“Only if he gets back,” Tuse says, “and that’s the chance we take. We’ll say he was lost overboard saving Beale. A hero’s end. Who’s to complain that it was improper? And our hands are clean.” He can see this appeals to Livion.
Livion says, “What about your rowers? Can we count on them?”
“I think so,” Tuse says. “They’ll need the money soon. The guild is finished. Soon the only rowers will be prisoners. They’re half as effective as brothers, but half the cost. And you can whip them.”
“Will they keep quiet?” Livion says.
“And risk the gibbet?” Tuse says. “Sure. But the poth won’t.”
On the rowers’ deck the poth wishes she had another bottle of wine and a sharper saw. She’s treated those who needed her help the most, and now she can consider those she thought would live regardless. She starts with a brother slumped over his oar.
Sleep is usually the best medicine. Nonetheless, Everlyn clears her throat. He doesn’t stir. Everlyn pats his shoulder. He topples slightly. She puts two fingers on his neck. It’s warm and wet and without a pulse. She raises his head. His eyes are wide and red; his lips and nostrils covered with sizzling foam the color of fire powder. Everlyn lowers his head then lowers herself to the edge of his bench.
When she looks up, Tuse is standing over her. “Livion’s waiting to see you.”
“I know,” she says. She stands up, her chin thrust at his chest. He slides aside to let her get to the ladder. “No,” she says, and heads forward again. “Let him wait. These men shouldn’t have to any longer.”
As she passes him, Tuse looks at the slumped-over rower. “This one all right?”
“He got the job done,” she says. So did I.
7
* * *
Livion orders Jeryon brought up and the dragon cut loose. They’ve rendered all they can, stuffing the captain’s cabin with bones, bolts of skin, and sheets of wing membrane. The dragon’s head has been carefully packed to ensure the phlogiston doesn’t escape, and so that it could later be made into a trophy. Crates stacked on deck are moved to the hold as soon as Jeryon emerges. Some people prize dragon meat as an aphrodisiac, but little could be taken that wasn’t ruined by the water, a dozen astounded sharks, the sandals of the renderers, and that bit which is being cooked over a brazier by the foredeck.
“Tastes like chicken,” Beale says.
“Fire chicken,” Topp says.
The rest of the carcass sinks quickly. The sharks follow it, and by the time Jeryon is marched the length of the ship past piles of stray flesh to the stern deck, the sea is empty but for the dinghy, now tied to the starboard rail.
Jeryon surveys the Comber and his crew without comment. He sees the poth in the rowers’ deck, hurrying aft. He says nothing to her either.
The mates stand together by the unmanned steering oar. The poth climbs up behind Jeryon and his escort.
“Have you come to your senses?” Jeryon asks.
Livion says, “We’ve decided to give you the captain’s chance.”
Jeryon tsks. “We’ve, Captain? There is no we in captain. Only I.”
The poth says, “What’s the captain’s chance?”
“A practice old as pirates,” Jeryon says without turning around. “The judgment of cowards.”
Livion says, “You will be set adrift without food or water, sail or oar, and the waves will decide your fate.”
The poth says, “That’s monstrous.”
“That’s prerogative,” Livion says.
“He could have me executed,” Jeryon says, “but he’s too weak.” He looks at Solet. “Pliable.”
“And you’re too rigid,” Livion says. “Four hours. That’s how long it took to render the dragon. The rowers needed the rest, too. Four hours. And a fortune. That’s what you traded for this.”
The poth pushes past the escort to stand between the mates and their captain. “And what have you traded?” She looks at them in turn. “Four hours. How many more got sick in Hanosh? How many more are dead? A body must seem awfully light when it’s weighed against a full purse.”
“I wanted to explain things earlier,” Livion says. “This isn’t your business.”
She shoots a look at Tuse. “It became mine when I signed on, but not for this. I won’t be a party to it. I’ve got enough blood on my hands.”
“Then you can take the same chance we’re giving him,” Livion says.
