Shadow Road: Book 1 of the Shadows Rising Trilogy

8. Eat Fish

14th of Uirra

A thick fog crept in last night.

I didn't know something as soft as fog could kill.

Laffa and I tucked the tarp down as well as we could, but the moisture still leached into our clothes, and the condensation from our breath and body heat began beading on the inside of the tarpaulin. It trickled through our hair and down our backs and gathered in the floor of the boat. There was no way to escape it, and what little warmth our bodies generated quickly wicked away.

I thought we might die. Just slip away, drifting peacefully into whatever waits beyond this life. It didn't really seem like a bad way to go, all things considered.

I didn't die. Neither did Laffa. And there was no peace. She kept poking me, her knobby fingers digging into my ribs until I moved. She rubbed my hands and feet between her palms, then kicked me until I rubbed hers. She woke me just to crack the tarp open when the air inside became too stuffy. And always there was the demand for "magic water." It seemed as soon as I began nodding off, all too gladly giving in to the welcome pull of oblivion, there she was, her scratchy voice loud and grating in the dark, "You! No sleep! Sleep bad. Up. Make magic water."

By dawn there was a film of ice floating in the puddle at the bottom of the boat, but we survived.

One of the other young women didn't.

The big, burly man – Orrul – found her this morning. She hadn't been willing to share her tarp with anyone for fear they would take advantage of her. Now that she didn't need it anymore, two of the other women were fighting over it.

I sat on the gunnel of our boat, watching, numb, as three of the men discussed what to do with the girl's body, their breath pluming in the air and freezing to their already frost-covered eyelashes.

"We shouldn't let her sit here like this. It isn't right."

"What would you suggest then, Patrus? We can't exactly light a candle for her. Does anyone here even know her name?"

"It's too cold for all this talk," the third man grunted. Then he bent over, grabbed the girl's corpse by its stiffened arm, hefted the body up out of the boat, and rolled it clumsily over the side and into the water. "Problem solved," he croaked, and hobbled back toward his tarp.

The other two men gazed at the girl's rigid figure floating a few feet away, but neither of them was willing to get wet retrieving it. They left her there, watching in silence as the waves pulled her into the grey of a misty dawn.

15th of Uirra

I might have missed a day. Or two. If not, we had been drifting with the current, rudderless and helpless, for six days. If I did miss a day, today could very well have been the eighth sunrise since the Galvania went down. Just a week, but it felt like a lifetime.

Ironically, we knew where we were thanks to the navigator. We simply had no way of doing anything about it. Oars could only do so much on the open ocean.

The ration tins started running low this morning. With the extra boats there were extra survival tins, and someone – a doctor named Turragan – had the good sense to suggest we hold them in reserve for when we ran out of biscuits, rather than dividing everything up at the very beginning.

The fat man that pushed me on the Galvania died today.

He and his wife didn't ration their biscuits. They were in a boat not far from ours, and I could hear them bickering about it all last night, blaming each other for sneaking more than their fair share. The woman finally reminded him that there were more biscuits, and that it wasn't right that Turragan had control over them. She suggested that everyone should be able to have any of those biscuits if they needed them. A moment later, I watched the man poke his head out of the gap in their tarpaulin.