“I can’t get our army raised and marched to Bren by summer,” Inda stated.
“Nobody wants your army,” she retorted, sharp with fear.
Evred raised his brows at her rudeness, but even in the fading light her face was blanched, anxious.
Pim went on less truculently, “They do want you to lead a fleet against the Venn. Like you once promised. Fleet Guild believes only you can do it, and Chim says Prince Kavnarac told him that other kingdoms in the east are saying the same thing.”
“Me?”
“According to the prince, Khanerenth’s king says he’ll declare a full pardon if the Freedom Island independents sail under their former admiral, you know, at Freedom—”
“Dhalshev of Freedom Isles,” Inda said. “I remember.”
“Dhalshev says he is willing to lead Khanerenth under your command, independents and navy both.” She snorted. “Despite Deliyeth of Everon’s claims, we know who really won at The Fangs.”
Inda send a puzzled look Evred’s way. “I didn’t know about any battle at The Fangs,” Inda said in Marlovan.
Evred addressed Ryala Pim in Iascan. “Return on the morrow. We will have an answer then.” He got to his feet and walked away, Inda following after exchanging a pained look with his wife.
Hadand signed to her Runner, who led the rigid woman off to be housed in the guest hall.
Out in the courtyard Inda turned to Evred. “Did Barend tell you about a battle off The Fangs?”
“This was a couple of years ago. My last direct communication with him, he reported only that a sea battle was imminent,” Evred said. “He lost his locket during it. I subsequently found out that the Venn had retreated, and so trade was resuming. It did not seem pertinent to our affairs here to report any of that to you.”
“I sure didn’t think to ask.” Inda grimaced. “I used to know everything going on in the southern seas. Now I’m behind, what, how many years since I came home?”
As they ran upstairs Inda thought back, trying to recover when he’d last heard any news of the Fox Banner Fleet. Then he remembered throwing his golden scroll-case into Tdor’s fireplace in a fit of temper and reddened. It was his own fault.
Evred kicked the door to his private office shut. “The kingdoms along the strait are all in turmoil, according to Taumad. I haven’t said anything to you or Hadand because their internal affairs are their own business. Just as they left the pirates and Venn to us a few years ago.”
Inda turned out his hand. He didn’t care about the matters of kings. It was the individuals he wanted to hear about, but he’d let time slide by without troubling himself to ask.
Evred went on, his manner tense. “It sounds like the kingdoms along the strait are far worse than Idayago was before we went north: kings conspiring against one another, secret deals and spies and lies, not just lurking in alleys but high in courts and palaces. My mother sees that as normal dealings. She even likes it, or at least the social side. Taumad finds it all amusing. I . . .” His voice suspended, and he stared out the window as the guards-in-training ran along the sentry ways, snapping alight the torches. He swung around to face Inda. “They’re weak. Like the Idayagans were. Too busy squabbling with one another over who will pay for what, who gets what. The Venn will smash them.”
Inda sighed. “Probably. But if they do, then they’ll come after us. Especially since the plot against you failed.”
“Against me?” Evred repeated.
“You already knew about it.” Inda flicked his hand open. “Magic. Take away your brains. You remember. Well, Erkric was going for it, only in secret.”
Evred controlled the recoil, but blood beat in his ears. “I thought that idea was hypothetical. That the threat ended when the Venn left.”
Inda sighed, and smacked the edge of Evred’s desk. “I didn’t tell you because . . .” Another smack. “Well, the reason Signi disappeared is, Erkric blamed their problems on her. She got hunted down and put on trial. And tortured.”
“I had no idea.”
“I don’t think she even wanted to tell me. But I saw her scars.” Inda paused to get control of his own voice. Weird, how the very word torture brought a surge of anger—he wanted to smash something. He released his breath instead. “D’you see? The hunters that nabbed her were training to go after you next. Erkric’s secret plan, so he could control you as well as their king. Her friends couldn’t save her, but they made sure Erkric can’t get you. You’re protected by magic now. Long’s you stay in this city.”
