Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  Two was unsurprised that, from the long façade of solid stone fronts and heavy window shutters, he should choose a door whose frieze showed a ship wreathed in grapevines between sheaves of grain. Shippers, as my mother had known, always get the freshest news. If the sign read true, this one might trade as far north as Wave Island. Or Dhasdein itself.

  The open door revealed a smallish rain-dimmed room, a sort of desk, ceiling-height shelves, records no doubt, half the back wall lost to a wide arch that emitted the fragrance of wool and spice and, beyond doubt, wine and grain. The three men at the desk swung round, two donning a polite habitual smile.

  Then the man in sea-jacket and heavy boots gulped audibly. The man before the desk smothered a gasp, the one in the other modest version of Therkon’s dark coat and once pristine white shirt nearly jumped off his stool.

  Therkon said, “Give you good faring, sirs.”

  Dhasdeini phrase, Dhasdeini accent. To my wonder, it evoked plain relief.

  The man behind the desk came back hastily, “And a fair wind to you.” The speech was ours, the accent not quite so thick as Nouip’s. “Ah. Um?”

  “Of your kindness, sir. My sister and I are merchant folk. From,” it came quite steadily, “Outsea.” Nouip had told us the word to use, but it did not seem to work as it should.

  “We are seeking kin and, ah, house-friends. Caught in a great storm, driven south. Might you have news here, these last few days? Folk brought or blown ashore? From a, a wreck?”

  He had pushed his hood back. The fur framed his face spectacularly, but the cloak still swung round him, its sleek dark fur beaded with rain. He was tall and slim enough for them to do each other justice. But hardly to warrant a response like this.

  The two neat men exchanged frantic looks. Therkon’s slight, enquiring frown became pure crown prince. The seaman breathed in as for a dive, and broke out, “Wreck? Where?”

  “Off Rack Head. We were told, the Rackstream might bring . . . things here?”

  Their faces spoke volumes, had I been able to read past the shock. Then the seaman blurted, “Where’d you come ashore?”

  Therkon’s little breath put memory’s dagger in my own ribs. “On Evva beach.”

  The second neat man changed colour. Therkon said earnestly, “We had help and shelter from Evvamoor’s ban-keeper. She—”

  At that the man behind the desk did gasp. “You were in the house?”

  No time to say, I knew it was Under the Hill. Therkon’s brows rose a single warning notch.

  “She was very kind to a pair of castaways.” And would you, the tone added, wish to asperse our benefactor at all? “She suggested we ask in Grithsperry.”

  The desk-man winced. Therkon’s frown creased: then he slipped the laces and doffed his cloak, gathering it over an arm. Doubtless a courtesy, to keep wet from their fine mosaic of grapevines and dolphin, as well as to show his empty hands. The hitch at his sword-belt was as automatic, but it made them notice Hvestang.

  The seaman backed into the desk so papers or tallies went everywhere, the second man gasped out loud. All three made a finger sign, what Riverfolk would call the horns. I cleared Therkon’s left arm and loosened Verrith’s wrist-knife in the sheath.

  Then the man behind the desk recovered nerve and voice at once and gulped, “My lo—Your Maj—ah, ah—if it please, ah . . . what might we—”

  Therkon stared at him. Crown prince, emperor’s heir. Almost, imperial hatchet man. Then he demanded, quite softly, “Who do you think I am?”

  I think they would have run if he had not already nailed them to the ground. Their eyes went round like mill-wheels. The desk-man gripped his table for courage, but he got it out.

  “Outsea. You said. But . . . the ban-house . . .”

  Therkon handed off the cloak as if I were his valet. Unbuckled the sword-belt, handed it after. Still staring at them, he held a hand out, palm upmost, and said, “Will you cut me, to prove I bleed?”

  The man behind the desk made a kind of squawk and began gabbling, “No, no, m’lord, but the beach, the sea-sark . . . They say He comes ashore there, seeking his own, after the big storms. And that cloak, the Winter Man wears it. In Evvamoor. For sun-turn. The, the old feast.” And.” He gestured to me. It went almost inaudible. “Sharp-tongue. When there was a king, a king on Sickle . . . that was his blade.”

