Riding hard for several more days, we traversed the hills in the north of Aerron. From their still-green swells, the view of the vast desert below struck me hard. Ringed around with fertile farmlands, the yellow sand seemed a barren blight, another kind of monster, eating its way ever deeper. The days remained clear and dry, the sun burningly intense this far south and east. We’d packed the fur cloaks away and Zynda had happily returned to her usual light garb, when she wasn’t assuming some animal form to run or fly alongside. She said it kept her in practice to shift into a variety of forms, especially the farther we traveled from Annfwn and the Heart. Privately I thought she enjoyed unsettling the Dasnarians as much as anything.
Coming through the pass that marked another nexus, this time the four-way point between Duranor, Nemeth, Aerron, and Elcinea, we stopped for the night at the great Watchtower there. Standing on the tallest peak, the tower stood as high as fifty men, built of stone laboriously gathered by generations of Elcineans, to keep a lookout for incursions from their aggressive northern neighbors. Not that it had helped. Elcinea had been the first to fall to Duranor’s acquisitive ways—leading to the conscription of a young Elcinean fisherman named Uorsin.
As we traveled through Elcinea to the Port of Ehas, with the landscape softening, becoming lusher with every passing hour, it seemed ever more paradoxical that such a hard man had come from such a gently beautiful place. The one must not inform the other. After all, Ash had come from the harshest of backgrounds and had become the most gentle of healers. Harlan and Kral could not be more different in aggressiveness and their regard for others, yet they’d grown up in the same family. It was interesting to ponder.
When we topped the last rise above Ehas, I gasped as I took in my first view of the Sea of Elcinea as the poets wrote about it. Dazzlingly clear, showing the famous white sands beneath the calm waters, intensely blue in others. Not the aquamarine of Annfwn’s sea, but a deeper set of colors. The city—the largest I’d ever seen—rolled over the hillsides, all the low, rambling houses facing the sweet breezes off the sea. The buildings became denser toward the city center, coming to a point at the great harbor. Possibly a hundred or more ships sat tied to the docks or at anchor in the harbor.
“There,” Kral said, pulling up next to me and pointing. “That galleon with the crimson sails? That is mine. The Hákyrling.”
I followed the line of his finger and smiled at the pride in his voice. “The Lady Shark?”
He grinned, a happy expression for a change, without his usual angry malice. “You are learning, nyrri.”
“And you are relieved to find your ship where you left it.”
His smile dimmed and he lifted one shoulder, let it fall, just as Harlan would. “It occurred to me that your High Queen could have been bluffing and sent us to chase our tails.”
“With me the sacrificial dove?”
“In truth, the fact that she sent you along is what convinced me to accept this plan. You may be a woman, but your queen clearly values you. I did not think she would use you as a bynde.”
“A bynde?”
“A piece in a Dasnarian game of strategy. The bynde can be easily sacrificed to gain ground for pieces with more power.”
Ah. Closer to my role in life than he thought. “It seems to me that someone who is ‘only’ a man can be a bynde, also.”
“I meant no offense. Simply an observation.”
“You pointed out to me, General, that our cultural differences are vast. You may give me offense whether you intend to or not.”
He eyed me thoughtfully. “In Dasnaria, a man does not apologize to a woman. But I believe that applies to Dasnarian women. I shall consider you a third gender. A woman of the Twelve Kingdoms; therefore, I apologize for my offense.”
“Accepted,” I replied, as that was likely a major concession from the general. So interesting, the arcane reasoning of the Dasnarian male mind. In some ways I understood Harlan better, having a deeper perspective of the culture that bred him, but it also pointed out how much he had changed from that. When I returned, I’d have questions for him, if he’d answer.
Would Jepp fall into Kral’s third-gender category? Very tempting to ask, but unless it became diplomatically relevant, I wouldn’t touch it. Jepp could fight her own battles there. I might not like the role of women in the Dasnarian culture, but my job was to understand Dasnaria in order to preserve peace, not to change them to my liking, much as I might want to.
