“If Fallion was alive,” Rain objected, “wouldn’t he unbind the worlds?”
“I don’t know,” Draken admitted. “Think about it: He’s down in the Underworld, and reaching the surface could take weeks. Once he does, once he sees what a mess he’s made of things, he might wish to reverse his spell—if he can. But that would mean another perilous journey, weeks or months in the making. He could be alive. I have to hope that he’s alive, and at the very least make the effort to come to his aid.”
Rain just shook her head sadly. “I wish that he would unbind the worlds. I wish that we could turn about, get back to living our lives. . . .”
Now she switched the subject. “Aaath Ulber doesn’t care about all of this, about your brother. He has other designs, I think. He wants to fight the wyrmlings more than he wants to save Fallion.”
Draken wasn’t sure if that was true. “I think his loyalties are divided. He’s two men—Borenson, who has children in danger, and Aaath Ulber, who has a wife and family in need.”
“So who will he put first?” Rain asked.
Draken knew the answer. He’d look in on his wife and children at Caer Luciare. If the ship took port at the Courts of Tide, they’d have to make their way inland for hundreds of miles. The fortress at Caer Luciare would be on their way.
But he had to wonder, was that the right thing to do? Who was in greater danger, Aaath Ulber’s wife or Draken’s brothers and sisters?
Suddenly the seas pulsed with light ahead and salmon began to leap from the water, their backs flashing silver beneath the powdered starlight.
The squids were driving the fish to the surface. He got up, walked to the railing, peered down, and witnessed a giant squid flash in the water, with long arms and tentacles. He had heard tales of luminous squids before, but he’d never heard of any this big.
Draken realized that he should get a spear and go to the prow of the boat, try to bag a couple of the fish in order to make their stores last.
But he hated the taste of salmon, and he wanted to stay here and cuddle with Rain.
Rain stepped up and grabbed him then by the collar and kissed him so passionately that it took his breath away. She pressed her entire body against his, so that he could feel every inviting curve. He could sense her longings, and he had never had a woman who so wanted to make love with him.
At that instant his mother softly cracked the door to her cabin and stepped on deck. She cleared her throat and suggested sternly, “Don’t tempt yourselves!” Rain scrambled to get clear of Draken’s arms. “We have a long trip ahead. And don’t let Aaath Ulber catch you.”
Myrrima stood staring at them in the starlight, with a crescent of moon riding the sky at her back, until Rain retreated to her cabin.
Myrrima sat next to Draken and gazed at him until he was forced to admit, “I want to marry her, Mother. I want to marry her now. I’ve never wanted a woman so much. I feel like I’ll die without her.”
His mother did not answer for a moment. The only sound was that of the ship as it bounded over the waves, and the splash as a fish leapt in the air. The wind sang in the rigging, and waves drove against the hull.
Myrrima stared in wonder at the flashing lights in the water.
“There are squids down there,” Draken said. “Giant squids.”
“Yes,” she said. “I can sense their . . . hunger.” She turned to look at him. “And I understand yours. You won’t die if you don’t have her. I know. I felt that way about your father.”
But Borenson had changed. The notion that she could feel anything for the giant Aaath Ulber was repulsive.
“I want to take her to wife,” he said. “I want her to be the mother of my children. It feels . . . so healthy, so right.”
“No doubt,” Myrrima agreed. “Young love is always that way. But you must not make love to that girl, do you understand me?”
“Father is the captain,” Draken suggested. “He could perform a marriage.” It felt wrong somehow, imagining that his father would marry them.
“You knew your father,” Myrrima said. “He wouldn’t have allowed it. I cannot imagine that Aaath Ulber will be any more eager. Hold off for a few years.”
Draken suspected that his mother didn’t understand. He sometimes found himself growing dizzy with lust, and he knew that Rain felt the same way as he did. “But Mother—”
“No!” Myrrima said firmly. “You can’t make a future with that girl now. We are going to war. If you were to bed her, she’d find herself with child inside a week.
“What if we get to Mystarria and find it overrun with wyrmlings? What if we find ourselves battling for our lives? What if you were killed, and left Rain pregnant, struggling to bring a child into the world and care for it?
“We have nothing, Draken—no home, no money, no safety. When you can offer Rain those things, then you can permit yourself to marry.”
“I love her,” Draken objected.
“You crave her,” Myrrima argued, “and that is only the beginning of love. If you really love her, you’ll wait until the time is right to be together, and that is how I’ll know that your love is true. You’ll prove your love by showing restraint.”
Draken knew that she was right, and so he told himself that he would obey. Yet he craved Rain that way that a drowning man might crave water.
“Is there a spell that you can put upon me,” he asked, “the way that you used to ease my mind when I was a child and I woke from nightmares?”
Myrrima studied him a moment, her mouth tightening into a hard smile. She seemed to focus on something behind his eyes as she thought.
“Magic shouldn’t always be our first recourse when we are confronted by a problem,” Myrrima said. “I could help ease your mind, make you forget your desires for Rain. But you’ll grow more by struggling against those desires.”
Draken resisted the urge to swear, but he wanted to. He was a drowning man, and his mother wouldn’t throw him a rope.
