Tait’s first thought was that he was fucking hallucinating, because if there was an afterworld he wouldn’t still be so damned cold.

He’d pretty much accepted the fact he was going to freeze his balls off and then die a lonely, pointless, little bitch’s death, swept out to sea like a pissant mainlander who didn’t know any better than to get in the way of the winter swells. Instead of the death he’d always imagined he’d die, at the point of an enemy’s blade in the midst of battle. The way a warrior brother of the raider clan should.

He still couldn’t believe it. He’d taken that watch a hundred times, huddled out in the shitty cabin on one of the barrier islands that clogged up the bay in front of the raider city and was the first defense against any intruders. He’d sat there in storms much pissier than the one that had crashed over the rocks and slammed into him, leaving him no choice but to hunker down in a bullshit canoe and hope for the best while it swept his ass away, far out to sea, where the eastern islands the raiders called home weren’t even a glimmer on the horizon.

And he was lucky he’d had the canoe. Without it, he would have drowned by now. He could swim like a motherfucker, but even a warrior brother of the clan needed to sleep every now and then. Still, Tait figured that one of these times he’d close his eyes and not wake up again, canoe or no canoe.

Maybe that was what was happening now.

But if this was death at last, after ten days at sea, Tait was okay with it.

The girl crouched there between his legs in the bottom of his canoe, making complicated knots with her clever fingers, was beautiful. Slap-in-the-face beautiful, which made Tait’s cock happy, something he’d figured he’d never experience again when he’d been ripped away from the eastern islands in this stupid boat. In January. He would have been happy to see any human. He would probably have wanted to fuck any woman he encountered at this point, just to celebrate the fact he wasn’t a corpse being picked apart by ravenous seabirds.

It took him a minute to process the fact that she wasn’t just convenient and his apparent savior. It was more than that. She was the kind of pretty his dick didn’t know how to handle.

First of all, she didn’t look like a raider at all. Tait was clan born and clan raised. He was used to his people. Hardy, sturdy raiders, men and women alike. Capable and fierce. This girl seemed frail. Fragile. Her hair was a thick, dark brown that fell down past her shoulders, and he wanted to bury his hands in the mass of it. Her skin was a red brown color, a shade he’d never seen before, that seemed richer than his own light brown. He wanted to taste it. But it was her eyes that really got to him. They were a deep, fathomless blue. Piercing and inviting at once. She was wearing shit he didn’t understand. Layers of wool that wouldn’t allow for any quick movement, flowing this way and that. Clothes that made no sense to his raider sensibilities, because raiders were always ready for an attack—from their enemies, from the weather, whatever.

One more reason to think that he’d already died somewhere out there in the bitch Atlantic, and was making up stories to ease his passage into nothingness.

“Where did you come from?” he croaked out, his throat almost too dry to bear.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried to sit up, but he did it now. And he must have looked like some weakling little bitch, because her eyes flew wide open and she threw out her hands as if she planned to catch him should he topple over.

Tait might have been insulted if he hadn’t felt so weak. Lightheaded. Nothing like himself at all.

“You’re the one who came from somewhere,” she said, and her voice was the best thing he’d ever heard. Soft and intense at once, with a kind of huskiness that made his cock even happier. “I’ve always been right here.”

She shrugged something off her shoulder and handed it to him, and Tait took it, still watching her. It took him a beat to realize she’d handed him a pouch of water. He grunted something like thanks—or praise—and sucked at it greedily.

Water. It had been days since he’d last had more than a drop or two of rainwater, caught in the bottom of the canoe or on his clothes. Much less a deep, full, satisfying drink. Tait thought he could love her for her water alone.

“I think you need to eat something,” she was saying, when he could focus on anything but the water and the glory of it on his tongue, then in his parched throat. “I have no idea how far away land is, but you can’t have eaten anytime recently. We’re nowhere near anything out here.” She shifted closer to him, putting her hands on his chest and gently pushing, as if she imagined she could move him somewhere he didn’t want to go. But the craziest thing was that he let her do it, lying back as if he routinely followed the commands of small, breakable females. Or anyone else outside the brotherhood, for that matter. “I don’t know why you’re alive.”

Tait smiled, yet another thing he’d imagined he’d never do again. “Too mean to kill, baby.”

He had said that before, in different contexts. He felt like a ghost, thinking of the life he was certain had ended or he wouldn’t be here now.

There was no question. He was fucking confused.

But he couldn’t really worry too much about that, because this fantasy vision in his head was right there with him, pressing cool hands to his forehead, then against his cheeks. She shifted back on her heels, and dug around the great blanket-like thing she wore wrapped around her.

It took Tait long moments realize it was a kind of coat.

And then he didn’t care, because she was pulling out food. Or what he thought was food.

“Here,” she said, handing it over. “Eat this.”

Tait didn’t ask what she was handing him. He didn’t care. It looked like little pellets, but it wasn’t until he popped a few in his mouth and chewed on them a while that he realized they were meat. Dried meat, or maybe fish. A salty, rich flavor on his tongue, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it all tasted like shit. He would have eaten anything at this point.

