Oath Bound (Book 3)

by M. A. Ray

  “What happens if you die? In Dreamport, I mean.”

  “Evan’s coming. Told you that.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” Dingus said.

  “Oh, hell, now you ask me this?”

  “Evan won’t—” He hung his head. “He won’t—be like you.”

  “No. He’s not like me.” Vandis shifted. “Look at me.”

  Dingus twisted to gaze at him where he half sat, propped up on his elbows. His granite face, his sharp eyes, looked almost soft.

  “If it comes to that? He won’t be like me. He won’t—you won’t be to him what you are to me. To anyone else, you cannot be what you are to me. Whatever happens, though, you will see me again, and that is my solemn promise. However long you live, you’ll see me again at the end of your road. In the Garden.”

  “Vandis—” he said, and choked.

  Vandis cursed under his breath. “Don’t,” he said, roughly. “Don’t. I won’t be gone long, I swear to you. Don’t be afraid.”

  Dingus looked away. People always said things like that, but they never said how to achieve it. It seemed both spectacularly unhelpful and unfair. Was it really that easy? Vandis laid a hand on his shoulder and squeezed—Vandis’s idea of hugging him—tightly enough for him to feel every callus.

  “Plenty of Juniors do this. You know that, don’t you? You can handle—”

  “I know that!” Dingus bit off, a lot louder than he’d meant to.

  Kessa grumbled and rolled over, but a moment later she issued a gentle snore.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, lower. “But something bad is gonna happen to you, because you’re not careful, and that’s what I can’t handle.” He lay down on his side, facing away from Vandis, and shut his eyes.

  “We discussed this.”

  “Call that a discussion?” Dingus muttered.

  “I’m not careful? You about gave me a heart attack with that stunt you pulled in the Practical!”

  “That’s different. I knew what I was doing, and nobody was fixing to kill me. You got people out for your blood and you don’t even look over your shoulder.”

  “Hey!” Vandis snapped. He grabbed Dingus’s shoulder and yanked him over so their eyes met. In the other bed, Kessa let out a theatrical moan and pulled a pillow over her head, but Vandis ignored her. “I’ve been doing this dance thirty-five years, Squire and Knight! I was Head before you were a twinkle in Angus’s eye, and you damn well know I expect better from you than this swaggering big-balls bullshit! Get a fucking grip!”

  The bed shook and the cords holding the mattress creaked when Vandis flopped down. Dingus rolled back onto his side and, somehow, fell asleep right away. Maybe it was because everything felt—well— normal.

  Anyways, it might as well have never happened, except for one thing: the fortnight they stayed in Seal Rock, there was Vandis and more Vandis. He’d only had this much time free for Dingus during those few weeks after Dingus had first met him, even when they’d been at Elwin’s Ford late last winter; but this time, Dingus wasn’t studying books, writing treatises, or honing his tracking skills. This time, it was Kessa stuck in the Slippery Seal, practicing her reading and writing. She joined them in the afternoons, but the mornings were all Dingus and Vandis rambling the fjord, fishing and hiking. Vandis showed him the seals, which really did look like a dog and a fish had kids, with long, sleek, furry bodies and big, soft, doggy eyes. They climbed down the side near the mouth to harvest the little animals that Vandis called “mussels,” and Vandis fell in the water. He was an excellent swimmer, but Dingus didn’t know that, and he’d just taken his boots off to go in after when Vandis grabbed his ankle and dragged him, yelping, off the ledge, into water colder even than the lake at Knightsvalley; breath-stealing, bone-aching cold.

  Vandis fit a hand over his head and dunked him. He wasn’t expecting it, so his eyes were open, and when he popped up gasping, to Vandis’s laughter, he got a good breath and went right back down into a clear, green world like no other.

  The salt stung his eyes, but he kept them wide, drinking it all in. A fish swam past his face, so close he reached out and touched its slippery side as it flicked away. He saw forests of weeds and terraced beds of shellfish on the rocks of the fjord—and Vandis’s legs, working slowly as his Master trod water. Dingus propelled himself up underneath and yanked Vandis down; he got a glimpse of Vandis’s shocked face before he broke the surface and lunged for the shelf. He was just pulling himself out when Vandis’s arms clamped around his waist. “Sneaky little shit,” Vandis said, the smile warm in his voice. “You’re not going to win this one.”

