by Ted Neill
She rolled onto her back and closed her eyes. She heard Adamantus kneel beside her to drink. The sound of his lapping tongue and his deep gulps soothed her, and she slept.
They must have slept there for hours. When Gabriella stirred, the light in the forest had changed. Amber afternoon sunlight was streaming though the leaves from the west. Mortimer and her brother slept, taking deep breaths, the color returned to their faces. Gabriella stood up slowly, for she was dizzy with hunger, and made her way over a carpet of leaves to the Elawn. Adamantus followed her.
She groaned, setting eyes on the Elawn. Gabriella had not even bothered to drop anchor. The bowsprit had snapped off. The prow of the ship was half buried. The ship had pushed the soil up and out to the sides like a plow in a furrow. The Elawn’s stern still floated in the air and stirred with the wind. The paneled sails, branches tangled in the lower rigging, were spilled out over the mid-deck. Loose ropes hung aimlessly. Not a landing Ghede would have been proud of, Gabriella thought, climbing aboard. She looked up through a gap in the branches at the afternoon sky. There was no sign of the wyvern.
“Odd that she has given us such a long leash. I don’t like it,” she said.
“Nor do I,” said Adamantus.
As if the same thought occurred to both of them, they looked to the stowage compartment where she had put the egg. Gabriella opened it and unwrapped the cloth around it. The egg was intact. “It’s still warm too,” she said.
“Good. Let us keep it wrapped for now to keep it warm. A fire would be dangerous until we know this land and the intentions of our chaperone,” the elk said, nodding towards the sky.
Gabriella nodded and turned to study the opening they had made in the trees. With the fading light, she was confident that the remaining leaves and branches would obscure their crash site. She was about to say so when she felt something in the egg move.
“What’s wrong, Gabriella?” the elk asked.
Suddenly she was not sure if she had felt anything at all. “Nothing. I think I am just dizzy. We should get some food.”
Their stores were almost gone. She brought the last of their biscuits to the stream, where Dameon and Mortimer woke slowly. The trapper offered Dameon a few biscuits before he took some for himself. While Adamantus left to explore their surroundings more thoroughly, Gabriella retrieved their blankets and sleeping mats. She made a small camp beside the stream, hid the wyvern egg in her blankets, then returned to the Elawn again, Dameon following her. The rear cabin was in disarray, but she gathered salt, sugar, and the last of their salted meat and dried fish. She also collected pots to carry water. Dameon waited patiently while she piled the supplies in his arms.
Mortimer had fallen asleep again. She let him rest while she and Dameon ate some of the fish and meat. As the sun painted the treetops in pink, she and Dameon walked down the hill and sat beside a second pool of the same stream. Adamantus was not back yet, and Gabriella felt comfortable being frivolous. She and Dameon picked stones out of the bank of the stream and tried skipping them over the pool. They attempted to play a game with colored leaves where they dropped them into the current and would watch them race, but the steam was too slow for it to be very riveting, so they tossed rocks and attempted to sink the leaves.
Dameon’s shrieks of delight were so high pitched they sounded like bird calls. He provided a count of all their acts: they skipped thirty-six stones, for a total of ninety-six skips. He seemed pleased by those numbers since they all were divisible by three, or so he said. They had set sixteen leaves in motion in the pool, sank five, missed ten, and one floated away.
Before long they both were exhausted, their energy still limited. Gabriella stared at the stream, watching the water skimmers upon the surface. There were water skimmers in streams on Harkness, too, but they were larger and had filament-like legs. These were smaller, but their bodies were fat like beetles and their legs hairy.
She realized that many of the species of plants and animals in this land were familiar, yet slightly altered. The odd-shaped acorns, the leaves that had the texture of oak but were smaller with more forks. There were also species of trees she had never seen. One tree had bark peeling off in rolls like paper. Another species of pine was taller than any she had ever seen, and at the top of its slender trunk it was not cone-shaped but flat. She saw a chipmunk, but it had a bushy tail, like a squirrel. The squirrels themselves were huge, long, and unusually colored—black and gray—much different from their cousins on Harkness who were red and dainty.