He practically cried for joy. The only thing that stopped him was the fact he wasn’t, despite all evidence to the contrary at the moment, a whining little bitch. No one needed to know how shaky he was and how close to the edge he’d been. Especially not pretty girls wearing weird clothes in some marina sort of place he’d never seen before in his life.

It was tempting to throw everything she given him into his mouth, gulping it down in three seconds, but he knew that if he did that he would only get sick.

And the last thing he wanted to do was puke his guts out in front of a pretty girl he’d much rather try to fuck, once he determined whether or not she was the sort who might try to kill him. Or hand him over to those who would.

Not that fucking her if she was deadly was off the table, it would just require a different approach.

He ate everything in the little package she’d given him and drank enough water to make him realize exactly how dangerously dry his throat had been, and then, finally, he sat up again.

This time, his head didn’t spin. His stomach felt like an unpleasant, bloated rock, but that was only to be expected after the length of his fast. Ten brutal days. His food—a few battle rations the warrior brothers who protected the clan always carried with them, because there was no telling when they’d find themselves in need—had run out a few days ago. If the usual grim and terrible winter hadn’t kept raining down on him, Tait would have died. Or maybe he had died, but now that his head fell a little bit clearer, he found that he really, really, didn’t want that to be true.

Because the woman in front of him had the kind of wide, generous mouth that made Tait remember that he was more than just a body washed out to sea in a fucking canoe. That he’d had a whole life before that bastard wave had slammed over the tiny island where he’d been overseeing some younger, prospective brothers on that miserable watch and tossed him—and the stupid canoe he’d taken shelter in, which he knew had saved him despite its seeming uselessness in all other things—out of the bay that hid the raider city.

A whole life that had included many, many ways to take advantage of a mouth like that.

“Tell me where I am.” He sounded gruff. Maybe gruffer than he intended.

But it didn’t seem to faze this woman at all. “The raft.”

“A raft?”

“The Raft,” she said, with an emphasis on the first word that he heard, but didn’t quite understand. “That’s its name. It’s a floating city,” she explained, after searching his gaze for a moment and clearly not seeing what she expected. “Surely you’ve heard of it.”

“Sure, I’ve heard of a floating city,” Tait replied. He had. It was always there on the maps raiders used to sail the seas. An arrow toward the Atlantic and to Floating City written beneath it. But like so many things in this ruined world so long after the Storms had kicked the earth’s ass, all that meant was that mapmakers had been told too many old stories. “I’ve also heard of dragons. And water snakes. And fucking Australia. Doesn’t make any of it real.”

“Well, the Raft is real,” she told him. She wrinkled up her nose and looked up and to the right, as if she was looking at something more than the much bigger boat docked beside them—a fishing vessel, as far as Tait could tell. “Unfortunately.”

He couldn’t remember what he’d heard about the floating city. What legends or stories he’d been told as a kid. Was it another one of those compliant places? Like the better part of the mainland, where everybody was terribly concerned about repopulating the earth—especially when it meant they got a new woman to bang all winter long in the name of doing their part for humanity. It was all such bullshit. Pussy was about pussy, and Tait had never understood how so many compliant people convinced themselves otherwise.

But then again, maybe he wasn’t meant to understand. He was a raider, blood and bone. His father was a shipbuilder and his mother worked in the clan nursery, raising the children of those in the clan who had other demands on their time, like the brothers. Tait had grown up in the raider city, right there where he could be awed daily by all those fierce, inspiring brothers, the warriors who fought for the clan, conducted all the raids, and acted as its first line of defense. He’d discovered what to do with his cock at the summer festivals on the eastern islands, which was when the raiders—already wholly unfazed about sex—let loose. Compliants had always seemed like yet another fairy tale to him, like fire breathing dragons and cities that floated out on the sea and never hit land.

But if the city was real—and he figured it had to be or this dream he thought he was having would’ve changed shape by now, and certainly would have gotten a whole lot more naked with a woman as beautiful as this one in front of him—he needed to figure out what sort of society he’d landed in.

Because if there was one thing compliants didn’t like, it was raiders.

“Tell me your name.” He didn’t pretend that wasn’t an order, but the girl before him didn’t so much as blink.

“My name is Elenthea.” She smiled when she said it, taking her flask back and securing it somewhere beneath that blanket thing she wore. Then she said something unintelligible about houses, of all things. And kept smiling at him.

“You keep smiling at me like I’m nice,” he murmured, which was maybe a clue that he wasn’t back to full capacity. That ten days of waiting for his death out at sea was taking its toll whether he liked it or not.

“I’ve never seen a man who looks like you before,” she said, without a shred of guile or flirtation on her face. She didn’t even wait for Tait to respond. “Though I don’t expect you to be nice, of course. What man is nice? Meaning no disrespect.”

And she laughed as she said that, as if the very idea was outrageous. So silly it hardly bore mentioning. There was no particular reason should lodge itself inside Tait the way it did, as if it was a personal insult when he knew very well it couldn’t be.

“What do men look like here?”

Elenthea blinked at that. “Well, you know . . . Like men.” When he only gazed back at her, she blew out a breath. She held her arms away from her, indicating something wide. Very wide. “Big and round, and very smooth.”

