by Kate Elliott
How the Tandi stared! But she thought their faces wore not surprise but calculation. Hari went out first, still holding the baby, and Fo stepped into place behind Lifka. Once they were down the steps of the inn and back out on the street, Hari spoke.
“My apologies, Lifka.”
“It wasn’t your fault!”
“Had you any notion they would confront you so directly? Have you seen them before?”
“No! I never knew Tandi existed until Treya mentioned it last time I was here. But when I was at the palace afterward one of Queen Dia’s women claimed to recognize my scar as a guild mark. She said the Phoenix Lineage lost all its children in the Eldim war.”
Fo said, “The tall man is waiting on the steps to see which way we go. Father, perhaps I should take Lifka back to the house instead of going on to the other shipmaster.”
They all looked back. The man with the gull’s wing was indeed poised on the steps as if to dash after them.
“Yes. You girls go home while I settle this.”
With the baby in his arms he approached the man with such a bland expression on his face that Fo whistled. “Sheh! Pa’s angry!”
“He is?”
“If Pa’s not smiling it means he’s furious. Let’s go!”
They wove through the bustling harbor-side traffic toward Grand Avenue. Fo had a formidable way of using her elbows to ram through the passersby and carts and wagons. Unaccustomed to dodging traffic, Lifka fell back as a cohort of sailors jostled past. A man pushed a cart between her and Fo.
A hand came down on her shoulder from behind. The white guardswoman tugged Lifka roughly around to face the man the Tandi called her brother. His frown made him look concerned, even worried, as she might herself have been if Denas or Alon had started spouting nonsense about belonging to some other clan.
He touched the ink on his face. “You and me are sister and brother of the Phoenix.”
She ducked out from the guardswoman’s grip. “Leave me alone!”
“Leaf!” cried Fo as a wagon drawn by oxen rumbled past, cutting them apart from each other.
Lifka bolted, and slammed into a solid, muscular body. A glance at his height told her who it was. She elbowed him up under the ribs, gripped her staff, and swept low for his knees to jar him off his feet. With astonishing reflexes he jumped over the swing and came down with a chop to her elbow that broke her hold on her staff.
A cough of pain: her own.
“Leaf! Where are you?”
A net of silver lacework poured over her face like rain from a cloudburst. Its weight drove her to her knees even as its strands adhered to her skin and then began to dissolve.
Her body melted as if she, too, were rain pouring away through the sieve of her body into a new vessel. Everything became light, too opaque to see through, although her ears still worked. Words swam like fish through a weir, trapping more and more of them until they began to crowd her thoughts in flashing silvery waves. The ground heaved, then settled into a rocking sway that unsettled her stomach so much that she opened her eyes.
Nausea roiled her stomach. She swallowed, then regretted the burning in her throat as it turned to a gagging cough. Arms hauled her up and held her over the rim of a wagon as she heaved up everything in her stomach. The road beneath glittered and splashed. Shadows rippled across its flowing surface.
This was no wagon. They had thrown her in a boat. Oars beat on either side in perfect rhythm as they dipped in and out of the water. Her captor pulled her away from the gunnel and she realized her hands were tied behind her back and her ankles wrapped with rope so all she could do was squirm in an effort to get away from him. But the tall man had a powerful grasp and a sour frown because evidently flecks of her vomit had gotten on his fancy silk sleeve. She couldn’t decide whether to laugh at him or to throw up all over his pretty tunic in the hope of pissing him off.
Find your calm space before you fight, Mum would say.
They had trained so often on this skill that Lifka could reach right down to the cool center behind her breastbone and quiet her nerves.
So here she was, kidnapped, in the stern of a narrow boat being rowed by eight people, including the three women and the other man. The speed at which they skimmed over the water astonished her. The port of Salya fell behind, buildings already small. Ahead they neared the deep-water anchorage where ships awaited the tide’s turning.