Jeryon says, “I didn’t want some Aydeni landlubber on this ship. I don’t want one in the dinghy either.”
“Think of her as provisions then,” Solet says. Several sailors, still armed with their gory tools, laugh.
“Stay with us,” Tuse tells the poth. “The men need you. Hanosh needs you. And you’ll get your share. You’ve earned it.”
“I don’t heal for money,” she says. “I won’t kill for it either. I’ll take the chance.”
Jeryon says to Tuse, “You don’t like this, do you?”
“It’s not the choice I would have made,” Tuse said.
“Did make, Tuse,” Jeryon says. “Putting me in a boat is one thing. Putting her in one is another. You didn’t think of that, but you can’t stop, can you?” Jeryon shakes off the escort and stands beside the poth. “She’ll be the one you see at night, not me. As for you two, if anyone cracks, if anyone lets slip what he’s done while he’s drunk in a bar, it’ll be Tuse. Then I won’t need to tell the Trust my side of the story.”
Livion and Solet give Tuse a warning look. He returns it.
The poth says, “I’d like to put on a fresh smock.”
“No,” Solet says. “And let’s check those pockets.”
“I’m going freely,” Everlyn says. “I will not be searched.”
“I could take the whole dress,” Solet says, “and give you to the sea in whatever’s under there.”
She tightens her lips and pulls from the deep hip pockets several bottles of lotion and powders. From those in the folds around her legs emerge bandages, small tools, and, improbably, two limes. From the pockets inside her sleeves come bandage ties, a pot of unguent, and packets of medicinal herbs. She drops it all in a clatter.
Solet says, “Is that it?”
“Yes,” the poth says.
“Let’s check one more place,” Solet says, “just in case.” He reaches for the thick floral brocade that extends from the deep vee of her collar. She covers her breasts. He taps her wrists. Resigned, she lowers her arms. He reaches behind the brocade and pulls from a pocket there a flat knife with a bone handle. He admires it. It’s like the full-size version of his finger blade. He pockets it.
“Is that it?” Solet says.
Again the poth says, “Yes.”
“Fool me once,” Solet says. “Hold her.” Two sailors stretch her by her arms and Solet runs his hands up each arm, over her back, belly, breasts, and broad, heavy hips, then from her crotch to her ankles. He finds no contraband. He and the crew might have taken a greater thrill from the search had her furious dignity not stiffened their hearts. The sailors let her go.
He says to Jeryon, “Pick up anything in the hold?” Jeryon yanks out his two pants pockets. They flap as uselessly as a spaniel’s ears.
Solet looks to Livion, who orders, “Put them in the dinghy.”
They’re led down to the starboard rail. The dinghy’s thwarts have been removed, as well as the collapsible mast, the rigging, and the rudder.
It seems so much larger, Jeryon thinks.
“It seems so small,” the poth mutters.
Jeryon offers the poth his hand. She refuses it, jumps into the dinghy, and kneels by the transom as he climbs in after her. He remains standing, the cords in his arms and his neck tensed. A sailor unties the painter and tosses it into the dinghy. It drifts away from the Comber.
Everlyn gets up
, rocking the boat as little as possible, and stands behind Jeryon.
Jeryon says, “Livion, remember this. I don’t take chances. I plot a course, and I bring my boat in.”
“If you did take chances,” Livion says, “you wouldn’t have that one to bring in.”
Tuse descends to the rowers’ deck, Solet takes the oar, and Livion pipes. The oars extend from the galley like the legs of a crab. The ports have been reopened, but none of the rowers look at the dinghy. Livion pipes again. As the oars stroke for Hanosh, Beale comes to the rail. He can’t help it. He waves.
Jeryon calls out, “I still would have saved you.”
CHAPTER TWO
The Poth
1
* * *
I shouldn’t have saved him, Jeryon thinks. Now I’ll have to destroy him too.