  This comes to me by blood as well as place. She had gifted us her past along with Evvamoor’s, and the island’s with them. The hair lifted on my neck. I had ado not to salute.

  Therkon’s face had gone quite blank. Imperial composure.

  Imperial arrogance. Moreover, they had slighted his benefactress. Worse than taking him personally for some haunt or revenant.

  “I,” with a slight emphasis, “am a Dhasdeini merchant.

  Honored by strangers’ bounty. Seeking news of my own folk. Can you tell me, then? Have any from Outsea—come ashore here?”

  Their eyes still spoke more than awe, but the authority made all the heads shake at once.

  “Not—not—”

  Not bodies. He could not quite manage that. But the flaw did what armor could not.

  “No, sir,” the desk-man answered almost gently. “There’s been nothing, flotsam or jetsam or—come in here.”

  “Thank you.” Therkon managed courtesy, at least. “Is there anywhere, anyone, anyone else—we might ask?”

  They volunteered names, a handful of shippers, the latest vessels from the north. Eagerly, by the end almost falling over themselves. Therkon did not demean them by offering money, also one of Nouip’s gifts, but as we walked away I felt them watching us with awe, with fear. Perhaps with yearning as well.

  * * * *

  Therkon was so ruffled he went straight back to the inn and hired at least one room where he could cache Hvestang. I persuaded him to leave most of the money with it. After that, though my leggings drew some odd looks, we searched in relative peace. But if everyone remembered the storm, no-one had any other news.

  In late afternoon we plodded back to the inn. The weather had closed in, bringing a sour little southerly. Everything was grey, without and within. We tramped past the tap-room door to the steep stairs for the sleeping quarters, and I was bracing for another fuss over the shared room, when we turned a twist of passage. And found the door ajar.

  The walls were stone, the door wood, as seemed usual in the Isles. The wood was unbroken. There was a latch-string, and we had a key, in Therkon’s pocket. And clearly, there was another key elsewhere.

  After a truly pregnant moment he put out a foot and gave the door a solid shove. It swung open on its prediction: two beds, our scanty belongings, the tiny window, intact. Hvestang, its gear, and the little bag of money, were gone.

  After another moment I sat down with a thump on the closest bed and put my head in my hands.

  I felt Therkon sit down too. Presently, his arm came round me. Just audibly, he said, “You still have your knives.”

  And the other loss was my fault, but it was the thought of Nouip that I could not bear. To lose her family’s, perhaps her father’s blade, like this . . . Better to deplore the lesser loss.

  “The money!” I almost wailed. “What are we going to do? We probably can’t pay our reckoning, let alone passage—!”

  Therkon sat still. He, I thought with a moment’s compunction, must be tired and despairing too. He had lost people, as I had. He had lost Hvestang. We had both considered him in charge. Whatever went wrong, he would take as his responsibility.

  Ignominiously, I considered putting my head on his shoulder and dissolving like a true Dhasdeini woman into tears. But he had already removed his arm, and was clambering off the bed, with a little, wry, but visible smile. “Two said, we were intended to go south. If so, this is also a setback to the enemy. Let it find us a way.”

  And what, Two wanted to know
, if we were not meant to go south?

  But Therkon was already crazing the inn-folk with demands for a screen between the beds, chamberpots, heated water, private hire of the inn’s bathhouse, not least to use the razor he had just bought. Distraction, I realize now, that lasted till the evening meal. Since, he also decreed, the fastest way to be taxed with an unpayable reckoning was to behave as if we could not pay.

  * * * *

  Unlike River inns, the taproom, as they called it, served both food and drink. The thick bare beams and the fireplaces’

  copious soot umbrellas were familiar, at least to Two, though the carving on mantle and door jambs was strangely angular, and

  eating happened only in a series of booths along the wall. Beer and food did come from a single servery, but beside the outer door was an alcove where every incomer lit a candle, of the most

  pungent kind, before a pair of images also dark with soot. The Mother, I decided one might be. Of the other, Two had no idea.

