Tamlyn

by James Moloney

  Tamlyn guided our boat to the dead man. ‘You’re not the only one who can aim blind,’ he said to the corpse with the grim satisfaction of a victor towards the vanquished.

  Leaning over the side, he grasped the hilt of the sword and yanked the blade free. Like Tamlyn’s, this body didn’t respond with a gush of blood, either, but in this case it was because the heart was already still, unable to pump red ooze from the wound.

  Was I safe to sit up now? Might there be other attackers still hidden by the fog? I took the risk and perched once more on my seat, daring Tamlyn to object.

  ‘We have to find Lucien,’ I reminded him.

  ‘All the harder because of this delay,’ he said, nodding towards the dead soldier in the water.

  His casual tone shocked me. ‘Is that all he was, a delay? Did he die for no other reason than to slow down our search?’

  Tamlyn stared at me. ‘Of course. My father would expect me to kill them both.’

  In the mind of a Wyrdborn, I realised, the question had no real meaning because commonfolk were there to be used for whatever purpose they might serve. The moment was a reminder that my gentle companion, who cared so much for me, could be as callous towards others as any of his kind.

  2

  Waterspouts and Weakness

  Tamlyn took the oars again. ‘Coyle has had time to get free of the harbour by now. We have to find our own way out as soon as we can.’

  I went back to listening for every sound and so it was a surprise when it was my eyes that proved more useful. A breeze began to stir, thinning the fog — some luck at last.

  ‘There, I can see it,’ I called to Tamlyn and, snatching a glance over his shoulder to get his bearings, he aimed the little boat through the gap in the seawall.

  The breeze became stronger once we had cleared the harbour, sweeping whole clouds of mist aside to let me see for a hundred yards in some directions. It coaxed the water into a little dance as well, but with the boat moving so quickly thanks to Tamlyn at the oars, I barely noticed.

  I was soon shouting, ‘The mast of a ship!’

  It was some way off, but it gave us a target and a new dose of hope.

  The fog was quickly succumbing to the wind and as the hull of the ship came into view, so did Coyle, who had reached the vessel and was passing Lucien to a sailor who had climbed down a ladder to their rowing boat. Above them, on the deck, the captain wasn’t wasting any time. I could see him waving his arms frantically while bodies scampered to set the sails. Some were already in place, and as I watched the ship began to move forward.

  ‘Hurry, Tamlyn,’ I urged over my shoulder.

  His task was getting harder because the surface of the water was becoming choppier by the minute, forming tiny white caps and dashing me with spray so that I had to turn my face away. In the distance, far to the left, I could see the darkness of the storm that breathed these winds across the water’s surface.

  Despite the churning sea, we continued to surge forward faster than a small craft like this was meant to travel; we were sure to catch the ship before much longer. What then? Could a minnow attack a whale? Tamlyn would think of something. My job was to hold Lucien in my arms again, and not even the gods would get in my way.

  The ship was making for deeper water, every inch of sail catching the gusts whipped up by the distant storm. At the stern rail, Coyle stood taunting us. I shuddered at the sight of the little boy in his arms.

  Tamlyn saw him, too, when he turned his head for an instant to adjust his course. The brief glimpse was all he needed to find even more strength in his shoulders and injured back. A hundred men might have pulled on those oars and we wouldn’t have closed on the ship any faster.

  ‘We’re catching them,’ I shouted to encourage him.

  I wasn’t the only one to notice. The sneer on Coyle’s face was replaced by a scowl and then a frown as he watched us grow closer and closer. Then he turned towards the storm, as though seeing it for the first time, and a cold smile curled at the corner of his lips. If I hadn’t already been shivering from the water seeping through my dress, that fleeting glimpse would have been enough to make me start.

  Moments later, sailors in the rigging began to point towards our left. I turned to see what had drawn their eyes — it wasn’t hard to spot.

  ‘Tamlyn,’ I called in alarm, ‘what’s that strange column coming towards us?’

  He checked his rowing long enough to follow my gaze. ‘A water spout,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of them, but never seen one.’

