The Fox

by Sherwood Smith

  Barend shut his eyes. As always, ever since his first ship journey at a young age, it felt good to think about home— when he was far out of the reach of his father’s hard hand. “Hadand will drop her pen and ask what Sponge is reading, and if she knows it she’ll start a debate, and if she doesn’t she’ll bear it off and read late into the night when we’re supposed to be asleep. I’m quiet unless my mother has said something wise that I can remember and tell to them, and pretend to sound wise. I never did much like reading, not like Sponge. And Kialen will look at them both, but she won’t speak either, unless they remember her and ask, and then she’ll whisper it to Hadand.”

  Inda’s chuckle was lost in a clap of thunder.

  When it had died away, Barend leaned back on his elbows, chin up as he studied the carvings of winged children in the ceiling. “I don’t know. I don’t see meaning in much, I guess. My mother always used to tell me to behave with honor. But she never said to behave like him. Meant, I figured, my father had none. At least in her eyes. I know he thought he had plenty of honor, which was why I never believed there was any such thing. Not if it was whatever he had.” Barend shifted slightly and opened a hand. “So maybe Hadand has honor, as does Sponge, but what will that mean when the Sierlaef is king? It seems to me the ‘honor’ of those who have power is really what suits them best.”

  Inda scowled at the steadily growing rivulet. The water ran clear in the center, carving its way through the dust, an ever-widening stream. The tile below was patterned, highly stylized lettering in some unfamiliar alphabet, cobalt blue and pale gold. “My mother used to have me parsing her copies of Old Sartoran texts, along with Hadand on her home visits. And Joret, my brother’s betrothed. And Tdor.

  She is. Was. Is. My betrothed.” Another pang. “One of those texts said, ‘Civilization is not made by single great events.’ ”

  Barend waved a dismissive hand. “I remember my mother quoting that one. Thought it was a crack at my father wanting to become Harskialdna and have his war at last.”

  Inda closed his eyes. He cherished his memory of Tdor’s long face, her steady eyes; he heard her voice over the drumming of the rain. “Tdor says civilization is a net, made up of moral choices. Bad ones tear the net.”

  Barend laughed. “My father is a tearer. Even if thinks he’s a maker. And as for Sponge, you could say he’s a maker, but Aldren-Sierlaef beat him bloody all the same. And all the adults called it training. The Sierlaef has no honor—no morals—and it was my father who made him that way, while saying all the right things.” Barend laughed again. “The king stood by and let it happen because he was too busy with trade, and scrolls, and future plans, but most of all because he’d never believe anything said against his brother. He thinks they have the same honor.” He snorted. “The king means it, my father says it. But the king thinks he means it, too. If brotherhood makes you that blind I’m glad I never had a brother.”

  A stab of light flickered patterns of reflected light up the walls.

  “I think the squall is passing,” Barend said, rising.

  The thunder, rain, and wind were as loud as before; still the two made their way to the refectory, which was awash with water. As they stared out the round windows, rain slanted down to the southeast under a greenish-gray cloud. A spectacular rainbow arched across the blue sky.

  “Let’s get the nuts,” Inda suggested. “And get down to the boat. If it’s even there.” His mind was streaming again, like the rivulet in the room behind them, clearing out the mud that had clogged his thoughts ever since Walic had taken them. He needed to think; he could do that while they rowed.

  The image of Coco, or Walic and his chief mates, as small children who had a father like the Sierandael—no, he had to be Harskialdna now. What might have happened to them to make them the way they were? It did not change what they now did, but it changed, profoundly, how he perceived their motivations, their place in the world.

  The stream caught an image of Fox and tumbled on, faster and faster. He remembered hearing about the Jarl of Montredavan-An sitting up in his tower, exiled on his own lands not because of anything he had done, but because a Montrei-Vayir had managed to knife Fox’s ancestor in the night and take the kingdom by treachery. The Jarlan had talked about how the Jarl supervised the great horse-stud there in Darchelde, and she talked about history, as had Fox’s sister Shen, who had been merry and full of games. He remembered his own distant cousin, Marend Jaya-Vayir, Fox’s intended, who was quiet and kind. But now Inda could see how the Jarl of Montredavan-An, who had never been permitted to ride with the other lords—whose family had once been kings—would waste his life away because of a cruel treaty, and Fox, who never went to the academy, had learned the Odni in secret from his mother before they sent him to sea so he wouldn’t waste his life, too. Fox’s parents wanted the best life for their heir that they could manage around the cruelty of the treaty that bound them to their land for ten generations. Treaty. A betrayal by a knife in the night that was later made into law.