“Do you mean fat?”

“Sure. Fat, I guess.” She dropped her arms. “I never really thought about it like that, but I guess that’s the right word.”

“All your men are fat?” Tait hadn’t seen a lot of fat people in his life. Oh sure, some raiders were thicker and some were thinner, but big and round and smooth? As wide as her arms had gone? That sounded like something completely different.

Something that a well-trained brother like himself could exploit, because there was no way a bunch of fat, plucked men could defend themselves against a raider. No way in hell. He might as well be his own, private army.

“Not all.” Elenthea considered. “There aren’t that many men. There are the unranked classes like the fishermen, but they’re shaped more like barrels. But you have to be born into the unranked classes. Otherwise, most men are Houses and Houses look the way Houses always look.”

Houses were people, apparently. Men. Rounded, hairless men. Tait filed that away.

He moved to his feet then, because he’d already spent more time sitting and lying down in the past ten days than in his entire previous life. He stood up slowly and then, when he was sure of his balance, jumped from the canoe to the dock beside him.

Everything worked. He was a little tight in weird places and wouldn’t have wanted to head into battle—or one of the war chief’s killer training exercises back home on the eastern islands, because Tyr was a sadistic fuck who exploited weakness for fun—but he was fine. Functional.

He was aware of Elenthea moving behind him, climbing up to stand on the dock with him, but he didn’t look at her directly. He was too busy looking around.

He was standing in a shipyard. A shipyard filled with all kinds of boats.

Elenthea had taken a raider to a shipyard, and given him food and drink. She might as well have handed him her people’s fleet and cut their throats herself.

She was either a dissident or she was clueless, and it was too early to tell which.

“What happened to your men?” he asked instead, casing the boats in slips all around him. None sleek and low like the glorious raider vessels that rightly owned the seas, but he hadn’t expected that. A bathtub of a boat might take longer to get him where he needed to go, but it would get him there. As long as he could steer it—unlike that damned paddle-less canoe—he was good.

“The Raft has always been divided into different houses,” Elenthea said from behind him.

“Different houses ruled by a man called a House.”

“Yes.” She made a soft sort of laughing sound. “You say that like it’s weird.”

When Tait turned, she was pulling that heavy blanket thing closer around her, as if the frigid wind was getting to her. But she still stood there, gazing back at him with her oddly intent blue gaze.

“The Raft has had the same houses as long as anyone can remember. Fathers pass them on to their sons. It’s very hard for a new house to rise. Partly because there are so few boys born and most of the ones that come around are related to an existing House, so they just take it over when their father dies. You know.”

Tait didn’t know. Raider kings took and held their thrones with their strength and cunning, not because of their fathers. The king of his clan was Wulf, the most dangerous of all the raiders, who had taken the throne when he was eighteen and had held it ever since. What was more, if Wulf ever had a son with similar ambitions, he’d expect him to take the throne from him the same way or do without it.

Passing thrones down to any old idiot because of bloodlines was stupid, in Tait’s opinion. It just encouraged weak-ass rulers, which in turn was pretty much begging for an invasion.

But Elenthea was explaining the Raft, and Tait needed to listen so he could plot out his strategy. Though the more she talked, the more Tait figured this place was stuffed full of a bunch of pansy-ass bitches who lounged around and let all the women wait on them as if they were the prize. Then they shuffled the ladies around come summer, so they could get a little strange on their dicks in the fall. They didn’t call it compliance. Elenthea didn’t mention a church like the one on the mainland that hung over all the foolishly pious people like a bullshit cloud of unsatisfying sex with a grim focus on procreation. The Raft wasn’t religious, but still, rotating women was just the way things were done here. And it wasn’t a bad life, he supposed, as lives went on this side of the end of the world.

After all, not everybody could live free like raiders did.

“What if you don’t want to have sex with some round, fat guy who sounds like a dick anyway?” he asked, his hands on his hips and his gaze maybe a little too narrow on Elenthea’s bright blue eyes.

She laughed. Then it seemed to occur to her that the question was a serious one, and she pressed her lips together. And frowned.

“I don’t think that anyone has ever asked that question,” she said after a moment. “Not around me, anyway. There’s no point. This is how things are.”

Tait grinned at that. “You’ve never met a raider before, have you?”

“Of course not.” Elenthea smiled again, something Tait figured it wouldn’t take him long at all to get addicted to, if she kept it up. “There’s no such thing. Everybody says. Like dragons and Australia.”

He wanted to touch her. Hell, he wanted a whole lot more than that. But even though he felt more like himself than he had in days, he still wasn’t back to even half his strength. He knew it. He could feel it, like he was wearing another, weaker man’s body. And the fact that his cock was perfectly happy to risk a suicide run just to get a taste of her didn’t mean that he had to listen. He’d stopped listening to that single-minded asshole when he was still a teenager. No need to backtrack on that shit now.

“So,” he said, studying her face. Committing it to memory, not that he wanted to admit that. “Elenthea. You found a raider washed up from the sea. What are you going to do with me?”