“It’s not much,” she says when Dekala awakens at dusk. “But I’ve survived on less. If we can make it to Somanchi in a day or two, we’ll be fine. It’s a faster journey by sea than on land.”
“We should have commandeered the Djevehav,” Dekala rasps, swallowing the last of the water. She lifts her eyes to the sky, a rueful smile creeping onto her face. “We would have spent the entire journey looking over our shoulders and fighting off attackers, but at least there would have been food.”
“I think they might have accepted us,” Ruti says brightly. “Well, maybe not me.” She flips her blank palm upward for a moment. “But they did have a beautiful lady captain already, so they aren’t opposed.”
Dekala eyes her, brow creasing. “You thought their captain was beautiful?” Ruti shrugs. Dekala looks irritated at this confirmation. “She’s a pirate!”
“I know.” Ruti licks her lips, if only because it makes Dekala’s eyes narrow even more. “But I’m not blind.”
“She tried to imprison us. She threatened your life.”
Ruti props herself up on the seat of the canoe, elbow resting against the flat bench. Dekala is sitting against one side of the canoe, scowling. “You did both of those things to me, too,” she notes, stopping short of calling Dekala beautiful as well. Somehow, she suspects that Dekala will not take kindly to that observation right now.
Dekala glares at her. “You have the worst taste,” she says huffily, and Ruti has to bite her tongue before she can say what she wants to.
Instead she says, “At least I’m not in love with Orrin.” It’s meant to be light, a tease, but it emerges with a sharpness that Ruti regrets.
Dekala doesn’t respond, and Ruti turns away from her, squinting into the distance against the orange hues of the setting sun to search for land again. There is nothing but empty sea ahead of them, but for a few suspicious movements that might be sea predators. Whatever they are, the current carries them away from those movements, and Ruti says, “We shouldn’t have more than—”
“I’m not,” Dekala says abruptly.
Ruti turns to stare at her, bewildered, and Dekala says again, “I’m not in love with Orrin. I have never claimed to be in love with Orrin.” Ruti gapes at her, and Dekala says, her eyes boring into Ruti, “Orrin is in love with me.”
It’s a revelation from Ruti’s dreams, an impossibility, and it makes no sense. “But you—” Ruti blinks, shaking her head. “You want to marry him. I don’t understand.” Dekala has been very clear about her intentions with Orrin, has laid her head on his shoulder and cradled his cheek in her hand. She has never been overly demonstrative about her affection, but Ruti had ascribed that to Dekala being distant and private, nothing more. “You just ran away from home to fill the flasks in my pocket so you could marry him!”
“I do wish to wed him,” Dekala says, Ruti still staring at her in outrage and confusion. “I will not be held hostage to the mark on my palm, and I will never be bonded to another. Orrin is infatuated with me. He is a Bonded already, so there is no risk of him leaving me for someone else. He has little interest in being a king, and he seeks no power or control. He is my perfect king.”
Ruti stares at her in dismay. “That’s—” Dekala watches her evenly, no sign of discomfort in anything she’s revealed, and Ruti sputters again. “That’s what you want in a husband? Someone you can control?”
“What else is there?” Dekala’s stillness belies the calm she’s projecting. She sits too stiffly, her face unreadable, and Ruti is certain that she is lying. She must be, to be so sure of something that sounds so dreadful even to a Markless doomed to be alone forever.
“What else is there?” Ruti echoes, disbelieving. “What else—what about love?” It isn’t something that Markless are destined to experience, but Dekala is.… “Don’t you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you’re meant to be with? Don’t you want to fall in love?” It’s baffling to comprehend, being a princess as Dekala is and rejecting a soulbond for no reason but practicality.
Dekala’s eyes glow like hot embers, like a determination so strong that it is unquestioned. “I will never fall in love,” she says, her voice low and fierce. “Never.”
It stings Ruti in a way that shouldn’t matter to her, and she swallows and stares out into the sea. Dekala speaks again, the words abrupt and out of place. “My parents adored me,” she says. “I adored them, too. My childhood was only … me, sitting on my father’s lap on his throne as he judged the people. My mother brushing my hair and telling me stories of distant places. I loved my parents with all I had.”
“It sounds nice,” Ruti says. It does, like a fairytale of what a family should be.
Dekala nods sharply. “It was. It was my life. And then my mother contracted the fever.” Her face is stiff, carved from stone. “She bled for a day, then two. We cried to the spirits, but the healers could do nothing for her. She was gone within a week.”
“I’m sorry,” Ruti murmurs. She’s never had a family, of course, but she remembers her one ill-fated attempt to live as an orphan with a painted mark, the moment the family that had taken her in had realized, and the pain that comes with losing, deeper than never having at all.
