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Desperately.
When the cages hit the current and the one at the end of the line bobbed and tossed on the white cap of the surface, I hung my entire weight on the rope. “Pull harder!”
“I am!” Rose heaved behind me as a handful of curses tumbled from her mouth. “Make that three fish!”
She could have four and the rest would still bring me enough money that I could finally haggle with Thorsten in earnest, and get the flea-bitten gray in his stables.
Three loud cracks threatened those hopes.
One of the cages broke apart, and pieces of wood first tossed in the air before they hit the water. The current swallowed them whole, sending them down the falls where it would sink to the ground next to the cage I’d lost four damn days ago.
But I wouldn’t let the rest go.
It was still heavy.
Against the tremble in my arms and the pain searing along my shoulder, I pulled, fighting backward against the current, until the first cage dragged over the rock. I counted two trout jumping in its belly. Another cage emerged with one more measly trout.
A knot formed at the back of my throat, but I swallowed it down. “Careful with the last one. An entire swarm must’ve caught in that one.”
One final pull and all resistance fell away as the cage tumbled to shore. I stumbled back, straight into Rose. We careened over each other, but she caught her balance while my knees hit the ground.
A rock cut through the cotton of my dress and scraped my skin, ripping a hiss from me. “Devil be damned, there better be an eel in there, too.”
Rose scoffed and circled a hand over her pregnant belly. “Not unless they grow beards now.”
When my eyes snapped to the last cage, my stomach bottomed out, sending a lap of bile onto the back of my tongue. “No…”
“I still want those fish you promised me,” she said. “I pulled, Elisa. Not my fault you caught a corpse.”
For a moment, I just sat there, listening to the treacherous sound of water lapping against the shore and how it distracted from the violent current hidden beneath its surface. A little over two weeks, and I was no closer to the Pale Court. Two weeks without a sign from Enosh, but all the more talk about how they’d captured the King of Flesh and Bone.
A sob built at the back of my throat, mixing with the acid that kept rising from my empty stomach. Three coins for the healer, two more for the tenancy on our little hut, and another for Pa’s herbs… At this pace, I would never make it home.
Behind me, Rose groaned, one hand pressed against the small of her back. “Augh, this babe is killing me. When it gets like this, I can barely make it down the hill.”
“Lean over and brace your thighs.” I got up and positioned myself behind her, letting my thumb press against the nerve along her tailbone through the cotton of her dress. “His head is coming into your pelvis. Not much longer now. Better?”
She straightened, shifting her hips this way and that, humming with relief. “Curse this place and how we have no midwife. We women could do with someone like you who knows how to make the aches go away. Where did you learn this?”
“Saw it somewhere once.” I walked over to the cages and pulled my knife from its sheath by my belt. “Idiot got himself so tangled during the full moon, I don’t even know how to cut him free without damaging the rope.”
Rose walked over and glanced down at the man, his blueish face waterlogged and swollen, algae woven through his red beard. “You’ll have to bring him to the cellar so they can lock him up. Magistrate said it’s the law now.” When I cut her a glare, she shrugged. “Don’t give me that look. Leave him here, and he might start twitching.”
Something corpses across the land had reportedly done after Enosh’s capture. They’d crawled from the dirt, only to collapse three steps later, and so it went on.
Rise. Collapse. Rise. Collapse.
“None of them have moved in at least a week.”
My guts tied into a knot. I couldn’t stomach what that might mean. That, maybe, whatever they were doing to Enosh was so gruesome, he no longer called the dead to his aid. Curse these lands and all these fools. I’d been so close. So close to fix this mess. And then they had to capture him, ruiningeverything! Perhaps Enosh was right about the depravity at our cores? Was there truly no fixing it?
“As if I could drag a grown man all the way there.” I leaned over, feeling the corpse’s arm for a joint to sever as I swallowed past a swell of bile. “My handcart’s too small—”
My stomach heaved. My chest convulsed, strangling that swallow of bile straight back up. It burned along my throat, bittered the back of my tongue, clenched my gums until—
I retched onto the rock to the sound of Rose shuffling away from me as she said, “By Helfa, you better brought no sickness here.”
Using the train of my dress, I leaned over and wiped the yellow strings from my mouth. “Just had no breakfast.”