  There was also some odd seating etiquette. Azo’s precepts in mind, I headed for the shrine corner, which was least busy, half-masked from incomers, with a good room-view and quick

  possible exit. But the beer-seller frowned and told Therkon, “Winter

  corner, sir.” We had to take the next best, a booth halfway down the wall.

  Wonderful to relate, the servery offered fish: fish baked, fried, rolled in breadcrumbs, shellfish for the eccentric, and with it all a grainy, dark and heady beer. “Barley brew,” Therkon observed when I gasped. His slight frown came and went. “No hops down here.”

  No wine either, despite that shippers’ frieze. But Therkon had intelligencer’s reflexes, at least. He was trying to catch scraps from the next booth: “worse than last year!”—“Nothing left on . . .”—“The Yarl . . . forgiven taxes”—“But what about the fleet?” I was chasing the opportunity to hiss, “What’s a Yarl?” when the outer door opened, and I found out.

  The four men who came in wore knitted hats and dripping cloaks like everyone else, but when they pushed the cloaks back, unlike everyone else, they were carrying swords. The one in the lead glanced casually round the taproom, nodded to the beer-seller, and headed straight to us.

  Therkon froze. I gripped a table-leg to curb my knife-hand. Two was in emergency mode. The leader loomed over us. Sketched a perfunctory courtesy and said, politely enough, “The Yarl wants a word. If ye’d come with us?”

  Our eyes flew about in unison. Nobody else looked guilty. Or alarmed. Or in fear. This was not unusual? But who was the Yarl, was this incursion danger or routine, what was I to do?

  Suppress Two. Azo’s voice was crisp as in my living ear. Keep surprise’s vantage and manners’ defense. And pick better odds for a fight.

  Therkon’s eye caught mine. Without a blink to reveal collusion, he stood up.

  We tramped through the rain, which was blowing now, all muffled in our cloaks: uphill first, then left-hand along the slope, Therkon and I stumbling behind the leader’s lantern over un­familiar stones. The street had a roaring central gutter, echo to Two of Amberlight. We swung past a door whose reek of beer and bawling voices warned, low-level inn, mere drinking-house, perhaps dangerous. Another doorway. A dark shoal rose athwart the gutter, somebody coughed, and the leader stopped.

  He said something to the cougher, invisible in the rainy dark. Then he held the lantern low and asked, “Would you know that, at all?”

  Silver glinted to the lamp-glow, a shining tracery. Below a hands-breadth of sheeny, wet grey steel.

  Therkon gave a grunt half shock and half relief and retrieved his wits with it. “What is Hvestang doing here?”

  In a tone that made further claims of right and ownership superfluous.

  “We thought,” the lantern-carrier answered, still non-commital, “you might tell us that.”

  Therkon said, “Will you hold up the light?”

  The gutter-shoal was a man, wrapped in a cloak, arms wide. His face lay in the water that foamed round his sodden hair, and a red tinge spread downstream from around his throat.

  Therkon drew a little, comprehending breath. “Was there money?”

  The lantern wavered. The cougher in the dark spoke, hoarse but unsurprised. “Just t’bag.”

  Therkon looked back at the corpse, and down at the sword. And said, in a still, cold voice that would have graced Nouip, “It puts an end to dispute.”

  The men all moved, as if they had somehow been released. The lantern came down. The cougher emerged from the dark, took up Hvestang by the middle of the sheath. Silently, held it out.

  Therkon wiped the hilt and scabbard gently on his cloak. He did not don the sword-belt, just tucked it all, like a child or an heirloom, into his arms. Then he said evenly, “It was a gift.”

  All the men seemed to sigh. The lantern-carrier said, sounding suddenly far more matter-of-fact, “Aye, sir. But there’s a man dead of it, and another gone wolfs-head. A matter for the Yarl.”

  Authority, Two extrapolated. The town’s ruler, the island’s ruler? Are these men his? Warriors, or civil authority, on patrol in the streets? No time to ask. Therkon was answering as calmly, “It seems so. Shall we come now?”

  We trekked back to the right through the narrow, winding, now slippery paven ways, and then upward. When lamplit

  windows began to pick out a taller shape above the roofs, Two knew what it was.

