Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

Then Rathi said harshly, “Was that y’r ‘companion,’ too?”

  Therkon shuddered once and took his eyes from mine. Looked vaguely at the soiled sheets, the empty bowl. Then lifted his stare to Rathi and answered bleakly, “No. That was what brought us here.”

  Rathi’s mouth opened, and I felt my own jaw drop. Two had named, we had both thought we accepted Therkon as strategist, but his decisions could still catch us both unawares.

  Therkon pushed bowl and tray away and began at the beginning. With the Dhasdeini wrecks, and the survivor in that Sea-fort bed.

  When he stopped, Rathi had subsided on the forsaken stool, with both hands plunged wrist-deep in his beard, yanking it so hard his head swung to and fro.

  “Somethin’ brought ye to the Isles. Wrecked y’r ship. Saved ye, maybe. Sent ye on south. Maybe. So ye cannot say, flatly, Aye, or Nay. Ye only think this bogle’s arranged things. Tiran’s eyes, d’ye mean it arranged me?”

  Therkon answered flintily, “There is no use trying to divide what was planned from what went awry.”

  Because if I had been manipulated on the cliff, with intent to part me from Therkon, why would I have been allowed to rejoin him? And if we were both meant to die, why would a rescue have been allowed on Skall?

  “But ye can make no sense of this either way?” Rathi was almost ready to tear his hair. “Do ye at least know what’s doin’ it? Do ye have the faintest idea where ye’re goin’?”

  Therkon looked up with eyes black as midnight water, and said, “Kaastria.” Just as Two said, “Sthassamaer.”

  For an instant Rathi froze. Then he almost shouted, “What d’ye know—what have ye heard—how d’ye know about that?”

  He had gone a clay-ish grey, and his hand had flown by instinct into the horns. Therkon stared at him, and then at me. But I was already staring at him.

  He looked back to Rathi. Tiredly, he said, “The survivor said it. The Seer knew it. She said, Black water. My—Chaeris—sees—feels—black water. Rising. Around her.”

  Rathi gulped, twice. I said, flat and loud, “Kaastria?”

  They both jerked round, but my own eyes were already fixed. “Kaastria. When did you think of—why did you decide on that?”

  Therkon scrabbled a little higher among the tangled, soiled sheets. He still looked half invalid and half vagabond, but the hatchet man, the crown prince, the strategist, were all in that steely stare.

  “That was the name she had.” He spoke to me, as if we were alone. “The name we were given. The sagas’ message. The clue. Whatever muddles, whatever tangles have befallen since, we have always moved toward Kaastria. Whatever we did.”

  “But t’is only one island, and half the Isles around ye! Why d’ye say that?”

  “Because Kaastria is the only name we had.”

  He stopped, and stared past me into the grey mosaic of rain.

  “And Kaastria,” he added flatly, “is in ruin.”

  Where had he heard it? At Ve Pool, on Eithay, from Thralli’s crew, even on the way to Skall? But in whatever extremity, the strategist had not mislaid the gift.

  Rathi seemed to have been struck mute. Then he swallowed and croaked, “Ruins? Why ruins—?”

  Therkon’s back sagged, and he began to slide down against the pillows. The quick, unforeseeable ebb of over-tried strength. But he flapped a hand at me and managed, “Chaeris? Two?”

  And Two was already answering for us both.

  “You are the strategist,” she said.

  Rathi clutched his hair and almost bellowed, “Will the pair o’ ye just make sense?”

  Two answered, but not to him, “Because the name was given,” she said. “Because on Kaastria, there will be no-one else.”

  The casement rattled in a sudden little gust and a draft slid across the room. I felt the goosebumps rise on my neck.

  No-one else to intervene, Two meant, for good or evil, as Azo and Verrith and Deoren had in the wreck, and Nouip and Frotha on Sickle, and Veenn’s folk, and Vithre, and even Stokka, at Ve Pool. Or Rathi, at Eithay and Skall. No-one else to mar plans. No-one else to rescue us.

  “Because,” I said to Rathi, “Two or I can read information. But at the point, we are troublecrew. We just have to make things happen. My—brother—knows what the things should be.”

  Rathi hurled both hands in the air.