Solet would happily kill for revenge. Ynessi love revenge so much they have songs celebrating it. They feature the most brutal and cunning slaughters, people and places, times and events. Children are taught the songs as much to learn about the city’s history as to learn about its mores. And you can dance to them. Because revenge leads to more revenge, songs are often parts of a cycle, and these are the basis for daylong, sometimes weeklong, parties.
Tuse would kill for revenge if he were drunk and angry enough.
Not Livion. He would take a slight as his due until someone told him what to do.
I’ll get my revenge the old-fashioned way, Jeryon thinks. Nothing threatens trade like mutiny, and trade is all the Trust and the city care about. The Trust will be his hammer and the law his anvil. He looks forward to seeing the fear in his mates’ eyes as they’re condemned. He looks forward to watching them struggle or, better, sit stunned as mullets while they’re carted through town and rowed to the gibbets, then listening to them scream as thirst gets its claws into them. It’ll take three days for them to die. Such is the essence of justice.
The poth settles against the transom, her knees pulled up, her smock tucked around them, her arms shrunken into her sleeves and wrapped around her calves. She feels unmoored in such an empty smock. And it will be a long, hot afternoon. She’s already thirsty. Who decided poths must wear dark green?
When the Comber is far enough away that Jeryon can no longer make out the crew on deck, he says, “There are two things you need to know, poth.”
“Sit,” Everlyn says.
“What?”
“Sit,” she says. “I like your shade, but not you looming over me like some shipowner on his parlor throne.”
He sits, pressing his spine as far into the bow as possible. If that’s how it’s going to be, let her squint, he thinks. She does.
“One,” Jeryon says, “here’s what stands between us and Hanosh. The nearest land is Eryn Point at the mouth of Joslin Bay, eighty nautical miles away. Hanosh is twenty beyond that. If we had oars, half a barrel of water, and the stamina of guilded rowers, we could make the trip in three days and see my mates tucked into their gibbets in four. Instead, we have the Tallan River.”
“What’s that?” she says.
He looks as if she’d asked, What’s air? “It’s a current. The current. How can you live in Hanosh and—”
“I’m not Hanoshi,” Everlyn says. “I’m Aydeni.”
“I know,” he says. “It’s the fault of you Aydeni that we’re here in the first place.”
She nearly stands. The dinghy rocks severely. She doesn’t care. “I’m here because I wouldn’t have a hand in your death.”
“You’re here,” Jeryon says, “because Ayden wouldn’t sell us its store of shield. At any price.”
“I wouldn’t have a hand in Hanoshi deaths either,” she says. “Your Trust didn’t come to me. I went to them. I said I could help.”
“They trusted you?” he says.
Ayden, deep in the mountains west of Hanosh, has been the city’s chief rival in the Six Cities Trading League since it was allowed to join. Their admission ended a ruinous war and ushered in four decades of mutual prosperity, but for the last several years they’ve been taking baby steps toward another conflict. There’s not enough money to go around. Pirates who’ve plundered Hanoshi ships are rumored to have been Aydeni privateers. Bandits who’ve attacked Hanoshi caravans are suspected of being backed by Ayden. Not that Hanosh doesn’t have its own agents in Ayden to steal their trade secrets. Not that they aren’t rumored to have attacked Aydeni traders too. Denying Hanosh the golden shield it needed to fight the flox was the first adult step, even if Ayden claims they only took it because two years ago Hanosh gouged them on the price of grain after a drought doomed their crops.
“Of course they didn’t trust me,” Everlyn says. “They thought I was a saboteur, maybe a venomist. But my patients, the shipowners’ wives, they vouched for me.”
Owners aren’t easily swayed, and their wives don’t sway lightly: Where’s the profit? Jeryon figures her advocates still consider it fashionable to have an Aydeni apothecary, just as some still wear boots and plain smocks instead of returning to sandals and embroidered chitons and mantles. To get her on the Comber would signal their power.
