Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  Besik, his apprentice windman, was missing and had to be presumed dead—his loss would hurt the Taag more than Aaran dared consider. Faryn Wo, the remaining windman, was hurt, but Aaran thought he would recover under the Moonstones’ care.

  But nine Obsidians lay dead upon his deck, and three Moonstones. Four Rosestones, who with the dead Obsidians, had given their lives to protect the rescued girls. They had nearly succeeded.

  The Iage had managed to get into one of the passenger cabins, and had slaughtered a dozen of the younger girls before the Obsidians and Rosestones broke down the door. Still, just over a hundred survived.

  That was something.

  But the bodies of twenty-five dead women and children lay on his deck, and with them, the bodies of forty-one crewmen and officers.

  Some of the survivors were badly injured. Hawkspar bore so many wounds the Moonstones couldn’t even tell him everything that was wrong with her. She wouldn’t wake up. He feared she would die.

  And he and his shorthanded crew now had to get though the islands without the assistance of the Iage. They weren’t crippled. But they were badly hurt.

  Tuua, wounded but still functioning, limped from body to body and gave the dead grace. The sailors who could scrubbed the blood from the decks, and the marines worked alongside them.

  Several of the older girls had taken over kitchen duties, noting as they did that they, too, knew their way around kitchen and pantry. They’d been inventorying stores when he checked in on them, and putting together a simple first meal for those who labored above.

  Aaran went from group to group, checking. Alwyn, his healer, still lived, thank Jostfar, and the surviving Seru Moonstone were unhurt. They had their hands full with the wounded. The Taag was not, Aaran, knew, at the end of its dead. Some of those still living barely clung to life, and before the sun set again, they would be joining their comrades in the sea.

  The survivors struggled on in varying states of the same shock and grief that he felt. They were worried for friends, devastated by the deaths of friends. No one had been spared loss.

  Tuua had finished the words for the dead; Aaran found him in the temple, sitting with Eban, who was weeping.

  Aaran raised a brow, and Tuua patted Eban on the shoulder and said, “I’ll be right back.”

  “What’s wrong?” Aaran asked.

  “One of the Seru Rosestones had taken him in and mothered him; evidently along with having a dreadful father, the boy had no mother. And that sera was killed in the fighting.”

  “We lost a lot of them,” Aaran said, and he was thinking of Hawkspar, in his cabin with two Moonstones working frantically to save her, and with Redbird hovering like a mother bear over her hurt cub.

  Tuua said, “You bear a deep grief. What are you not telling me?”

  “I’ve lost officers who were friends. I’ve lost crew who were fine men. There are dead women and children on my deck.”

  “And a hurt woman occupying the bed in your cabin.”

  Aaran paused. “Well … yes. I fear for the Oracle Hawkspar’s life, as well.”

  Tuua said, “The dead are gone beyond our reach. We can mourn them, but we cannot help them. The injured we are doing with what we can. I am hurt, true, but the Moonstones are extraordinary healers, and Alwyn is solid as well, and between them, you need not worry for me. After this, I’ll be able to walk around on the deck with a few fine scars, so that I may go shirtless without shame, like the sailors and marines.”

  His mouth curved in the ghost of a smile. “But young Hawkspar … I thought the rumors about you and her might have had some truth in them.”

  Aaran turned his back on his cousin. “No truth. We’ve rescued her, she’s a passenger, she thinks she can help us win a war we didn’t even know we were fighting. I … admire her courage. And her tenacity.”

  “Right. Of course you do.”

  “I do.”

  “I’ve known you all your life, Aaran. I’ve seen you in your best times and your worst,” Tuua said. “I know when you’re telling me the truth—we’re blood, after all. So, every time you look at her, your admiration shines in your face so that your expression becomes one of besotted idiocy. We all look like that when we’re consumed with … admiration.”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “I’m not blind. Nor a fool. If you want her, why not pursue her? Why not be honest about it?”