  We were about to see one now, and from much closer than I wanted to. I’d called it a column and that was what it was: a slim funnel of whirling air and water that rose from the water’s surface to join with a low cloud above. Already its faint roar was growing louder and the violence of its swirling frenzy frightened me.

  Then another sound: a bellowing voice. Coyle. ‘You want the power of this child? Then show you are strong enough to take him.’

  He swept his arm towards the water spout and, to my horror, it changed course and veered towards us. Where it met the ocean’s surface, spray kicked up into a cloud. The edge slammed into us. The folds of my dress battered against my legs, and even though I clamped my hands to the plank of my seat, I felt myself tugged one way, then thrown another. At the spout’s centre, I could see forces stronger than I’d ever imagined driving the wind in a deadly circle.

  For a moment, it seemed the watery monster would pass between us and the ship, but as it drew level with our rowing boat it lurched towards us again. Since I was in the bow, I was the one who felt its grip. The spray stung my face and lashed painfully at my eyes. The force of the wind seemed to double, yanking me from my seat. If I hadn’t scrambled desperately for a hold, I would have gone over the bow. A seam in my dress had been coming loose in recent days and now the cloth simply ripped apart. Worse, my legs were being lifted and I couldn’t keep them in the boat. Every part of me, every part of the dinghy, was drenched, even the seat that I clung to. My grip was slipping.

  ‘Tamlyn,’ I cried.

  But what could he do? He was still at the oars, trying to row us away from the hungry spout that seemed to follow us as though it had a mind of its own.

  My hold was broken and, with nothing to hold me down, I was sucked towards the vortex where I would surely be torn to pieces.

  Just as the greedy wind took a firm hold of me, a second force slammed into me. It was Tamlyn, I knew. He’d sprung into the maelstrom, his arms closing around me with a grip stronger than any wind could break. Together we were snatched up into the spout and began to rise. How high would it take us?

  Tamlyn strained against the terrible force and, although he had nothing to push against, he succeeded in releasing us. We sank down, then suddenly plummeted the rest of the way into the ocean. It seemed I had traded one death for another for I couldn’t swim.

  Somehow I floundered to the surface, gasping for air, and saw that our boat, left without Tamlyn to keep it steady, had capsized. It bobbed some distance off, its hull pointing to the sky. But the water monster, at least, had moved away.

  That was as much as I saw before I slipped beneath the water again.

  Tamlyn dragged me up. ‘Are you breathing?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m alive, if that’s what you —’ My mouth flooded with water before I could finish. I spat it out, but there was so much water around me, all of it bitterly cold, making each breath harder to take. ‘What are we going to do?’

  When he didn’t answer, I saw that his eyes were elsewhere, and when I followed them I could see why. Instead of heading straight out to sea, Coyle had ordered his captain to turn sharply, bringing the ship back towards us. Already it was straightening to bear down on us.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ Tamlyn told me. ‘A ship is difficult to steer. I will keep us out of its way.’

  But crushing us beneath the hull wasn’t what Coyle had in mind, it seemed. As the ship cruised past, Coyle held Lucien out for us to see, l
ike a general displaying the prized sword of his defeated enemy.

  ‘Such weakness, Tamlyn,’ he shouted. ‘You will always fail against a stronger will.’

  Then they were gone, the brisk wind propelling the ship towards open water while we shivered in its wake.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked again. ‘It’s miles to shore.’

  ‘Well, we’re not going to swim,’ said Tamlyn, and he dragged me through the water after him until we reached the upturned hull of our dinghy.

  ‘Hold onto the bow so you don’t drown,’ he said, then disappeared under the boat.

  I didn’t like being left by myself amid the vastness of the ocean with only a slippery hold on a knob of wood to stop me sinking to the bottom. There were creatures in the sea, I knew — whales said to be the size of a ship. Fear was just beginning to gnaw at my imagination when the water in front of me erupted. I screamed loudly enough to be heard on shore. Whale, sea monster, whatever it was, rose up out of the water and twisted in the air before crashing down again.