  Seen that way, becoming a pirate seemed a reasonable plan. Inda felt his way toward comprehension, drawing on half-forgotten vocabulary learned in his mother’s study: Fox denied moral certainties not out of cowardice or dishonor but because moral certainties had been stripped away from him by the law upheld by his own countrymen.

  Inda could imagine Tdor insisting that moral choice was possible. And if enough people made the moral choice, wasn’t that as near to creating a moral certainty as anything else in the world? Tdor will always be a net maker. That I know.

  The two gathered their nuts and started down, meeting the cousins halfway.

  The leader snarled, casting a grimace skyward, “Why is it as soul-sucking hot as it was in morning?” Then he glanced down into Barend’s and Inda’s baskets and gloated. “We got more’n you did.” He eyed Barend. “Save ya the rope’s end and watch-on-watch if we even ’em up. But you gotta do our night watches for the week.”

  Barend noted the peach pits among their nuts, and cast a questioning glance Inda’s way. Inda just stood staring witlessly at the baskets. Did he even see them?

  “Naw,” Barend finally said. “We’ll take what comes.”

  The pirate boy snorted, picked up his oars, and the others did as well: the wind had dropped, the air was again breathless and metallic.

  Another storm on the way! They pulled hard, Barend hoping Cook looked into the baskets before Varodif started swinging his rope, the cousins muttering about the weather, and Inda thinking, thinking, thinking.

  Chapter Seven

  FOR some months afterward, Fox Montredavan-An sustained a series of dreams in which he was running over an endless grassy plain, the wind blowing leaves before him. Golden leaves, or maybe they were pieces of gold, or papers with precious words inscribed, which he tried in vain to catch. No matter how fast he ran, they blew ahead of him, dancing on the wind, until they vanished.

  He knew what the dreams meant. He could even identify the moment that inspired them.

  Before that moment, no one could foresee anything but a watery death. By the time the rowboat made it back to the Coco the second squall was upon them, far worse than the first.

  Pirates flung lines down to the four whose baskets of nuts, so carefully gathered and hoarded, were all lost when a kelp-veined wave swamped the rowboat. The four smashed against the side of the ship, holding their breath as the cold water first pounded then sucked at them, their hands clenching the ropes with desperate strength. At last the ship heeled and they emerged, bruised and dazed. Violent heaves from the deck brought them aboard, where they stood, stunned and bleeding, until with hard blows of the rope’s end the second mate—awake and angry—sent them aloft.

  Furling and reefing was all Inda could comprehend. He clambered up behind the leader of the cousins, who made the mistake of slewing about to look for his lifelong follower; the ship gave a sudden leeward lurch and flung him screaming into the green wave cresting over the bowsprit, never t
o be seen again.

  Inda gripped the ropes, barely hearing the first mate shouting at him from two arm’s lengths away. More hands scrambled aloft. Thirty pirates wrested down the raffee-sail—Walic had to keep them in the lee of the island, riding in the teeth of the wind. Another dozen struggled with Walic to hold the helm.

  The wind rose, shrieking. The sound everyone feared reverberated up the ship and through their bones: Crack! With stately slowness the foretopmast began to fall. The damage party, already holding axes, sprang to cut away ropes before it could drag the ship into capsizing. The ship plunged into the next green wave, flinging the mast into the white water boiling down the deck, dragging several people with it.

  Then began the eternity of fighting wind, rain, storm, and tortured wood, until Inda’s brain was as numb as his hands and feet, until he could not remember the past as far as morning, or imagine a future beyond this terror.