Evred was far more adept at hiding anger. Magic, how he loathed it. There was no defense against so immoral and horrific a personal trespass. To take away someone’s mind! It was worse than death. If he died, there would be another king; Hadand was strong enough to hold Iasca Leror for Hastred. But if I am made into Erkric’s puppet, forced to mouth out Erkric’s commands . . .
The horror was inexpressible.
When Evred spoke alarm burned through Inda’s nerves. Evred only whispered in that deadly soft tone when he was in a cold rage.
“So we can be certain, then, that the Venn’s next try against us will be the massive invasion.” Torchlight from the windows gleamed in Evred’s wide eyes, twin leaps of ruddy flame. The rest of him was in shadow: he did not clap on the glowglobe. “They want the strait so they can coordinate a large scale effort and aim everything they have at us. Probably in the very same plan you once outlined, and as much as we’ve recovered, we would never stand against that. There aren’t enough of us.” Then, in a less deadly tone, “Could you defend the strait?”
Inda sank down into one of Evred’s wing back chairs. “I don’t know. I doubt Bren’s got enough ships, or they wouldn’t be wanting me. But even if the fleet Jeje was training is still somewhere waiting for me—and I don’t believe it, as I stopped paying them before the Venn attacked us here—sending indies, fishers, and privateers against well-drilled warships would not be like my old fleet fighting pirates. We counted on pirates not trusting one another enough to learn to fight together. That would not be true of the Venn.”
Evred opened his hand. “So it’s impossible, is what you are saying?”
“Depends on what sort of allies I’d get, and what I’d have at the center to build around. Don’t know where Fox is with the Fox Banner Fleet—or if he’d respond.”
“Center to build around.” Evred paced along his torchlit windows, hands gripped tightly behind his back. “If your fleet with Savarend Montredavan-An was willing to become the core of a Marlovan navy . . . that would not break the treaty agreement. I would pay them. Do you think they would accept that?”
Inda whistled. “Fox’d have to decide for himself, but I suspect the others would go wherever there’s pay. But how would I even find him? It would take years! Last I remember of my gold case is kicking it into Tdor’s fireplace. Dunno if it exists, and if it does, if it even works.”
“It does, and it does. Tdor rescued and kept it.” And then, though it took an effort, “I have been reading the missives in it from time to time.”
Evred knew he would have put to death without hesitation any man who had breached his own privacy in that way, and yet he had done it to Inda, the man he trusted most.
Inda leaned forward, and because Evred could not see his face—he had not wanted Inda seeing his—he clapped on the globe.
The light threw the shadows back. Though Evred had little appreciation of figurative language, Inda’s thought processes had always reminded him of a running stream. Inda seemed clear as water, and yet, if you assumed you saw straight to the bottom, the illusion of the bent stick was a reminder of how easy it was to trick the eye. Inda was clear, he seemed to hide nothing, yet Evred could not predict Inda’s reactions when it mattered most.
Inda groped impatiently. “Well, what was in it? I’ll eat this desk if Jeje ever wrote me. And Tau lost his, as I recall him telling us. The only one who wrote back to me was Fox, and that was usually to jab at me.”
“There were a few letters from him. Nothing that seemed important enough to interrupt your ongoing duties. Though the most recent one repeated gossip about the Venn. The letters are there—not many—when you want to read them.”
Inda lunged out of the chair. This time Evred sat down, to be out of Inda’s way as he prowled the perimeter of the crimson and gold rug. “So if I can find Fox . . .”
“Can you do it?” Evred said again.
Inda grunted, tapping the windowsill, the inner door latch, the desk, the wall, the top of a wingback chair, then circled around again. “Look, Sponge. Here’s where I keep coming back. If they’ve got their entire fleet, why didn’t they take the strait already? Why dig in at Llyenthur and send threats? Even if they took damage after that typhoon Ryala Pim mentioned, they’d still be stronger than anything . . .”
