Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

however bowed together, he could not hold himself still.

  “Sometimes. If I just lie down. Others: cramps. Much . . .” He let that go. I already knew. Much pain. “The—” It was coming word by word now. Not just pain but reserve. Having to bare this to someone else. Someone new. “With the worst. I throw up.”

  I did not have to finish, This is going to be one of the worst.

  “Something new. Perhaps the fish.”

  Resignation now, at a cycle all too well known. Then, with a tiny glint of black humor, “But good cause to bang the door. You could even,” dryly, “scream.”

  * * * *

  I screamed. I banged the door too, with the heaviest plank I could carry stumbling and teetering up the steps. I shrieked till my throat hurt, with my heart behind the simplest distress call: “Help! Help! Help!”

  And just before my voice gave out, the door emitted a rattle. A scrape. A crack opened on light and a querulous voice demanded, “What in heyill’s wrong?”

  “My brother!” I had no need to act. “My brother needs a healer, quick!”

  Silence. A mutter. Another rattle. Panic spurred my wits. “He’s ill, he’s been poisoned! For the Mother’s love, get someone! He might, he might—”

  Genuine tears choked the rest. I had heard Therkon throw up once already. It sounded fit to tear his stomach out.

  More muttering, but “poison” had done it. The light broadened suddenly. The voice ordered, “Stand away from the stair.”

  I stood away. At least, I danced from foot to anguished foot while the lock worked again, while the lantern descended, all but step by step. When it reached bottom I could not help darting forward. “Here, he’s here!”

  I would not have cared if it had been massed retainers led by the Yarl himself. But it was a lone man who held the lantern high enough to get a clear look at Therkon, and let out an involuntary gasp.

  He stepped by me. In a single slide I was behind him with my sheath-arm round his neck and the drawn knife at his throat. “Don’t move,” I said, and heard Azo’s casual, pitiless menace in the words.

  He gave one grunt and froze. He had not known I was armed. He never dreamt a woman might attack. He knew Therkon was unarmed, and one glimpse of Therkon, a mucky beige color, knotted on the blankets with a pool of vomit at his feet, had done the rest.

  Therkon got to an elbow, then, teeth bared against a new pang, struggled to his feet. I said in my prisoner’s ear, “Hold the lantern out to the side.”

  And only realized then that I expected Therkon, like Azo or Verrith, to know what to do next.

  But Deoren had hammered some things into him. He moved hunched and shakily, but he circled to reach the lantern and pluck it loose. Set it on the slab. Got out huskily, “I’ll get,” a breath, “his belt.”

  Whatever his body did, his wits worked. We would need to secure this captive first of anything, and we had no other bindings. I could have cried with relief.

  * * * *

  Only after that did I wonder where the rest of them were. How long before this one would be missed. How we would get further, except with the simplest and most unlikely bluff: take him with us and threaten his life to get us out the door.

  And then, where would we go?

  Away. Anywhere. To a healer who would know what to do when Therkon doubled up in another spasm and collapsed back on the stone.

  He struggled up again, hands shaking, body clenched, but still thinking, despite it all. “How many,” he got out, and gestured overhead.

  I shifted the knifeblade. The prisoner said in a hurry, “They’ve all gone home.”

  Despite everything, Therkon’s brows climbed into his tangled hair. Pure crown prince.

  “It’s the store-tower! Nobody’d stay.” I could hear his own resentment at being left with the task. “Cold as the ice and draughty as Shivell Straits. They thought, till morning—”

  With a lock, and a door, and no weapons, we would be safe enough.

  Therkon looked at me. I looked at Therkon, and gave the point another fraction shift. “Likely,” I said, mimicking Azo when dangerously bored.

  “It’s the truth! I swear, sir, m’lord!” He had spoken throughout to Therkon. Not only was I a woman, his resentment at my capture was coming out. “Nobody’s up there. Nobody thought—”

  Therkon got off the slab, with a hand clamped to his middle, and gathered up our sodden cloaks.

  He took the lantern and went first. Having demonstrated I could throw the knives, I made the prisoner climb behind him, with me a good six steps below. And those six steps, given his resentment, must have seemed opportunity enough.