  Then something bright struck his eyes, almost blinding him. He and his mates stared upward, rediscovering the sun; the wind’s scream whined down to a moan through the remaining shrouds, and then hauled around to the southeast, diminishing rapidly to occasional drafts of warm, salt-laden soughs to blend with the hiss of the foaming rollers. It was over, and they could look about, dumbstruck in amazement, to survey the damage without knowing where to begin.

  Inda’s body was deadened with fatigue, but his mind began once more to stream with possibilities, assessing not just damage but sky, sea, crew, the images coming faster.

  Almost right . . . almost—

  Walic stumped forward, his embroidered coat hanging sodden, the silken fabric squeaking at his every step. Pointing at the second mate, he snapped, “Take a crew and bring us spars off the island!” And to the first mate, “Get that wreckage cleared away, now! If another comes, we will be ready for it.” Then he stumped down the shallow steps into the cabin and slammed the door.

  Dazed, nearly bludgeoned into imbecility, the crew turned to their tasks. The worst of the wreckage was cleared and the large boat hoisted over the side; the big second mate and his strongest and most trusted forecastlemen began to row through heavy running seas for the shore, axes at their feet, scowls reflexively turned skyward at the smiling blue sky.

  From the helm the first mate waved a hand, and silently—too exhausted to speak—most of the rest climbed below, some too tired to eat, wanting only sleep. The duty crew, a bare minimum, leaned tiredly, a few falling asleep right where they stood.

  Fox shoved his way to the galley along the walls, hoping that something hot to drink and some biscuits and cheese would diminish his blinding headache. He blinked uncomprehending at the little pots of herbs rolling about the deck that the cook had not been able to stow before the second storm struck, wondering if he should sleep before he ate. Beyond even that decision, he started when Inda’s fingers gripped his arm.

  Fox ripped free, then stilled as Inda whispered in Marlovan, “It has to be now.”

  “Now?” Fox repeated, peering upward at the low bulkheads as though he could check the skyline for another storm.

  Inda whispered, “Gutless and his strongest followers are on their way to the island. Varodif is aft at the helm, consorts all blown out to sea, captain in the cabin—” He listed in a quick tumble of words where every enemy was. By the time Fox’s mind caught up with the idea that Inda meant for them to take the ship now, not in a month, or in half a year, after secret meetings and careful plans and Fox’s watchful direction, but right this moment, Inda was on his last item. “. . . and the weapons locker broke open under a falling spar. See? No longer matters that Walic has the only key.”

  Barend appeared at Fox’s shoulder, massaging a wrenched arm. Behind him lurked tall, strong Tcholan and the strange Chwahir girl, her face pale and tense.

  Fox stared in disbelief. “But the ship is a wreck!”

  Barend rolled his eyes. “So you want to wait for the Gaffer to hand it over in good shape?” he whispered fiercely. “Or when he and his gang are well rested?”

  Fox struggled to comprehend. Mutiny. Now. The moment chosen not by him, but it was the right moment. One he’d missed—

  He shook his head violently. A mistake. When he could breathe again, he forced his hoarse voice low: “Send the new hands after Walic?”

  “Waste. We need ’em.” Inda turned his thumb toward the galley. “Just one for Walic. Cook,” he said, taking Fox by surprise again. “Worst grudge.” Inda flicked a glance past Fox’s shoulder. “Thog? You know who’s good below, don’t you?”

  Thog nodded, her work-roughened hands pressed tightly together at her skinny chest. “I knew you would do it.” She breathed the words on an exhaled sigh.

  Inda said only, “Make it now.”

  She flitted away and dropped down the hatch to raise those she’d already chosen as allies. Inda and Fox entered the galley, Fox cramming some bread into his mouth, Inda a sentinel at the door, observing everything.

  Barend watched him observing everything, except himself amid the flow of people and events. He was the eye of the storm, his voice and hands moving the storm before him, around him. Barend tried to figure out how Inda had transformed within a single watch from the Stupid of before into what he was now.

  He was the only one who knew what to do.