Dameon became fixated upon a pinecone, counting its spurs, irritating Gabriella. When he became fixed on his numbers, it was hard to reach him—especially with her weakness in math. For a few minutes it had felt like she had a normal brother—save for the counting of their game at the end. Then she realized she did have something to share. She asked him for the pinecone and, pointing to its design, explained to Dameon the sequence of numbers, each number being the sum of the two numbers before it—one, two, three, five, eight, and how it often appeared in nature.
Dameon was skeptical at first, insisting that plants could not count. They searched the forest floor until Gabriella found a leaf stem that demonstrated the same pattern. Dameon was riveted. He began to pluck stems and count each one. When he found that each was uniform, he turned back to pinecones, determined to find one that was an exception.
She lost him to his obsessions, as she always did, but at least for a short while they had shared something. Soon she was thinking about all they still had yet to accomplish. She thought about how much ocean they had crossed and how long it had taken.
Now her mind filled with all the tasks they had to do just to find Dis. They had to refill their barrels. They had to clear the decks. They would probably have to use the poles to push free of the landing site. They had to repair damaged planks. They needed more food as well. They certainly did not have enough food to reach home, especially if the wind was not in their favor. She wondered exactly how many days they had been away from Harkness and how many days they had left. She started calculating but lost track. She turned to the ground, brushed aside leaves, and tried making a tally in the dirt, but she ended up sweeping it all away in frustration.
By any estimate it had taken them nearly three weeks to reach where they were now. That left only days for them to locate the treasure and return. It could not be done. Even if they found the treasure, if they did not meet the deadline, all would be lost. Her head suddenly hurt.
To have come this far, for nothing!
Dameon was still counting. She scrambled to his side.
“Dameon, how many days since the meeting in the town hall?”
“How many days were we sick without water?” he asked.
Gabriella was not sure herself. It seemed like three days, and this was still one of those days. “Three?”
“Then it has been twenty-four.”
“Counting today.”
He nodded.
She dropped her head, feeling defeated. Just then she heard Mortimer scream. Birds flew, startled, out of the canopy. He came crashing through the underbrush.
“Gabriella,” he said, his eyes wide, his hands shaking. “The egg is gone.”
“What do you mean?”
“I looked in the Elawn. It’s gone.”
Gabriella sighed with relief. “I moved it. It is in my blankets.” She gave Dameon a tap between his shoulder blades. “Come on, Dameon. Let’s go check on the egg.”
The egg was still safely ensconced within Gabriella’s blankets. She had just shown it to Mortimer when Adamantus returned, his eyes bright with excitement.
“I climbed the high ridge to the southeast,” the elk said. “We are on an island, not a peninsula, but that is undoubtedly the mainland across the channel. I spotted smoke as well. The island must be inhabited. If there is a sizable village, and the residents are kindly, we will be able to replenish our provisions.”
“Then we move on and find our treasure,” Mortimer sai
d.
“Indeed,” the elk said. “Tonight though, we must rest.”
They did not light a fire. As soon as it was dark, they all curled up to sleep. Gabriella listened as the wind rustled in the trees and leaves fluttered down to land lightly on the forest floor. The others fell into deep slumbers.
As tired as she was, Gabriella thought she would sleep well, too, but she did not. Every time she closed her eyes, her head swayed, as if she were still on the rocking deck of the Elawn.
Stillness illness, she thought. She had heard sailors who had been at sea a long while complain of it when returning to shore.
Sleeping next to the egg did not help. It was warm so she had hugged it against her chest, but a few times she was startled awake when she thought it moved. She concluded it was only the beating of her own heart that had startled her.
It must have been long after midnight by the time she finally drifted off. She woke up in the morning to the sound of bird songs—melodies and voices that were wonderful and exotic—and the luscious smell of frying fish and potatoes. Mortimer was making a breakfast feast complete with bitter-root tea. Gabriella opened her mouth to protest the use of their last supplies, only to remember they had finally found land and most likely, a new source of food stuffs.