  I heard the crash and tinkle and a thoroughly recognizable grunt the instant he went out of sight. I cleared the stairs in two leaps and hurdled Therkon’s fallen back in time to see lantern oil fan in a burning cascade across the main room floor and pile like a wave around the first bulky shadow heap.

  Sacking kindled at once. Flame went up the heap like a treed cat to burst in a rosette of fire and the vilest imaginable stench, and the prisoner let out an anguished, “No!”

  Therkon threw the lantern remnants at him. As the man reeled back I caught him by the belt fastened round his elbows in the usual Imperial restraint. I had the knife at his throat in earnest when Therkon grabbed my knife-wrist, jerking it up and round into a soggy crunching thud.

  The man folded through my hands. I stood paralysed, unable to think past the woman in the Seaforts. A second time that someone had died by my hand.

  “Just hilt. Behind ear.” Therkon had both hands on his knees and was gasping in the throes of another cramp. “Get cloaks!”

  I snatched them off the floor and beat at lingering sparks. The prisoner was out cold. The heap, it must have been wool bales, was enthusiastically alight. Raw wool, Two informed me, full of natural oil. We would burn out the tower . . . Therkon staggered past me to the prisoner and gasped, “Help!”

  The outer key was on the man’s belt, easy to see as the keyhole, by the escalating flames. Therkon threw one desperate glance around and I knew what he was thinking. Secured prisoners or not, they would never leave Hvestang here.

  His face twisted in a different pain. Then he started struggling with the man’s legs.

  I nearly ruptured my back helping to get him outside:

  nothing had prepared me for an unconscious human’s weight. Therkon heaved the door to behind us with a bang, and tried to straighten into the still enthusiastically pouring rain. “Come!” he gasped.

  “Come where?” He was moving already, half reeling, half crouched as the next pains hit. “Not there, the town’s the first place they’ll look!”

  He checked, no more than an intimation of movement in the inky, streaming street. The voice was contorted by his stomach’s work, but the brain behind it was still razor-sharp.

  “No use go up. Catch us . . . fast. Not expect—down here. Fire not showing. When it does . . . Run up. Not down.”

  “But down? The, the port? The sea?”

  “Got to get off—island. No use stay here!”

  No, we had no means of travel or flight on land except our feet. And whether or not it was planned, we had to keep going south. Over the sea.

  “A ship? But the money?” He could not mean to expend the ring on this?

  “Stow away.”

  Chapter IX

  If that next hour was nightmare to me, for Therkon it must have been the Mother’s hell on earth: stumbling, slipping, floundering through those pitchy street caverns, cannoning off walls,

  blundering into dead-end after dead-end as we tried first to double back leftward, then blind-stab to reach the quays. With the rain still streaming, and hardly a house showing light.

  The rain and dark at least were a double-edged curse, blinding us, but emptying the streets. The hue and cry was unequivocal. A rum
or, then definite shouts. Then a great spurt of fire as some unwary soul forced the tower door open, and a sudden wounded-bull roar.

  No mistaking the Yarl. We ran until I thought my heart was burst. How Therkon bore it, half-doubled up even between cramps, I cannot guess, but at the end of eternity, we staggered out onto the wharf.

  The strengthened wind told us, and the glow night-water always brings, however slight. With riding lights added, we could actually guess at shapes. We took the first ship moored rather than anchored, and without a light. Even in terror’s befuddlement I thought her alarmingly small, but she had at least one mast, and a gangplank. That should have warned us, had our last strength not gone in getting aboard.

  The deck heaved slightly, disorientingly, gloriously, under my feet. I groped for bulwarks, for ambushed ropes. Therkon crossed before me against a distant lamp, a doubled-over silhouette that wheezed, “Down here.”

  Black as Aspis’ lower-deck. I would have jibbed. A hand grabbed my wrist. She was a merchantman, not a galley: it was the sail-locker, up past the hold on the foredeck, with a hinged, raiseable lid. We thudded down together in a heap and stink of moldy canvas, on a relatively soft floor of bundled sails. At least, it was softer than naked stone.

