Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  taciturn. We sat behind what seemed, after Skalr’s house, a

  scrupulously tidy but almost mundane cottage, and drank Sickle ale with new bread and home-gathered eggs, under the first tiny fruit setting on her apple-tree. Since Two had Skalr’s tale word-perfect, I let her begin.

  “A canny spinner,” Nouip said, when the final silence had gone long enough. “To honor ye, and pass matters outbye her bailiwick. ‘From northward.’” She smiled slightly. “Aye.”

  “Oh! I see.” It had not occurred to me, among the dazzle and embarrassment of being hailed a hero, the careful accounting of everything within the Isles, how masterfully Skalr had excluded so much outside. I had to laugh myself. Even after retelling that tale, nowadays laughter came easily. “I wonder what the other sagas had to leave out?”

  “Such as,” Nouip observed, “that you’ve grown an inch since ye saw me last?”

  “Oh, Nouip! You too? Segil said, I’ll never be called ‘wee’!”

  Therkon had laughed with us. Now he said, “Especially, the sagas forget things about how tired, and cold, and hungry, and frightened the heroes were.” He glanced across to Nouip. “But one thing they never omit is the thanks.” He rose and turned to our packs.

  “My lady Nouip.” Formally, he laid the seal-furs out on the simple plank table. “We have no gift that would suffice. We do not even have all we were given.” I knew he had never forgotten the loss of the cloak-brooch in Jurrick. “But what we have, we can return.”

  He lifted Hvestang from where it had leaned on the bench beside him, and laid it atop the cloak. “Even if it—bears marks of the journey, too.”

  The furs looked no different, though the scent of cedar had become human sweat, and salt, and I always fancied, the after-memory of snow. Hvestang’s sheath was clean and polished to match the blade within. Only the hilt, scorched now to the color of dark honey, had changed.

  Nouip examined both in silence. Then she shifted Hvestang carefully and gathered the cloak to her side of the table, as formally as Therkon had laid it down.

  “This,” she said, “is of and from Evvamoor. It belongs to the Winter Man. T’was lent for the enterprise, and were it lost, that would be within the gift. Now I will keep it in trust once more.”

  “But this,” she took up Hvestang by mid-sheath, “is of my own house, my own line. This I can bestow as I will.” She rose, and held it out, formally, across both hands. “Take this with you, Dhasdein.”

  Therkon very nearly gulped. He did back a step. “My lady Nouip, this is a, an heirloom. A treasure of the Isles. It belongs here, it should not—”

  “T’is of the Isles, aye. And ye’ve seen for y’rselves, t’would be better out of the Isles. For longer than I shall live.”

  Therkon looked up sharply, but he did not try to argue. We had indeed seen for ourselves, at Grithsperry.

  Nouip shifted the sword a little. “Take it for your sake, as well as ours. For the memory. Of who you are. Of what you did.”

  Therkon turned his face away. In a constricted voice he said, “My lady, I have no great desire—nor, indeed, any great claim—to remember what I did.”

  “Think twice, then,” Nouip said flatly. “Why d’you think Skalr named the deed for both o’ ye? And gave you a talename? Spare me false modesty, Dhasdein. Without ye both, we would ne’er have prevailed.”

  We. We, the Isles, we, the Seers, Two extrapolated. We, the inhabitants of the earth, the Isles and Outsea with them.

  And, as resonance invoked the Seeing eye, We, also. We, the gods.

  Therkon was looking at his hands. Less abashed than silenced perhaps, despite the tiny flush that did not signal shame.

  Nouip’s voice changed. “Keep it, too, for memory of what you are. T’was you, at the sticking point, that had the nerve, and the hardihood, and the skill to swing this blade.”

  Therkon’s head came up with a jerk. Nouip looked him straight in the eye and went on in her Seer’s voice, “To see, and to do what must be done.”

  To override companionship and compassion and conscience and give me, the gods, the world, a second chance. To strike down Rathi.

  To play the role he had warned me of. The imperial hatchet man.

  They stared at each other, while Therkon’s face spoke for him. Yes. She had seen truly. She knew what, as well as who he was.

