Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  * * * *

  Someone was weeping. Someone was praying, by the tone. Someone was babbling, all women’s voices, but none of them mine. With light at hand the emergency alarms had shut down, and now my abused ribs were exacting their full toll. I all but doubled up on the hearth edge, clutching my side, feeling tears run, trying not to scream aloud.

  Male voices deepened the noise. Light came suddenly toward me. As suddenly the hubbub stopped dead and I saw what they had seen.

  At first it was just a bulk on the light’s rim, another motley heap of household goods. Then details opened out of it: the dark base, spreading, glistening. Then, more sudden than dawn, identifiable pieces. A hand. An outsprawled boot.

  And another hump in the half-light beyond. Dead men. We—I—had killed them both.

  I doubled up in earnest as shock’s aftermath and horror struck together. Trained, yes, I had trained for trouble, for attack and ambush, but in all that stringing of nerve and reflex no-one ever bled. No-one had ever died. Not by my own, active hand.

  The light came closer. A male voice, vaguely familiar, said, very deep and low, “Thrif.”

  Silence replied.

  The light moved. The voice spoke again.

  “And Tjofor.”

  Some shock in it. Some regret. No grief. And no surprise.

  The light stooped lower. So low that he, and I, and those

  beyond him, saw Verrith’s knife-hilt, upright in the upturned throat.

  My stomach rolled. Dimly through the struggle to control it I heard exclamations, more than shock and surprise. “—killed each other?”—“Tjofor?”—“but his knife’s there!”

  The light swung round. Swooped abruptly. Its bearer set the candle on the hearth rim and held something else up, a lantern, to show my face.

  “Lass,” he said, quite quietly, “did ye do this?”

  “I—I—w-woke up—there was s-someone here. I heard—they tried to, to grab me, I think, one came—there wasn’t time—!”

  Time to ask, time for second thoughts, margin for mistake. Troublecrew training is made to eliminate that. For troublecrew, at the crisis point, there is never time to doubt.

  Hubbub broke out again, astonishment, consternation,

  disbelief. A nuance that made the dead neither strangers, nor well liked. Known, for things that made this outcome horrifying, but not a surprise. Then one voice burst atop the others, a woman’s shriek. “. . . let them in, the wicked besom, t’is all her fault!”

  Another yelled back and I lost the sense. Through it the man beside me said curtly, “See the door.” I almost tried to get up before motion in the dim air told me he had addressed someone else.

  He half reached out, and stopped himself. “Bide ye, lass,” he said under his breath, and then, louder, “Heima? That’s enough.”

  The woman’s clamor eased. In the relative quiet Vithre said behind me, from across the hearth, “The bar is snibbed.” And, slightly louder, “As I left it when I let Rekkir out.”

  The women burst out again, louder with fury at being baulked. The man beside me ignored them, but he tilted the light-source in his hand away from me, up toward the roof.

  As the light circled slowly I heard steps round the hearth.

  Beside me Vithre said, “You’ve jarred your ribs.”

  A healer’s tone. A healer’s conclusion. A healer’s single-minded concern. I felt a laugh near hysteria catch in my throat.

  “Let me see.” He eased down beside me, waiting a moment before he touched my shirt. I could just straighten enough to let him lift it. His fingertips brushed the strapping and I winced, and he drew back. “Willowbark.” Another brush of fingers over my left wrist. “So.” He sounded almost amused now. “No wonder ye’d not strip yestreen. Arm-knives, eh?”

  I managed a gulp that might mean, Yes, and he stood up. Went to the nearest body, and with a healer’s coolness, slid the knife out of the throat. Turned it once in his hand, moved on to the other. A longer examination there, then he brought both back to the hearth.

  “Home to the hilt. Into the gold. In the dark.” He sounded more wry than amazed, let alone shocked. “Girl, where did ye learn that?”

  It was almost a relief, for once, to tell the truth. “In my—home place. The, the guards. They taught m-me. From when I was young.”

  Verrith’s knives, Azo’s council, Zuri’s unrelenting drills. The sinews and spine of Iskarda.

  “Young?” Vithre was saying softly, and now the amusement was plain. “And ye’re so old now?” He broke off. “Fiskri, what’s there?”

  The circling light came down. “Smoke-hole,” said Fiskri, in that deep voice I had identified at last. “A line fast up there.”