  “So he decides ye’re goin’ to Kaastria? Now? Wi’ him limp as a jug o’ whey, an’ ye no’ much better, an no’ a ship or hand between ye. An’ ye want to go to Kaastria? To ferret in a heap o’ flood-wrack and mud-fall an’, an’—what are ye goin’ to do?”

  Between him and my own terrors, I was very close to tears. “I don’t know! I don’t know how we’ll go or what we’ll find or what’ll happen and I don’t care! I only know, we have to go!”

  Therkon stirred, and tried to lift a hand, then his head. I put my own hand hard on his and stared at Rathi, who was staring, as speechless and over-harried, at me.

  Then he pushed the stool aside and said flatly, “Nay.”

  We both stared. Rathi shoved fingers yet again into, through and out of his beard.

  “If ye can find nothin’ better, between ye, this part I’ll tell. Ye may take ship for Kaastria.” A sudden little shudder ran through him. “But ye’ll do it on Anfluga, the pair o’ ye. Ye’ll sail wi’ me.”

  Therkon heaved himself half up, and put in huskily but dourly, “I will go with you.”

  He let me shout, conserving his strength. When I finished he had slid almost flat again, and let his eyes close. But at the pause he opened them and added, on a note that had become familiar, “Chaeris, it wants you.”

  One of us had to go: we had no choice, he had already come to terms with that. Plan how we liked, the margin was no longer wide enough to think of reversing the tide. We had chosen to come south, on Phaerea. If we refused here, simply baulked, even took a ship and tried to sail back toward Dhasdein, how far would we get? In the teeth of that steadily northering wind?

  So he would go. If it wanted me, then I was the more valuable, to the Isles, to Dhasdein and Iskarda. I must be left behind, protected, never hazarded. So if he did meet the enemy on Kaastria, I might still survive. Might still help the Isles, or if that was unnecessary, might go back, to bring the news, to become the next kingpost of Dhasdein.

  Without him.

  I might have screamed protests. I might have drowned in tears. Neither of them touched Two.

  “If it wants us,” she said, “will it take you instead?”

  Therkon’s eyes flew open. Shock, disbelief. Disillusion. Something near despair.

  “You can’t—”

  On my own account I snorted at him. “Do I have a choice?”

  Because Two was right. If I did not go, would it even bother with Therkon? Might it not simply bypass him for some new ploy focused on its real target, now conveniently, perhaps utterly, even fatally alone?

  I worked down Two’s logic paths and wondered that I had not already seen it for myself. If staying had been an immoral choice on Sickle, it was outright impossible now.

  Therkon put both hands over his eyes. Rathi stood abruptly back from the bedside and growled, “I’ll find the healer. Whatever chances next, ye’ll not be leavin’ the day.”

  * * * *

  We did not leave Gildair for a whole six days more. When I look back, it seems a time that swung like a pendulum between the Mother’s heaven and the Adversary’s hell. Because by day there was Therkon, safe, mine to cosset and tend and lovingly tyrannize over, recovering fast but still unfit or unwilling to rebel. But by night there was memory and dream to fling me back into Skall’s freezing murk, to the sights, the sounds, the sensation of a light-gun shearing human flesh.

  The third evening, after the healer had brought his salves and diminishing bandages, I found Therkon sitting, as he had m
ost of the day, on the side of the bed. As I came in he said quietly, “Chaeris? Would you wish to sleep in here tonight?”

  I could feel my jaw sag. Injunctions and recollections raced past me, divided rooms or separate cabins, that searing insight on the hill in Skall. Sharp panic as Two fired other memories atop them, the weight and warmth of him asleep on my shoulder, the muscled support of his back against my forehead, the velvet touch of belly skin under my hand . . .

  “It’s not correct, no.” He spoke in some apparent embarrassment, eyes on the floor. “But,” sounding rueful now, “after Phaerea, and the hills, ah, we may be past correctness, do you think?”

  I could not suppress Two and speak as well. He looked up, and it was open anxiety now.

  “We could make a partition. Hang a sheet, perhaps. They could bring another bed.”

  I found words, however foolish. “It—why?”

  His lashes went down again. He had adamantly demanded to shave, the very first day, but his hair was still loose as I had hardly seen it before Gildair. Through its shadows even whale-oil light did not fully reveal his face.

