Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

This was moving too fast even for Two. I looked desperately at Therkon. The Yarl snapped his fingers and said with steely affability, “Talk to me, girl. What’s his name?”

  “My sister is not used to this. Dhasdeini women seldom go in public. Allow me—”

  The Yarl’s eye swiveled. “She’s not y’ sister, any more’n you’re a merchant. She don’t talk Dhasdeini at all.”

  “My half-sister—”

  “Don’t palter with me, heyill take you! What is she? Your thrall? Your mistress? Both at once?”

  With one economic twist Therkon dropped Hvestang’s gear into his left hand and drew the blade.

  The hiss cut like a snake’s. As the blade flared retainers snarled and surged, swords flashed, feet thumped, I jumped myself with a handful of wrist-knife just as the Yarl bellowed, “Stop!”

  His men just managed to obey. The first sword-blade shook upright, six inches from Hvestang’s edge, and Therkon was already in the soldier’s crouch. Not expecting room for a duel: prepared to take his enemies massed, as he stood.

  The air quivered to fire-flicker, the tremble of men’s breath. The Yarl glared at his retainers’ backs.

  “Might you,” with awful courtesy, “wait on me, Vaskyr?” His eyes switched. “’N you, Yabbie. D’you mean what Sharp-tongue says? If you do,” his eyes narrowed, “how’ll your sister fare?”

  Therkon’s face was rigid as ice. Mortal rage. Mortal threat. Then he drew a sudden shuddering breath and eased Hvestang back into its sheath.

  The Yarl half-relaxed. “Vaskyr?”

  His men backed clear. Swords went home in a straggling scrape. I buried my own knife. The Yarl sank into his seat, tilted an elbow to a chair arm and his chin to a fist, and confronted Therkon, I saw in amazement, with the suggestion of a smile.

  “Fight for her, whoever she is?” Therkon’s jaw worked. “Stand easy. I’ll not bait you again. But if she’s not y’ whore or y’ sister—who is she, then?”

  Therkon gave me one swift glance and tilted his chin in imperial hauteur. “The lady Chaeris is my companion,” he said.

  Don’t, I prayed the Mother, let this creature sport with that.

  “Companion,” the Yarl repeated. Dear enough to fight for, the tone added. To die for? He glanced over to me. “Companion in what?”

  Therkon drew breath and bit the words off in his teeth. The Yarl nodded at him, acknowledging a lesson learnt, and looked back to me.

  “Sir,” Two said, “will you first tell us? The ban-keeper. Evvamoor. What are they? What do they matter? Why is the town overset?”

  The Yarl almost recoiled. He did blink: then, while I stood in terror lest his wits be acute as Nouip’s and Two have started an even more dangerous hare, he gave a smothered snort.

  “Questions to keep off answers, eh?”

  He paused. Then went on with a jerk. “Evvamoor’s the last Old Place. They live there as we all did once, in the Isles. Dark-houses. The Stones. The old—workings. Summer-height. Sun-turn. The keeping of—the dead.”

  I felt the shiver that went through the rest of them. I shivered too.

  “But the keeper.” He gave me a sudden piercing stare. “They say she comes down in direct line from Langlieve. The last of the kings. The one,” he jerked his chin at Therkon, “who carried that.”

  There was another pause like a boulder-fall. Into it Therkon said a fraction too loudly, “Why should the town be—why would a man kill, for this?”

  “Dumb as a block, like all the rest.” He sat forward suddenly. “Look’ee, Yabbie. D’ye know what ‘King’ means, here? Langlieve’s kin held all Sickle, true. But Langlieve’s sire was Lord o’ the Thirteen Isles. Overlord, from Sickle to Foldbay and clear down to Phaerea.”

  He flapped a hand. “’N Grithsperry, Grithsperry’s not just quiet, the day. There’s lordless men ’n run Navy-men here, there’s ousted folk from south’ard. There’s merchanters with their trade wracked ’n fishermen starved from the gales. There’s talk—there’s always talk! But d’you know what they’re saying now? ‘The King’s come! The King’s come back! Down with the Yarl and his like. Beer in the streets’!” He flapped the hand again. “D’you wonder some gangrel lifts it when you turn y’ back, and gets his throat cut by some other fool that’s sure he’s but to lay hands on Sharp-tongue, and he’ll down me and Phaerea both, sit a golden throne and be King-come-again!”

