“Boat ho!”
Jeje faded back as the newcomer’s crew hooked on.
The rest of the day, Inda received a succession of captains. First the higher ranks, but as the Death did not signal a desist, several other captains had themselves rowed over so they could meet the infamous Elgar the Fox in person. Both Foxes, because there was the tall redhead as well as the short one with the scars.
Inda welcomed them all and patiently explained his line-with-inverted-arrowhead idea over and over, figuring the word would pass the faster.
At the end of a long day the last of the boats rowed back, the three captains sharing it filled with Lorm’s good whiskey-laced punch as they talked over their conversation (and the good advice they’d bestowed on Inda Elgar) before returning to tell it all over again to their crews.
Just after sunset, Inda, tired and hungry (he had not drunk a drop of the punch) left the cabin to walk on deck with Jeje. She’d stayed to furnish names and backgrounds. Tau remained in the background, listening.
Inda said, “So that just leaves Chim, and whatever his surprise is, and I still haven’t seen these Ymarans and Everoneth—”
“On deck. Signal!”
Inda poked his had out the cabin door, peering upward. “Who?”
“ ‘Captain Deliyeth invites Elgar alone, or requests permission to bring party.’ ”
Jeje snorted. “It’s an insult! She’s all but saying she doesn’t trust you. What can one of her parties do if we really wanted to kill her?”
“Jeje, if you’re going to make that face around her—and by the way, does she get a special title? High, or flag, or crown, or—”
“She’s their commander, but she expected us to only call her captain. Tau says it’s reverse snobbery.” Jeje grinned unrepentantly. “I’m leaving. Sun’s about gone. My guess is this is your last visit of the day, and you don’t need me for it. Eflis and I worked up some night drills for the schooners and scouts while we were waiting for you. It’s your idea, only smaller. For taking on raiders.”
Inda lifted a hand, and she left. He yelled for the watch mid and they both began neatening up the cabin, which still had a few cups lying around. As the girl carefully carried away a tray full of crockery, Inda cast a look around, satisfied that things looked shipshape.
Captain Deliyeth had waited all afternoon for the Fox Banner Fleet to signal her. They’d held court instead, like the pirate emperors she suspected them to be.
When the sun had slid most of the way down the western sky she decided that sitting around waiting for a signal and asking herself questions was even more useless than cadging thirdhand gossip from others. She had never shirked her duty, no matter how unpleasant.
It was time to go call on the pirate king.
She chose her biggest, strongest, toughest marines. She knew they could hardly take a stand against the entire crew of the pirate ship, but she wanted visual evidence of just how much she distrusted the chosen leader of the alliance.
She had her gig crew row her over as she sat in the stern-sheets, straight-backed and silent, perforce requiring her company to remain silent.
She eyed the long, low trysail as they neared, not admitting even to herself how interested she was to set foot on board the infamous black-sided Death.
The ship was clean, everything neat, in fact neater than the ships of some of their allies. She glimpsed that sneering redhead Fox at the wheel, but she did not acknowledge him, nor did he do anything but lean his arms between the spokes and smile that hateful smile of his.
The cabin was surprisingly beautiful—but of course pirates would have their pick of the world’s treasures, since they never actually paid for anything.
Inda Elgar was younger than she’d thought, though scarred, the top of his head even with her eyes. Unlike his red-haired captain, he dressed like a deckhand. He even had bare feet, though they were far lighter a brown than the rest of his visible skin. “Sit down, please,” he said.
She took her time motioning her marines into place, sat down on a carved bench that had probably been looted from a monarch, and said without any preamble, “You are the one who murdered Count Wafri.”
Inda Elgar’s face blanched, then flushed a deep red that made his scars stand out palely. At first she thought that a reaction of guilt, except for the downward turn to his mouth. That was pain.
Inda had expected trouble, but not that. “I didn’t kill him,” Inda said finally, when he knew his voice wouldn’t bleat. But he was unsettled enough to burst out, “Why don’t you people believe that? And would you blame me if I had? He used to torture your people for sport! He assassinated your queen—he-he-he bragged about it to me.”