After breakfast, they turned to the Elawn. All four of them set to work, Dameon sweeping the decks, Adamantus spearing fallen branches with his antlers and tossing them overboard. Mortimer worked in diligent silence on the water barrels. The repaired seals were not perfect, but they would have to do.
Mortimer, Dameon, and Gabriella hauled water in buckets from the stream until the barrels were filled again. Water leaked so steadily from one that they salvaged what they could into pots and buckets.
As she worked, Gabriella scanned the sky for the mother wyvern. There was a faint object in the clouds that caught and reflected the sun’s light that could have been the dragon, but it was so distant she was unsure. She took Dameon with her through a hatch in the mid-deck to inspect the magnetic stone that gave the ship its lift. Gaps between the planking allowed daylight to slip through so the inside of the chamber was not too dark. To Gabriella’s surprise, she found some of the metal buttons ripped from her tunic still stuck to the bottom of the stone from when she had crashed through the deck on their first day of sailing.
Dameon showed the same fascination for the inner workings of the ship that he had for the wyvern. He investigated the gears and belts, tracing out the pathways of force and torque. Gabriella turned her attention to the beams, fore and aft, that held the stone in place. Cracks had opened in both. The crack in the aft beam was wide enough that she could fit two fingers into the gap.
On deck, a compartment held rusty vices and grips, and Gabriella took them to repair the timbers. Careful not to carry them below the stone, she clamped the vices onto the splintering beams. She was not strong enough to tighten them so she asked Mortimer for help. He had to take off all his knives before he came below. Still, he lost a few buttons to the stone, as its force popping the metal fastenings right off his shirt. He secured the vices, and as a last step to brace the timbers, wrapped them in ropes.
“Hopefully that will hold.” Mortimer patted the ropes.
They worked the morning away—repairing rigging, sewing shrouds, and replacing broken railings. They had set the wyvern egg in the coals left over from their breakfast fire so it was warm when they wrapped and stowed it on the ship. With effort, Mortimer pushed them off with a pole. Once free of the ground, the ship righted herself, and the deck was level once more. The beams and joists and planks beneath their feet groaned and settled into place, making Gabriella wince. She would have preferred slightly less noise from the Elawn.
Mortimer used his pole to guide them away from trees as branches snapped and ripped across the hull, but once above the treetops, the sky opened around them. The sun was warm after the cold shade of the forest. Gabriella could hear the soft waves of low tide on the beach. A gentle breeze blew, and Mortimer raised the sails.
The hilly island waited beneath them and across a channel was the mainland, the great expanse of the Eastern Continent itself. The sun was not yet at its zenith so blue shadows hugged the vales between wooded ridges just below. Gabriella was conscious of feeling both disappointed and anxious. Disappointed because she knew they had lost too much time in crossing the sea. They still had to stop in a village for supplies and who knew how long it would take to find Dis. It would be impossible to make Miller’s deadline of the new moon. And she was anxious because, late or not, they would have to face the labyrinth, and she had yet to unlock the secret of the map.
Her hand trembled as she put it on the wheel.
Chapter 11
A Hero Among Us
Sade found Raven in his study looking out over the sea. His mentor’s hair had grown streaks of silver in the last few years, but his body was still strong and lithe. Raven’s feet rested on a small stool as he sat beside his desk and the familiar pose reminded Sade of the many hours he spent in his tutelage. If Raven were ever to reject him or betray him as Jerrold did, it would be infinitely worse.
Perhaps I grow too trusting even of this mentor.
Raven, who always knew Sade better than even Sade did, said in a low tone, “The betrayals are over, young man. You have found your home among us.”
Sade was taken aback, but instead of revealing it he decided to counter insight with inquiry. “If the Servior are my family, Slitstone my home, then I am ready to be initiated into our highest secrets.”
Raven closed the book that had been open on his lap and set it on the table between them. Next to it was an unrolled scroll decorated with a woodcut press of a large deer—an elk—with a fell look in its face, antlers like swords, and teeth like a jackal. He sensed Sade staring at it.
