Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  “What do you ask?” said Two.

  Even Fiskri drew breath that time. I struggled not to squeeze my eyes shut as I screamed, Shut up, shut up, you just played right into her hands!

  “How if I say, the sword?”

  She really was toying with me. I cursed Two again and with too much distraction. She had answered before I could.

  “The sword is not ours to give.”

  This time the Lady’s lip curled in a definite if unpleasant smile. “Oh, aye?”

  “It came to my brother,” I got control before Two could make worse trouble, “from the Seer. Who is of Langlieve’s line.”

  She had sat back an inch, perhaps despite herself. Her brows climbed again, but I could tell that name carried weight.

  “And did she say t’would stay with him?”

  “The Seer said, he would have use for it.” The rest leapt at me as from the sagas that Two remembered so vividly well. “The sword speaks for itself.”

  It puts an end to dispute. That corpse in the Grithsperry gutter. Colne on his own gangplank, face purple with impotent rage.

  “Does it so?” She could not have known what I remembered, but she read the intonation more than well enough. The eyebrow had climbed again. “An’ so ye’d give him back its use?”

  My heart did a dolphin leap somewhere under my chin. “If m’lord so please.” Even “m’lord” did not choke me as it might.

  “Ye’d have me name a price? Any other price?” She leant back again into the high-backed chair. The hand wave appended, Anything other than the sword?

  Don’t offer an actual price, Fiskri had beaten into me. For the money price, let her come to you.

  Silently, I bent my head.

  “Ye’ve coin for a ship-load o’ herrin’. I doubt a brither’s worth less.” My eyes jerked up. She was smiling, a little, smug,

  ambushed-cat smile. “Pity I’ve no way o’ testin’ that.”

  I did manage to keep my hands still. I hope, to hold my face still. To swallow the breath that seemed to choke in my throat. To look, and nothing more.

  “Y’r brither was here, aye. For an Outlander, a fine piece o’ man. Vinegar tongue an’ uppity ways an’ all. I’d like fine to have had the breakin’ o’ him.” Her smile flickered like an adder’s tongue. “But happen I found him other uses. To pay, ye might say, a debt for m’self.”

  The hall was wavering about me as if clear water rose over my head. I dug the nails into my hands and concentrated on that to keep my head up, since I could not bite my lip. It was Fiskri whose deep voice intervened.

  “M’lord?” He at least sounded steady. “What d’ye mean?”

  She glanced once at him and back at me. The enjoyment was delicate, but gloating all the same.

  “Y’r brother’s gone to the Lord o’ Skall,” she answered sweetly. “He sailed this mornin’. I’d need for a fine partin’ gift.”

  * * * *

  “South, aye,” Fiskri said wearily. “Skall’s south an’ west o’ Sandouin. T’is said they trawl the Hamair traffic, them tryin’ to dodge the Fleshes comin’ north.”

  “Trawl traffic? What?” My brain was refusing to work at all. “What traffic . . . Oh.” My heart sank. “Oh, no.”

  You’d best not call them pirates, Frotha had said, in the south.

  “Angrir,” Sheinn growled, and spat over the side. “What in Tiran’s ice brought that limb o’ misdeed up this far? Now?”

  “Hraffni,” Halri retorted, and spat over the opposite side.

  “Ravens,” Fiskri told my bewildered stare. The curl of his lip added the rest. Carrion birds, both lords. Feeding on slavery, on piracy, on the slow unraveling of the Isles. What likelier than that, nowadays, they should make common cause?

  “Aye,” Sheinn grunted. “But hap she’d no’ bid him here, either. There was need,” a hard stroke emphasised it, “of a fine partin’ gift.”

  “You mean,” neither Two nor I were thinking well, “she didn’t want alliance? He just came? And she had to get rid of him?”

  None of them looked at me. But presently Sheinn growled in his throat. Yes.

  So Therkon had been traded as a bribe, a sweetener. To a

  pirate. From a woman who would have taken pleasure in breaking him.

  What manner of creature had him now?

  I bent over on the thwart and laid my face in my hands. Let me go home, I besought the Mother, as the tears began to well. Or let this all be some longdrawn nightmare, and wake me, now. To the fire with the Isles and Dhasdein and the River and Sthassamaer. I have made nothing but mistakes from beginning to end and now it’s beyond me. I’ve lost Therkon, again, maybe beyond recall. I’ve used and jeopardized all these other people and now it’s just too much. I can’t go on. Let me go. Take me home.