He sounded outraged! Deliyeth jerked her hand up, waving aside his words. “So you say, so you say. But his lordship was well loved in Ymar. He was the new king’s own cousin, from a long-respected family. Whereas about you, what do we hear? Everywhere, blood and death. Burning and destruction. With my own eyes I saw what you did to Limros Palace.”
Inda gritted his teeth.
“We’re told you even allied with Norsunder to get rid of your rivals in the Brotherhood of Blood! Who can stand against you?”
Inda twisted away and worked to calm down, wiping his sweaty face. Just the thought of Wafri made his joints flare in memory-echo. “I did not ally with Norsunder. And I didn’t make that rift.”
“The Venn all believed you made it!” She pressed her hands against her forehead. “They said so in the hearing of—”
“Damn the Venn! Ramis made that rift.”
“How can you expect me to believe you? We’ve heard witnesses who saw your fire ships, saw you burn pirates. Heard from traders about you walking about Ghost Island like old friends with the Norsundrian Ramis—”
Inda resolutely stayed silent. No one had ever called him a liar before; there was a disturbing sense that every word he spoke somehow twisted in the air, turning into some other word before it reached her ears.
She hesitated, unsettled by his glumness. Fox’s insolence, his sarcastic drawl, that she expected from pirates. Of course, Elgar’s reaction could be a sham, or maybe even guilt to have his crimes spoken out loud. Obviously none of those other bootlicks had dared.
She squared herself to duty. “And next thing we hear, you’ve made yourself the Marlovan king’s right-hand man, though you’d been exiled for killing a boy ten years before. How many of your countrymen did you also kill to make that jump in rank? Not that I care anything about the horse barbarians. You can kill all of them you like, since that seems to be what they like doing to other people. Here’s my question, what is to stop you from taking all our ships and people, and once the Venn are gone forever, just stepping in and taking their place yourself?” She thumped the bench she sat on. “Is this going to be your throne, Emperor Inda Elgar the First?”
Inda stared back at her. “You don’t know the truth about me. But I’ve also learned that people who don’t want to see the truth won’t.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, then flung out his hands. “I promised people I would lead an alliance against the Venn. If you don’t want an alliance, then there’s nothing to talk about. If you do, let’s just lay out the conditions and proceed from there.” And when she did not get up to leave, “How many ships do you have, and what types?”
When she departed a short time later, Fox was waiting. He’d positioned himself at the wheel, where he could keep an eye on the comings and goings, and hear everything in the cabin below through the open scuttles.
He summoned the mate of the watch to take his place, and went down to the cabin, where he found Inda alone, prowling around from object to object, touching them sightlessly the way he did when he was thinking, or upset.
“I heard that,” Fox said. “She’s a damned fool.”
Inda looked up, and for a moment all the old pain was there, bleak and stark. “Wafri.” He expelled the word like a curse. Then rubbed his hands over his head. “How c
an they see escaping from a torturer as being destructive?”
“Probably has to do with setting the treasure room at Limros Palace on fire.”
“I did not!”
“Inda, you and I nearly caught fire, we stood there so long, watching Wafri’s stuff burn.”
“I did not burn anyone’s treasures. I remember that damned day clear as—” Inda’s voice tightened. “I remember the rope—and you pulling me up. I remember walking. My ribs hurt, I remember that much.”
Fox studied Inda uneasily. “You don’t remember the eggs in the boots?”
“That wasn’t us, that was a story from when I was a boy. Dogpiss Noth and Dancing Nderga. I must have told you that story, and you mixed it up with—” Inda frowned. “Wait. Wait. I remember the stairs. I slipped on some water somebody threw. There was fire. We were laughing. Did I have a basket of eggs, or is that a dream?” He shook his head. “I do remember shooting from the wall. But not burning anybody’s treasure.”
Inda had hunched over in the old way, as if he was seventeen again, and Fox reflected on how physical scars might heal, but the emotional ones could linger through one’s life. “I remember you nailed more of those Limros guards in knees and elbows than I did,” he said easily.