  His thick legs launched them off the rocks. He threw them both backward, headfirst, and peeled away mid-somersault, leaving Dingus disoriented, swallowing seawater. When he broke the surface again, Vandis already sat on the ledge, cracking up and dripping from hair, clothes, and nose. Dingus swam over and started to climb up, but Vandis nudged him off again with a foot, laughing harder. “Yield?”

  “I yield,” Dingus gasped. Vandis let him flop out and onto his back. “Not fair when you can fly underwater.”

  “I can’t.” Vandis slicked back his hair, grinning. “That’s how I learned to maneuver, though. It’s the closest I could get.” When Dingus got his breath back, they climbed to the top of the fjord wall with the bucket of mussels and squelched to the Slippery Seal, where Kessa laughed at them over dinner.

  It went on like that, good day after good day, until they walked up the gangplank of the Jellyfish one morning before the Queen started Her climb. In spite of the pickled herring, Dingus felt like refusing to leave. It wasn’t just the scenery he’d miss; like crazy, he’d miss Vandis, who’d leave from Windish in less than six days, once Dingus and Kessa were settled. If only the sea voyage would last forever—and damn, it did, just not the way Dingus wanted it to.

  The time Kessa and Vandis spent watching orcas, Dingus spent leaning over the rail. The whole ship danced under his feet in a dizzying roll, and when Vandis helped him lie down in a cabin below decks, it made matters worse. He couldn’t imagine why ships were supposed to be women; if he ever met a woman who reeked like the Jellyfish, he’d run the other way. The bilge, the single “head”—which was what the sailors called the privy—and the people, not to mention the barrels of pickled herring they’d brought for the journey to Windish and beyond: it all stank together. The whole five days were a fetid, swaying, crowded dream. Vandis didn’t get seasick a bit, and Kessa got used to it after about a day, but Dingus couldn’t adjust. He spent his last five days with Vandis, puking up what had to be the entire contents of his skin.

  He’d never been so glad to see anything as Windish Harbor, even though it was raining at the time, a steady, soaking rain. The inlet was too wide to see both sides clearly, and masses of gray-shaded hills and mountains receded from the water. As they got close Dingus’s nose filled with fish and salt, rain and fresh evergreen. If he hadn’t already been reeling, the scent would’ve spun him like a whirligig. When they finally came to berth, he needed to spread his arms for balance down the gangplank, and the wharf itself swayed beneath him—he swore it did, even though Vandis told him it was rooted to the bottom of the bay with thick beams.

  “Never again,” he rasped as he staggered after the others, trying not to bump into any of the stevedores that rushed the opposite way to unload the Jellyfish’s cargo of seal pelts. “Never.”

  “Fair enough,” Vandis said. “It takes some people that way. I didn’t think you’d be one of them.”

  Dingus stopped once they got off the boards of the wharf and muffled a sickly burp. He couldn’t abide all the swaying. “Can we sit down?” When Vandis paused and turned to look at him, he added, “Please.”

  Vandis considered. “All right. Let’s find you a spot to sit for a little while.”

  Dingus followed him gratefully, feeling ready to move, if only so he could at some point stop.

  Houses of the Holy

  Windish to Dre
amport

  The first time Vandis had landed in Windish—almost exactly eighteen years ago, but who was counting?—he’d been enchanted. He’d never seen a place like it: wet, but fiercely green to match, and exploding with life in the dim beneath the great trees. He’d wandered around, a man dreaming, slurping it all up like strawberries and cream; and he hadn’t noticed, at first, how nobody addressed him directly, hadn’t seen the scowls directed his way because he was alone.

  He’d never forget the statue, the pretty little oak tree carved out of wood that he’d wanted for his office. Long story short: he’d tried to buy it and wound up talking faster than he ever had in his life to keep the stall owner from calling on the Treehoppers.

  In Windish, men hardly had the right to live. At the time, he’d blazed with rage at the injustice of it: men had no property rights and all of a gnat’s power to buy and sell. Instead, they were reduced to little more than bits of jewelry, selected from the Men’s House for the strength in the secretions of their balls. Oh, he’d burned at that. It wasn’t fair.