  In a moment Therkon said, sounding small as a boy, “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh. So, d’you see why I might just wonder? If y’ knew what you were at?”

  Slowly, but awkwardly, Therkon disengaged his grip from Hvestang’s hilt, and took it by mid-sheath. “If this belongs on Sickle . . . If it will bring quiet . . .”

  The Yarl jerked his chin. More than acknowledgement. “Just tell me. Where did y’ get the things?”

  Therkon answered tiredly, “I have said already. They came from the Evvamoor ban-keeper. As gifts.”

  There was another plummet of a hush. Then the Yarl grunted, “Easy to say, ‘the keeper.’ D’you have a name?”

  “She told us to call her Nouip.”

  That time I actually heard someone gasp. The Yarl’s brows certainly rose on end.

  “If y’ have it, so. It belongs to you.” He hesitated. “But they say, she has the Sight . . .”

  “She told me,” Therkon said, “I would have use for this.”

  I could almost feel the retainers’ hair rise along with mine. The Yarl looked from Therkon to me and said the inevitable. “Use it for what?”

  “We do not know.”

  Therkon spoke before I could. Flat, if without offence. A stall-off, if not quite a bluff.

  The fire flickered and phutted. The Yarl stared at him, brows coming slowly down.

  “Look’ee, Yabbie. Ahhhh.” Half apology, half exasperation. “What is y’ name?”

  Therkon stared back. I could see, as in a counterpoise, his chin go up.

  “Therkon,” he said.

  The Yarl frowned outright. “Therkon? That’s not Dhasdeini, either. Therkon? That’s province or upRiver. Quetzistani. What’s a Quetzistani lord at, playing merchant—Come here. Into the light.”

  Two was going crazy. I gripped both wrists behind my back and tried not to shut my eyes, told myself Nouip would name him anyway if they asked, tried not to yell, Did you have to tender your imperial pride now?

  Therkon took three steps forward, full into the candles’ range. The chin was higher than ever. Mother, I cursed, why afflict me with a prince who’s never had his edges smoothed?

  “Huh. Quetzistani, sure enough. Know those eyes anywhere. And a lord, ah, plum-in-the-mouth as the Riversrun Suzerain. High Quetzistani. What was y’ clan?”

  He knows too much, Two was screaming, in a minute or two he’ll add the last facts and realize just what he has in hand, stop him, stop him! Therkon answered, words slicing the white roil.

  “I was of Jhuir clan.”

  “Jhuir! The same as—”

  He stopped dead. “Y’re close kin to the Empress.”

  Therkon said with bitterness, “If I had been acknowledged. Yes.”

  The Yarl’s jaw dropped. “Y’re a by-blow? Some lord’s bastard? Got in the rebellion, when the clans changed—? Never! There’s no lord in Riversend’d acknowledge, let alone raise one. And y’ were raised in Riversend, don’t try to tell me not. Therkon, Therkon . . . What is it I’m thinking?”

  “Sir,” Two burst out in pure desperation, “what is the Sthassamaer?”

  “What?” But he did swing round. “Girl, what in heyill’s name makes y’ think y’ can spout questions hither and yon?”

  “Sir, we need to know what you know.”

  Stop it! I screamed. Too late.

  The Yarl’s brow literally darkened. “You need to know. ‘My lady’ Chaeris. If y’ were raised
in a decent household—”

  “The lady Chaeris may be a Seer.”

  “What?”

  Therkon had made the supreme counter-diversion. But did he have, I bawled to myself, to draw the hounds off by exposing me?

  “A Seer. You mean like—like—”

  “My lady Nouip,” Therkon was as precise as ever, if he had muted some of the disdain, “said she would See. One day. But—differently. The lady Chaeris needs information. Everywhere. As much as she can get.”

  I tried to keep my face calm and hoped the pulse was not hammering visibly in my throat.

  “One day.” The Yarl had fastened on the crucial point. “She’s not a Seer yet.”

  “She still needs facts. In particular, about—Sthathamaer.”