Inda’s face eased. “I was always a better shot than you, even if I couldn’t beat you on the deck. Did you ever lose a fight?”
Fox laughed soundlessly. “Once,” he said. “Once.”
Inda scarcely heard. He got up and roamed restlessly about the cabin, touching things in absent pattern. “Fox, listen. She was the last of them. I asked everybody how many ships they had on hand, and I’ve kept a running tally in my head. We don’t have enough.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Since the Venn are coming, we don’t really have a choice, do we? Well, we were outnumbered in Andahi, too. And I do have my plan. So I’m going to start right in working.”
“How do you want to do that?”
“I’m going to put ’em through maneuvers until they’re tight, fast, know how to watch one another, and don’t have to be sitting on signals. You drill ’em on their decks. If you can get some of their boarding crews trained to our composite bows, good, because they’re so much handier in the tops. But if you can’t, train ’em to use what they’ve got.”
“Done.”
Chapter Nineteen
AT first, Halvir Durasnir found Llyenthur Harbor interesting. But that did not last long.
He would have loved to run up and down those zigzag steps below the palace on the hilltop, especially in the warm air. They almost never had warm air at home in Twelve Towers, and definitely no zigzag flights of stairs. Through the window he’d seen boys his age, some of them going to the fishers, or to the harbor shops where they prenticed, and some helping the workers busy on the expansion, but at first he was forbidden to go near the scaffolding, and then he could not go outside at all.
Instead, he had to sit in the king’s outer chamber, being absolutely quiet so that he would not disturb the king at meditation. And all he was permitted to do was practice his runes until he felt like his head was stuffed with armor quilting. Like he was six, not ten!
So after too many boring days, all exactly alike, when the Dag came in and told him to follow the king to the royal ship, Halvir leaped up. At last he’d get to do something! He’d be sailing with the Oneli! And best of all, he’d get to see his father, who he knew commanded the Oneli flagship.
One by one his hopes were smashed. The Erama Krona closed in like moving white pillars, with the harbor duty Drenga as outer perimeter, so Halvir only saw armed men, between whom were mere glimpses of people, of dock, of water. The Erama Krona carried the king in a throne-like conveyance, but he did not talk to anyone. He did not even look around.
Then—finally—the ship they got onto was just a converted raider, no cut booms or anything. Not the Cormorant. There was a sail crew, but no Drenga, only Erama Krona, silent as always, plus a lot of sober-faced dags in blue. Halvir felt the fuzzy tingle of magic as he and the king were led straight below to a big cabin in the middle deck and Halvir got pushed beyond that into a tiny oddly-shaped cabin that he figured had to be in the forepeak. Halvir didn’t even get to stay with the king, not that the king had ever spoken to him once past that first “Welcome, Halvir.” And he’d said that as if he were asleep.
Halvir’s new quarters were clean, with two small scuttles, a narrow bunk, and on the opposite side a tiny desk below a glowglobe. Several scrolls sat on the desk, and paper, and ink, and pens.
Lessons. Halvir groaned. He so wanted to climb the rigging, and talk to people, and see something. Where were the other boys he was supposed to be learning with? He’d even be glad to see that sniveling Fald Hadna.
He was shut in and told to sleep or read a scroll. The ship rocked and rocked, and then he felt the jerk and lift and roll that meant they were under way. He waited, stomach growling. He knew better than to complain. It was a little frightening, being under the watchful eyes of those silent Erama Krona, who (everyone knew) would kill you if you as much as talked to the king without his asking you a question first.
It was dark when he woke and peeked through the scuttle just overhead. He felt cranky and stiff as he climbed off the bunk and straightened out his clothes. Then the door opened, an ensign brought in some warm spice-milk and food, which made Halvir feel better.
But then Dag Erkric himself summoned him. “Now, Halvir,” he said. “Tell me, who do you think are the smartest boys your age?”
What did adults mean by smart? The ones the adults told you to act like, or ones you liked to play with? Ones who thought up the best games? Andr Loc was funny, but he was always in trouble. Maybe better not mention him.