  We had seen it from the quay, almost atop the southern headland, a stolid drum-shape of rough-hewn stone: old, I had guessed, if nowhere near the age of Nouip’s house. The alleyway twisted, skirted a handkerchief-size enclosure, and the lantern-carrier pushed open a tall iron gate.

  The entry itself was low and lowering, with an iron-braced door that opened to a screep of wood and stone on a reddish glow of fire. A voice bellowed, “Vanni, that you? You turn up this bugaboo, or what?”

  The lantern-carrier returned something brief. A sort of

  passage-tunnel emitted us on a circle of stone floor amid bulky heaps of shadow, with a fire at their midst. This one blazed in a semi-circular fireplace with a mantel, a hood, and presumably a chimney to draw off the smoke, limning a man in a chair big enough to call a throne. With a cluster of retainers at his back.

  * * * *

  “Come on, man, where are they?” He was already rumbling in a near-bass voice as we appeared. There were candles, gratefully, on the mantelpiece, revealing a redoubtable black beard and a nose to match, carving on the chair arms, the colour, as he leant to the fire, of an almost purple coat. “Couldn’t’ve picked a finer night for it . . . ah.”

  We had reached the glow. He was looking Therkon up and down.

  “So.” The voice had changed a fraction. “That is the cloak. And who in heyill’s name are you?”

  Therkon’s back was already stiff. I tried not to groan aloud.

  “I am a Dhasdeini merchant. We were wrecked here. We are seeking news of our folk.”

  With one push the man was on his feet.

  “You’re no merchant.” It came so flatly the men behind him tensed and my own hand flew to my wrist. “Dhasdeini, true. A lord, or an officer.” He grinned suddenly, wolfishly, teeth a fire-red flash in his beard. “I’ve heard enough of ’em. I was in your benighted navy, m’lord Yabbie.” It is what they call the Delta shrimp. “Ten blighted years!”

  An Archipelago sailor, or marine. In the Imperial navy, groaned my sinking heart, far too conversant with Dhasdein, the River, recent history, he might even have left at the cataclysmic end of the war, when half the navy deserted, from under Therkon’s own command.

  He might know the crown prince by sight.

  My lungs froze. My sight blurred. Two was in a whirl of projections that might pre-empt everyone. I fairly screamed, Shut up! Wait!

  Therkon was only just answering, as coldly as before.

  “I was a
lord. Yes.”

  There was an almost abashed hush. Then the Yarl exploded, “So what’re you at, sending my town crazy with that cursed sword? Folk jumping at shadows and crying Bogle and a man already dead!”

  “Will you at least tell me who I am supposed to be?”

  He had known better than to move, but it came out a whiplash all the same, tension and exasperation breaking loose.

  “Tell you?” The Yarl’s eyes actually bulged. “Wander in with the old King’s sword and the Winter Man’s cloak ’n say you’ve toured the ban-house coming from Evva beach . . . A pox on your Outsea brains, Yabbie. They think you’re the Ash Lord, of course. The Dead-Thane. The King of the Sea!”

  His retainers seemed to cringe away from the words. The very fire seemed to dull, as if a wind blew past us, a thinly creeping nor-easter, in the hot shadowy room.

  Two said before I realised, “Sthassamaer.”

  That time everyone jumped. Then the Yarl whipped round and roared, “Don’t dare name him with that thing!”

  “But,” I stammered, “but—”

  “Fetch and bogle he may be but t’Sea King’s ours. Come of Isle folk, fed on Isle folk—nothing to do with that—!”

  Then he heard himself, and broke off short. “And who,” now he was truly glaring, “may you be?”

  Therkon took a swift sideways step that made all the sword-hands jump. “This is my sister—”

  “Stand away from her, Yabbie. ’N keep quiet!”

  The shift of men behind him added warning enough.

  Silently, Therkon stepped back. Gulping, cursing Two, I confronted the Yarl alone.

  “Who are you, woman? Girl? What’s your name?”

  “I am called Chaeris—sir.” Any title was better than blank discourtesy. “I am m-my brother’s sister. At least, I mean—”

  With any other leader, the hirelings would have laughed. The Yarl twisted half round and the single snigger choked.

  “Y’ brother’s sister, eh? ’N what’s his name?”