  A hand settled across my shoulders. Nobody spoke, but the silence in the dinghy was solid as its touch: not condemnation, but silent comfort. Determination. Trust.

  Then Fiskri said above me, “Sheinn, we’ll be needin’ stores.”

  “No.” Two spoke before I could. Two had my head out of my hands regardless of the tears, Two was saying what I should have, had I had either resolution or words. “You have cargo. It must go to Ve Pool. You must not go further south. You are needed northward. You must be home before the storm.”

  They were all gaping: Fiskri by me in the stern-sheets, Halri in the bow, Sheinn at the oars. This time, I thought as my belly went to water, they’ll know it’s Two beyond all doubt. And what will they do then?

  It was Fiskri who spoke first. Steadily, as Fiskri could. Evenly, too evenly.

  “Lass? Is that ye?”

  I bit my lip on craven evasions. If anyone did, they deserved the truth.

  “She’s—part of me. Me and not-me. She—comes from Iskarda. From long before Iskarda. She—we—were born together. I—we—sometimes she speaks for me. Instead of me. She has—memories. Sometimes, she knows what I—we should do.”

  They had stopped breathing. Sheinn had stopped rowing. Their eyes were round as bilge-stops. Now, I thought wretchedly, it’s over. Now they’ll name me for a witch and toss me overboard.

  Fiskri got breath, audibly, first. “Ye mean—there’s two o’ ye?”

  When I nodded, beyond words, he breathed in again. And then almost burst out, “An’ t’other. She. She knows what to do?”

  All too open portents of disaster, every past warning about silence and discretion fulfilled. I could only say desperately, “She can, can, put facts together. Sometimes she knows. Yes.”

  Fiskri caught his breath again. Halri flung his glance from one end of Eithay harbour to the other and almost shouted, “Storm?”

  “You can see that yourself!” I nearly shouted in turn. “I’m sorry, I only meant, you know the sea, you can tell—” their stares were thoroughly discomposing—“I mean, if I can, you must, too!”

  And after another aching pause, Fiskri said somewhat shakily, “Aye. Aye. The lass is right. There’s somethin’ comin’, ye can feel that. Don’t need some—some—We can see that, aye.”

  “Then you know what we have to do.” It did not need Two now. “I have to go on. To Skall or wherever it is. You have to go back. Your family. Ve Pool needs you. I can’t,” I felt the tears return despite myself, “I can’t take you with me. Not any more.”

  Fiskri patted my back, absently but gently, while Halri made comforting noises. Sheinn rowed. But as we came under Aerful’s quarter he shipped oars and said, “The lass’s right.”

  The other two made protesting, disapproving sounds. Sheinn looked at Fiskri and gave a snort.

  “What speed’ll we make, wi’ a hold full o’ fish? But we can find,” his eye glinted, “somethin’ better. An’ be sure t’is better for her.”

  Chapter XIII

  I argued my way on board, belowdeck, ab
ovedeck again. Clambering back into the dinghy, Fiskri just looked over his shoulder and asked, “Are ye comin’, lass? Or not?”

  Left to myself, I would probably have leapt to the nearest deck and paid whatever they asked for passage anywhere south. By the time my companions sieved half the port, I had learnt better. Not a fishing boat, too slow, not the fast fore-and-aft rigged schooner, she would be sailing north for Inganess on Terrace, and not the schooner from Cuwen, because “her skipper’s a rascal.” Nor the solid-looking brig. “She’s another slaver, lass.”

  When they did make a choice, a well-kept sloop whose

  captain’s name they knew, we met a flat head-shake and a, “No’ headed that way.” With a look south-east, into the eye of the wind, that added, Who in his right mind would?

  “T’is no’ the gale,” Fiskri said grimly, after the fourth refusal. “The Woman’s been busy.”

  Spelling from oar-work in the bows, Sheinn glowered. “So t’other sells him on now, what’s it to her? She gave the man away.” But Fiskri shook his head.

  “T’would have been a pledge. She’d no’ want him thinkin’ she’s changed her mind.”