Make no predictable move, Mum would say. Even though she had grown up swimming in the river, with her hands and feet tied she was not about to throw herself into the bay. Fo had explained earlier that the tide’s turning was hours away. Plenty of time for the others to catch up.
Yet even as they pulled up alongside one of the ships, sailors already swarmed the rigging and ropes to unfurl canvas. With the greatest indignity she was trussed in a fishing net and lugged up, bumping against the hull like a sack of rice. Slung onto the deck, she wriggled to try to get out of the netting. People raced around her shouting orders in that language she knew and yet could not understand.
The tall man hoisted her to get her out of the way. With her stomach pressed into his shoulder she had the pleasure of spewing the last of her bile down the back of his tunic. Sometimes you had to take whatever petty revenge you could get. He dumped her onto a coil of rope wedged between heavy jars and a cage of pigeons, then cursed again as he tried to shake out his tunic.
“Asshole,” she said, to relieve her ill humor. The rough netting scratched her lips.
He walked away with the easy pitch of a man accustomed to the way the deck didn’t stay still. Her stomach clenched, made queasy again by the incessant movement. She tried to hook her chin to the leather cord twisted against her neck, worked her head forward against the netting. If she could just reach the bone whistle, she could call Slip.
“Sister.” The stocky man knelt beside her. He patted his chest. “You are the sister. I am the brother. I am called Ilekovi.”
“I am not your sister and you are not my brother.”
He reached toward her face but when she drew back he did not touch her skin. “The scar was cut by a desperate person. This person knew you must not be lost to your people, so they made the mark to remind you. Who cut you?”
“I don’t remember. I want to go home.”
“We are taking you home.”
“No, you’re doing to me what soldiers did when I was a child.”
“No. We are rescuing you. Word has already spread that a Phoenix daughter survived. If we had not found you, some worse person would take you to sell you to the Imperators.”
“Is this how a rescue goes? My feet are going numb because they are tied too tightly.”
“Ah. Too tight. He is worried and too eager for the prize, that one.”
“The asshole?”
“The hole of the ass? Ah!” He laughed in a way that made her want to like him. “Yes. We call it a man with a rude nose.”
“A rude nose?”
He began to peel her out of the netting. “Maybe nose is the wrong word. My speech is not so good. This is my first time to the western continent and I learn the language only as we sail. He is a man hard to like because he is a bitter food to the tongue. He pokes his nose in and says harsh words before he knows the truth.”
Mum would say to keep them talking to relax and distract them. “That sounds right. Are you related to him?”
“No, we are not kinsmen. He is my spouse.”
“Your husband?”
“Husband? I do not know that word. Clans arrange a marriage to tie two families together. We are spouse to each other. Is it not this way in all lands, that the elders choose what persons their children will marry?”
“Not if that means kidnapping people.”
“This is not a kidnap. The elders of the Tandi Guild will pay a bounty to the Gull Lineage for bringing in the last born-daughter of the Phoenix Lineage. You are precious, of highest worth. The guild will find you a spouse in the proper way. Maybe a more likable one than m
ine!” He smiled just as if he and she were accustomed to jesting.
“You people stole me to get a reward?”
“It is other people who stole you, when you were a child.”
A sail rumbled into place, but there was so little wind it hung slack. Surely they could not sail against the tide!
She smiled wanly in the hope of rousing his sympathy. “If I am precious I hope you do not damage me. My ankles are scraped raw. Look! Blood! Can you retie me so it doesn’t hurt?”
Kotaru the Thunderer must have been watching over her because he untied her ankles while elsewhere on deck the grind of the anchor chain came to a thumping halt and a second sail was unfurled. She stood, steadying herself on one of the giant ceramic jars as she stamped feeling back into her feet. He offered her a sip from his flask. The harsh flavor of a bracing liquor slammed straight between her eyes and cleared her mind wonderfully.
“My apologies, sister. I must tie your feet again but I will not tie so tight.”
“I can’t feel my hands at all,” she lied. “They’ve gone numb.”