  In a minute or two I regained breath to get disentangled. As I squirmed clear of Therkon’s legs, an importunate arm, a double ell of wet furry cloak, my hand caught on suddenly yielding cloth. Wet cloth, soggy in a single spot.

  He had gagged himself with a shirt-sleeve. I could hear, now, the wheeze of his breath. And feel too clearly how he lay, limp as a shot deer, too exhausted even to try to get up. Until the next spasm doubled him over, muscles rigored, grabbing the shirt and stuffing his mouth again to muffle the groan.

  When it finally began to ebb I said, “I’m getting a healer. Now.”

  “No!” He still had a man’s strength. His hand grabbed me like a trap. “Wait! Will pass!”

  “And will it—”

  Will it kill you first?

  I bit that off. In cold reason, he was right. He knew his body. He had suffered this how often before? We had already dared to the limit of the Mother’s luck. Escaped the tower. Reached sanctuary, and nearly killed him doing it. How could I ask him to suffer more?

  Two might know the number of my second thoughts, after we sorted out the cloaks and huddled down, trying to find some bundle of canvas halfway comfortable. The myriad irks of weariness, hunger and a full bladder joined forces with the cold. Worst of all, I had to listen to the muted sounds of spasm after spasm, and wonder how either of us could possibly last till dawn.

  Therkon had just relapsed back into fresh exhaustion when the canvas conveyed a faint, sudden tremor. Then, even in the sail locker, we heard the clump of boots.

  Therkon grabbed another mouthful of shirt. I had just time for terror to sear right through me, Not just coming aboard, they’re coming here! Then the sail-locker lid rose like a vertical dawn, light burst in our eyes, and a deep voice commanded, “Come out.”

  No hope of fight, let alone flight. Four shadowy heads looked down on us. The locker was lit from end to end. Nowhere to hide.

  I tried to get my feet under me. Wobbled up against a wall. Looked up the further two feet to the hatch rim, and managed a very small, “I c-can’t.”

  Not unkindly, they laughed. Someone made a pointed remark about getting in there well enough. Someone else tossed down a rope. Another said, “There’s two of ’em.”

  “My brother. He’s been—he’s ill.” Two shot a bolt of memory’s warning and I gabbled, “Not plague or fever, something just upset his stomach, it’s very sensitive—”

  “Ah?” The first voice again. Not unkind, but not overly friendly either. Then, “Skappi, you’d best go down.”

  It took two of them and another rope and a very considerable slice of imperial pride, before they finished fastening him in a series of half hitches and then steadying him while those overhead hauled. One of them legged me over the coaming, as if onto a horse, and I scurried after the two carrying Therkon, down abaft the mast, into a companionway.

  “Present for ye, Mither,” one was saying, as they lowered Therkon onto some kind of wall bunk or seat. A hanging lamp lit a shadowy, crowded but warm room that smelt of wet wool and man-sweat and sea-salt, peculiarly dashed by whiffs of mint-tea and geraniums.

  A female voice retorted, “Ah?” But a bigger, solider presence ducked under the lintel behind me, and the now familiar deep voice announced, “Here’s our stowaways.”

  “How,” Two got quite away from me, “did you know?”

  All five of them laughed. The big man even slapped my back, all but knocking me down. “Next time you take the rat’s path, boy, before you run up the cable, wipe your boots!”

  Mud. We had been so spent, so bent to the limit on other endurance, we had completely forgotten that. I could feel my face burn hotter than the lamp.

  Therkon was struggling to sit up. Lamplight showed his face an alarming beige, all sunken eye-pits and baulks of cheek. “My,” he managed, just as the big man realized for himself.

  “You’re a girl!”

  I was past anything but a mumbled, “Yes.”

  His eyes narrowed. He was tall enough for that to show, so close to the feeble lamp. Darkened slits in a beefy but not bearded face, under a knitted cap releasing strands of some dark-colored hair. He swung suddenly and caught up a handful of Therkon’s cloak.

  “Ye’re Skatir’s bogles,” he said.

  Therkon got one hand on the table and tried to push himself up. The table swung sideways—it was on gimbals—and the big man pushed him firmly back.