  “Sir, if you could tell us, we know hardly anything but the name.”

  “The name. Uh.” Give him that, he was resilient. We had bounced him from one shoal-edge to another and he was still on the scent. And he was a ruler. He gave me a stare half affront, half recognition. If I were a Seer, even in the future, information now might help his own folk.

  “Comes from south’ard. The outed folk, some’ll say it. Most—not.”

  “But do they say what it is?”

  “No.”

  Two clenched my hands. I tried not to swear aloud. In a minute the Yarl would start a fresh chase, and there were too many vulnerable spots. “Do they, does anyone say, it has something to do with the storms?”

  “Everything’s to do with the storms. Heyill’s luck. Somebody saw a merewife. Somebody shorted the Mother a candle. The gods weary, and the world ends.” It was exasperation, but under it was something I knew all too well. The first struggling sprouts of hope. “Is that anything y’ can . . .”

  “Perhaps for Nouip.” Two was being too honest again. “Not for us.”

  And will you, I bawled, stop saying Us! How long do you think before he wakes up?

  He did not say, Oh. Or lament outright. His face merely

  dismissed another marsh-hope, before he turned away.

  “You. M’lord—Therkon. What, exactly, did y’ plan?”

  Therkon parried the new thrust with hardly a twitch. “We came asking after our folk. From the wreck.”

  “That was before. This is Now. What’ll y’ do next?”

  “We will try to find our folk . . .”

  “If they’re not in Grithsperry,” the Yarl said brutally, “they’ll not be anywhere. What then?”

  Therkon opened his mouth. And then, slowly, shut it again. And said nothing at all.

  The pause stretched and stretched, filling gradually with men’s movements, the flutterings of the fire. The creak of my own joints. The coil of fear in my belly, as the Yarl realized Therkon was not going to reply.

  He can’t say any more, I told Two flatly. He can’t say, We’ll go home, because we can’t. He can’t say, We’ll go south, without raising worse questions. Not least that we don’t have passage money. And how can he say, the way will be opened by Sthassamaer? This man is too sharp and already knows too much. Disaster is a breath away. If he just remembers why he knows Therkon’s name . . .

  Almost casually, the Yarl said, “Don’t want to say?”

  Therkon actually seemed to relax a little. He dipped his head. Acknowledgement as well as agreement. Quietly, almost ruefully, he answered, “I cannot.”

  Calamity, one half of us groaned, while the other remembered my fathers playing castles, and bawled, The only safety is to end this. At whatever sacrifice!

  The Yarl sat up with a short if tumultuous sigh.

  “A maybe-Seer. A Dhasdeini—lord-merchant—with a not-sister. From nowhere. Going, who knows where? Carrying a brand to fire the Isles. M’lord—Therkon. If the ban-keeper gave y’ that blade, only a fool’d try to part you. But for the moment, y’re best under ward. For all our sakes.” He jerked a thumb downward. “Vaskyr, see ’em downstairs. Blankets. A necessary.”

  His eye came back to Therkon and I knew it would be granite hard. “And I think y’ know the rest.”

  Almost soundlessly, Therkon sighed. Then he offered Hvestang hilt first to Vaskyr and answered resignedly, “Yes.”

  * * * *

  “This would probably have happened, whatever we did.”

  “At least it got us out of there. If he’d asked more about me. If he’d remembered why he knows your name. If they’d searched us!”

  No need to tell walls that, even in the dark. A search would have found Verrith’s knives.

  “Downstairs” proved to be the tower’s undercroft, barricaded behind another iron-strapped door, beneath stone steps whose crooked edges and single unshaped slabs hair-crispingly recalled Nouip’s house. Older than the tower itself. At their foot Vaskyr’s lantern revealed a big semi-circular space as full of miscellaneous shadows as the room above, another man dropping blankets on the stone slab by the door, while a third set down a bucket, then pulled back a stone lid to reveal their equivalent of a latrine. Then they took the lantern and locked the door, and left us to the dark.

  “They must not search us,” Therkon said.

  Not merely for Verrith’s knives, but for the rings. One of those our sole source of funds, the other a betrayal worse than his name.

