From Whence You Came

by Gilman, Laura Anne

  “Hoy! West and down!” The call came from high above them, and Bradhai craned his neck to look up, squinting as the sunglare hit him in the eyes.

  “Hoy, west and down!” the sailor next to him yelled, passing the word along, and then poked Bradhai roughly in the ribs, forgetting – if he even understood – who the Vineart was. “Come see this,” he said, and his grin revealed a mouth half-lacking in teeth. “A sight you’ll never see on land, I’ll vouch you that.”

  Uncertain, but willing, Bradhai allowed himself to be led further along the railing.

  “There. See it?”

  He saw nothing save the endless open waters, rising and falling in swells as they turned and rolled. Then the hint of something caught his eye, a change in the color of the water, a tension that had not quite been there before, almost the way he felt before a storm, or the evening before the first grapes began to ripen in the sun….

  “Full on!” the call came, even as something burst through the surface of the water, a huge gleaming blue-black shape, fully the length of the ladysong but no boat, this, breaching from the water. It soared into the air a full length, turning to fall back into the water, surrounded by flumes, with a resounding crash that silenced all other noise.

  “Sin Washer’s Grace,” Bradhai breathed, his eyes wide and his heart racing. “A leviathan?”

  “Aye,” the sailor said, as proud as though he had spelled the beast up himself. “And not even the largest of ‘em, neither. Why I-“

  “Full on!” came the cry again, and they both turned to watch, eager for a repeat. But this time the beast did not thrust itself out of the water into the sky, rather seeming to thrash on the surface, twisting and turning, its great tail rising as though to slap something down.

  “Fire and rot,” the sailor swore, and turned, shoving Bradhai away from the railing. “Take cover, man, and stay down!”

  Bradhai could not move, not even for his life’s safety. His gaze was caught on the great leviathan, trying desperately to escape something rising below him, something that had it in its grasp, somehow. A krekken? But no, krekken only emerged in storms, and the sky and sea were calm, save the battle in front of them. The ship, previously sailing alongside the leviathan’s path, was now hauling about, hurrying to get out of the way.

  And then it rose – no, not it. Two beasts, grey-green and elongated, heads the size of a cart, limbs pulling at the leviathan, great clawed pads scoring the heaving sides as it turned once again to escape. But what might work against men with spears, or a krekken, could not avail it, not when those two great heads came down as though driven by a single intelligence, and each took a bite out of it.

  Blood flowed, turning the water murky, and the wind brought the smell of entrails and raw flesh, making Bradhai gag and turn away.

  When he recovered enough to look again, the seas were empty.

  “Port and down!” the call came, this one far more alarmed. The leviathan was gone, but the serpents remained.

  “Turn! Turn and away!” someone shouted, and the ladysong turned again, her prow heading away from the encounter, and another canvas sail snapped open overhead, released by sailors seeking extra speed.

  The Captain’s voice bellowed out again, louder than any sailor’s chant or wood’s creak. “Vineart! Now for your proof, if you will!”

  Despite the ‘if you will,’ it was not a request. Grabbing the wineskin at his belt, Bradhai hurried to join the captain and Hernán, standing on the raised deck just behind the main mast.

  “That? That is what you hope to save us with?” The captain said, spying the palm-sized wineskin in Bradhai’s hand.

  “I need no more than this,” he said. In truth, he did not even need all that. But there was no need to tell these people how little spellwine was actually required. If their coin bought more, they were happy, and his House prospered.

  He stepped onto the deck, and looked to the Captain. “What and where?”

  The Captain might be worried, but he had a protocol he would follow. “Two lengths south and east, if you would, Master Vineart.”

  “I am no Master yet,” he said, uncorking the skin with his teeth, and letting the stopper dangle from its tie. “But soon, with Sin Washer’s Grace.” With his free hand, he lifted the silver spoon from his waist, and measured out just enough of the aetherwine for the spell.