  “I would feel happier. If I knew. If I was at least in earshot—of you.”

  The strategist. He was thinking ahead of me, even of Two, considering some incursion here, as in Fiskri’s house. And I was thinking, as fast as Two, that it was a more than cogent point. Never mind modesty, forget nightmares. What if the enemy decided to move, this time against him?

  I said, “I’ll ask Husvorth what they can do.”

  So when the next nightmare brought me gasping up in a pool of sweat it was not half-dark and solitude that met me, but the glow of a night-light. And Therkon, silent in bare feet and nightshirt, drawing aside the makeshift curtain to murmur, “Chaeris?”

  He had known better than to walk in and touch me. Not troublecrew, fresh sprung from nightmare and still half-awake. Or perhaps, his own custom forbade breaking in on any female, however close she had become to him, in her bed.

  In a moment I managed, “I’m all right.”

  “Of course.” His head slanted, against the back-light. “But I, at least, could use a sleep-settler. Heillor showed me how to heat up milk.”

  In the peat coals of the brazier that served as fireplace, in a little brass pot, from the jugful on the window-ledge. A jug that must have come each night after I so tactfully left him to put himself to bed.

  By the time the milk reached a bearable drinking heat, it seemed natural to sit on his bedside as we sipped.

  “Ugh,” I said, the only safe thing that came to mind. “I hate hot milk.”

  He laughed, a breath in the night-lamp’s twilight. “Drink up. It’s good for you.”

  “My fathers used to say that.” The pang of memory almost blocked my throat. Evenings in infancy, one or the other of them taxed with the job of “getting Chaeris to bed.” Whether by cajolery, bribe or threat.

  “My nurse,” he said, after a pause that nearly over-charged the moment, “said it too.”

  His father was an emperor. Who would never do something as menial as bed down a son himself.

  And I knew he had bad dreams too, and it would only embarrass him to say, Did I wake you? He would surely know better than to ask what had woken me. The past was forbidden territory. As for the future . . .

  Rathi talked about thatt daily, mapping routes to Kaastria. “No’ down t’west o’ Hamair, though that’s quickest, aye.” Hamair was the one big island ahead. “But the chance o’ weather’s worse. An’ ye’ll no’ want another turn o’ the sea-qualm for him.”

  So instead we would slant down Hamair’s long, deeply indented eastern side, past capes and towns Rathi named with old familiarity. “Easy enough, wi’ this wind settin’ northerly. An’ Anfluga’ll run better, on that reach.” Faster, as well as easier on Therkon’s stomach, I understood.

  “If this pestilent weather ever turns.” Rathi again, grumbling at the window with its vista of dull-blue tile and stone, dark grey sky, pelting squalls of rain. “Tiran damp it. Ye’d think, by this time, we’d be half into spring. Seems the whole year’s turned hindabout, an’ headed back to winter again.”

  And the wind still sat persistently from northward, a wholly untoward phenomenon in the Isles, whose weather came up from the west and south. Rathi had grumbled about that, too, if less than about the rain. “At least, if the cursed wind’s still workin’ westerly, it’ll no’ be in our teeth.”

  Now I looked abruptly along the bedside at Therkon, who was looking at me. When our eyes met he put out a hand and laid it over mine.

  Don’t think about it. Don’t wonder how and why the wind sits so long and so unusually as it is. He had known where my mind went, as I could have guessed for him. To the future, the real future, the unknown that waited for us on Kaastria, at the voyage’s end.

  And he had not paused to consider Two’s reaction, or mine, or his own scruples. Not this time.

  I turned my hand under his and his fingers shut, gently but decisively. We sat uncounted moments, taking comfort in the simplest, most banal human contact, in the empty night.

  * * * *

  In truth, neither Rathi nor I expected to be out of Gildair in less than a week. But for all his damages and privation, the third morning Therkon was up, walking, however unsteadily, about his room. Coming downstairs at intervals the fourth day, and ready, the fifth morning, for a sortie outside.

  Heillor firmly vetoed that. But at noon Rathi came into the taproom with a pleased expression, announcing, “Picked up a cargo. Naught but letters an’ such, an’ it’ll take us clear in to Rangar. But we can take shore-rest there. An’ the better for it.”