“Fald Hadna?” Halvir asked. Adults always held him up as the example of a good boy, though he was a sneak and a serpent-tongue.
“You think carefully before you speak,” Dag Erkric observed, his gaze steady.
Halvir looked down, fighting against the fidgets. He couldn’t define why he felt uneasy, he just wished he could get away.
So how was he to answer? The Dag smiled. “That is a very good trait.”
All right, so far at least there weren’t trouble questions, like, “Why are you so undisciplined?” There was no right answer to that question.
Dag Erkric said, “Get your pens and ink and paper, Halvir. You are to sit at this desk while I work at protecting the king and the ship by magic. You must sit very still and not disturb me, for this is difficult magic I must cast. You are to write out all your runes, taking especial care with them.”
Halvir bit off a protest that he knew his runes. He obeyed, but as he sat down to the tedious task, he wished he had another boy to talk to.
Instead, here he was, with the king somewhere, and all those silent Erama Krona. He was so very glad he was an heir, so he would never be asked to join them. The grown-ups all said it was a great honor if a second son or a cousin of an heir was invited to the Erama Krona, but who would want to be taken away from his family for years and go through the terrible training he heard about? The big boys once told Halvir and his friends that the Erama Krona candidates had their balls cut off, but his mother had said that was only in the olden days and they hadn’t done that for centuries. But still. You couldn’t be in a family until your twenty years of service were over and you were fifty. Who wanted to live at fifty? Well . . . Mother would be fifty next year, and she was alive . . . and maybe . . .
As Dag Erkric’s voice droned softly in the background, whispering spells over and over, Halvir blinked at his rune, and tried to remember where his mind had been wandering. Odd how sometimes it got really hard to think.
In the palace courtyard, Dag Anchan straightened up wearily. She fought the impulse to tug that disgusting iron torc around her neck. She knew it would not choke her. Iron did not change size. It was the idea of it, the heaviness of it, that made her feel choked.
She
stretched her back and regarded the lines of sheets adjacent the racks of shirts, drawers, and socks, all spread out in readiness for the rising sun. Down here in the south, laundry could usually be sun dried at least once a week during most of the year. Even in winter, she was assured by a local woman, there were plenty of sunny days this close to the middle of the world.
At home the laundry was above the baking rooms, which kept the air warm and dry. Mages kept the glowglobes intense, which required almost as much work as the cleaning and cranking through the wringer.
Anchan was finished. Not just for the day, but for good. She looked around at the people who’d been her companions, some for three years, others since her arrival in Llyenthur. Most were justice thralls, their crimes petty, except for the Laundry Chief, who was a born thrall. All but one were young. The older woman’s thieving made no sense. Anchan suspected from her odd comments that the woman saw the world through a broken window and needed a healer good with troubled minds. It would not happen, not with Erkric sending the best healers on the warships.
The court was warm. The new sun radiated off the stones, burning her bare toes a little. She walked head-bent toward the thrall gate. As always, the few people she passed avoided looking at her, as if thralldom would defile them if their gazes touched. Could she blame them? No. She’d expected to find no lover during her rare free moments—she’d grown up hearing people say in a disparaging tone, She’d have sex with thralls, or He couldn’t get anyone but a thrall in his bed. Long, long ago thralls could not say no. Now, people despised you if you slept with thralls. She had discovered that she couldn’t bear the thought of intimacy with any of these people by whom she sat at meals, whose breathing she heard from their sleeping alcoves when she was off duty.
Now she could leave. It would even be easy. No one noticed thralls unless they did an unthralllike thing. The small traces of her magic would vanish before Erkric or any of his minions could be bothered to examine the space. Everyone would assume her time was done. So she rolled the sleep-mat, stashed it neatly under the narrow sleeping platform. She folded the ugly, rough brown thrall tunic and placed it on the barren shelf for the next poor soul assigned to this minuscule alcove. She put on her blue dag robe, wriggling all over just to feel the fine linsey-woolsey again. Then she pulled her transfer token from where she had wedged it between the join of the sleep platform and the wall.
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