  By the time we rowed, tired, damp and crestfallen, back to Aerful, I was frantic. Every hour was taking Therkon further away. With the wind making, every hour lost here would increase the gap, and if a storm was coming in truth I desperately wanted Aerful out, off, homeward bound before it struck. But, “We’re goin’ nowhere,” Fiskri said flatly, “till we’ve sorted passage for ye.”

  We were belowdecks, waiting in glum silence for the kettle to boil, when something bumped alongside, and a shout sounded overhead.

  As we stuck our heads up he came scrambling lightly aboard and straightened up: an old man, I realized, startled by the lithe, assured movement in contrast to the long beard, the equally grey hair, an old man seeming well into the spindling, muscle-wasting phases of age. But his dark eyes were neither faded nor filmed, and he stood straight as he said, “I hear ye’re wantin’ a passage south?”

  “Aye.” Fiskri’s answer was slow. He would be scanning the usual heavy trousers and boots, well-kept if not new, the jacket under an equally well-kept weather-canvas. The dinghy and

  rower alongside. “Where’re ye bound?”

  “Anfluga, out o’ Munen. We’re a sixer, but new-scraped. An’ the wind’s workin’ east.”

  I had no idea what any of it meant, but I could read Fiskri now. Favorable, so far.

  “We’re wantin’,” he said slowly, “a passage to Skall. To Yinstey, aye?”

  The old man combed his beard. “So we go soon, aye. We’ll run as quick for Yinstey as Munen. So it’s worth our while, beatin’ back.”

  “The passenger,” Fiskri said after another thoughtful moment, “’ll make it worth your while. So ye get her there, soon as wind’ll carry ye. An’ in one piece.”

  “What do ye take me for?” The old man straightened with a jerk. “We’re no’ coggers or slavers. Or rude men, either, d’ye see?”

  Fiskri produced one short wicked grin. “I’ve no call to worry for her. I’m thinkin’ o’ the craft.”

  The old man paused, then shrugged. “I’ve run to an’ from Sandouin all m’ life. To Eithay, often enough, wi’ the whalebone from Hivell an’ Kaastria. An’ wi’ Anfluga six summers now. Ye can ask ashore. What ye’re doin’ here, I can’t say. But we’ll be comin’ back.”

  Fiskri nodded, even more slowly. Then he said, “Anfluga, aye. An’ who’d you be?”

  His name was Rathi, which means something like, Advice, but he was normally taciturn, to my relief. Anfluga was beached beyond the port: a six-oared boat, though bigger than Aerful, high-raked and pointed at both stem and stern. Uncomfortably, Two’s ancient Amberlight memories informed me, like a River raiding craft. She was broad-beamed, with hardly a keel to speak of, and a single square-rigged sail like Aspis. Most daunting of all to me, she was undecked.

  Fiskri and Sheinn seemed undeterred. They examined her clean, “new-scraped” outer planks, her rigging, then her crew. They actually did check with a shipper: then Fiskri negotiated a fair price to Yinstey, and I produced half the coin.

  When we returned to Aerful for my packs, they loaded me with spare willowbark, a flat tin of tallow—“Keep the sea out o’ them boots”—and a cascade of advice. We rowed back to the beach. And then, with half her crew and my packs already aboard Anfluga, it was time to say goodbye.

  None of us could find many words. Sheinn and Halri did

  produce weak grins and sallies about not carving up the oarsmen before Skall. I did try again to voice my thanks. Then I consigned Two to the fire and hugged them all, careless of whether their bonecrushing responses made her spark or not. Wished them good wind. And torn between loss and relief, that it was little past noon, that they would have half a day’s light to run before that blustery wind working steadily easterly, I watched them row away.

  * * * *

  At first Anfluga was more than daunting: an open hull lacking even Aspis’ hencoop, no foredeck, no sterndeck, neither hold nor cabin. No belowdecks at all. Most was filled by benches and oars, a sail that now seemed rudimentary, the minimal freight lashed to the sides and wrapped in weather-canvas, as I half feared they would do to me. Worse still, waves heaved up higher than the ship and near enough to touch, and worst of all, the entire frame worked like muscles to every shift of the water beneath.