  Silver was useless for cups or pitchers: spellwine and the metal did not well like each other. But for the brief time it rested in the shallow of the spoon, the silver caught the deep red glint of the wine, showing the clarity and depth of the magic.

  He let it linger a breath longer than was needful, to ensure both the Captain and Hernán made note of the wine itself, then slipped the liquid onto his tongue.

  Holding it there, he closed his eyes, and felt the magic surge within him. Others, ordinary folk, might use a spellwine; it was incanted for them to use. But a Vineart – especially the Vineart who crafted it – could sense more in the wine, call more from less, do more without cost. That was part of the blood-magic within them, what tied them to their vines.

  The decantation to raise the wind was a simple one. The trick was to make sure the wind did only what you wanted it to, no more and no less. While a Vineart could use blood-magic to influence a decantation, Bradhai had no desire to show off; he merely directed the spellwine to do what he had created it for.

  “Rise and speed, sweet to our need.” There was a skill to speaking decantations without swallowing the spellwine; Bradhai did it without hesitation. “Carry us hence, south and east: go.”

  The sails overhead snapped and belled, as more wind rose to join them, jumping the ladysong like a stone skipped from a child’s hand, driving it ahead of the serpent even now rising in their wake.

  “Ahead, Captain! Forward a th’ bow and down!”

  “Washer’s piss,” the Captain swore, and started shouting commands to the other sailors already in motion.

  “What is happening?” Bradhai looked around, bewildered. “I did as you asked, I filled the sails.”

  “You did,” Hernán agreed, clearly just as mystified.

  “The other one swung around,” the Captain said, in between shouting commands, the man in front of him hauling hard on the wheel. Bradhai felt the ladysong swing under him like a hard-reined horse. “They’re trying to drive us somewhere.”

  “That’s impossible.” Hernán was certain of that, it seemed.

  “Don’t tell me, Shipsmaster; tell them!”

  “Sta’board and down!”

  Unable to help himself, Bradhai jumped down from the aft deck and, dodging sailors who cursed him without stopping, he went to the railing, and looked over. There was nothing that he could see, and he wondered if the ship’s eyes had been mistaken – and then the water changed color, darkened. He realized that from that distance above, the eyes had been able to see far further down, predicting the –

  The beast burst from the water, and Bradhai stumbled back, soaked with the sea brine. He did not think, he could not think, but his mouth flooded with vin-tinged saliva, and he swallowed, muttering what he’d meant to be a prayer to Sin Washer, but instead came out as a command:

  “First Vine, defend us. First Vine, protect us.”

  And the magic within him rose to the words, driven by the vin magica in his mouth, and the magica within him, shoving the beast away with a blast of wind, sharp with the scent of land and sun, anathema to such a creature of the briny depths.

  It let out a sound that was neither shriek nor scream nor bellow, swung its great head around as though looking for the source of the magic, then shuddered and sank below the waters as swiftly as it had arrived.

  “Gone, Captain! They’re all gone!”

  Bradhai stumbled back a pace or two, until his back was against something solid. He had used blood-magic. In public, in the presence of outsiders, he had called on the magica within every Vineart. The extension of a Vineart’s Sense, the ability to use magic withou
t drawing on the vin, was not something for outsiders to know. Had anyone noticed? His heart raced more from this new fear than aftermath of the serpent-driven danger.

  No. No one had noticed. They were all too busy thanking the silent gods that the beasts had left them unmolested. No one had seen what he had done –

  “Vineart!”

  He turned, uneasy, and saw Hernán standing at the upper rail, expression unreadable.

  Hernán had seen something. But all the Shipsmaster said was, “Come with me.”

  The Captain’s quarters were cramped, and sparsely decorated. Despite the nautical design of the bunk, and the table that was bolted to the wall, Bradhai felt strangely at home. That comfort did not last long.

  “You drove them off.”

  “I? I filled the sails with wind as you asked.”