  Excitement made his hands shake, his knees watery, made him want to pee, made him want to laugh as he scrambled down the ladder to the lower deck. He shook and pinched awake the battered, bewildered hands that he and Fox had long ago chosen and to each bleary face he whispered the words, over and over, Take the ship. Now. Get a weapon. Wait for my signal. Your target is—

  They crept swiftly, silently, past pirates sunk into exhausted slumber; though equally exhausted, they moved with the desperation of those who, once committed, know the risk: they had to win or die.

  They flowed like ghosts along the companionway and up past the cabin, most of them sending furtive glances at the cabin door, behind which Walic sat in an exhausted haze waiting for Tau to bring wine as he tried to soothe the still-terrified Coco.

  Fox’s head rang. The galley fire had been doused, no hot drink possible, so he ducked his head into the pure water in the magic-cleaned bucket, sucking down great gulps.

  The headache had fired into molten rock. But he forced himself to lift his head and leave the galley. The world, his place in it, seemed strange and unreal as he slipped down the hatch behind the galley to his bunk. He pulled out his fighting knives, then dug down into his gear and retrieved the Sartoran knives he’d captured from Inda—which he’d intended to hold until he was ready to use Inda in his plans. Laughing at himself, he ran back to the galley, not even pausing to tie on his black fighting scarf, though he hated sweat in his eyes.

  He did not hear Inda’s low-voiced instructions to the stunned cook. He slapped Inda’s knives into his hands, and Inda’s fingers closed over them, his face distracted, unquestioning. His mind obviously far ahead.

  Cook worked his big, fleshy face as though he would speak, but said nothing. A sheen of tears stood on his lower eyelids.

  “Go,” Inda said softly.

  The cook grabbed up his biggest chopping knife and vanished up the aft hatchway.

  “Now,” Inda said to those crowded along the passage.

  The sense of unreality intensified for Fox when his head cleared the level of the weather deck. His awareness sharpened, taking everyone in.

  Sails used her awl to gut Walic’s torture expert, sobbing as she did so; Nizhac tumbled into the hatch past Fox, who swung out of the way, then lunged up to the deck.

  On the companionway Taumad, dressed only in cotton trousers, his hair flagging in the wind, struck down one then another of the torturer’s mates, handling the boarding cutlass and a vegetable knife with speed, skill, and a lethal grace.

  Stamping feet: Fox whirled as Inda led an attack party onto the forecastle. Inda fought with the unerring speed and assurance Fox had seen only once before, when they first
attacked Inda’s convoy. Inda grinned, a ferocious, white-toothed grin that distorted his face as he chopped his cutlass into a pirate’s neck, then—how could he do that?— kicked up behind himself, straight into the crotch of a pirate bringing his blade down toward Inda’s neck. He was so fast you had to concentrate to see the individual moves, but every strike was telling, every block effective. With power focused from his planted bare feet through his shoulders Inda drove his blade straight into one of the first mate’s biggest followers. Then—again without looking—he kicked out the knee of the one who had smashed that small Chwahir boy down just behind him.

  Inda then snapped his knives out, shifting grip from cut to thrust as he jammed them into attackers on either side. The pirate on the left dropped, blood spraying from a ripped throat; the one on the right staggered, gripped his sword with both hands to drive down at the Chwahir boy struggling to rise, but Inda whipped up his blade and took the man right under his chin. He flung the pirate backward, blood gouting. Then Inda twisted, sword raised in a block as a cutlass slashed at the back of his head; he struck the cutlass aside and kept moving, his blade sweeping in a horizontal arc straight into the ribs of one of Walic’s best killers.

  Inda whirled back without looking at the dying pirate. The fight had spread out. He leaned his hands—still gripping his knives—on his knees as he panted open-mouthed. Paused to wipe the sweat off his face, then he rasped orders in a dry, wheezing voice. Like they’d first seen on the deck of the Sartoran Guild ship. But this time, instead of watching Inda through a glass as he issued a continuous stream of orders, Fox heard the orders spoken in a voice of command.

  The sense of watching from the periphery fled when Inda’s gaze met Fox’s dead on. “Behind!”

  Fox whirled. Brought up his knives, one high and vertical, the other low and horizontal, ready for the Leap of the Deer. The first mate’s eyes distended with disbelief and rage.