“How long must I wait to marry her?” Draken begged.
Myrrima considered. He knew that she had no idea what they might be facing, how long the coming war might last—whether it would be over in a matter of weeks or stretch out for a lifetime.
None of them knew what they were getting into. They only knew that Gaborn had warned that it was urgent for Aaath Ulber to go to battle.
Myrrima shook her head. “Years,” she said at last. “You will have to wait for years—perhaps only three, but ten would not be too long to wait for someone you love.”
Draken took a deep breath and prepared himself to wait.
When Rain got up the next morning, she felt embarrassed. She could hardly look Myrrima in the eye.
So she went to work. She went into the hold where Aaath Ulber snored louder than an army, and milked the damned goats, then fed them some of the grass that she’d gathered the day before. Then she went topside to the galley and boiled some oats, spooned a bit of molasses over it, and served everyone breakfast—even daring to wake the giant.
She now felt determined to win Aaath Ulber’s respect. In the few days that he’d known her, she felt he’d hardly said a kind word to her.
So she handed him a giant’s portion of breakfast and waited for him to say thank you.
Aaath Ulber sat groggily on the side of the bed, scratched his chin, thought for a moment, and said, “Thank you, child.” He studied her a moment, as if assessing the glare in her eyes, the anger in her stance. “You know I’ll expect a lot from you. You’ll have battle practice each day, of course, but there is plenty of other work to do. There will be sails to be mended, decks to be swabbed. You can start by taking the bucket and emptying the water from the bilge each morning. In a few days the wood in the hull will swell up and seal tight, but until then you’ll have to keep ahead of the leaks.”
“Yes, sir,” Rain said.
She got the bucket, filled it, and spent the next two hours emptying the bilge. Then she practiced swordsmanship for an
hour. When she was done, she opened a bale of linen undergarments that the men had salvaged earlier, unbundled them, and found that the seawater was ruining them. She could smell mold growing.
So she took all four bales of garments topside and boiled the undergarments, then strung them out to dry, so that for the next four days linens were strewn over every spar and tied to every rope that held every sail.
Thus there were underskirts flying like pennants from the crow’s nest, and breast bands in the rigging, and dainty night blouses that young newlywed women liked to wear to please their men all strewn across the deck.
She’d never really get them dry, she suspected at first. The salt spray thrown up from the whitecaps kept everything moist, but she discovered that when she climbed the rigging and got high enough, she was able to dry out the clothes.
Thus she was able to salvage hundreds of garments which she imagined were worth a small fortune, but got hardly a word of thanks from Aaath Ulber.
Any free time that she had, Aaath Ulber put her to work in battle practice, and so she discovered that she was trying to stay out of the giant’s way, trying to avoid his baleful gaze.
She realized that she couldn’t visit Draken at night anymore, couldn’t try to find time alone. Aaath Ulber and Myrrima wouldn’t approve.
Draken steered them through the night and was up well after dawn, and Rain had to be content to serve him breakfast, earn a smile and a thank-you.
Soon, Rain’s muscles ached constantly from the toil of battle practice and from scrubbing the decks; she wished that Fallion would unbind the worlds, undo the damage that he’d done.
The sun rose bright and clear each day, and the skies were hardly marred by clouds. The winds drove them mercilessly toward Mystarria.
In the far north of Landesfallen, the company stopped once again to obtain firewood, get more forage for the goats, and refresh their water supply.
They set sail to the west.
Over the days, Rain’s relationship with the giant did not improve. There was a wall between them, a wall so high and thick that she could hardly see over it, see Aaath Ulber for what he was. She kept expecting him to blow up, lash out at her in a senseless fit of rage.
A week out on the voyage, Rain was on her hands and knees, swabbing the deck, when Aaath Ulber bumbled past, stepping on her hand.
She let out a scream of pain, for the giant weighed well over three hundred pounds, and she heard fingers crunch as he plodded on them.
She lifted her hand instantly, found that it was swelling and bleeding. She worried that he’d broken her fingers, for pain was lancing up her arm.
She pulled her hand away, sat up, put it under her armpit and squeezed.
“Sorry,” Aaath Ulber said.
“Sorry for what?” she demanded.
His brow scrunched. “Sorry for crushing your hand.”
She knew that she’d never get an apology for the rest of his faults, but she had to ask. “You didn’t have to kill my father. You left those men in Fossil alive. Why couldn’t you have left him alive?”
Aaath Ulber shook his head. “Oh, child, I didn’t think of it in time,” he admitted. “He pushed me too hard, too fast, and then the world went red. I—don’t know how to ease your pain. . . .”
The giant choked up, then hung his head. “The man is dead. He was a fool to fight me.”
That’s when Rain saw the truth of it. Aaath Ulber was afraid to apologize. His emotions were too strong, too close to the surface.
The words he had just spoken were the closest thing that she’d ever get to an apology.
“I thought you hated me,” Rain said.
“If I hated you,” Aaath Ulber said, “I wouldn’t be working you so hard. I wouldn’t be so eager to keep you alive. I . . . don’t know you well, but my son loves you, and that counts for something.”