  I’d lost my grip on the dinghy, of course, and with nothing to keep me afloat, I gulped once, twice, and slipped under the surface. A hand plunged down after me and hauled me up — not only to the surface, but into the air. When I came down again, it wasn’t into the water, but into the boat, now floating the right way up.

  ‘It’s back to the shore for you before you freeze to death,’ said Tamlyn. Yet as he spoke, he looked away from the shore and out to sea, where Coyle’s ship was still easy to make out against the horizon.

  ‘He called you weak,’ I said. ‘It’s not true. Your strength has kept us alive.’

  He shrugged this aside. ‘That’s not what my father meant. He turned the ship around to taunt me with my Wyrdborn weakness.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘To the Wyrdborn, it’s not just the strength of your muscles that count. He was laughing at the choice I made when the water spout tore you out of the boat. He used his magic to change its direction — it was a test. I went after you into the wind.’

  ‘You saved my life.’

  ‘Yes, and that is what Coyle scorned. If I had let you die, I could have kept the dinghy from capsizing, boarded the ship and fought him for the possession of Lucien. To save your life instead showed a weakness in my will to take the prize. That was the weakness he spoke of, Silvermay.’

  ‘He is wrong,’ I said, ‘as wrong as it’s possible to be. When you plucked me out of the wind, you showed the strength to defeat your Wyrdborn blood. There was love in what you did, Tamlyn. I am more grateful for that than for my own life. It was a human choice you made, not a heartless one.’

  We both fell silent. I had spoken a word that we had been dancing around for some time. Love. Neither of us knew what to make of it.

  Thankfully, another idea distracted me. ‘Can you send a bird to follow the ship? That way we’ll know where he’s taken Lucien.’

  I had seen Tamlyn speak with birds before and use them as messengers — another example of Wyrdborn magic.

  ‘Look above you,’ he said. ‘What birds do you see?’

  The storm had only recently passed and few birds were in the sky. It was a moment or two before I could point out a tiny shape some way off.

  ‘A gull,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Quarrelsome creatures and too scatterbrained to obey the strongest magic. Hawks are better suited, but they stay over land, and I don’t have the magic to change that even if there were a dozen of them here for me to command. I’m sorry, Silvermay, once the ship is out of sight, only the gods and Coyle himself will know where it goes.’

  The ship was even further away now. In a matter of minutes it would dip from view altogether. My mind filled with a terrible scene: my arms, outstretched, offering Lucien into the hands of a fiend. The image conjured even worse memories: of a cave in Nan Tocha, inside it a cavern carved out of the rock and decorated with the most bloodcurdling mosaics. Among them was a picture of a baby being passed into the hands of another, who then used the boy to bring unspeakable misery to the entire kingdom. Now I knew they were my hands. I had betrayed Lucien. I had betrayed the people of Athlane. It didn’t matter that I had been deceived, that I hadn’t known I was giving Lucien to the last man on earth who should have him.

  ‘What have I done?’ I wailed in despair.

  ‘The mosaics are not Lucien’s destiny, Silvermay. You’ve said it yourself, many times: they are not the unchangeable future. We make the future, you and me more than anyone. We gave our word to Nerigold.’

  Mention of Lucien’s mother roused me, but only enough to shoot back at him, ‘What use is our pledge now? Lucien’s gone — I handed him over, just as the mosaics showed.’

  ‘And we will get him back. We made that pledge together and that is its strength. It’s what binds you and me; it’s why I couldn’t let you be hauled away by the wind. Without you, I wouldn’t be able to keep my word.’

  He couldn’t know how quickly those words chased away my despair.

  ‘And without you, I doubt I’d want to,’ I said, giving way to tears.

  Tamlyn had been getting ready to take the oars, but instead he climbed forward to sit beside me on the bow seat. I fell against him and he folded me in his arms, lending me the warmth of his body and the strength of his will.

  The rain still fell, washing salty water from my hair onto my face and into the corners of my mouth. At least it hid my tears. From the sanctuary of Tamlyn’s embrace, I looked out to sea once more, not in some childish hope that the ship would have turned around, but to remind myself that I would follow, somehow, even though I didn’t know where Coyle was taking Lucien. I would find a way to free the little boy and get him back into my arms.