  “So the lass never let ’em in.”

  Fiskri did not dignify this with any sort of comment. The light simply swung back to the bodies. The other onlookers had come closer, a shifting wall of shadow-feet and hands and sometimes white garments blurring the light, so only Vithre’s presence kept my hand from springing for the knives he still held in his lap.

  “This,” Fiskri said soberly, “may be my fault.”

  The onlookers got no further than gasps.

  “I speired round Drek’s taproom the night. About Thralli. I’d to let out . . .” he paused, and went on. “Had to let out, there was maybe another outlander, seekin’ passage. Ready to pay.”

  And these two had been there, or had heard from someone who was.

  “Lass, I’d ask ye to forgive me.” Fiskri’s voice had gone deeper yet. “I never saw this pair around the booze. I never thought such—illdri—would break house-faith. Guest-faith.” His shape straightened a little. “For my house—for Ve Pool—I am shamed.”

  I tried to find a disclaimer, courteous or not. But his kindness had been the final straw. All I could do was whisper, “not want—bring trouble here.”

  “Trouble, aye!” The woman burst out again as if a cork had popped. “Ye outland hussy, we’re the ones with trouble, left wi’ these blothgra on our hands! What’ll the lord say, what’ll we do the morn—!”

  “Heima!” Fiskri still did not shout, but his voice was a slap in the face. She gave a gasp and stopped.

  “T’is Ve Pool’s wrong,” Fiskri said grimly, “come of Ve Pool’s work. My work.”

  “If she’d never—!”

  “Heima, I’ll not tell ye again.”

  He waited to confirm the silence, before he went on.

  “Outland or kin, a guest is a guest. And a healer’s charge is his bond.” He was, I realised, defending my first appearance at the house. “Would ye have y’r brother deny his craft?”

  Heima knew better, at last, than to reply.

  Fiskri turned a little, the lantern beam swinging, and not, I thought in a moment, entirely by chance, across my face.

  “The lass is grieved as any would, at such a thing. To come on her by stealth, in a guesting house, by night.” The anger burned up in that somber voice. “If she defended herself, t’is no more than a guest’s right. Man or woman.” Cutting Heima off at the butt of an objection about women bearing weapons, let alone being able to kill with them. I could guess that all too well.

  He paused, letting the lantern trace other faces in the dark. Two more men, one darkly stubble-faced, the other with tousled brown curls. Three women in toe-length night rails, their hair in braids, a scad of awe-silenced older children, all teeth and eyes. Fiskri was, I understood, delivering judgement: as head of the house. Thinking out the terms that justified it, as he went.

  “For these two,” his toe touched, so lightly, the edge of a boot, “t’is this house they broke, and through my fault.” His eyes moved through the lanternlight. “Kerlin, will ye see the children settled? And y’rselves as well?” The other women, I realised. His eyes moved again. “Sheinn, Halri, come ye here?”

&nbs
p; The quick, low-voiced men’s talk must have gone some time. I missed most of it, for almost immediately Vithre went off for willow­bark, and then coaxed me to sit on the quilts, my back against the hearth. Despite the aftermath jittering through me, the proximity of the dead, even the illogical fear that this place was no longer safe, I must have dozed, then. For I came to with another start, pulse if not limbs leaping, as someone hunkered down by me and Fiskri’s deep voice said, “Lass?”

  “Vithre says, ye’re fit to walk.” The slight upward ending added, Is this true?

  I nodded, gazing into the pools of shadow that held his eyes, sunk deep amid gaunt, broad cheekbones, high, corrugated forehead, all caricatured by the upward-thrown light. “If ye put that cap on, an’ y’r hair up, soon as it’s light, Sheinn’ll take ye down the beach.”

  The beach. Outside the gate, so we must wait for the gate-watch to open for the day. I had to gulp.

  “Yes, sir, I’m so sorry to have brought this trouble on you, I never meant to do it, but—the beach.” Did they mean to cast me adrift as Frotha had? My left hand had suddenly, unintentionally, shut on Hvestang’s sheath. “If you please, sir? My packs?”

  “Sheinn’ll take the packs for ye. Ye’ve a cloak? Aye. Put—that, then—underneath.”

  “Yes, sir.” Another who thought ahead. I took a careful, thankful breath. “But—the beach?”