  “Oh, if only Azo—”

  I bit that off in earnest. Along with the stab of memory, the panic and lamentations and all the other unwomanly cries, curses, tears. You are in the blighted fix, I rated myself. Put your mind to getting out.

  Therkon said, “I am sorry, my lady.”

  For more, I could tell, than my loss, or even our situation. For what he considered his own lapses, his own failure. As he had been on the beach.

  Two said, “There were too many dangers. You did what was best.”

  The pause was startled, even in the dark. Then he said, sounding strained but somewhat rueful, “I never did things like this, face to face.”

  Never confronted an enemy or opponent without the insulation of his troublecrew, his officers. The court, his rank. I dropped the search for some mealy-mouthed version of, It was rather flashy, to challenge for me like some touchy court-gallant. Two had exonerated him. A better pardon than mine.

  And Two should not get off scot-free either. I said, “Two didn’t help.”

  “At least once, she did.”

  He still sounded odd. Fatigue? Stress? But I heard him move then, a boot scraping stone. A hand touched my arm. Human touch, seeking and giving reassurance. At least, I know where you are.

  I bit down even harder on the impulse to swing round and plaster myself abjectly on his chest. No doubt that he would receive me, as he had on the beach, in Nouip’s house. Probably it would ease him, to play the protector. But I was a woman, if a newly-made one. A scion of Amberlight.

  But, Two lamented, he would be so warm . . .

  I just managed not to let my voice shake. “Should we try to look, ah, feel, around?”

  His hand clutched and released. It was a good long moment before he spoke.

  “Yes.” It came with effort, with untoward resolve, but it came. “You are right. We cannot risk more questions. We have no safe answers. We have nothing for bribes.” Nothing we could afford. “We cannot even risk him remembering, before morning.” Who a high-bred Quetzistani called Therkon and raised in Riversend had to be. “We have to get out. Tonight.”

  He had jumped farther ahead even than Two. I had only meant to scout our surroundings, not work for immediate escape.

  “But the door. The lock. And I think they barred it. All those men—”

  Two shut me up, that time. How do you know what will fail, till you see what you can try?

  “Well, I could hunt around.”

  “I will do that.” I could feel him physically pull himself

  together. After everything,
he was a Dhasdeini man. “If you would speak when I ask? To show me the way back?”

  I stood with one calf against the blankets and listened to fumbles, the occasional clatter, once a muffled, “Adversary take it.” He seemed untowardly slow. But at last his hand touched my elbow: he put a foot out, then sank down on the slab with an audible outgoing breath.

  “Barrels.” He sounded muffled, and still strained. “Not beer. Heavy, though. Timbers, of some sort. Planks. Stacks of peat.”

  The silence thickened like the encroaching cold. Waiting for one of us to say it. There is no way out.

  “Blight and blast,” I heard myself say, thin and quakily, “If only Azo—or if I had her tinderbox.” Or the one from a ship’s chandler, cached in our room. “If we could just make them open the door.”

  Therkon did not enquire, And if they did, how do you propose to overcome the Yarl and six or eight grown men, with one unarmed helper and a pair of throwing knives? Therkon did not say anything at all.

  “We can’t stay here.” I could feel panic rising like the cold. “If it’s supposed to get us south, this is hardly the way to do it! If—anything—goes wrong here, who knows where this could end?” The Isles’ hope dashed along with the River’s? The enemy left to advance unhindered, while, at best, we sat in the Yarl’s undercroft, waiting the fulfillment of a ransom demand?

  “Maybe we could bang with timber? Or roll barrels? Or . . .”

  “My lady.” Therkon sounded very odd indeed. “I think I, may have the diversion, at least.”

  “You do?” I thumped down beside him and grabbed a hand by pure chance. “What?”

  The hand was clammy. It clenched suddenly under mine, his breath caught in a gasp and his body went into a rigid hunch.

  “Therkon! What is it? What—!”

  “My stomach.” I could not tell if it was shame or chagrin or simple pain. “I hoped not, but . . . It is about to—misbehave.”

  “Oh, Mother!” I leapt back up. “Not now, it can’t, I don’t have any—” any help, any supplies if I could use them, any idea what to do. “Is it—how is it—what—happens . . .?”

  This time it was definitely a gasp. I felt him twist as if,