Page 21 of A Dance of Shadows

That’s not an empress they’ll want to support even after her husband is gone.

Lorenzo’s boat skims by. He rams his spear into the water and appears to mouth a curse he can’t actually voice.

A man stumbles out of the surf, dragging a particularly huge slab of coral with him. One of his little fingers dangles from his hand, nearly severed off. Another gouge streams blood down his calf.

I tense against a shudder, and something inside me cracks.

What does it matter if Linus would object to me lending help, no matter how honorably I do it? I can’t just watch this horror, no matter what he expects of me. The Rionians need to see that I’m strong enough to stand on my own two feet apart from him.

Ineed to be more than a pawn, whatever else it might cost me.

As my mind scrambles for the best hasty remark that will deflect some of Linus’s anger, I reach out with my gift and a prayer to my godlen.Elox, let me see. What’s nearby that I could use to soothe these injuries?

With a tingle, my gaze tugs toward the mounds of water-smoothed rocks protruding along the shoreline between the harbor and the beach. Their tops are layered with pale green seaweed that’s matted with age and sun.

“Husband,” I spit out, knowing my excuse won’t sound quite right to him and beyond caring, “I think I should ensure all of these loyal subjects are still well enough to continue serving us after today. My godlen calls on me to heal!”

Without looking back, I slip from beneath his arm and dart across the edge of the square to the rocks.

My guards follow with a thud of urgent feet. “Your Imperial Highness?—”

They don’t dare outright tell me to stop, and I’d ignore them anyway. I bend down by the rocks.

The drying seaweed squishes in my grasp, giving off a crisp herbal scent. Yanking my tiny knife from its sheath, I dig it into the layers of aged vegetation.

I wrench off as many swaths as I can in the space of a few thuds of my heart and then stride over to the beach, my guards still in tow. At the edge of my vision, I spot a few of the Rionian nobles who didn’t take to the boats following me and grabbing handfuls of their own.

The man with the nearly detached finger has collapsed several feet from the growing frame of the new boat. I crouch next to him and peer into his face.

“I will help you,” I say in my halting Rionian, holding up a strip of seaweed. “Please.”

The man stares back at me with a dazed expression, too lost in pain to argue. Setting my jaw, I lift his damaged hand, set hisfinger back in place, and wrap it there with the rest of his fingers and his palm to stabilize it.

I can’t ensure the finger will meld back into place. It’ll probably take a medic to actually reattach the digit. But at least this should stop any further damage and bleeding.

Blood has splattered across the silk of my dress, but I barely see it. How can I complain about a bit of cloth when these people’s bodies have been ravaged for their emperor’s amusement?

I wrap more of the seaweed around the cut on the man’s lower leg. It isn’t a perfect bandage, a little red seeping through, but my gift tells me it should work better than any other material I have close by, and possibly protect against infection as well.

As I move to a woman who’s gripping a wound on her arm, a couple of Rionian nobles hustle past me and start murmuring to other injured swimmers on the beach. The ache in my chest, as hard and sharp as the chunks of coral, starts to soften with a flicker of relief.

Maybe we can’t save everyone from my husband’s tyranny, but we can lessen the harm. I can show I’m more than a bauble decorating Linus’s arm.

While I move from patient to patient, the tolk coral boat continues to grow, looking as if a massive husk sloughed off a reef all at once. The fishing boats hiss back and forth over the water; the hunters haul more barama out of the waves.

Several of the elderly locals set up a spit over a firepit near the edge of the beach. It’s not long before one of the huge fish is roasting over dancing flames, sending a surprisingly sweet meaty smell through the air.

By the time a cry goes up that the boat is finished, my own fingers are raw from twisting clumps of seaweed. I look up from my last patient to see my husband approaching the makeshift craft.

The last few swimmers slog out of the water. The builders carry the boat over to the dock. When they lower it into the sea, it sinks to halfway down its hull and then floats there.

Linus steps into the craft with no hint of concern. While the boat holds him, he raises his arms like he did when he first announced this challenge, as if he’s the one who’s triumphed.

Which I suppose he is.

“I can go forth through all the empire like Jurnus himself,” he calls out. “Now let us feast!”

Chapter Nine

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