Anet peeled an orange while Selka spoke.
The smell filled the shelter they had found behind a collapsed fisherman's pier. Outside, Darr and Iven listened for footsteps on the bank. Sorell had gone forward to check the channel. Ruun remained within hearing; there was no space on the boat for a private betrayal.
“You told me it was healing,” Anet said.
“I told you your lungs needed help.”
“That isn't an answer.”
Selka rested her hands on the bench. There was bronze dust in Anet's cuticles still. She had been afraid her daughter would cry. The neat, furious peeling was harder to watch.
“It agreed to stay for a season. We said the river would open, that we would stop the taking downstream. It was willing to help us.”
“And you changed the words.”
“Yes.”
“By mistake?”
“No.”
Anet broke off a strip of peel. She held it so tightly that juice ran onto her fingers.
“I was carrying you,” Selka said. “You couldn't—”
“I know what I couldn't do.”
She stopped. The boat rocked slightly as Ruun moved in the bow.
“You knew what they would do to it?”
“I knew they would hold it. I knew the pledge I spoke wasn't the pledge it gave. I didn't know how much they would build on it.”
“But you stayed.”
“Yes.”
Anet glanced at the god. “And when you're free?”
Ruun answered in trade speech, slow but plain. “I take my movement.”
“Mine.”
“It is in you.”
She looked at the orange in her hands as if she had forgotten what it was.
Selka leaned forward. “That's why you have to go with Sorell. Away from the city. We'll find—”
“Will being away stop it?”
“No.”
“Then stop telling me to go as if that fixes it.”
Anet's voice cracked. She pressed a fist against her mouth. Selka wanted to pull her close, but Anet put the orange between them on the bench.
“I don't want to die,” she said.
“I know.”
“No. I don't want it to become a noble thing that you tell people. I want to make the third bell sound right. I want to see where the river ends. I don't want to spend my whole life thinking every breath has to make you happy because you got it for me.”
The accusation hurt. She had asked too much of Anet, but she wanted to protest that it hadn't all been like that. There had been years of flour on the floor, laughter in a bed, fierce pride in the first thing Anet made. They had not all been debt.
“I did love you,” she said.
Anet's face changed. “I know that too.”
For a while only the water moved against the hull. Ruun lowered its head, giving them as much privacy as its body could.
“I don't know how to stop it without keeping it chained,” Selka said. “I know there's one anchor left. I know I helped put it there. That's what I can do.”
“And you want me elsewhere while you decide what it means for me.”
Selka closed her eyes. She had used better words, but the girl had heard the meaning.
Anet divided the orange. She gave half to Selka, then reached forward and offered one segment to Ruun.
“It doesn't eat fruit,” Selka said.
“It can tell me.”
Ruun looked at the segment. “I can hold it.”
Anet placed it in the wet palm. The god examined it, puzzled by the membrane. Neither seemed likely to forgive Selka tonight.
Sorell returned. There was a narrow way through the old estuary to an abandoned lifting lock. From there they could turn upstream beyond the watched main channel. Two soldiers had been seen on the far bank. They would have to move before dawn.
Anet stood. “I'm staying.”
Selka nearly said no. The word rose easily, worn smooth by twenty years. She swallowed it.
“Then sit when you need to.”
“I will.”
Her daughter left the orange peel on the bench. Selka ate the half she had been given. It was sour enough to hurt her jaw.