  “Less the blade, o’ course.” An appraising glance. Then something that might have been a chuckle, sunk in his chest. “Finest I’ve heard a man swear. That fool Stoth out like a candle, the birds flown, and his whole poxy wool-tithe alight!”

  It became a full-chested laugh. He actually slapped a thigh. “And here’s the pair o’ ye, fetched up on the Tolla, snug as rats!”

  Under the cloak my hands moved without volition, sliding loose Verrith’s knife. Driven less by the words than the look on Therkon’s face.

  “Whisht, man.” The big man had read it too. “Only fall on your nose. The whole town heard Skatir bellowing.” Another chuckle shook him. “Same as they heard the rest.”

  “But you.” Pain and throwing up had reduced Therkon to a whisper, but the panic and defiance were clear as a shout. “How did you know—where were—who are you?”

  “Me?” It had brought another general laugh. The big man out-bellowed them all. “Oh, I’m his misbegotten, meddling, tight-fisted Phaerean marriage-kin!”

  Therkon’s face said it all. Two had us on my toes, tension shooting bolts down every nerve, fingers tightening on the hilt . . . But then the woman moved round the table-end.

  “Colne,” she said, “let him be now. Light the galley fire, and heat me some ballast stones.”

  * * * *

  “Skatir is the Yarl. My brother, yes.” She spoke almost resignedly. Quietly as she had issued every order from the first, which sent the big man off with hardly a word, before she dispersed the three younger ones to fetch blankets and drying cloths and “my herbs.” While she herself moved in and began, as calmly, as irresistibly, to unfasten Therkon’s cloak.

  “We were at his house. ‘Supping.’ Him and Colne, telling jokes. A new way to squabble over harbor dues. Take this, Skappi.” She handed the cloak behind her, and did something that swung the table aside to stay. “Now, you. Therkon, is it? Can you lie down flat?”

  Therkon was past questions, let alone demur. She touched him lightly but carefully, temples, throat, chest, then bent her head and pressed an ear to his solar plexus. Straightening, she did not bother with so little verbal confirmation as a grunt.

  “You, girl, come here.”

&n
bsp; I got my hand from the knife-hilt and hurried to her side.

  “Take that off, t’is streaming wet. Skappi.” Without raising her voice, but he was there instantly. “Hang this with t’other. And keep your hands off those furs.” Then, re-directing her voice to me, “A belly upset, aye. Ye thought right.” She must have observed him all through the men’s talk: made her diagnosis, and decided, without a word, what she, and they, would do.

  As calmly, she drew open Therkon’s coat, pushed up folds of shirt and found the trouser buttons. “Be still.” With a flattened palm as Therkon came to life and tried weakly but wildly to protest. “Girl, rub your hands warm.”

  I obeyed in a hurry. She already had enough buttons undone to loosen the shirt, and was easing the trouser flaps apart. “Give me your hand. Here, where I’ve put it.” Therkon let out a yelp. “Rub with the heel of your palm. Slowly. Very gently. This way.” Down in a circle from right to left and up. “Not any other. Keep doing that.”

  She turned smoothly but swiftly to the thump of things on the table. I was left kneeling beside Therkon, the heel of my right hand pressed to his naked belly, to a final brusque, “Rub.”

  Therkon gasped and tried to wriggle, then, wordlessly, to

  protest. The muscles under my palm were ridged with denial. With ongoing pain. The skin . . .

  The skin was warm. Smooth, soft as velvet. Far softer than the shaven stubble of his cheek. Far more delicate than my own palms. The velvet touch of protected body skin, the body of a man whose people almost never strip.

  I clung to my orders for dear life: rub here and thus, only the heel of the hand, this much pressure and no more. The crest of a pelvic bone nudged my wrist, and my fingers wanted dizzily to slide upward, over ribs and breastbone to trace the swell of a pectoral, smooth, firm, warm, all but assembling under my touch, but Two was insisting as dizzily that I move down, that just a handspan lower would find skin more delicate, even more deliriously velvet than this . . .

  The Mother preserved me. A step sounded, a voice, then the ship-wife slipped down to sit by Therkon, saying, “Can you lift your head?” And to me, “Don’t stop.”