  “Aerful’s buoyed, but t’is low-tide. She’ll be half aground. Sheinn’ll see ye aboard. Aerful’s my boat. Herrin’ boat,” he expanded belatedly. “Ye’ll find stores there. Vithre’ll give ye herbs.”

  Herbs, stores, a boat. My head swam with fatigue and stress and hope. “Yes, sir. What am I—”

  “Bide ye till we come. Belowdecks, aye?” A somewhat self-conscious pause. “Ye’ll maybe mislike the reek, but . . . T’is these.” He gestured briefly, the direction clear from the distaste in his voice. “First we’d a mind to leave ’em in the street, an’ let the clack fall as it would. But there’s too many questions loose an’ too much known already. About ye, an’ y’r brother, an’—what I’ve blabbed. So we’ll let the loobies come, an’ gowk an’ squawk an’ carry the word. Thrif’s father, he’ll be grieved, but I doubt he’ll cry blood-debt. Not with ’em lyin’ here, dark lantern an’ line an’ dirks an’ all. An’ the door full snibbed.”

  My head reeled as Two caught us up: they meant to get me out of the way, of gossip, of retribution, of Stokka’s undoubted interest. They meant to run the gauntlet of talk over a pair of locals dead. But in Ve Pool, where slavers landed as a matter of course, men slain in blatant burglary would not warrant an open feud.

  And they would decide all this themselves.

  “Will the lord not say, not judge, what’s happened? Who’s to blame? To pay?”

  Fiskri snorted softly. “For this pair o’ line-snippers, off his own grounds, an’ maybe trouble kept from him after? Nay.”

  “Oh.”

  “So ye’re away out, and no word left o’ ye, Stokka’ll let it go.”

  “But—but!” The reality spun back on me. “How were they killed, what will you say happened? And—and—”

  And would everyone in the house tell the same tale?

  “Ne’er you mind for Heima. She’s a tongue on her, and flings blame about. But she’ll not tattle over this.”

  “Yes, sir.” Could the children be so suppressed? “But about what happened? What will you say?”

  His shadow shrugged. “Happen they’d a disagreement, an’ fell out. T’would no’ be the first.”

  “No. No. Wait.” Even if no-one made a true, ruler’s enquiry, how would they explain the wounds, the men’s own, clean blades? More vitally, what they had been doing here?

  Then light burst on me, with the blaze of a full dawn.

  “Sir, sir. Say they came to rob me and I killed them. Wait.” The next connection struck and I clutched Hvestang off the floor. “With this.”

  His mouth fell open. I yanked Hvestang to me and almost laughed aloud.

  “If they doubt, if even Stokka doubts, say the sword led me. Like in the stories, the outland stories.” I could hear Therkon in the Sickle uplands, reciting the Delta saga of the sword that fought by itself. “I just had to hold it, it made the kill. And now it’s gone, we’ve both gone away!”

  And Stokka, Two was almost making me laugh aloud, Stokka gave me the sword, it’s Stokka’s loss, for the deaths it’s Stokka who’ll be to blame.

  Fiskri’s mouth was still open, but he was catching up fast. “Aye. Aye.” His face spoke the conclusions back to me, Stokka muzzled by his own deed, motive, means, both evident: everyone could blame the absent outlander. “Aye, lass. So long as ye’re out o’ the way, that’d be best of all.”

  Out of the way. Abruptly the malice and pleasure quenched. “Yes, sir. If I could stay on your boat. Just a day. Perhaps, then, I could walk to Mirkadin. Or Thring’s Deep? And, and try to find a ship.” With the packs, and Hvestang, how far would I get? But I could not stay to endanger them. And to follow Therkon, I could not delay.

  “Walk?” Fiskri all but toppled off his heels, he straightened up so fast. “Did ye not understand, girl? Ye’ll walk to the Aerful, aye. I had no time to tell ye. They were talkin’, round at Drek’s. Thralli, he sailed for Rostack. Thinkin’ a sale, maybe, in Eithay town. Once fettle this, we’ll be down the boat wi’ ye, the three of us, an’ so the Mither smiles, we’ll catch the noonday tide.”