The third sail rolled open. A cry like a seabird’s keening caught at the edge of her hearing. An uncanny force spilled through the ship like the breath of a giant creature shivering into wakefulness.
All three sails filled as if with a steady following wind, only it wasn’t windy.
Shadows played across the canvas like sheared wings lifting on the breeze. She blinked to clear her vision.
He shaded a hand to look toward the cloudless sky. “To see the spirit waken is magnificent.”
Masts threw shadows across the deck and onto the water. Sailors worked the ropes and scrambled about their business. The bay spread around them as a sheet of water with the green shore hulking in the distance. Overhead the sky had the cloudless blue sheen of a dawn-thrush’s egg.
A massive shadow rippled across the decks as if clouds were passing the sun. Slip’s shadow looked just this way as it flowed across the ground when she and the eagle flew aloft, only this shadow was larger even than Slip and it had narrow, bladed wings and a blunt tail.
The ship began to move as if the shadowy wings lifted wind out of another realm into this one.
As if the ship had a bird’s shadow haunting it, just as Reyad had said.
It was frightening but also so incredible it made her want to try to touch that shadow and see if she could feel what a bound shadow felt like.
But not today. Not now, or anytime soon.
While he wasn’t looking at her, she sat on the rope, tucked her unbound feet out of sight beneath the coiled rope, and twisted her bound hands up. “My hands are numb. You said you would loosen the rope. Is it really true a gull’s spirit haunts this ship?”
The ruse worked, because he wanted her to trust him.
“The shadows of birds are bound into the hulls of our ships, yes,” he said as he bent over to pick at the rope pinching her wrists.
“Don’t you keep such powerful magic a secret?”
“How can we keep secret a thing people can see?”
“So it isn’t only Tandi who see the shadow of the bird? Anyone might?”
“Any person might or might not see the shadow, regardless of who their mother is. But every person sees a ship sail where there is no wind, even if they do not see the shadow.”
Over his shoulder, in the direction of land, two specks appeared in the sky within her field of view: two eagles.
“Ah! Why does the asshole bind the rope so tight?” Ilekovi muttered under his breath as he pried a finger under the wet cord.
The rope finally began to loosen enough to give her hands play.
She head-butted him, slamming her forehead into his nose so hard the pain almost cracked her head in half, but she was already pushing to her feet. He reeled back, blood pouring over his lips. She jumped for the railing shoulder-first, ramming a hapless sailor aside. His surprised cry was lost within the slap of the wind in the sails and the shouts of sailors. Ilekovi staggered into her. She kicked, and he reeled back, tripped, and hit the deck hard.
The rope burned as she scraped her left hand free where he had begun loosening it. Clambering up the rail, she swung her legs over.
The tall man loomed to her right, looking furious. He scooped up the discarded netting and flung it. She pushed off and cut right through the shadow of wings through air so cold her skin went instantly numb. Then she hit the sea. The force drove her down and down, water boiling up around her and the ends of the rope unraveling like a writhing snake. The netting tangled over her head but she was heavier and kept dropping into the depths as the water slowed the net’s descent.
She had forgotten to take a breath.
She kicked back toward the hull, bumped into it, and came up gasping for air. The sailors weren’t looking down; they pointed at the clump of netting as it brushed the surface. She inhaled, dove, and swam under the hull, popping up on the other side. After shedding the rope she dove again and swam underwater as far as she could manage away from the ship. The sandy bottom was stippled with rocky clumps like a hundred small outcroppings, fish teeming among them. She surfaced to take another gasp of air, then dove and swam, and surfaced again this time with eyes stinging and lungs throbbing. A glance toward the ship showed that no one was yet deliberately looking for her on this side, but the sailors in the rigging had already begun to survey the water on all sides. They would put rowboats in and come after her.
But what really made it hard to breathe was how the ship looked now, no longer just a ship with sails set. A vast gull’s shadow glided within the masts, like mist intertwined with the wood and rope and canvas of the vessel.
Magic.