  “You know why we sail.”

  Tuua said, “I’ve not forgotten. Your sister, our vow. The hope that we might yet find her alive.”

  “And I have never let myself fall in love. Nor have you.”

  “I’ve fallen in love a thousand times,” Tuua said. “And broken my heart a thousand times less one.”

  Aaran turned to study him. “You’re in love now?”

  “Deeply. With a girl who was one of the penitents. Her name is Jarynan.”

  “And when we reach Hyre, you’ll see her off on a dock somewhere, and never see her again while she goes on to find a husband and make a life for herself and have a house full of fat babies without you,” Aaran said. “You can look at that future and live with it?”

  “I don’t know that I can,” Tuua said. “And I’m not sure it’s the future to which I’m willing to resign myself.”

  “You’re going to stop looking for Aashka, then?”

  “No.”

  “You’re going to marry your Jarynan, and leave her alone to fend for herself for months or years at a time while you search the seas for Aashka?”

  “Not that either, I don’t think,” Tuua said. And now he sounded uncertain. “She’s Tonk. I’d thought to make her my assistant after this voyage, and sail with her.”

  “And we’d have a mutiny the same day. Or shall all the sailors and all the marines bring their wives, too?”

  “I don’t know,” Tuua said. “I don’t. But I think this time I don’t want to have my heart broken.”

  Aaran turned to look at him. “She won me before she even met me, Tuua. Before I’d even seen her, I knew her voice, I knew her need, and I knew her courage. I didn’t know her name, but she doesn’t know it either—but without her name, I still knew enough to cross through hells and death for her.”

  He looked down at his hands, at the big, scarred knuckles, the calluses, the cuts and healing wounds. “I didn’t do it to find Aashka, Tuua. I told myself I did, because that is why I’ve done everything I’ve done since the day we both became men. But what I told myself was a lie—even if it wasn’t an intentional one. I did it to find her. And now that she’s here, I want her even more. I want her, and I don’t want to have my heart broken, either. What if she dies? What if she vanishes into the heart of Hyre, and doesn’t wait for me while I complete my vow? This isn’t what I wanted. Not ever. I didn’t let myself fall in love, because I had my duty. And now I am in love, and I don’t know how to live with that.”

  Hawkspar

  I hovered in a hell I had made worse—I’d shoved the gate to Ossal’s cage open wider with my failed use of the Eyes, and I had welcomed him closer to me. We struggled across his endless dark plain, with him touching me in ways I did not want to be touched, with me striking out at him in ways that had no effect. The woman in white did not save me.

  I could not break his darkness, I could not escape his territory, until sharp pain at last reconnected me to my body. With the memory came my thoughts of the sea, the ship, Aaran … oh, Aaran …

  … And shielding.

  With the fury of a sea storm, with the brilliance of the sun, I brought my own blazing light into Ossal’s darkness, and at last he fled.

  Two Moonstones were leaning over me when I opened my eyes, and I heard one of them sigh with relief. “How are you?” she asked me.

  I hurt. And not just my head, not just the Eyes. I hurt everywhere. I tried to move, but my legs wouldn’t respond, and my arms wouldn’t respond, and when I tried to breathe in to say something, the pain in my chest set me to coughing, and the cough
ing hurt so much I thought I might just die.

  I managed, between coughs, to squeak out a faint, “What happened to me?”

  “You fought.”

  I thought I recognized the voice of the Moonstone who spoke. “Seya?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You fell. And apparently many men stepped on you while they fought over the top of you. They broke more than a few of your bones.”

  “Why … can’t I move?”

  “Your arms and legs are weighted and restrained while we mend the bones. Your head we’ve pinned on a hard board between pillows, for your spine has breaks in it, too. And your ribs … well, we couldn’t do much to help you with the pain there, for you have to breathe.”

  “Not well, apparently,” I said.