  But however she worked, Anfluga did not leak. With relief, I found the crew remote, but neither crude nor importunate. Like the rowers, I learned that snugging close under the gunwale kept off everything but rain, and of that we had little enough. Like the sail and ropemen, I would snug down amid my packs to the squalls. The ribs seemed mending at last. Beyond cold dry-rations, the stale tasting water-butt, and trying to relieve myself over the bow while chastely wrapped in a cloak without being pitched overboard, the most frustrating part was the impossibility of workouts, lacking either partners or space.

  And the best part was the speed. With the wind set ideally on her aft quarter, Anfluga ran the sea like a wooden form of her namesake: Loneflyer, the great southern albatross. When I asked, rather timidly, if we would be far behind Angrir, Rathi almost achieved a snort.

  “A wind like this, Anfluga’ll do Eithay to Munen in four days or less. An’ another to Yinstey.” He patted the vibrating tiller bar. “In that barrel he calls a skaw, he’ll no’ land under a week.”

  Munen was the main northern port on the big isle of Sandouin. Skall lay westward, a small island, one of Rathi’s rare speeches informed me. Yet again I added the days, and prayed to the

  Mother on my own account. Surely, Therkon could not come to much harm, even in a week, on an ocean-going boat?

  We made landfall off the cliff-girt point of Oddi, Sanduoin’s broad westernmost promontory, on a dour, chilling day that had already tightened my nerves. Anfluga altered course then, pushing on west across a last narrow strait into the murk that waited beyond.

  Skall came out of grey sea and sky behind the grey smoke of a receding shower, like a towering, jaggedly-crowned grey ghost. ‘Cliffs an’ seabirds,’ Rathi had said in a more loquacious moment, ‘an’ not much else.’ In those long minutes as the outline coalesced, all I could see was cliffs: broken, deeply indented, uninhabited ciffs, rising sheer to the edge of sight.

  But the ropemen were standing by, calm and collected, the rowers still lounging off-bench. At the tiller, as if he did this every day, Rathi was laying a course by eye to angle slightly further south. Pointing the bow into what had become a cloud and rain-veiled gap in the shoreline, that with the wind almost due easterly would make its southern cliffs Anfluga’s leeward shore.

  I swallowed Two’s alarm and got down amid my packs.

  Another shower overtook us, hissed into the white-flecked waves and passed, veiling Skall in turn. The wind had grown steadily more bitter. The oa
rsmen had donned their weather-

  canvas, I was grateful in earnest for my knitted cap. Now, whirling past on a truly vicious gust, I saw white flakes that were not foam.

  Snow. My first snow outside Iskarda.

  Behind the shower the cliffs re-solidified. Much higher, they seemed, even higher than Rack Head, and far more rugged, though oddly immaterial through rain and cloud-light and the continuous sheets of spray. I had a sudden fear that if I took my eyes off them they would dislimn like a hallucination, and vanish quite away.

  And the port, Yinstey, would be down in the toe of this recess, which had made Rathi more voluble than anything else. “Proper bear-trap, the Gnufe. Good shelter from t’southerlies, aye, but let the wind go half north and ye’re better headin’ home. There’s too many craft come to grief when the wind backed, on that cursed southern arm.”

  I stared at it as Anfluga ran in, one long unbroken parapet of menacing black rock and heaving spray. Yinstey was still lost in the brume, but now I could catch a hint of the short northern cape. We were properly in the Gnufe, the maw of the Gulf.

  My stomach turned over. I looked back into the bitter white eye of the easterly and wondered yet again, What made the wind turn that way? So helpfully, so advantageously for a south-west bound sixer? So helpfully for me?

  Or had it been to help something else?

  * * * *

  Yinstey emerged reluctantly even from the earth. The Gnufe ended in a narrow cup of bay between slanted rock palisades, spatched with what looked like moss, flanking a scant grey beach. Above the sealine, a shelf green with the unhealthy tint of too much rain bore a couple of long tucked-down roofs. “Boat-sheds,” Rathi conceded when I asked. “They’ll no’ risk much here afloat.” One vessel was literally on the beach, rollers showing under her keel. “Angrir’s skaw. They’ll be heavin’ her up soon, too.”

  Not that far ahead of us, then. I swallowed hard and looked for Yinstey itself.

  Beyond the shelf a slope rose into the gullet of the cliffs, branded zigzag by the pale line of a track. The crest showed only a clutter of grey and green roofs, and evanescent sheets of smoke.