drinkable. We’re running low.”

  “Not a chance, we’re too close to the swamp.” Keetin bent forward, hands cupped around his eyes to block the sun. “It’s pretty murky even out here. I can’t see the bottom.”

  The water that slapped against the rock a handspan from the toes of Ryan’s boots was clear enough for him to see individual colored stones rolled smooth by waves. To see the shadow of a leaf bobbing on the surface. He’d have assumed it would be murkier closer to shore, but currents could have shifted the swamp further out.

  “If we can’t drink it,” Keetin called, “we could always swim in it. Wash away some of the stink.”

  The water slapped the shore hard enough to splash up over Ryan’s boots.

  A greenish-brown curve appeared against the pale stone of a post and sank again.

  “Keetin! Get back to shore!”

  To his credit, Keetin didn’t argue.

  One post. Two. Four to . . .

  The first tentacle was as big around as Ryan’s arm. The second, a little larger. The third wrapped around Keetin’s legs.

  Ryan had his sword in his hand when he hit the water. Was waist deep when he felt something slide against his hip. Both hands on the hilt, he stabbed down. The point of his blade sank into something. The sword jerked out of his hand; he lost his footing and flailed forward, dragged by the loop around his right ankle.

  Keetin hit the water, screaming.

  Then Destros was there, axe slamming down, sheets of water rising like wings on either side of the blade.

  Released, Ryan stumbled and nearly fell.

  Keetin’s head broke the surface. Then he was gone again.

  Three arrows slammed into the loop of glistening flesh arcing up out of the water.

  Keetin reappeared.

  Ryan felt a band tighten around his arm. Saw Destros go down, nearly taking the captain with him.

  Water closed over his head.

  He got his feet under him and pushed up. Got high enough, Captain Yansav hacked the thinner tentacle off his arm. Fell back into shallower water as the lake bed shook.

  Water fell up.

  Rock vibrated under his ass.

  Nonee charged past him.

  She held a tentacle in each hand by the time she reached the third post. Had disappeared entirely under water by the sixth.

  Destros hauled him up onto his feet and the captain herded them back to the shore.

  By the time Ryan turned, wet boots slipping on wet rock, Keetin’s head was out of the water again. He’d been dragged far beyond the end of the wharf in an impossibly short time. His shoulders, arms, and hips emerged, a large gray hand holding him upright. When Nonee’s head appeared, water sluicing off the curve of skin, he slid down until he sat on her shoulder.

  “Is it dead?” Captain Yansav shouted.

  “No.” Nonee tossed aside the length of flopping flesh she held in her left hand. “Too big.” She spat. It sounded like a solid hitting the water. “It pulled back to the center of the lake.”

  “What is it?” Lyelee demanded, eyeing the severed tentacle as it sank.

  “Mage-crafted,” Nonee said shortly, as though that was enough. She dropped to one knee as she hit dry land and Destros helped Ryan pull Keetin off her to the ground, where he rolled onto his knees, arched his back, sucked in air and propelled it out again with a wet painful cough that sounded as though he’d spit his lungs into the spreading puddle beneath him.

  Ryan remembered his brothers, silent, limp, and bloated as they were carried out onto the dock.

  Keetin kept coughing.

  Alive. As long as he was coughing, Ryan reminded himself, he was alive.

  Lyelee jabbed a finger into Nonee’s shoulder. “Where were you?”

  “Keeping you from being crushed by missiles thrown from the swamp.”

  Ryan could read the need to argue on Lyelee’s face. He wanted to yell, to demand to know why she’d left them unprotected. Had she’d known about the creature in the lake? He bit down on the words and said, “Did you get them?”

  “Them?”

  “The people working the siege engine.”

  She frowned, but before she could speak, Keetin sat back on his heels and Ryan dropped down by his side, rubbing his back. “Are you okay?”

  He managed a terse, “I’m great.” Coughed again, six or seven rough barks, and gasped, “What was that?”

  “Nonee says it’s mage-crafted.”

  “No shit.” Keetin spat and took a cautious breath. Another. Then jerked forward, coughing again.

  “Can it come out?” Servan asked, arrow on the string pointed toward the water. “Onto land?”

  Nonee stood and skimmed water off her leathers with the edges of her hands. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “But its arms can.”

  Ryan glared up at her. “You knew it was there.”

  “Yes.” Nonee met his gaze.

  “You should have warned us!”

  “How?” Keetin gasped. Coughed. “She was . . .” Coughed. “. . . chasing an enemy . . .” Coughed. “. . . through the swamp.”

  She still should have warned them, not run off and left them in ignorance. Keetin had nearly died.

  “Ow!” Keetin jerked his arm out of Ryan’s grip. “What was . . . that for?”

  “You nearly died!”

  “Why were you in the water?” Nonee asked, folding her arms.