We spent little time in Ehas, proceeding directly to the harbor in order to board the Hákyrling. Adventures do not lend themselves to sightseeing, unfortunately. The urgency of the mission overrides more frivolous concerns such as exploring a fascinating new city. The sight of not one, but several booksellers gave me a pang, however. And then a library—a large one. The general, who’d continued to ride by my side, asking for translations of the various signs or explanations for different sights, asked me what I stared at so wistfully. I explained and he grunted his disinterest.
“When you return home, perhaps you can spend time in this ‘library,’ ” he offered, not unkindly. I nodded, not mentioning that coming all the way to Ehas to go to Ordnung would not happen. Ursula didn’t want Kral to know of the closer ports and none of us would tell him.
Thus we sailed out of the Port of Ehas within hours of arriving, Kral delighted to catch the tide—and possibly to see the last of Brandur, who planned to stay—and me standing at the rail, watching the Thirteen Kingdoms fade into the distance behind me.
8
Soon I discovered that my thoughts had been overly dramatic. We sailed parallel to the coast of Elcinea, then Aerron and Avonlidgh, for some time. Some days I saw only open sea; then we’d draw nearer, enough to see the white sands turn to the parched yellow of Aerron’s desert. It wasn’t until we sighted the rocky cliffs of Avonlidgh that we struck out for open sea. Kral’s shipmaster, Jens, had spent the waiting time in Ehas speaking the universal language of all sailors—navigational maps—and was following a new route for the return voyage.
He patiently answered my questions, showing me his charts from the sunny, windswept upper deck while Jepp practiced her dagger forms nearby. Several of the Dasnarians eyed her with longing, but—so far as I knew, and Jepp was anything but reticent on the topic—they’d all obeyed Kral’s edict. They left me alone as much as they did Zynda. The Tala woman they regarded with superstitious fascination, particularly after she leapt overboard to shouts of alarm and transformed into a dolphin midair, cleaving into the waves and popping up to cackle a laugh at the men preparing to rescue her.
For my part, I confused them with my interest in their tasks and the questions I asked. They’d begun to treat me as Kral’s third gender. Not the way they spoke to other men, but no longer using the verb forms I’d begun to recognize as being specific to addressing a woman. Harlan had always used the male forms with me. Probably a deliberate gesture of respect, as the female forms seemed to be more directive, more command language, and also left less room for back-and-forth dialogue. Not as helpful for me in learning the correct—and polite—language forms. No wonder Kral had declared me not suited to diplomacy. I’d talked to him as a man would. However, the fact remained that I would not be able to sustain my cover as ambassador if limited to language appropriate for females. So I pointedly used male language with the Dasnarians as a form of practice, paying close attention to what they became accustomed to and what made them so uncomfortable that they ended the conversation.
Jens seemed impossible to offend. Happy to have someone to talk maps with, he showed me the path he believed they’d taken on the way in, where they’d circled far to the south to avoid the treacherously shallow, and to him unknown, waters of the jagged islands around the isthmus. Now, equipped with more knowledge and better maps, he planned to save time by cutting a diagonal across open water to the point of the Crane Isthmus, where we’d follow a meticulously charted route of deeper water through what the sailors at Ehas called the Sen
tinels. Jens pronounced the name not in Common Tongue, but in old Elcinean, which I found interesting. Clearly an old place name, then, and not one I’d heard before.
The shortcut had its perils, apparently, but nothing like risking an encounter with one of the treacherous winter storms farther south.
We’d reversed our seasons again, but over the course of two days, sailing from the warm summer of Elcinea into the deepening autumn of Avonlidgh. The Feast of Moranu would come before much longer and the days grew markedly shorter, the wind’s bite sharper. Zynda complained she felt warm only in the water, which made no sense to me, as the icy spray confirmed how cold that water could be.
“It’s because my animal form is adapted to cope with that environment in a way my human one isn’t with this one,” she told me in our shared cabin, hands cupped around a hot mug of tea, a blanket wrapping her. “If I could stay in that form until we reach warmer weather again, I would.”
