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14The Dead and the Dry

You know how I just said I was thirsty?

Turns out I only thought I was thirsty.

The next day was bad.

First thing after we woke up and started walking again—and may I tell you, I had a skullsplitter of a headache thanks to that cantrip I’d used to light the arrow in the god’s tunnel—we saw giants. Three of them. I couldn’t tell exactly how big they were, because there were no buildings or kynd to measure them against, but I know they were true giants, not halfies, by their proportions. True giants have something of a barrel about them in their shape, I mean. They’re strong as fuck and they run to fat. Also, they move like the world owes them someplace to walk. Elephants are the same; I saw one in Pigdenay when I was at the Low School. Even captive, it knew its chains were just a suggestion.

My eyes are good, and I’ve been trained to notice things, so, happily for us, I saw the giants before they saw us.

“Down,” I handcanted at Galva, and we both lay flat and had our packs off to lay flatter.

We were on the down side of a high bit of ground as well, so I scooted back behind the swell, and she did the same. We lay there for a good while, and I don’t know how Galva felt, but I felt like a mouse watching cats, hoping they kept walking the way they were going.

They did.

Before I stood up, a grasshopper leapt in front of my nose, and I snatched it.

“You want half?” I asked Galva.

She waved her hand at me like I was a fart she might disperse, and I popped the hopper in my mouth and crunched it up. They don’t taste good raw—like mushroom and bad chicken, and the texture’s off-putting—but there’s just that little bit of water to them. We used to catch them in my village of Platha Glurris when the crops ran thin or the fishers got a bad catch, and Ma would fry them with a bit of butter and garlic, and herbs if she had them. They’re good like that. And if you’re judging me, it just tells me you’re soft.

You haven’t truly been hungry if you don’t know the taste of a bug.

On we walked.

Galva shared her water with me, and she was good enough not to remind me I got outsmarted by the monkey, but we both knew it. Twice we went farther up the hills toward the Thralls because we thought we saw a stream, but both times, we were mistaken. It was past midday when it really struck home that the lack of water or other people would soon become more than just a discomfort.

Actually dying of thirst in this place was not out of the question.

“There’s grass enough,” I said. “It must rain a fair bit at least, yeah?”

“There is grass like this in Ispanthia’s south, but it does not rain much. Except in the spring.”

“And us just getting into winter here.”

“Is it?” Galva said, and this gave me pause. How were we to know what season it was? Why could a goddie who made nonsense of distance not do the same with time? It might be spring, for it felt middling warm enough. But if months had been cheated, why not years? Was it possible we’d gone forward past the natural measure of our lives, or back to some time before we’d tasted the pap?

I plucked up a blade of grass, mostly greenish but a purply-red at the end, and chewed it. At first it seemed to help my thirst-papered mouth, but then it didn’t.

“Stop thinking about it,” she said.

“And how would I do that?”

“With the strength of your mind.”

“I’m buggered, then.”

She narrowed her eyes at me and said, “You are from the country. Should you not know how to find food and water?”

“Food, sure, but have you never been to Galtia? All it does is rain. Besides which, I’m from a river town. The water finds you.”

“But as a thief, surely you learned something of surviving or foraging.”

“I was a city thief. I drank beer and whiskey, not karking pond-water. Anyway, if we could find people, I could steal their water.”

“Not so well as a monkey.”