  Only after he’d gotten a cheap bed in the common room of an inn—all he was allowed to pay for—and a supper of watered-down fish stew, only when he lay on his back listening to teakettle snores in the dark, did he stop to think. It was unfair, of course it was, but he couldn’t maintain his rage. Men in Windish weren’t any more oppressed than women were elsewhere, but he was lucky enough to have a dick, and the ill treatment of the opposite sex in general society rarely registered with him. After all, what someone had in his or her breeches didn’t make a lick of difference to the Knights. He still didn’t think about it very often, but whenever he was in Windish, he couldn’t help it, and one of the most beautiful places in Rothganar made him itch with uneasy guilt instead.

  It’ll be all right, he told himself, looking down at Dingus slumped against the side of a young cedar at the edge of the forest. He’s good at keeping his head down. Putting Dingus somewhere he might be stepped on again, just for what he’d been born, wasn’t an ideal solution, but it was the least of many evils.

  Vandis hoped, anyway. He’d made certain to brief the kids on the ship, telling Kessa not to let Dingus go anywhere by himself, to watch out for him. The Ish would expect her to do the talking, if it came down to brass tacks. The difficulty now was a question of how much Dingus had been able to take in. On land, Vandis’s boy had a cat’s balance, but on the Jellyfish, he hadn’t done much more than lurch to the railing. Vandis felt bad about that; he’d honestly thought they’d have a good time sailing.

  “How come there are so many ships?” Kessa asked now. “There must be a score, and there’s room for a whole bunch more at the—what’s it called?”

  “The wharf,” Vandis supplied.

  “The wharf.” Kessa tested the word. “The wharf. Anyways, I thought you said Windish wasn’t that big.”

  “The city of Dreamport,” Vandis said, “is home to just over a million people. Brightwater just under half. Windish, though, has under a quarter million. It is small, when you’re talking about the great cities of Rothganar, but compared to the places you’ve been so far…”

  “It’s humongous,” she said, her eyes rounding. Dingus uttered a quiet groan and covered his head with his hands.

  Vandis’s conscience jabbed at him. He turned and opened his arms. “Look, though. It’s beautiful—a beautiful city for a beautiful people.” The streets, lit softly by covered lanterns, twisted and turned under forest giants: cedar, cypress, sequoia, two or three hundred feet high. In the shadowy heights, the lights of houses gleamed like clusters of fireflies, and the lights strung on the rope bridges that crossed from tree to tree wove together like constellations. Some trees held only one house; some held two or even three. Sound felt different here, hushed, so that the shrieks from Ish to Ish sounded sweeter than they would have in open air. To Vandis, coming under the canopy here always felt like crossing a threshold into magic.

  The Ish people only reinforced the impression. On average, they reached Vandis’s waist, no higher; an Ish Vandis’s height would have been even more obtrusive than a human as tall as Dingus. Even the biggest males didn’t top his sternum. Their skin was furred, in a multitude of colors. Their bare feet were long, thin, with toes that could grasp nearly as well as fingers; their hips were strange and skinny, as if they were made to go on all fours, and their arms hung low around their knees. They pranced by on their toes, a never-ending parade of them, carrying string bags or parcels, with Ishlings—what they called their children—clinging to their backs or frisking about on the ground. Except where weighted down with charms and ornaments, their tails bobbed along high: smooth, tufted, bushy. The crests that marked adults were just as diverse: coarse, wiry, sticking up; soft, shiny, tumbling; short or long, wide or narrow, back from the forehead clear to the napes of their necks.

  “Oh, Vandis,” Kessa breathed, grasping his shoulder.

  He reached up and patted her hand. “It’s something, all right.”

  “I like how it smells,” Dingus said. When Vandis and Kessa looked back, he was on his feet, and he lifted his face to the canopy. His eyes fell shut and his nostrils flared.

  “What do you smell?” Kessa asked. Vandis was curious himself. He’d seen Dingus take a scent like this before, but it’d never seemed quite right to ask him.

  “Rain,” he said. “Mold and mushrooms. Acid—from the needles, I think. Pigs and goats and people. Cut cedar.” He raised his head again and took another deep sniff, and then opened his eyes to look at them. “You and Vandis. Thyme and rosemary. Somebody’s cooking a fish supper. Somebody else is baking apples in honey. With nuts, I’m pretty sure.”