  “No.” Hernán shook his head. “I saw you. You did something, although I don’t know what and the beasts gave up. What did you do?”

  “Shipsmaster.” Bradhai put on his best placating voice, the one he’d learned as a slave, sharing space with so many others who were not always of good temperament. “I had no spellwine to hand; I decanted no spell.” Neither of those was true, in the absolute sense: a Vineart lived and breathed spellvines from the time they were bought as slaves until the day they died; the vines were on his skin, in his breath, in his blood. And a decantation was merely the key to a spellwine’s use – for a Vineart, those doors were never locked. But he had not lied: he had used no spellwine, decanted no spell.

  “Those beasts worked together.” The Captain accepted Bradhai’s denial, and moved on to more pressing concerns. “Serpents do not do that, Shipsmaster. They do not school, they are solitary creatures. And they are not that large!” He seemed offended, as though their size was a personal affront to him and his ship.

  Bradhai was slightly relieved to hear that those monsters were oddities.

  “Larger?” Hernán asked.

  “By a length, at least. Mebbe more. And two of them? Two, working together, like hunting dogs!”

  He wasn’t going to let go of that branch any time soon, it seemed.

  Bradhai was suddenly, unutterably weary – pulling blood-magic had a cost, always – and in no mood to listen to the two of them squabble over what was and was not possible. “You brought me here to prove that my spells worked, that they were not responsible for the loss of your ships. I might suggest, Shipsmaster, that you look to these larger, fiercer beasts as the cause – had a ship, unprepared, been caught between two or three such…”

  He did not want to think what might have happened to the ladysong, had the creatures decided to attack it as they had the leviathan.

  “Having done my service, and proven myself,” he said, “I will leave you to find your solutions. If you would return me to shore, I will make my own way home.”

  “No.”

  Bradhai licked his lips, tasting the sea-spray still on his skin. Or perhaps it was sweat. “Shipsmaster…”

  “You did something. You drove off that beast, ended the attack. Whatever you did, even if you don’t know how, saved us. I need to know what it was. I need to be able to share it with the rest of our ships.”

  “You cannot hold me here.”

  They could, of course: he had no way of getting to shore, and the thought of trying to steal one of the lowboats they used for ferrying while in port, and striking out on his own.... Even without the recent demonstration, the ocean was a fearsome thing for a man alone. Knowing what lurked below the surface? No.

  He looked to the Captain, not expecting an ally, and was not surprised to see a frown on that weathered face. He clearly was not comfortable with the idea of restraining a Vineart, but neither would he argue with the Shipsmaster.

  “You would keep me here against my will?” Bradhai had no idea how to sound menacing, but he tried to imply the very many ways that this would be a bad idea. He had no access to firewines, unless he could get hold of the ones already shipboard, but certainly if they tried to keep him here, he could ensure that their sails were becalmed for weeks.

  “Of course not.” Hernán seemed horrified that Bradhai could think that. The Vineart’s tension eased, and then the Shipsmaster said “But if you abandon us, we will have no choice but to admit that our ships were lost…because spellwines could not protect them, and the Vineart who supplied them turned his back on us.”

  Shipsmaster Hernán could play the not-quite-a-lie game as well. And he wagered Bradhai’s reputation on the throw. The Guild would rather blame Vinearts than accept that the seas had become too dangerous for single ships to transverse.

  They stared at each other, and Bradhai broke first.

  o0o

  “Harini!”

  Her companion’s voice was low, sweet, and well-modulated. It also carried like the fog’s horn on a winter morning.

  “Harini, slow down. You walk too swiftly.”

  Rini did everything too swiftly. She walked too swiftly, she thought too swiftly, and assuredly she spoke too swiftly, without pausing to consider the ramifications and repercussions of her words. She had heard these laments since she was released from swaddling, and she had accepted them as truth.

  She also did not care a leaf.

  “What is it, Je’heirba? I am busy.”