  Then Nouip’s face softened a fraction. She set the sword down, came round the table, and took his right hand, turning it up to show the broad, healed but still angry red mark across the palm.

  “But keep it too, for who else you are. For who, now, you will always be.”

  Therkon Burnt-hand. Companion, helper, hero. Whose deed and cost and right to honor were printed in his own flesh.

  She let his hand go. Then she added very softly, “Take it, most of all, so you’ll not forget the Isles. When your day comes.”

  * * * *

  I will not forget, I thought, two mornings later when the freighter cast off, and hoisted sail, and stood out northward, and Nouip and her niece dwindled to doll figures on the quay. I may go back to Dhasdein, I may go all the way home, but whatever Therkon does, I will never forget the Isles. The faces, the places, the names. Sunlight on whitewash, blue tiles dark with rain. The smell of salt and tar and sea-kelp and labouring, unwashed men, the creak of rope and oar, the swash of waves and the thud and crackle of a sail. The rise of cliff and headland, a mere smudge or great towers of rock rising from the sea, and the cry of birds. Plovers, curlews, hawks, gulls. Turnstanes, cracking pebbles on a beach. I will hear them, always, in my dreams.

  Chapter XVIII

  Therkon leant so long on the stern rail beside me that I nerved myself to ask the question which had plagued my own mind. “Are you thinking—worrying about Dhasdein?”

  He looked round. Met my eyes. Started to shake his head. Then suddenly grimaced and said almost roughly, “I cannot help but think about Dhasdein.”

  And I knew what he had not said: I cannot bring myself to ask you, yet again, even now you have your Sight, to tell me what is happening or might have happened there.

  “I’d tell you, if we knew.” It was my turn to be abrupt. “There just isn’t enough news. I know that’s what we’ve always said, but I don’t think our Sight works like Nouip’s. Ours has to have information. However much or little that is.”

  “Sights are different?” I had roused the philosopher’s

  unquenchable interest. “Where does Nouip’s come from, then?”

  I could only shrug. “She thinks, perhaps from dreams?”

  “But if you and Two only have enough information, then a Sight is different to a, a forecast? As you could do before?”

  “Different, yes.” I felt again that indescribable sensation as all the facts and images and memories and projections coalesced and the universe gave me a single unassailable answer, back among Hringstenn’s stones. “It’s far, far—bigger. Far more—certain. It—” I fell back, trying to smile, on the qherrique’s own slogan. “Our words do not work, do not work, do not work.”

  “I can believe that.”

  He said it quite simply, but I saw in his eyes the memory of those moments when, however passively, he had known, felt, been Tiran.

  He leant back over the rail. And the companionship was there, as it had been across half the Isles, while we watched Sickle’s ling-green hills grow blue and indeterminate beyond the sparkling sea.

  Presently he said, “Can Seers See for themselves?”

  The simplest, most obvious question. The one I had an answer for, having asked it myself.

  “Nouip says, her Sights can show what she’ll see or do or meet, the way she met us. But they come as they please. And she can’t ask directly about herself. She says, no Seer can.”

  “Do yours come as they please?”

  “It seems so.” I could not he
lp sounding wry. “At least, I never know exactly when there’ll be enough of, of whatever it takes, to make one happen.”

  “You have not yet asked anything? Specifically?

  I had asked. It was what brought Nouip’s explanation, because the question now nearest my heart had not produced even Two’s usual white turmoil. Just a perfect blank.

  Nouip had sought an answer for me, so far as any Seer could. Two had no need to engrave those words on my mind.

  ‘You’ve a road ahead, aye, a fair and clear one, but t’is long too, and twisty as a skein of wool. And t’will end where you wish, but not where you expect that wish to be.’

  I had delayed too long. I could feel Therkon’s eye, and knew it had already read more than I wanted, while past experience told me his wits would not be far behind.

  “I did ask, yes. About how—when—I’d get home. When nothing happened, I asked Nouip.”

  “Oh.”

  He might justifiably have been disappointed, had I said I failed to See anything about Dhasdein. But there was something here a little more crestfallen, more despondent than I might have

  expected. Something that might have reached past even the crown prince, into the truly personal.