“Why don’t you?” Jepp asked, listening as she worked through one of her forms as the narrow space allowed. We’d all taken shelter indoors until the morning crossing, as the stinging rain and bitter wind made it miserable on deck. “I would if I could. This being stuck in a little room makes me crazy.”
“Are you sure it’s not the celibacy?” Zynda teased her.
Jepp stopped midspin and pointed her twin daggers at Zynda. “Don’t taunt an armed woman. Unless either of you has changed your mind about tasting the fairer sex, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Sorry.” Zynda sounded truly contrite. “The general hasn’t relented? He watches you constantly.”
“Does he now?” Jepp brightened considerably. “Good. He should suffer for being an ass. I don’t know if he’d relent, as I haven’t offered. And I won’t. I have my pride . . . of a sort. I’m holding out for a willing island boy. I’m imagining tanned, lean muscles from swimming. Mmm. Speaking of swimming, you didn’t answer my question.”
“Maybe she didn’t want to, Jepp,” I said mildly. For the most part we got along fine, the three of us, but being confined by the weather in close quarters would test anyone’s friendship.
“I don’t mind,” Zynda said in a thoughtful tone. “The Tala don’t generally share such information with mossbacks, but it’s likely good for you to know my limitations. The more we understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, the better we can support and protect each other.” She gave me a narrow look, some of that Salena steel in it. “But don’t write this down, Dafne.”
I set down my quill and attempted to look as if the thought had never crossed my mind.
I didn’t fool her, but she nodded in satisfaction. “We can’t stay in our animal forms for an extended time because we begin to lose contact with human thinking. Dafne—you asked me how much I knew in bird form what my human mind knows, and I told you it’s not so much having it, but keeping contact with it. The longer we remain in animal form, the more tenuous that connection becomes, until it breaks entirely.”
Jepp looked horrified. As it did Ursula, the thought of changing her body into something else made her deeply uncomfortable. “Then you’re trapped as an animal forever?”
“Yes. It’s one of our greatest punishments for lawbreakers—to trap someone in their animal form so long that they lose themselves.”
“How do you trap someone in their animal form?” I asked, fingers itching for my quill.
But Zynda laughed, shaking her hair back. “That, I think, I shall not tell you.”
“What if we need to know,” Jepp asked, clearly as curious as I, “in case it happens to you and we need to intervene?”
“It won’t. Nobody without Tala magic and knowledge of our ways could do that.”
Hopefully that wasn’t overconfidence, as we would be dealing with foreign magic and sorcerers in Dasnaria, but I didn’t say so. Another thought occurred to me, however. “What about relaying messages to Andi—what if Nahanau is so far that you can’t change back to human shape along the way?”
Seeing Jens’s maps had given me an idea. The landmass of the Thirteen was more or less the same distance east to west as north to south—depending on how much of the Northern Wastes I counted. Or rather, how much Ursula considered her responsibility, if our theory proved correct. If I drew a straight line between the farthest points that she legally held claim to, and made that be the diameter of a circle a dome would make, the barrier wouldn’t be that far out. However, Andi controlled the barrier from what she called the Heart, which implied the center. Assuming the Heart lay somewhere near the cliff city where she and Rayfe dwelled, that could make for a very large circle indeed. If Nahanau lay on the far western edge of the barrier, it could be as far from there to Annfwn as from the west coast to the east.
Zynda sobered. “That occurred to us. Andi thinks the barrier is not so expanded that they can be so far, but we don’t know. It is one of the uncertainties. And some forms allow for more brain space than others.”
I didn’t much care for uncertainties, but as the Dasnarians had on the way in, we would be sailing into uncharted waters. Jens had kept charts of their journey in, but he lacked knowledge of Annfwn’s coast, which was, naturally, not on the maps he’d obtained in Ehas.
“We’ll fight that battle when we reach it,” Jepp declared in her pragmatic way. “All we can do is be ready. Speaking of which, librarian, get your knives. Time for some practice.”
I mentally groaned, but—knowing she was right—went to do so.
