Free The Exile by Steven Savile

the icy water washed up around his shoulders.
    Five paces in, he was glad of the boulder.
    For all his preparation, Sláine had underestimated the river's power - it lifted him bodily and carried him twenty floundering paces sideways. Without the boulder's weight to drag him down he would have been carried away. As it was Sláine scrambled around, splashing up great plumes of water until he got his feet under him. An entire tree had been uprooted, stripped clean and washed downstream during a flood. The branches broke up the water, forming rapids.
    Sláine plunged forwards again, the white water cuffing him around the ears. The surge and splash were deafening. For a full five seconds he was completely under. He surged up to the surface, sucking down huge mouthfuls of air. He forced himself deeper into the river until he felt the shelf beneath his feet begin to creep upwards again. He risked fighting to get his head well up above the waterline just long enough to be sure he was passed the middle. The sooner he was out of the river the happier he would be.
    He pushed on.
    In six paces the water was around his waist and he was coming out on the other side. His feet sank into the shingle as he struggled out of the water.
    He clambered up onto the bank and collapsed onto his back, gasping as the sun dried him off. He didn't move as a mosquito landed on his arm and began to feed greedily, sucking the blood out of him. He let the insect have its fill and watched it fly off drunkenly.
    Sláine dragged himself onto his stomach and forced himself to stand.
    The river had pummelled him. Every muscle ached. Every ache was driven in bone deep, but he was on the other side.
    He fumbled with the knot of vine around his waist, picking it loose. He let it fall and crept up behind the roundhouse until his face was pressed up against the daubing on the wattle wall.
    He couldn't risk going in around the front so he was going to have to pry open the shutter and squeeze through. Sláine pulled the long-handled hunting knife from the sheath in his boot and worked it into the crack where the shutter joined the frame until he found - and cut through - the catch securing it.
    Grinning, he popped the shutter open and squirmed through, dropping awkwardly into the king's roundhouse.
    He was in the bedroom.
    It wasn't dark, as he had expected it to be. Candles burned. A tapestry was half-woven on a loom. The shuttle was dangling on the thread, still spinning.
    Grudnew's huge cot was piled high with animal skins and pillows of down. It was big enough to sleep a family of six. A curtain at the far side of the room was drawn over the king's changing room. Sláine pushed back the curtain and slipped inside. It took him a few minutes to find the chest containing Grudnew's various loincloths, and a few moments more to smear the poison oak inside the materialcups. The poison oak disintegrated in his fingers. He closed the chest and slipped out of the changing room.
    He walked over to the loom. The shuttle had stopped spinning. That was the first thing that he noticed. He didn't move. He breathed deeply. His nostrils flared as he caught the faintest musk of perfume.
    Sláine let his fingers linger on the loom and turned slowly. That was when he saw her, cowering in the corner. At first he thought she was one of the Sidhe, a fey spirit slipped through from the Otherworld. Her skin was pale; white where it should have been tanned from the wind and sun. Her hair was dark, black where the shadows of the candlelight failed to lighten it.
    He stared, dumbstruck and slack-jawed.
    She was a thing of beauty.
    No, beyond beauty - she was a thing of heaven, proof of the Goddess's hand in the perfection of creation.
    She looked at him with wide frightened eyes.
    Sláine stared. It wasn't often you met divinity without dying first - although he had come mighty close to that in the river.
    He held out his hand to her.
    She shook her head and pushed back against the wall as if