  He slanted a look at Therkon, mulishly established on a back-wall stool, meaning, too clearly, The better for you. Therkon returned crisply, “Can you sail tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Rathi stared. “We could, aye.”

  “If the wind suits,” Therkon said flatly, “so can I.”

  Rathi scrubbed his beard and looked anxiously at me. Therkon shot me one glance and got off the stool. “Tomorrow,” he said, in the crown prince’s voice, and whatever incompletely healed whipmarks and unfaded bruises he might be concealing, I knew better than to dispute.

  Because I knew that he, like me, could not bear any more delay. Whatever was on Kaastria, whatever the outcome, he wanted it met. Done. Over with.

  He did have to leave me most of the mundane arrangements, down to trading two more gems to pay the inn, the healer, Rathi and his crew for the two past passages, and, at my insistence, half the fair value of a further voyage to an unspecified port in Kaastria. I thought, with satisfaction, that I had learnt chaffering from Fiskri’s example, as well as caution in taking Segil and both stroke oars as escort to the money-changer. Until I overheard Husvorth and Rathi by the kitchen, Husvorth saying, on a note of wonder, “Paid the whole score, for y’r men as well. An’ never quibbled once!”

  While Rathi responded, with something closer to respect than satisfaction, “Aye. Bountiful as the Mither, she is.”

  Therkon did have the better of me over his new boots. It was manifestly ridiculous to summon a custom-making cobbler to the Lobster Pot. Nor could he do without. So his first genuine excursion was “up-town,” as Rathi described it, with someone’s weather-canvas instead of Nouip’s cloak—“we’ll not want a riot, d’ye see?”—Segil and Rathi both in attendance, and me right at his elbow, all but biting my tongue in between trying to see five ways at once.

  When we came back, the tap-room light showed him rather white about the mouth, but he made his own way upstairs. And when the boots arrived, altered from the best pair the cobbler had, he greeted them upright, if seated. “Now,” he said, pulling his hair back into its usual tail, suddenly turning into an approximate copy of the man I remembered in Riversend, “we can go.”

  I watched the dawn break ne
xt morning, grey and wretched as ever, feeling stretched and jaded after a mostly sleepless night. But departure already had its own momentum. The inn-score was paid. Our packs were filled. Breakfast had been ordered. Heillor arrived for a final examination and consignment of salves. And with them, to my amazement, a little vial of brown powder that, when he lifted the cork, emitted the pungent, unmistakable scent of imperial spice.

  “He’s a fussy stomach, aye,” Heillor observed complacently. “Ye’ll likely need a store of this.”

  A greater boon than decent boots. I shut my hand over it as on a butterfly, and managed, “I can’t thank you. How much—?” And he gave me an airy wave.

  “Lass, ye’ve paid me o’er and above asking.” A quick half-grin and a glance at Therkon, embroiled with Rathi over something. “Y’r man did most o’ the work himself. You take that now.” For an instant his look changed, into something that recalled the tone in Rathi’s words to Husvorth. “An’ remember us.”

  I would remember, I thought, with the last hot toast and delectably salted porridge warm in my belly, the rain beating futilely over my weather-canvas and knitted cap, and underneath, the heavy trousers and sweater Rathi had insisted I buy. “Those furs’ll ward him in Tiran’s own ice-house, but that bitty cloak an’—an’ y’r other things—” in Gildair too, women all wore skirts—“’ll never hold an honest southerly.” I would remember, yes, with as poignant a longing as I had preserved even the shape of Tolla’s cabin steps. Another sanctuary, so briefly found, so soon drawn away.

  Rain sheened the cobblestones and pocked the puddles, wind beat our gear as we tramped dourly onto the wharf. Anfluga was moored rather than beached, with a spare sail for tarpaulin abaft the rowing thwarts. To keep, Rathi carefully did not explain, a place dry for my delicate brother, at least until we cast off. It gave me some amusement to watch how swiftly they had learnt to manage imperial pride.

  We scrambled down and stowed ourselves, packs against the side, Hvestang atop. Only this time there were two of us to crouch beside them, as the rowers settled and the rope-men went into action, the warps dropped splashing, and Rathi nodded to Segil: Cast off.