  Then he stepped back from the rail and said, “It’s early yet. And this deck,” running his eye along it, “has plenty of room.

  Perhaps you would care to work out, Chaeris?”

  And the restraint was back, courteous, thoughtful, delicate as spider’s silk. Impossible to query. Impossible to undo.

  * * * *

  I could not breach that wall. Nor could I stop it widening, inexplicably but inevitably, from courtesy to quiet, to something darker and more worrying, however speedily we headed north.

  Seony was faster than anything we had sailed in before, including Aspis. The weather’s lift had brought her south from Doubleface, the Far North Isles as they counted them in Sickle, bringing grain and timber in hopes that expensive small-goods like whale oil and ivory might already have percolated north. Since little had, they were highly relieved when we used another of Therkon’s azians to pay passage clear to her home port of Prospect. So highly relieved that they never questioned how a pair of shipwrecked Dhasdeini merchant siblings might have either gems to barter, or a sword like Hvestang.

  Two insists the journey proceeded at normal speed: calling at Sprite for water, passing South Island and the barren Groans, swinging west from Whale Island round Doubleface to the wide, foliate inlet of Prospect Port. Even with a usually brisk southwesterly, it took nearly three weeks. And this, Therkon estimated, from names of islands Dhasdein and Two had at least heard of, was barely half the way Aspis had been driven in six days and nights. Considered rationally, I could not believe she had held

  together to reach Sickle at all.

  But irrationally, three weeks to Prospect passed like the fall of an eyelash in the time of my now protesting heart.

  After the South Isles Prospect was a busy, kempt, half-alien town: no red-sailed fishing fleets, no sixers like Anfluga at sea, no white-washed domes or brechs ashore. A council of lords ruled, merchant warehouses lined the harbour, freighters of every size berthed beside Seony, busy with the North Isles’ own staples of grain, timber, fruit. And wine.

  Prospect was also a town where we might expect not merely ex-Navy Isle men but true Dhasdeinis. We lodged discreetly in what passed for a small backstreet inn, and to his chagrin, Therkon had to concede Two was right. Safer to leave the hunt for an ongoing passage to me.

  Overnight my prepared excuse became a reality: something at dinner, perhaps the local crayfish we had been coaxed to try, upset Therkon’s stomach as Anfluga’s rations never had, so I set out after breakfast, laden with cautions and injunctions, but alone.

  After Ve Pool and Eithay, let be Skall, such an expedition did not daunt me overmuch, but by early afternoon I had to give in. Despite the truly formidable array of shipper’s offices, not to mention the multitude of actual ships, the best I could find was not direct passage to Dhasdein, but a next morning passage north-west to the island of Summertree.

  Leg-weary and hungry, I headed back. At this setback I

  expected Therkon to grumble, fret at his own limits, then say, Wait, try again. When I tapped at his door, I did not expect to be answered by a groan. Nor, when I shot inside, wrist-knife loose, to meet a heartfelt, “Oh, Chaeris. Thank the Lord it’s you.”

  The landlady’s brother had left the Imperial Navy with a very different view to Skatir’s. A fine-looking Dhasdeini merchant

  suffering a mild belly-ache had amplified the Isles’ off-hand kindness with distressed strangers to the point of three visits to offer possets, query about calling a healer, and, “I cannot think what she wanted last time. Or at least, I can. I could shake court leeches in my cradle, but this . . . A passage to Summertree, tomorrow? Take it. Take it! And don’t dare leave me alone again!”

  * * * *

  Pointing out the contradiction in these orders ruffled him anew. Worse, next morning, the Summertree skipper proved a Navy man of Skatir’s ilk. We were hardly aboard when his barbed comments on Dhasdeini seamanship and idle merchants’ wealth had me wound tight enough either to try Azo’s intimidation mode, or drag Therkon bodily below.

