On the third morning, the wheels began to ring.
They were crossing salt crust. Under it lay mud, and under the mud a drowned battlefield. Selka knew the road by the stakes rising from the pale ground. Every spring someone tested it with a long pole and planted fresh stakes where a cart might pass.
This year no one had come.
Darr sent a man ahead with a spear. The horses hated the footing. Ruun leaned toward the open flats, making the carriage list until Selka put her weight on the opposite side.
“Stay in the middle.”
“There was water here.”
“There is water here.”
“Not this.”
Its hand moved. The crust darkened. A pool opened beside the road, broad and shallow, and something curved rose beneath it. Selka thought it was a rib. Then she saw the length of it: a boat's bow, the wood bleached silver.
The soldier ahead jumped back. His spear sank almost to the handle.
“Stop it,” Darr ordered.
Selka put her hand on Ruun's wrist. “We're on a road.”
“On my mouth.”
The water cleared around the wreck. Through it she saw two more boats, their hulls tipped together like animals sheltering from weather. A bronze bucket lay between them. The river had once entered the sea here before Merrow diverted its deep channel, leaving the old estuary to choke with silt.
“Did you know these boats?” she asked.
“The narrow one would turn badly with a full sail. He told them. They liked the red cloth better.”
She pictured the man with crooked fingers, annoyed at clients who preferred a pretty sail to a sound hull. The god's gaze followed the wreck, and for the first time she could imagine it having a day that did not involve human need. Sunlight, a familiar voice, a foolish argument about cloth.
Then the wheel under her dropped.
Selka threw herself onto the platform rail. The carriage tilted toward the widening pool. One horse sank to its knees. Men shouted; a harness snapped.
“Ruun!”
It did not look at her.
She caught its face between her hands. The touch hurt. “We go over, and you go over with us.”
Its eyes focused on hers. The pool shuddered. Mud lifted beneath the sinking wheel in a slow, ugly swell. Darr cut the trapped horse free, and the animal scrambled onto crust that held.
Selka kept both hands against the god's face until the carriage leveled.
“There,” she said. “Keep it there.”
Ruun lifted her hands away one at a time.
They crossed the damaged patch by inches. Beyond it the road rose onto a strip of dry ground. Darr ordered everyone down and spent the rest of the morning finding a route around the newly exposed wrecks.
Selka sat beside Ruun. Her legs would not stop shaking, and there was a muddy print of its hand on the sleeve Anet had held.
“Can you bring them up?” she asked. “The boats?”
“I could. Before.”
“What would you do with them?”
“Look at them.”
She watched salt dry across its stone feet. “And the man?”
The water under its throat went still.
“No.”
“I didn't mean—”
“I cannot bring him back.”
It had answered the question she had tried to avoid asking. There was no comfort in its voice, no invitation to comfort it.
Selka took the cloth off her palm and turned it to the clean side. She wet it from the flask and wiped salt from the seam in its throat. Ruun allowed this, looking past her toward the wrecks.
“You want to go home,” she said.
“I want what was mine.”
Down the road Darr was helping the freed horse stand. It shook from head to tail and put its nose against his coat.
Selka thought of the foundry loft. Anet would have finished tuning the bell by now. Or broken it and started again. There would be bread somewhere on the bench, and Sorell telling her to clear away before she dropped filings into the crust.
“Will there be enough of you left to make it again?” she asked.
Ruun turned toward her.
“After I take myself back.”