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He ducked under, a brief twist of the body, and then he moved with all the fluid strength he could use. She clung to his bony plates and skin till her fingers ached, holding her breath, and then she lost him. She launched out on her own in sure, desperate strokes, looking for the surface, blind, and knowing there was something else nearby, something that might take half her body in a gulp, and the moving water resisted her strokes, wanting to pull her down.
She surrendered one direction, gathered speed and broke through to light in a spray of droplets, sucked air and water into her throat and coughed and flailed to stay afloat.
She felt the contact coming under the surface, a shock of water, a numbing blow against her legs. She swam in utter panic, striking out for the shore, the distant pale sand that wavered in her streaming eyes. Other water‑shocks flashed about her–a body brushed hers, a claw raked her and threw her under. She kept swimming, weaker now, failing and choking, driving herself long after she stopped seeing where she was going and after she knew the weak motions of her arms and legs could never make it.
Then her knees hit sand, and she hurled herself a lung‑wracking length further, sprawled on the shelf in shallow water, sucking air in great gulps and with her arms threatening to collapse and drown her in the shallows.
“Scar,” she managed to call, and struck the water with her palm the way she would to call him up, but there was not a ripple. She wept with strangling sobs for breath, wiped her salt‑stung eyes and nose, tried to walk and inched her way up the slope, flailing with swimming strokes while she could, crawling‑swimming in the extreme shallows because that was all she could do. She turned about again looking at the sea in panic.
Then a body broke the surface close in, and she sobbed for breath and tried to get up, but it was Scar rising out of the sea, his wedge‑shaped head coming closer until he could get his bowed legs under him and serpentine his weary way up the slope. He vomited water, but not the way he would coming out of fresh. His jaws trailed mucus and he dipped his head and washed himself, coughing in great wounded gasps. He snorted his nose clear and dipped his head again, suffering from the salt, pawing at his face in misery. There was a raking wound on his rump that wept clouds of blood. She got up in shaky haste and felt something wrong with herself, looked and saw the blood clouding away from her calf through the shallow water.
She cast a panicked look toward the shore, saw a human figure standing there. “Help,” she called out, thinking this one of the riders come hunting her. And then she thought not, because the outlines were wrong.
Scar was moving now, striding surely if slowly toward the shore. She joined him, limping, feeling the pain now, coughing and wiping her eyes and hurting in her chest. The blood leaked away too quickly. She moved with some fear because of it, and the figure was clearer in her eyes–no one from the Towers, not in that strange bright garb. It was a star‑man staring at her, witnessing all that had happened, and she stopped at the water’s edge ahead of Scar, bleeding into the sand, feeling the life leak out of her in one rush of sickness.
She had to sit down and did, examining the deep gash that ran a hand’s length across her thigh, deep into the muscle. It made her sick to see it. She tried to stop the blood with her fingers and then thought of her clothes far up the shore, which was all she had for bandages excepting her halter, and it was leaking out too fast, making her dizzy and sick.
Scar came up the beach, hissing. She looked up, saw the star‑man both closer and standing quite, quite still with Scar’s collar up like that and his tail tip flicking. Elai’s heart pounded and her head spun. They were stranger than Weirds, the star‑folk. Lately they came and went and just stood and watched the workers in the fields, but this one had something more in mind, and herself sitting here bleeding to death of her own stupidity.
“Can I help?” the star‑man called to her, at least that was what it sounded like, and Elai, sitting there and trying to hold her life inside with her bare fingers and her head none too clear, thought about it and gave a whistle that called Scar back, because the star‑man was carrying a pack that might have help in it of some kind. Scar hardly liked it, but the star‑man came cautiously closer and closer, standing over her finally and bending down out of the sunglare–a woman after all, with her hair silky fine and her clothes of stranger‑cloth and glittering with metal bits and wealth and colored patches. Elai frankly stared open‑mouthed as this apparition knelt down by her and opened her pack, taking out this and that.
“That’s bad,” the star‑man said, moving her fingers off the wound.
“Fix it,” Elai said sharply, because she was scared and it hurt; and because it seemed a star‑man who could make ships fly might do anything.
The star‑man took the tops off jars and unwrapped bandages, and hissed cold foam onto her leg, at which Elai winced. But very quickly it stopped hurting and the foam went pink and red and white, but the blood stopped too. Elai drew a great breath and let it go, relaxing back onto her hands in the confidence now that she was right and the star‑folk could fix whatever they had a mind to. The pain just stopped. At once. She felt in command of things again, while Scar put his big blunt head down closer to give everything a one‑sided examination. There was only a little queasiness in Elai’s stomach while she watched the star‑man work, while she put sticky stuff all over the wound somewhat the color of her leg. “Now you let that dry,” the star‑man said.
Elai nodded gravely, drew her leg back from the star‑man’s hands in the sudden conviction it was a little less than herself to be sitting here mostly naked and sandy and half drowned. She looked the other way, while Scar took up a protective posture, his head shading her from the sun.
“You think you can walk?” the star‑man asked.
Elai nodded, once and shortly. She pointed down the beach, where the point they had started from was out of sight. “My clothes are there.” Go get them, she meant. The star‑man seemed not to take the hint and Elai frowned, suspecting star‑folk of pride.
“You can send someone to get them,” Elai said.
The star‑man frowned too. She had bright bronze hair, a dusting of freckles. “I don’t think I’d better do that. Maybe you’d better not talk about this much, umn?”
Elai picked up a handful of sand and patterned it aimlessly, commentary on the matter. “I’m Elai,” she said. “Ellai’s daughter.”
“ ThatEllai.”
Elai looked up, liking the surprise she caused, lifted her chin toward the sea. “We’d have crossed the sea, only the river comes out into the sea too strong.”
“You hit a current. But there was something else out there too.”
“The sea‑folk.” The memory assailed her confidence, made her think of Scar, hovering over her, and she got up, holding to him, and favoring her leg. Her head spun. She leaned against his ribs looking at the cut he had got. “Fix his too.”
“He might not like that.”
The star‑man was scared, that was what. Elai turned a wicked glance at her. “He won’t bite. Go on.”
The star‑man did it, taking up her medicines; and Scar flinched and hissed, but Elai patted him and stopped him from more than a whip of his tail and a ducking of his head. “Hai,” she said, “hai, hai, hai,” and Scar stood still for it. She reached as if to mount, which worked: Scar settled, flicking his tail and stirring up the sand, his collar jerking in ill temper. But her dizziness came back and she leaned there against Scar’s shoulder looking at the star‑man as she finished, and Scar put his head about, likewise looking after his one‑sided fashion.