  * * * *

  Sheinn solved the pack question by calmly hitching them

  together, wrapping a swathe of net around, and hanging it all over his shoulder like a pair of saddlebags. At the gate he jerked his thumb to me and observed, “Some o’ Veenn’s kin. Wantin’ a passage to Mirkadin.” He rolled his eyes and the gate-watch

  swallowed his yawn in a laugh and a glance at the damp, louring grey sky.

  “He’ll maybe regret it, aye! But ye’re never goin’ to Mirkadin just for him?”

  At which Sheinn cast his own eyes heavenward and answered resignedly, “T’is Fiskri taken a bee in the ear this time. Swearin’ sure, somewhere by Rostack, we’ll find fish.”

  “Fish?” The watch’s answering eye-roll died in an expression I had not expected. Then he touched knuckles to his breast and said, all but under his breath, “Mither grant him sight.”

  * * * *

  Aerful means Sea-fowl, but she was no flyer, only a three-man fishing boat, even smaller and slower than the Tolla. She took five days to make Rostack, and for the first three I was more than happy to obey Vithre’s commands. “Get aboard, get below, take this when it’s needed.” He had made me a whole flask of willow­bark, already compounded and stoppered with an actual cork. “And let yourself heal.” With a pause, and a wry glance. “The ribs as well.”

  The flask survived upending in my packs, and in those three days I commended him to the Mother over and over again. Not merely for the surety of sleep in the cramped, fish-acrid quarters among three strange, if reticently respectful men, or for the drowse that cocooned Aerful’s constant saw and pitch in what Fiskri called “a sour milk wind,” but above all, for a way to ease the shock. To break the memories’ cycle. The terror of death. The sounds of dying. Worst of all, the thud and sink of a blade in naked human flesh.

  By the fourth morning the fug belowdecks outweighed that slow subsidence. I crept up the two-step companionway and turned Two loose on deck.

  Aerful sat low in the water, with a pronounced rake from a higher stem, her paint a faded blue with now dingy white trim, and black seeing eyes. She had a single tall mast and gaffed mainsail, and her living quarters were far rougher than the Tolla’s, though most of belowdecks was also devoted to holds. She was one of what, a bare five years since, had been a twenty strong fishing fleet.

  “Gale took ’em,” Fiskri told me. “Southerly, out o’ season, out o’ strength. Put the fifteen
of ’em straight on Skeia Rocks.” He stared somberly forward, past the tall leach of the dark-red sail. The sky there was grey, as it had been since I came out of his house, grey as the miserly, restless sea. “Never picked up more than a couple o’ boys.”

  Fiskri had told me all I asked about Terrace, about Mirkadin, about Thralli. Above all, about Rostack and Eithay, and Two and Azo’s tenets made me near insatiable. But I knew better than to demand, What brought the gale? Let alone to mention Sthassamaer. When it came to the Why rather than the How of the steady calendar of calamities, Fiskri would clam up faster than Veenn.

  Rain spattered in constant drizzles, and the wind, tetchy as the ocean, chopped yet again from south to south-east. Fiskri shifted the helm and muttered tiredly under his breath. Halri stuck his head up from mending an over-mended net, and Fiskri shook his head. No tacking yet. I knew now why not. Why he himself looked so gaunt. Five years and more of calamities had brought Ve Pool near starvation. He would conserve all their strength.

  Five years, Therkon had said, since the unseasonal storms began to wreck Dhasdein’s ships. What had happened to drive the weather, the seasons, life itself awry, five years ago?

  Too close to the brink that mystery had brought, Fiskri would not help me speculate. I looked into the eye of the wind instead, and said, “Do you think it’ll storm?”

  He gave me a slightly odd glance. I wondered if the memories of Sickle had somehow infiltrated my voice. Then he shrugged his canvas-swathed shoulders and said, “Pray the Mither not.”

  Cold comfort, after all their help. I tried to repay by working with them over the scanty meals, the nets, but I had found no real recompense before a smudge climbed from the persistently surly sea, and Fiskri said, for the first time letting me hear

  tension eased, “Yon’s Rostack.”

  * * * *

  At closer quarters Rostack was lofty and forbidding as Sickle. “Aye, well, t’is named Red Cliffs.” Aerful had to beat long and hard down-coast from the prow of Nebin Head, with its swirling sea-birds and the crash of surf too vividly reminiscent of Evva beach, before the grey sea surrendered a beading of human work behind a lower point. Halri, at the tiller, nodded to me and said, “Eithay.”