“Secrets like this?” Raven asked.
“Indeed, what is it?”
“A Stygorn elk. Look closely. Any Servior who found one would be a hero among us.”
“Why is that?”
Raven rolled up the scroll. “In time, all will be explained. But first, a last mission, your last as an apprentice to me.”
Despite himself, Sade felt the blood run to his face. His head felt light while his extremities were suddenly heavy. “Sir, have I not pleased you? Was my punishment of Jerrold unsanctioned?”
“No, it was masterful. Your crew came back in thrall of you. A fitting fate was meted out to him. I say ‘last mission,’ because you are close to being a full sorcerer now. Soon you will don the red cloak all sorcerers wear for their first five years. You have excelled in mage craft, business, and leading men. Now, finally, a test of your guile.”
“I am honored, sir.”
Raven scrutinized him carefully before beginning. “Foyle Island, home to King Robert and Queen Yvonne. They are enemies of ours, allied to old powers that oppose those whom we serve. We want nothing less than the complete eradication of their line. Ruin to come to their people, destitution to their house.”
“So we are at war.”
“So to speak, but not that they know it. That is why we will send you.”
“With a contingent of warriors,” Sade said with eagerness, picturing a pitched battle, a raid, or a siege to bring the lords of the isle to their knees. He would have an army at his command, he imagined with a rush.
But again, as if Raven had special insight into his mind, his mentor broke into his thoughts. “It is the slow knife that cuts deepest. An all-out war would unite their people and tax our resources. We are a small order, not a nation-state. What is needed is dissolution from within. You will go with a single companion of my choosing. You will move to Foyle, live among the people, earn their trust, and find a way to ferment dissent, distrust, and discord. Means of force will not be available to you. It is a disease of hearts you must be, not an attack of steel.”
Sade swallowed. For months he had been a captain of men, a leader in the open. Now he was to bring down
a kingdom with subterfuge.
“Consider it the last of two tests.”
“Two tests, which is my penultimate one?”
“This: there can be no bond over that of the order.”
“I have none.”
“Do you, what of your brother?”
Sade caught himself. So close was he to Vondales, so intimate their bond that he took it for granted. He was united with his brother the way his spirit was united with his body. Only death would separate them.
“He also serves the Servior. In honoring him, I honor the order.”
“No,” Raven said, cutting him short, his voice iron. “You honor the order by honoring the order, no one else.”
Sade was quiet, unsure as to what to say next. If this were a test, he was worried he was failing.
“You will not be given an army nor even a cadre of men. You will receive a single companion, as I said, of my choosing. The one best suited for you and this mission. You will travel to Foyle, disguised as a lowly weather worker and healer, with this companion posing as your servant. You will travel on trade vessels and passenger ships. And you must renounce your brother for the order.”
Sade felt as if the room would come apart around him, as if an ocean wind had swept into the library and threatened to blow them all out, furniture, books, bodies into the sea. His brother was his life, his only bond to what was his identity. His only family left.
But the Servior is our family now.
Sade was not one to trust, even Raven. Betrayal was the way of the world, perhaps that was what Raven wanted to teach him: that to earn more power, he would even have to turn his back on his brother. For what felt like an eternity, Sade sat in silence, deliberating, weighing his loyalty, his love, for Vondales. He saw his brother as he had looked that first day they had lost their mother, his eyes red and swollen, his cries inconsolable. He remembered sleeping, curled next to him in their uncle’s cabin, inside the stolen skiff, even under the docks at Mornaport. There was the thrill he felt when Vondales won his first match in the ring. The pain he had felt when the slavers on the Judgement had beaten his brother—it had been as if the blows had landed on Sade himself. And there was the relief he had felt that day, opening his eyes to see all the crew of the Judgement dead, but his brother somehow spared. There was no magic more powerful than love. Or was there? For the sake of power he had to find out. For the sake of power—and there was nothing but power—he knew he would have to forsake even love.