  3

  Alive and Dying

  The journey back to Greystone Harbour turned me blue with cold, even though the storm clouds were mostly gone by the time the dinghy bumped to a halt at the jetty. Villagers were venturing tentatively from their doors, no doubt pleased to be free of their homes for the first time that day. When they saw us, though, they stared with sullen, worried faces, and mothers called their children back inside.

  ‘They witnessed this morning’s fighting,’ said Tamlyn. ‘Hallig and his companion forced me back through the village.’

  I imagined them hacking at each other with their swords. No wonder the villagers backed away. As we passed one circle of men, their backs turned to us, I heard someone mutter, ‘Wyrdborn’.

  ‘We’ll get no help from these people,’ said Tamlyn who had heard it as well.

  ‘The Widow Wenn will take us in,’ and I pointed towards the house where I had slept the night before. It was further round the edge of the harbour, almost the last house before the cliffs that marked the end of the village.

  Mrs Wenn had the door open for us before we’d even started up her front path. ‘There was fighting after you left this morning,’ she said, but then she saw how utterly soaked we were and the way I shivered uncontrollably. After that, there was no more talking until she had us inside.

  ‘Where’s your little baby? Goodness, he’s not lost at sea, is he?’

  Her hand went to her mouth at the thought of such a tragedy. She was a kind soul, Mrs Wenn.

  ‘Yes, but not the way you fear,’ I told her. ‘He was stolen from me by that rogue who brought us to Greystone. He called himself Miston Dessar, but he was Lord Coyle, Wyrdborn to the king.’

  ‘And my father,’ said Tamlyn with equal parts anger and shame.

  Mrs Wenn wasn’t slow to see what this might mean. ‘Are you Wyrdborn also?’ she asked.

  Tamlyn didn’t answer, but let his head droop forward so that he no longer faced her. It wasn’t the usual response of a Wyrdborn who had been challenged so openly. Mrs Wenn could have expected the back of a hand across her face from any other of his kind.

  ‘Tamlyn’s not like the rest,’ I told her. ‘He … he cares for Lucien, and for me,’ I dared add. It had been on the tip of
my tongue to say he loved me, but that was more a hope than a fact I could claim out loud.

  ‘If that’s true, then he’s the first I’ve ever heard of who cared for anyone but himself.’ Mrs Wenn looked from him to me and I could guess what she was thinking — that he’d conjured a spell to win my heart, just as Coyle had done to Nerigold.

  She was good to Tamlyn, all the same, in the wonderful way that commonfolk have of overlooking a man’s faults when he’s in need. She led us both upstairs, me to the room where I’d slept only hours before and Tamlyn to her own room. When I saw him again, he was by the fire, wearing dry clothes that were meant for a shorter man. His ankles and a good stretch of his calves jutted out comically from the trousers and his torso looked constricted inside the shirt and jerkin. I had done a lot better, with a yellow dress Mrs Wenn had worn when she was many years younger and a great deal slimmer than she was now.

  Our own clothes were laid out in front of the fire and we pulled our chairs close to them to enjoy the same heat. It was so good to feel warm again. Mrs Wenn waved my thanks aside and went into the kitchen to make us something hot to drink. While she was gone, I told Tamlyn of my days travelling with his father, when I’d known him as Miston Dessar.

  ‘I was such a fool,’ I kept saying, as if confessing my faults would excuse them. ‘I should have seen through him, especially when he tried so hard to convince me of your betrayal. I’m sorry, Tamlyn, truly I am. Please forgive me — not just for handing Lucien to him the way I did, but for doubting you. I see, now, that it was all lies and I didn’t want to believe him anyway. I fought it, but he seemed so …’

  I trailed off, and waited in dread for what would come from Tamlyn’s beautiful mouth. In trying to justify my actions I had managed to humiliate myself even more. I’d let him down; I’d believed Coyle’s lies instead of what I had learned about Tamlyn during our days together. He had every right to be angry with me.