She dove again. Probably they could see right down into the clear waters with her a too-large fish swimming all clumsy where it should be sleek. But cursed if she was going to go without a fight. Slip was coming. The jess tugged on her soul.
Wasn’t the bond between reeve and eagle also a kind of magic?
She burst again to the surface. Treading water, she turned a circle as she scanned the sky.
There!
“There!” cried a voice from the ship. They had spotted her.
An eagle’s shadow spread over the water. A reeve she didn’t recognize swooped low, a rope dangling from his harness. Lifka grabbed for the end of the rope but missed and had to watch helplessly as reeve and eagle banked up and looped to swing back around. Oars splashed the water as a rowboat appeared from around the hull and sped toward her.
Out of the sky Slip dove for the boat. His talons grazed a sailor but he didn’t get a grip. The man screamed and slumped over the gunnel of the boat, his companions shouting. Slip flew sharply up and circled around for another strike.
She had to tear her gaze away and focus on the other eagle as it circled back around. The rope’s tip skimmed the surface of the water, the reeve measuring his approach. Lifka lunged and grabbed it. Her weight jerked down the eagle but this one was a bigger, stronger eagle than Slip and lugged Lifka like a sack through the water. Lifka thought her arm would pull out of her shoulder even as she tried to wrap the end of the cord around her wrist so she wouldn’t lose her grip.
The cord scored an abrasion across her fingers and she lost hold and sank back into the water. Her fingers burned painfully. The whole side of her back felt pulled out of line. Her mouth tasted of brine. Still, she was farther away than before, and the sailors had stopped rowing and raised their oars to protect their heads.
Slip circled for another dive. She wanted to cheer him on but she had to tread water.
The sails of the Tandi ship began luffing. The huge gull’s shadow rose off the mast like steam off a boiling kettle. It shattered into so many smaller shadows she could not count them as each took the shape of a small gull. The shadow gulls split into two flocks and raced across the waters to mob the big eagles, diving and harassing until the eagles sheared off.
Lifka couldn’t bear to watch. The agony of shifting
her right arm made her grit her teeth, but she began a slow stroke anyway toward the green horizon. Swimming hurt, but the thought of her family starving in Weldur Forest with no one to look out for them and nowhere to go drove her past the pain. They had never done anything except work and garden so as to live a peaceable life. The shrine’s work gangs, the archon’s unfair licenses and demands for money, the prince’s swollen pride, the Tandi merchants who had decided she must be some person they wanted her to be, and even the reeves carrying her away from home: What right had they to trample in and take whatever they wanted from people who couldn’t fight back?
The splash of oars grew louder. She was exhausted and in pain but she kept swimming. They would have to haul her kicking and biting out of the water if they wanted her.
“Lifka!”
Fo’s shout startled her so much she took on a mouthful of water. Fo came up in a canoe alongside her while she was still coughing and trying to keep her head above water rather than swallow more. Men hauled her over the gunnel, and she hung there hacking out seawater.
Fo stowed her paddle and raised a crossbow. The rowboat plowed closer, the tall man standing in the prow. The mob of shadows turned away from the retreating eagles and instead swooped and turned around the becalmed ship until they became a twisting sheet of darkness.
“There are ten more canoes coming from Salya,” Fo called across the waves to the rowboat with the tall man. “You can see them right behind me. We don’t take kindly to having our guests stolen. You want a fight, you’ve got one. But I recommend you go on your way and never come back.”
The tall man raised a hand, and his sailors stopped rowing.
The two vessels floated in silence. Water sighed at the hull. Lifka craned her neck to see the two eagles flying in a wide sweep, cautious after the attack of the shadowy gulls. In the far distance several more specks appeared, reeves from Bronze Hall coming to investigate.
The tall man crossed his arms in disgust. “Did you and your brother Ilekovi arrange the escape between you?” he shouted. “So his clan’s ship can get the prize money for bringing you in?”
Lifka coughed, then spat, trying not to throw up again.