“Which brings us back to the Tallan River,” he says. “An actual agent probably would have been briefed on it.” He lays his arms over the gunwales. “The sea is shaped like the bow of a boat pointing north. That—” he points to the starboard oarlock, “is Chorem. And this—” he points to the larboard oarlock, “is Yness. Eryn Point is a couple hands forward, where the center thwart would go. Everything aft of the oarlocks is ocean: trackless, empty ocean. Now—”
As he scoots forward, Everlyn tucks her knees tighter.
Jeryon puts his left foot on the bottom beneath the starboard oarlock. “The current is fifty miles wide,” he says, “a bit wider than my sandal in boat scale. It leaves the ocean here, runs up my left leg, around my back, and down my right leg into the sea here.” He plants his right foot under the larboard oarlock. “And we are here.” He puts his finger on the bottom between his knees, amidships, and too close to his crotch, in Everlyn’s opinion. “Do you see our problem?”
The poth had hated her loremasters. When she was twelve her father discovered that she was running away from them to tramp through the woods with a forest warden. The warden convinced him that Everlyn, whatever her talent for sums, had a real devotion to herblore and healing. So her father gave Everlyn to her for schooling. She broke her slate in joy.
“How fast does the current run?” she asks.
“Correct,” Jeryon says. “Six knots. The Comber could cross it in four or five hours under full sail and oar, entering the river north of Eryn Point and letting it carry the galley down to the mouth of the bay. If we had oars to reach it, we would cross more slowly and be carried much farther south. Hopefully we’d make it to Yness before being swept to sea.”
“But we have no oars,” she says.
“Or water, which makes the issue moot. We’ll be dead of thirst before we make it across.”
“So we have no chance?”
“Not according to my mates’ calculations,” Jeryon says.
2
* * *
“Which brings us,” Jeryon continues, “to the second thing you need to know. I will get you to Hanosh so you can testify against my crew.”
“I could write it down,” she says, “and save you the trouble of saving me too.”
“We don’t have anything to write with,” he says. Jeryon reads her like a manifest: “Smock. Boots. Presumably undergarments.” She scowls. “Those sticks in your hair, let me see them,” he says. She looks skeptical. He says, “I won’t run off,” and holds out his hand.
She draws the pair of long steel pins from her bun. Her hair unfurls. Her neck sweats. “Why do you need them?” she says.
He tests their points, which are oddly sharp, and taps them together. Their surfaces are mottled
like flowing water. “Gift from one of your company ladies?” he says. “These aren’t cheap.”
“Not everything has a price,” she says.
“In Hanosh it does.” He crosses his right leg and with one of the pins worries the seam of his pant leg. He says, “I bet someone came to you for help and discovered afterward that she was also suffering from a touch of embarrassment. So she paid you with these. Her husband’s going to be very upset when he finds out. What did you palm while Solet was searching you?”
Startled, the poth says, “You saw that?”
“Never lose sight of a person’s hand,” he says. “That’s Solet’s weakness. He’s easily distracted.”
The poth reaches into her pocket and removes a purple phial. “For cuts and burns.”
“Handy, if we live long enough to be cut.” He looks at the sun. “We will be burned. Especially you.” Her upland skin is more golden than his, what the Hanoshi described in better times as “tea with honey” and now call “milky.”
“There we go.” A stitch pops and he yanks out the thread with the pin. He opens the seam and removes a steel blade, one edge straight, the other serrated, and a thin envelope the length of her pinky.
“Aren’t you full of surprises,” she says.
Jeryon has such a bland face, like dough too dry and hard to be pounded, that she’s shocked to see a bit of mischief dart through his eyes.
“Trust your sails, but not the wind,” Jeryon says. “And I’ve been thinking the wind was about to turn.”
“Do you have an aphorism for everything?” she says. “Any port in a storm? Nodding the head won’t row the boat?”
“Simple rules prevent complex problems,” he says.
She humphs. “What’s in the envelope?”
He unfolds it carefully. In it sits a bone needle and some red thread.
“What’s that for? Sutures?”
“Do I look like a surgeon?” he says. “It’s for fixing my pants. I can’t run around with my pants falling to pieces, can I?”
The Dragon Round Page 5