  “I wasn’t in the . . . water until that . . . thing grabbed me.” Tendons on his throat stood out as he struggled not to cough. “I was on a . . . post. Looking at the mage . . . tower.”

  “Don’t do that again.”

  He flicked flame at her. “No shit.”

  “All right, enough!” Captain Yansav snapped. “If that thing can reach out of the water, let’s all move away from the water.”

  “Wait,” Ryan commanded before anyone could move. “Nonee’s here now and Keetin isn’t ready . . .”

  “I’m fine.” He coughed again, drier but more painful sounding.

  Nonee stared at Destros’s pant leg, the spreading red diluted to a pale pink. “You’re bleeding.”

  Destros glanced down and shrugged. “It’s nothing. Happened before I charged in to save the day.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You went into the water with a fresh wound?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  To Ryan’s surprise, Nonee dropped to her knees and wrapped a hand around Destros’s ankle. “It needs to be purged.”

  “Purged?” He tried to step back, but it was clear to everyone watching he was going nowhere. “That’s . . .”

  She shoved the wet fabric up his leg, closed her mouth over the wound, and her cheeks hollowed.

  Harris shoved his shoulder into the larger man’s armpit and kept Destros standing.

  The guardian had barely begun to swear when she rocked back onto her heels and spat blood into her palm.

  The black speck in the red had multiple, threadlike legs. One hand still on Keetin’s back, Ryan leaned over Nonee’s shoulder for a closer look.

  Destros blinked at her. “You sucked a baby tentacle monster out of my leg?”

  “Yes. Fresh blood attracts them.” It cracked audibly when she crushed it between her thumbnails.

  Lyelee, sample box in hand, jerked at the sound. “That creature had historical significance!”

  Nonee scraped the residue off on a rock. “Yes.”

  “You’re destroying the historical record! Wiping out unique evidence of the Mage War! From now on . . .” She jabbed the box toward Nonee’s face. “. . . scholarship will take control of all such finds!”

  “No.”

  “The Lord Protector . . .”

  “Knows the dangers of the Broken Lands better than you do.”

  “He approved the petition for scholarship,” Lyelee snarled. “He sent us here!”

  Nonee stood and cocked her head, her expression carefully blank. “Yes.”

  Chest heaving, Lyelee glared up at her, but before she could speak—because if Ryan had noticed the multiple layers of Nonee’s answer, Lyelee must have—Destros broke the silence. “So, Nonee, just the one monster in my leg?”

  Nonee’s posture softened as she turned toward him. “No.”

  “No?” Destros shot a narrow-eyed glare at the dribble of blood running down his calf. “And the others . . . ?”

  “Gone.” She looked as close to embarrassed as her features allowed and ducked her head, looking almost shy. “Eaten.”

  “They won’t . . . ?” He waved a hand toward her stomach.

  “No.”

  “Okay, then.”

  He was taking the idea of multiple tiny tentacled monsters inhabiting his body better than Ryan would have. Than Ryan was. His skin crawled at the thought.

  As Harris took Destros to one side, Arianna’s paste pot in his hand, Nonee swept her gaze over the other three in dripping clothes. “Strip.”

  “Strip?”

  “They need wounds. Eyes, mouths, noses . . .”

  Captain Yansav blew her nose, snot and water splatting against a flat rock.

  “. . . don’t give them access,” Nonee continued. “But the smallest wound will.”

  “We need to move away from the water. Now.” Captain Yansav’s voice was steel.

  “If you’ve been . . .” Nonee frowned. “. . . infected, there’s limited time to save you.”

  “Strip,” Ryan barked, ignoring the captain’s reaction.

  “Yeah, stripping.” Coughing, Keetin struggled to get his shirt over his head. Ryan moved in to help. The bruising on his torso had turned green around the edges, the center of the impact still deep purple. His fingers trembled as he unbuttoned his trousers, but he sounded almost normal as he said, “I’d like to remind you all that the water was cold.”

  He managed a grin when Servan whistled.

  “Ryan Heir.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  Bruises were already rising around Keetin’s waist, his thighs, and one arm. There were no breaks in the skin.

  “Now.”

  He dragged his eyes off Keetin and stripped.

  Captain Yansav’s skin was whole.

  Nonee took his hands in hers and scowled at the tears around his fingernails. “Not deep enough,” she said after what seemed like days, and released him.

  Ryan fought to keep his hands at his sides. “So I can get dressed?”

  “Yes.”

  After the intimacies of the road, they’d seen each other in every state of undress, but this, this was being put on display, and that had always ended in his being found wanting.

  “Only because you’re a waste of space.”

  “The water was quite cold, my lord,” Harris murmured, scooping Ryan’s wet clothes up off the ground.

  The heavily emphasized, insincere sincerity pulled him out of the impending spiral, and Ryan grinned as he dragged wet linen up over his thighs. “In case I haven’t made it clear, I’m glad you’re with us, Harris.”