  Kessa frowned. “You can smell us? Way over there? What do I smell like?”

  A grin darted across Dingus’s face. “Sweat and butt.”

  “Aw…”

  “What about me?” Vandis asked.

  “Sweat and butt. Like everybody else in the world.”

  “You’re not always so fresh yourself.”

  “True.” Dingus stuck his hands in his pockets, pulling his shoulders around his ears. “I don’t mind my own ’less I’m real bad. Don’t much mind you guys either. Except Kessa’s on her monthly.”

  Vandis told him, “I did not need to know that.” He struck north and east, toward Tikka’s house.

  “I can’t help it!” she protested.

  “I can’t help smelling it. It’s just what we are.”

  “The whole world stinks to you, doesn’t it?” Vandis said.

  Dingus pulled his shoulders up again, then let them fall. “Basically. I don’t pay attention most of the time is all, ’cause I’d never get anything done.”

  “Well, keep your guard up. Petty theft’s an institution here. The pickpockets will mark you two quicker than sneezing.” Vandis looked the two of them up and down. “Staring around at everything won’t help you.”

  “I never saw anything like this place,” Kessa said defensively. “I never even knew a place like this existed.”

  Vandis grinned. “You’re not wrong to stare. There’s nowhere else like Windish. Just be careful.” As they walked, he told Kessa and Dingus what he knew about the city: main streets, points of interest, temples. He told them about the rocky beaches and the tide pools choked with anemones and shellfish. He showed them nurse logs that babied trees, and trees so old the nurse logs had rotted out from beneath them, leaving arcane root formations behind. He showed them a few of the mosses that carpeted the forest floor, the sphagnum mosses that dripped from the boughs. “More types of fungi grow in a square mile of Windish than in the whole of Dixon Forest,” he told them. “Look at those.” He pointed out a tree with a white shelf fungus growing like steps up the trunk.

  “Bet they don’t eat pickled herring here,” Dingus said. “Can we try the food soon?” As if on cue, his stomach let out a ferocious growl, and Vandis laughed.

  “Tikka’s going to want to feed us. It’d be rude to disappoin
t her. Don’t worry, though—good cooks in her house.”

  “Who’s Tikka?”

  Kessa scoffed. “Weren’t you paying any attention?”

  “Hell no, I wasn’t. You saw me. Just tell me who Tikka is.”

  “She’s the lady who’s going to let us camp on her land,” she explained. “She used to be a Knight but she’s retired now.”

  “Was that so hard?”

  “Would it have been so hard to listen when Vandis told us?”

  “I—” Dingus began, but Vandis cut him off.

  “Quit bickering. We’re almost there.”

  Tikka lived about four miles inland, away from the obscenely huge, tightly packed houses of the North Coast, in a quiet neighborhood with plenty of space. She had two acres to spread out on, and a good-sized place: privy on the ground, kitchen and smokehouse in one cedar, and a tidy four-level house in another, larger tree, connected by a rope-and-board bridge. A forest of small metal chimneys ran out of the mossy roofs to funnel smoke above the canopy and minimize damage to the trees. “Hello, up there!” he shouted when they came under the branches of the bigger tree. “It’s Vandis plus two!”

  Nothing happened. He drew breath to shout again, but Dingus said, “They’re coming.”

  Sure enough, a trapdoor swung open from the bottom level of the house, and a rope ladder unrolled swiftly down to them, bouncing at the end of its descent. Vandis didn’t waste a moment. He climbed the swaying ladder and pulled himself through the trapdoor into warmth, light, and the fluting chirrups of greeting accented by native Ishian. If Windish made him uncomfortable, well, he’d never felt uncomfortable here.

  Tikka herself was white with age from the top of her crest to the tips of her toes, but her black eyes shone and snapped. She went mostly unadorned except for a gold ring around her tail and a colorful tunic, which tonight was bright red embroidered in a black geometric pattern around cuffs and hem. “Vandis!” she cried when he pulled his legs from the hole in the floor, stretching out her arms and making clutching hug-me motions with her fingers. “Hello, young man!”