  “Yes, I can see that. And where do you think you are going, with your long legs and your fast pace?” The older woman gestured grandly, her arm swinging out in an arc as though to indicate where, within the confines of the ship’s length and width, her charge might be headed.

  “I needed to think,” she said. “I couldn’t stay cooped up in the cabin any longer.”

  They had been at-sea for three months, and the quarters given to her were half the size of her bed chamber at home. However, their size was not the reason she could not stay, nor was Je’heirba’s constant fussing. Rather, it was the accusing weight of the manuscripts and calculations stacked on the desk, filled with information that she could not decipher.

  Interrupted in her attempt to walk away from her frustrations, Harini instead turned and went to the railing of the vessel, staring at the cause of her frustrations.

  “Here.” Je’heirba placed a delicately woven wrap around her shoulders.

  Harini accepted it with a muttered word of thanks. It was cooler here, out on the cold waters, than it had been back home. They had come further north than she had thought they would, on her fool’s chase.

  “I am right. I know I am right.”

  “You are always right,” Je’heirba said.

  “It is one thing to be right,” a third voice said. “It is another entirely to prove it.”

  Normally, sailors would spit at the thought of a single woman on-board. The fact that no storms had stalled them, or beasts attacked, with three among the passengers, Rini could only assume the crew thought a small grace from one of the silent gods.

  “I am trying,” Rini said in exasperation, slapping the railing lightly with her palms. “But how am I to do that when the rotted things will not show their face? A tease here, a sighting there, but not one will surface for more than a moment of time.”

  The solitaire joined her in leaning against the railing, and Je’heirba, no longer required, faded back to the comfort of the cabin. The older woman did not look like a fighter; her body was rounded rather than lean, and she wore long wool skirts rather than the usual leathers of other solitaires Rini had met, but she had come well-recommended enough that her father had hired her on the spot, when his only daughter had insisted on making this voyage.

  And there had been evidence enough of her competence, when she dispatched two would-be bandits on the way from Harini’s father’s house to the docks. The solitaire had not even drawn the sword that rode low on her hip, but simply flicked a thick-bladed knife from a sheath on her arm, sending it quivering into the first bandit’s boot-toe, and warning him that the second one would cut off something higher and more dear to him.

&
nbsp; Rini was a scholar, not a fighter, but she certainly understood competence, and had soon accepted the solitaire as a trusted companion and sounding board.

  “They’re hiding from me. We have followed them in shallow waters and in deep, spotted them in prime feeding areas, and they see us, and leave. They are avoiding me.”

  The solitaire managed to keep any tone of teasing out of her voice when she asked, “Do you give them credit not only for that much intelligence, but malice as well?”

  “Yes. No. It’s possible. No, it’s not possible,” she admitted. “I am just frustrated.”

  A year ago, she had seen a serpent swimming along the coast by her father’s estate. It was not such an unusual thing: the serpents liked the warmer waters off the coast of Varsam for their breeding, and her people knew to leave them be.

  But this one had been acting oddly, and Rini – who had been out in her little boat sketching the coastline, where a rockfall had occurred over the winter – had been intrigued enough to follow at a safe distance. And she had heard it singing.

  Serpents did not sing. That was the stuff of legends, and Rini was a scholar, not a storyteller. But she had heard it making a low, sweet noise…. And another serpent had come to it. A full grown one, not a spawnling called to its mother. And it had sung in turn, their noises twining together into almost a melody.

  And then they had sunk below the surface, and Rini neither saw nor heard them again.

  But the sound preyed on her. There was nothing in any book she could read, nothing any source could tell her, that would explain it.

  And so – being the daughter of a man wealthy enough to indulge her, as he had given her leave to pursue her curiosity since childhood, she had arranged this ship, and this voyage, to find other serpents, and listen to them sing.

  But they were avoiding her.

  Harini did not take to commerce, as the men of her family did, but her mind worked in the same fashion: she studied her goal, and did what seemed most effective to achieve that goal.

  “Will you direct the captain to another route?”