Rain broke into tears of relief to know that he did not hate her, tears of frustration that he had hurt her so—then rushed to her room to bandage herself.
Draken called at the door later, but Rain did not open it. She decided that she would comport herself with complete decorum from now on. She would not seek Draken out, or go to him at night. Instead, she would avoid him.
That night, the first autumn storm blew in, a hurricane. The sky became dark, the clouds the sickly green of a bruise. Then the winds and hail struck, and lightning lashed the heavens.
The men were forced to stow the sails while the storm blew the ship backward, far from its course.
The ocean swelled, and enormous waves rose up, threatening to smash the vessel. They slammed over the railings, and drenched the decks.
Thus, the hard times began in earnest.
Yet it was not the wind or the weather or the storms that bothered Myrrima most—it was the loss of her family.
From the time of his change, Myrrima had not slept with her husband; they were growing further apart by the hour. Aaath Ulber spent his days at the rudder, eyes cast toward Mystarria and his wife there.
The children, too, seemed lost. The whole family was torn apart. Sage had lost her sister along with all of her friends. She cried in her sleep at night, haunted by the memories of rushing water.
Meanwhile Draken barely spoke to anyone, and had become so morose that he spent every free hour huddling in the hold. When he wasn’t asleep, he was feigning it, Myrrima felt certain. He too pined for his sister and for his friends. But most of all he longed for Rain.
Perhaps, Myrrima wondered from time to time, we should have left them both back in Landesfallen.
But Draken would not have been happy there, either. He would not have fit in among the Walkins. He was bright enough to recognize that.
But most of all, the children seemed to miss their father.
In the first few days of the ship’s voyage, Myrrima still saw traces of her husband in the giant—in the way that he held his head, or the way that his blue eyes sparkled when he smiled.
But over the weeks, Aaath Ulber asserted control. He began to show a gruffness that she’d never seen in Sir Borenson. He quit smiling, quit his jokes.
After three weeks Sir Borenson was all but gone. Aaath Ulber became a driven creature, and desperate.
14
RUMORS OF A HERO
Do not fear mankind. They cannot withstand the might of Lord Despair.
—From the Wyrmling Catechism
“Damn these humans,” the wyrmling lord Yikkarga growled as he knelt near a pit on the side of a small creek, the full moon shining brightly upon his pale face. “They’ve gotten to another cache!”
Crull-maldor stood on a levy behind the lord, some nineteen days after the binding of the worlds. There had once been an outcropping of a blood metal by the creek—red stones, soft and heavy and coated with small particles of metal the consistency of sand. Crull-maldor recalled having seen a few stones on the surface here several decades ago, but obviously the humans had been digging at the site. The pit here was twenty feet in diameter now.
She tried to calculate the loss. A dozen pounds of blood metal, she suspected. That was all that she remembered seeing on the surface here. But the pit might have yielded more ore. A great deal of dirt had been removed. There might have even been a ton or two deposited here underground—enough to make tens of thousands of forcibles.
The threat provided by so many forcibles was incalculable.
Over the past three weeks, Crull-maldor had begun creating her own army of wyrmling runelords, twenty thousand strong.
Victory over the humans had come rapidly, it seemed.
After the binding, the human runelords had spent the greatest part of their strength attacking her fortress. But Crull-maldor’s counterattacks had been swift and brutal, decimating the humans until none had the strength to openly defy her any longer.
She’d taken throngs of the small folk captive—marching them down into her fortress where they were either butchered for meat or put to the forcible.
The yo
ung men were the first to go—those who were strong in arms and firm in their courage, those who had no wives or children and therefore had little to lose.
Some had been taken slaves, sent to work the mines. Others were forced to gather cattle, horses, and fish for the wyrmling hordes, thus freeing her wyrmlings for the more important duties of guarding Crull-maldor’s empire.
The humans’ weapons had all been seized—as much as Crull-maldor had been able to find; their gold and treasures had all been looted.
Thus, her armies had subjugated the vast majority of humans in the Northern Wastes.
But her hold was tenuous. There was far too much to do. The women and children in her tunnels were struggling to carve their own armor. The smiths at the forges kept their hammers ringing night and day. Her troops were grappling to hold on to the human territories—even as her scouts raced to relieve the small folk of their blood metal.
The emperor was being stingy with his blood metal, keeping her weak.
Often, a new slave will strain at the bands that bind him, and that was an ever-present danger.
She could not afford to let the humans gain an advantage.
Not three hundred yards away, a dog was barking and snarling furiously at the edge of a small village, distraught at the scent of so many wrymlings nearby.
Crull-maldor knew that one of the humans from the village must have discovered the ore, probably within hours of the binding. Crull-maldor had sent her troops to mine this outcropping twice already; and both patrols had come back empty-handed, unable to locate the trove. Now she knew why.
“We should destroy the village,” Yikkarga suggested.
Crull-maldor scowled. She didn’t trust Yikkarga. He was the emperor’s man. It had only been six days since his ship had arrived from the mainland, and already he was seeking to wrest control of her troops from her.
Rumor said that Yikkarga was someone special. He was more than a runelord—he was under the protection of Lord Despair himself, and “could not be killed.”
Chaosbound Page 17