  He did limit himself to a deal of imperial frost, and lasting selective deafness. A single round of Wavewalker’s deck, Therkon with Hvestang and me with both my knives, silenced most of the crew. But I was not in the least surprised when an almost-storm caught us north of Greenhill, the timber in ballast shifted, and when we limped into Grey Island’s tiny harbor, the skipper

  informed us with vindictive zeal that he could not justifiably

  hinder our journey further. “Here’s the half of y’r passage money. There’ll be keels headed north, far sooner than us.”

  Not, Therkon furiously did not retort, from this sketch of a port! But he took the money with frigid displeasure and stalked off down the wharf.

  Five mornings after the actual storm, it was a bright day, white clouds puffed up like argosies overhead. Grey Island’s bony hills smiled down on us, fawn, gold or brown, its select few vineyards dark with fruit. The warm, salt-flavored air was leaning toward heat and dust. Summer, I realized with something near amazement, would already be past its zenith in Dhasdein, let alone Iskarda.

  Therkon glanced longingly up to the white block of pillars and walls that signaled an Imperial governor’s ex-residence, probably still a Dhasdeini consulate. But it would break our incognito to ask official help. Azo, let alone my own instincts, vetoed it instantly. We were still too far from home.

  Wavewalker was the biggest hull among the scatter of vessels in port. I did not have to hear the growl rising in Therkon’s throat. Without official help, we would be crawling the last leg in another Tolla, or even a simple fishing boat.

  The best we found was in fact a fishing boat, headed away off our line, north-east to the last islet in the Tail, the string hanging like beads south from Wave Island. Even if we island-hopped from there to Wave, we would still be a good ten days from Dhasdein.

  Despite his previous huff I had expected Therkon to sigh,

  finally change his mood and accept the next best choice. With a face of thunder, he simply demanded, “How soon can you leave?”

  We were four days snailing to the Tailbone. The weather was average, the three-man crew polite but wary, and Therkon stayed in what, from a man of lesser courtesy or status, could only have been termed a sulk.

  He did not improve over the week it took to reach South­water, Wave’s nearest port. When we actually had to go overland to Wineweigh in the north, I rode two days in virtual silence over the spine of the island, through ripening vineyards that made the Riverworld’s most famous wine, over dusty terraces and enchanting vignettes of distant sea, in company with a terse, brooding creature I hardly recognized as the hatchet man. Let
alone the philosopher.

  He was fretting over Dhasdein, I thought. With no other distraction, that would grow more and more imperative. I could not give him a Sight, far less solider news. Gossip was rare, we could not ask outright, at least, not the sort of questions he would want. He had been too long away, on this irresponsible quest. It had succeeded, and we were heroes, yes. But now he had to forget Therkon Burnt-Hand, who had met adversity with courage and endurance, and given me kindness, friendship, laughter, even at the bitter worst. The time I had had him to myself, when nothing had mattered more to him, was almost over. Now, he only wanted to become the crown prince again.

  It helped neither of our spirits that the only freighter at Wineweigh even half interested in sailing north before vintage was small and fairly slow. Finally, in sheer exasperation, Therkon actually bought half a holdful of Redrock hemp and tar, plausibly re-saleable to the Riversend shipyards, and the Puffin at last put to sea.

  From Wineweigh to the Delta, Therkon fumed in a more

  accessible moment, would, for a big Dhasdeini freighter, “be no more than ten days!” Our ship would probably have taken a fortnight. Even had we not run afoul of pirates almost in sight of the Washes, the eastern Delta isles.

  They came running briskly up from south-westward, between us and Riversend: a vessel hardly larger than a sloop, but with low lean lines and a two-masted spread of sail that spelt, Trouble, long before we caught the sheen of steel on board. At the first definite word from his look-out, the Puffin’s master winced and swung the tiller. “All hands!” he bellowed. “Make sail!”

  “She’s got the weather-gauge,” he snapped when Therkon

  began to protest. “Wind from her to us an’ we’re tryin’ to cross her stem. She can tack as she likes and we’ve not a quarter her speed. Or her fighting load.” He snorted at Therkon’s glare. “I’ve seven men and a pair o’ cutlasses. That kite’ll carry thirty or more. With bows. The Washes is our only hope. We’re flat as a scow, we can sweep through the channels. They’ll not risk that keel in there.”