Evred waited.
Inda pounded the windowsill, the chair back, the windowsill, the chair back. “Rajnir. It’s got to go back to Rajnir and Erkric and all that.” He whirled around. “Where’s my chart? Where’s my—oh, yes. On the Death. Right. Right . . .”
Evred said finally, “Right what?”
Inda whirled around and paced back. “Ever since the Pim ships were attacked, when I was pigtail-age, I’ve fought the battle the enemy brought to me. Even the pirates. I figured we were close enough in force for me to have a chance. This battle, even if the Venn are weak, that weakness is relative, I’ve got to pick the ground, but is that enough?”
“The reports all mention three hundred ships. More. Isn’t that what came against us?”
“They now have over three hundred warships, what they call the drakans. They’ll have more like a thousand with the raiders and that.”
“And you think them weakened in some way?”
Inda jabbed a finger toward the window. “Relative. Something’s wrong.” He stopped abruptly. “I need Signi’s deep sea navigation. If she plans to give it to Sartor, why not teach it to me first?”
Evred had no answer. Inda wouldn’t have heard one if he’d spoken. He clutched his head, then exclaimed, “I have to write to Fox. Will you give me leave, if I do come up with a plan?”
“I could never deny you anything,” Evred answered. And wished the words unsaid.
But Inda just laughed and rubbed his hands. “Then let’s fetch out that scroll-case! I’ll write to Fox and see if I have a fleet, or if it’ll be just Chim and me in a jolly-boat waving the Fox banner and yipping as loud as we can.”
Chapter Ten
THREE people did not sleep that night.
Inda’s mind cascaded the familiar stream of images and ideas, beginning with his dash up to the archives for a continental map to recover current and wind patterns while he waited for an answer from Fox.
Twice he stuck his head in Evred’s door. The first time, “Did they say Rajnir was with them, like when they came against us?”
“I gained that impression. I do know from something I read in the Ala Larkadhe archive about the Venn that the Golden Tree banner only goes where the king is, or a prince under the king’s orders. Taumad mentioned once a thirdhand report of that banner being flown on the flagship.”
The second time, “A Marlovan navy. Does that mean the exile treaty will be set aside?”
Evred could not sleep until he had confronted the profoundly disturbing threat of Erkric stooping through the skies and reaching magical talons to pluck him from the once-regarded safety of his fortress to be used against his own people. The Venn truly had become an evil empire, but even so, he could not trust impulse and emotion. He had to get control of his emotions. To think everything out, in the most methodical way.
Exile. Montredavan-Ans. “I will have to put the question of the Montredavan-An treaty to the Jarls at Convocation,” Evred said.
Inda grunted and vanished.
He prowled around the Harskialdna suite. Tdor was asleep in the big bed. A ghost-hand squeezed Inda’s heart when he looked at her still form, outlined by the knife of light through the cracked door. I won’t be here for my boy’s birth, he thought. He couldn’t imagine having anything but a boy. Especially since a girl was supposed to go to Darchelde to marry Fox’s son, a decision made long ago in accordance with some treaty. It had been a promise made to Inda’s mother when she was forced to leave what had been her home to marry Inda’s father. It had also been an implied insult to Montredavan-An ambition that the Algara-Vayir second son, and not the heir, would provide their treaty daughter . . . and look what happened! No, the idea of a girl was too strange, her future too unclear.
Inda shook his head, closed the bedroom door, and saw the gleam of light below Signi’s door. He tapped.
“Enter,” she said.
On her desk lay a complicated map drawn on thick heralds’ paper, with a webwork of interconnected lines laid over the outline of Drael and the Sartoran continents.
“Is that what I think it is?” He pointed. “I was just coming to ask if you’d teach me Venn navigation.”