  “You’d have starved without me, sir.”

  Ryan’s grin broadened. “You’re welcome.” As his head emerged through the neck of his shirt, he saw the captain thrust Keetin’s vest at him, scales rustling.

  “This works better if you wear it, my lord.”

  “I’d have sunk to the . . . bottom, Captain.” He took the vest, then let it drop as he coughed.

  Captain Yansav stared at him for a long moment, nodded, pivoted on one heel, and snapped, “What happened in the swamp?”

  “Got away,” Nonee growled.

  “Away? Right.” The captain swept a gaze around the company and settled her helm on wet hair. “We move off this road and into a defensible position on higher ground now!”

  Arrow still on the string, still pointing out into the lake, Servan shook her head. “We’re not going to make the top of headland before dark, Cap.”

  The captain’s nostrils flared. “So you suggest we linger between the enemy in the swamp and the enemy in the lake?”

  “Uh, no, Cap.”

  When he lifted it onto his shoulders, Ryan’s pack was lightest it had been, a reminder that the water was almost gone. Sunlight danced mockingly across the surface of the lake. Wisps of fog clung along the far shore.

  * * *

  Nonee crossed the stone bridge first. If it could hold her, it could hold them all. At the same time. While dancing.

  “You call that clumsy shuffle you do dancing?”

  “It isn’t how well the pig dances . . .”

  “. . . but that it dances at all.”

  Ryan barricaded his response behind clenched teeth. His brothers had had a dancing master. He’d been too young at the time and the master hadn’t been rehired for him.

  The captain kept them moving as quickly as possible; their pace, as always, set by Gearing. Ryan wasn’t sure if it was the rest, the creature in the lake, the attack from the swamp, or the combination of all three, but the scholar made good time on the flat and barely slowed as he stepped onto the bridge.

  Ryan glanced over the edge as he reached the apex of the arc. The weeds growing through the surface of the water swayed in the currents. Or maybe not in the currents. “Nonee, does the creature extend tentacles into the swamp?”

  She paused on the other side of the bridge to look back at him. “Probably. There’s nothing left alive in the lake.”

  “Why hasn’t it taken over the swamp?”

  “Lingering mage-craft.” She shrugged. “Competition.”

  “Wonderful,” Keetin murmured beside him before beginning to cough again, fist pressed against his chest, trying to force the last of the lake out of his lungs. He went to spit into the water, thought better of it, and spat on the stone instead.

  “My lord Marsan! Lord Norwin-cee!”

  They were the last two on the bridge and the captain wasn’t happy. Ryan gave Keetin a shove toward the road and fell into step beside him, trying not to wince at his hacking cough.

  Nonee believed the . . . infection needed a wound.

  Lungs had to be at least as warm and damp as the inside of Destros’s leg.

  Just beyond the bridge, the road had been shattered.

  “This was done some time ago,” Lyelee noted.

  “Does it matter?” Ryan asked wearily.

  Lyelee glared at him. “Apparently not.”

  The hole had filled with water. Not rainwater, not in high summer, so either the lake or the swamp had found a way in. The gap was too large to jump, even without packs.

  Ryan scratched at the beard growing back in under his chin. “If Nonee stands in the center, we can step onto her shoulder, then across.”

  Nonee dropped one of the decorative stone pillars that had anchored a corner of the bridge into the gap.

  “Or that,” Harris said quietly.

  All four pillars and a bit of parapet made an uneven path that rose barely a handspan above the surface of the water.

  Gearing slipped as he crossed, windmilling his arms and sounding like a startled duck. With Harris’s help, he regained his balance and kept walking, loudly declaring he needed no assistance and that they should all remember he wasn’t more than a year or two older than Harris and hardly as decrepit as they all liked to believe.

  “The Lord Protector’s party lost their slowest member in the swamp,” Keetin murmured by Ryan’s ear.

  “And?”

  “Maybe I should seize the moment.”

  “You can’t push him in.”

  “But . . .”

  “No.”

  * * *

  On the far side of the harbor, the road rose in a gentle curve up to the headland. The further they climbed above the swamp and the lake, the less Ryan stared at his hands, wanting to claw off his skin and rip out any multi-limbed creatures making a home in his flesh. Destros didn’t seem bothered by the idea that he’d actually had said creatures living inside him, more concerned with mournful observations of how his leathers had stiffened as they dried while Servan ignored his complaints and told impossible stories about seafood. Keetin kept coughing, but Ryan convinced himself that each cough sounded drier than the one before. Although she still held her sword, the rigid line of Captain Yansav’s back had relaxed. Giant not-squid and flung skulls joined the list of things that hadn’t cracked Harris’s quiet competence. And although the two Scholars grumbled, the rise and fall of their arguments had become the background to Ryan’s life.