By morning, we’d come within sight of land again. I braved the chill, my furred cloak and hood firmly tied closed, and stood on the upper deck with Jens to watch him delicately maneuver the ship through the Sentinels. They’d taken down the sails so a wayward wind wouldn’t dash us against one of the jagged rocks that speared up all around. Instead the Dasnarian soldiers took on the job of rowing the ship through the narrow passages. They’d removed sealed coverings from ports I hadn’t known were there, pushing through long oars, and chanting as they worked.
Jepp checked it out, of course, just as she’d scouted every inch of the ship, and pronounced it a fine sight, the men working up such a sweat that they stripped to shirtless or less despite the chill outside. I, however, declined to see for myself. Apparently, though, the men were bored and restless enough with the enforced inactivity to embrace the exercise. Jepp seemed more than a little disappointed that they wouldn’t let her join in, saying that her smaller size and pull would throw off the rhythm.
I was happy enough to stay on deck, withstanding the numbing cold on my fingers so I could sketch the sights in my journal. The scenery was far from pretty—rather, imposing in a dreadful way. The reason for calling these islands the Sentinels became obvious. These were not the rounded humps visible from the cliffs at Windroven. They reminded me more of the rock formations in caves that I’d seen in books, if someone had lifted away the cave ceiling. Nearly black, with a glasslike sheen, the rocks pointed at the sky, rearing up around us taller than the mast—sometimes two or three times as much. Fog curled around them, the waves hitting, then splintering against them. Farther away, larger islands loomed, looking more like a normal assembly of rocks. I imagined that with these, the ocean had worn away all but what remained. A kind of core of obsidian. We seemed far from Windroven, but perhaps that volcano had spewed her lava this far. Or her sister volcanoes. I needed to read up more on the properties of volcanoes, particularly given where we headed on the way to Dasnaria.
It took the better part of the day—short as the light was and with such painstaking maneuvers—to make it through the passage, and we all breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of open water again. Not just to have escaped without becoming wreckage like so many ships we spotted remnants of, but because those rocks cast a kind of pall over us all. The way the wind howled through them sometimes sounded like the screams of the doomed, and more than once I startled at a curl of fog that seemed to move of its own accord, reaching out to me. I refused to be superst
itious, but my skin crawled. It might have been my imagination that the ghosts of drowned sailors lingered there, trapped among the unforgiving, unchanging obelisks that guarded the isthmus, but if they did linger, they deserved to go to Glorianna’s arms at last.
Once we were clear of the dolorous place, the clinging miasma and sense of gloom fell away. The furling sails caught the wind with a vivacious snap and the Hákyrling leapt forward, as if the ship was as happy as we to escape that place. We slept well that night, the calmer waters palpably soothing after the rough seas off Avonlidgh. The rising sun showed us deep-blue ocean, with hints of aquamarine in the distance. How close would we go to Annfwn?
Zynda stepped up to the rail next to me, eyes focused along the same lines.
“Tempted?” I asked her.
She flicked a glance at me and restlessly pulled her hair behind her neck, holding it there as if contemplating knotting it, then letting it fall free. “After the Sentinels? Yes. I didn’t care to even touch the water there. And now I imagine I can smell the flowers of Annfwn on the wind.”
“You could go. Swim there from here. I doubt we’ll be closer than this.”
“Fail in my first adventure?” She huffed out a sigh. “No. I’m thinking that journeys of this sort are meant to be painful at times. Moranu guides me where I need to go, to grow and learn. To become more than what I’ve been. Change is rarely easy, and with growth comes pain.”
I mulled her words long after she jumped overboard to swim a while, with a jaunty promise that she’d be nearby. Watching her leap and dive through the swells caused by the ship, I nursed a little envy of her ability to take on a form like that. What did it feel like, to swim so freely?
The Hákyrling sailed fast, with a good following wind that made Jens grin. All the Dasnarians became lighter hearted, cheerful at the prospect of being able to return home, and they sang as they worked, chants with multiple harmonies made for male voices.
The Pages of the Mind Page 10