Her smile was crooked as she turned her ruined hand over in a graceful gesture, her wrist veins close to the surface of her white, puckered skin. “Our first big test is to draw an accurate map from memory.” She touched the map. “A quick explanation, then questions, then the long explanation if you and I agree. This is what we call a mirror map. These mirror maps are easy to make. When I was a sea dag, we used them to check on our peers’ positions. You can also ting anyone—”
“Ting? Is that like tigging lances?”
She smiled faintly, a smile more sad than merry. “Perhaps, but we use the image of a bell. If you tap a bell in a forest, people can follow the sound. You ting ships and map-dags on either ship or on shore. They ting you back. The mark shows up as a little magical glow.” She whispered, and the paper filled with what looked like firefly dots all over the paper, clusters along the western end of Drael, and a mass off the fish-mouth of Llyenthur Harbor.
“That’s the fleet at their latest ting,” she said, then made a sign and the lights vanished.
Inda lunged forward, hands grabbing at air. “Wait!”
“No, first I must ask you to promise. If this forming alliances does choose you as leader. Will you promise me not to loose a slaughter?”
Inda flung his hands out wide. “D’you see, that’s my plan! What I figured is if Rajnir is going to battle himself, but he’s . . .” He knocked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “It has to mean your Erkric keeps him close by, right? Because only he can control him, right? And he can’t let anyone else know, right? I’ll lay out a good battle plan. I’ve got some ideas, pending information from Chim. But the real plan is I go after Erkric myself.”
Signi stilled, her face distraught.
“What is it? I won’t go alone, I’ll have a picked team to help ward off those fellows in white. Erkric’s the cause of all the problems, right? So if they’re gone, well, things can’t get any worse, can they?”
Signi trembled. “Oh, Inda, you can’t. Erkric is the most powerful dag of the Venn. You cannot challenge him to a halmgac—”
“A what?” Even as he spoke, Inda heard the familiar root for Marlovan duel in the unfamiliar word.
“It is old, very old. Forbidden now. At least, according to the old form, where they rowed away to an island and one returned. Some say that’s where we get the notion of the far shore, though we have the far shore in so many meanings. . . . Is that something exclusive to us Venn? Or is it a part of human nature, to go from the group, or force one from the group, but what does that say about the group?”
There she went, in that soft voice, her gaze far beyond the limits of furnishing and walls. Inda loved those conversations, when one thing would lead to another, and then to another, often not resolving, questions netted to other questions as he and Signi and Tdor speculated about every subject under the sun.
But that was before time pressed him for answers. Time, and Evred. He sensed Evred waiting there in his office.
And Signi heard, or felt, or saw some subtle clue in Inda that brought her back. She squared her shoulders. Her tone shifted from wondering to brisk. “We still have duels. Anyway, too many were dying, and Drenskar, the . . . the honor of service, replaced it. But Inda, this is what’s important. You cannot attack Dag Erkric, either alone or with your warriors, however well they are trained. His flagship will be filled with wards and traps.”
Inda bumped gently against the table and frowned down at the map. “Well, so much for the easy way. We’ll just make my other plan the real one. Signi, I can’t promise how others will behave, you know that. But I can promise that my own orders will never include massacre or torture. Fight until they surrender or retreat. Then end it.”
She trembled there on the opposite side of the desk, eyes half closed as she gazed down the path that he could never see. But he’d always sensed it. And so he waited.
Her gaze lifted and searched his, her brow tense with questions. “I think . . . I think I see the true path. And I believe you.” She held herself tightly, then opened her eyes. “Here is how it works.”
When Inda walked into Evred’s office at dawn, he discovered the king there, and though glowglobes did not reveal time like candles, and Evred was scrupulously neat in his person, Inda sensed he had not slept.
“Your report?”
“Fox just wrote back. They’re off the coast of Khanerenth, trying maneuvers with them, Dhalshev’s independents, and some volunteers from Sarendan. It gives me half a year to get to Bren.”
“If you leave after Convocation,” Evred said, “you can ride north with Cama and a wing of dragoons. He’s already started down with just a flight, but I can give him more. Was going to rotate some to the north anyway.”
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