“My father,” Dekala says, and now she’s spitting out the words. Thunder rumbles above them, the wind speeding up the boat. “My father who loved me, who had an entire kingdom to rule, who only had a seven-year-old child to inherit the land—my father found it too difficult to bear life without his soulbond,” she says, and there is raw fury in her voice, fire instead of ice. “He lay down in the bed he’d shared with my mother—the bed that she had died in, that I slept in beside him—and he drank a mixture of herbs with wine he’d specially commissioned my mother’s healers to make. It’s a common thing, soulbonds who choose to leave this world together. It’s weak and it’s selfish and I swore when I awoke, alone and abandoned, my father dead beside me, that I would never let someone else have that kind of power over me.”
The stories had always been that the king and queen had gotten sick, a shared illness that had taken both from Zidesh too quickly. If the king had gone some other way, the palace had kept it a secret from the people. Ruti stares at Dekala, stunned and discomfited at her revelation. “No, Ruti,” Dekala says again, blinking as though she’s only just remembered who is with her. “I will never fall in love. I will never be bonded. I will never surrender my whole self to someone else, even if the wind betrays me every day for the rest of my life.”
“That’s.…,” Ruti hesitates, lost for a response.
Dekala is glaring at her with eyes that are lost and wild, like a feral beast instead of the distant princess she becomes at her most vulnerable, and she barks out, “What? Will you call me selfish again for leaving my soulbond unbonded forever? There are worse things.”
“No,” Ruti says. “I was only going to say.…” She watches Dekala, still without the right words, and whispers, “It seems very lonely to live like that.” It’s a life that Ruti had imagined for herself, loveless and alone and with nothing but her own survival. For Dekala to be that unhappy by choice is heartbreaking.
Dekala’s jaw clenches and she twists to face Ruti, glaring at her with eyes that are suddenly very close. “It will make me a good leader,” she says. “It will make me the person my father was too fragile to become. Love is nothing, a feeling passing in the wind. I will cling to real things.”
It is strange, slipping into the role of advocate for love when Ruti has spent her life telling off dreamers. Dreamers are the ones who believe in love, who fall for a pretty boy or girl or family and believe they can have what Marked possess. Ruti is not so foolish to think she might ever have love, and yet.…
Dekala is captivating, and so very close, her breath near enough to leave its warmth on Ruti’s skin. Dekala has been all Ruti has been able to think about for a long time, has consumed her with her presence and left Ruti helpless but to drink her in. And she is made foolish with it, is lost to Dekala’s eyes, and all she can think to whisper is, “Is this not real?”
Dekala’s eyes glitter and the fire fades, melting ice in its wake. Ruti is frozen in place, is afraid to lift her hands and see what they might do, and Dekala moves for them both. With aching gentleness, she slides her fingers into Ruti’s hair, her thumb stroking Ruti’s chin. “I will never love,” she murmurs again, and Ruti closes her eyes and feels, rather than sees, the brush of Dekala’s lips against her. “None of this is.…”
“Real,” Ruti echoes in a breath, her heart racing, and she slips her arms up to clasp against Dekala’s back and pull her closer.
The kiss deepens, grows more desperate and wild, Ruti pulling Dekala nearly atop her as their lips lock and separate and lock again. Ruti is breathless with it, opens her eyes at last and sees Dekala’s eyes glowing with untamed desire, pulls her closer and falls back against the wall of the canoe and feels heat and want and something that squeezes at her heart as though it might never let go.
She kisses and kisses Dekala, and wonders for an uninhibited moment if this is how it feels to be marked, to have someone, to feel and feel and revel in it with no qualifiers. She has had her dalliances, brief and unremarkable, and not one of them has felt transformative as it is to kiss Dekala, to be wrapped in Dekala until Dekala is all she can think about, Dekala Dekala Dekala and her heart thrumming with renewed emotion and hope, the most vile emotion of all—
The canoe tilts dangerously to one side, nearly capsizing, and water splashes in from the sea to hit them. Dekala wrenches away from Ruti, her eyes wide and horrified, and Ruti can only think to reach for her again, lost without her touch.
No, the canoe had capsized, she realizes woodenly, had turned fully on its side, but they are not underwater. The water is too much, too wild and heavy; and yet, impossibly, they remain safely on board, nearly drowning in the water that leaves them soaking. It’s almost as though the water has been manipulated, as though—
“Bonded,” Dekala rasps, pulling away from Ruti to stare up behind them. There is a ship there, looming over their little canoe. The ship is large and grand beyond any craft Ruti had seen in the Guder harbor, and water Bonded stand at its bow, their hands outstretched toward Ruti and Dekala’s little canoe.
Ruti sucks in an unsteady breath, struggling to regain focus. “We’ve been … rescued?” she says dubiously. “Is this a rescue or a capture?”
“A rescue,” Dekala says, and her voice is cool again, distant as though they’d never been entwined moments before, kissing as though it was all they could do. Ruti hurts, even as she knows she should have expected this. “And …” She stares at her palm, then up at the ship again. “I understand what my aunt has always said about.…”
“What?” Ruti says, feeling small and aching with what Dekala has already moved past.