  “Better than you were,” Seya said. She was one of the few Moonstones who had taken back her name. Many, like me, had forgotten theirs. “You don’t have little pink bubbles coming from your mouth every time you exhale. We thought you were too badly hurt to live,” she added.

  “I’m grateful for the pain,” I told her, and let her form the wrong conclusion. “I’m quite happy still to be alive.” And then I asked, “Has the captain been in?”

  “He brought you here, and he’s been by to check on you twice a bell. He’s been in a foul mood.”

  I could imagine. I could imagine, in fact, that he was in a foul mood with me, since my failure to spot the treachery in those around us had led me to give him some very bad advice. We would have been far better off to have attacked the Iage while they were still in their little oar-powered longboats. Aaran had mentioned Greton fire as a fine weapon and one they had plenty of, and I had told him that the islands in these parts were full of Iage, and we were better off negotiating with the send-out party.

  I had a lot to answer for.

  And would clearly have the opportunity to do it, for Aaran slammed through the door right then, demanding, “Any improvement? Any?”

  “I’m awake,” I said. But that started another coughing spasm, and the sera had to give me water laced with something bitter, sipped through a reed, to soothe it.

  “Out, all of you,” he snarled, and the Seya and the other Moonstone, and even Redbird, whose hand I had felt on my shoulder the instant I woke, hurried out.

  “I would have words with you,” Aaran said.

  “I’m so sorry,” I told him. “This was all my fault. If you want to toss me into the sea, I’ll completely understand. I’ve earned no better.”

  “I … what? You think I want to throw you overboard? I want no such thing.”

  I said, “Oh. But it was my bad advice, and my difficulty in navigating the time rivers, that led you to let them on board.”

  “I didn’t come to talk to you about what happened. I came to talk to you about the future. About the two of us.”

  “Now?”

  “If now is all we have, I will have said this, at least. I love you, Hawkspar. I don’t know what to do about it, because I am bound by oath to find my sister, and life on the sea is no place for a woman. But I love you in spite of duty. And if you told me that to have your love, I would have to forsake duty …” His voice broke, and I could hear the anguish in his voice. “ … Then I would break my vow, and be Tonk no more. If you demanded it.”

  He loved me. And I loved him. And because I loved him, I could not let him suffer as he was. “We both have our duties, Aaran. Yours is to find your sister, and make pay those who stole her away, and murdered your parents. Mine is to die stopping a war.”

  In his quarters, silence lay between us like an ocean. “Die?” he whispered at last.

  “Yes. If I succeed in stopping those who seek to destroy the Tonk, I will die from the sacrifices I must make to do so. If I fail … well, it will be because I died before I could succeed.” I felt his hand moving on my forehead. “I can see my own future. It has only two paths. One is short, the other shorter. There is no third way.”

  “I do not accept an immutable future.” He was silent a long time. “So many dead. We lost so many, and you seem so weak. Seeing you like this …” He tensed. “How did the Iage find us, Hawkspar? They came in force when we were still far from land, and they came not as a scouting party, but as a war party. That as many of us lived as did, I can only consider a miracle. So how came they to discover us?”

  I did not know that question. I had not thought to ask it. “Bring the Moonstones back. I will search the past for your answer, but I want them here when I do, in case they have to revive me.”

  He went to the door—he did not have to go beyond it. They and Redbird stood just outside, talking with the marines who guarded it.

  I didn’t want to look—pushing the Eyes was going to add even more pain to the pain I already had. But delaying looking would mean that I would have to dig deeper into the past. The waters of time flowed away, and those who had caused so much death and destruction moved farther from our reach with every moment.

  When the Moonstones were in place, I let the river of time flow around me, let myself slide into it. All the voices and pictures flashed around me, all the possibilities of the moment. But I did not want possibilities. I wanted facts. The past, and what had transpired there.

  I waded upstream, where the river narrowed to a hard, fast current, a single powerful thread that pushed against me with all the weight of time itself. The past does not welcome intruding eyes. And I was pushing where I was not wanted.

  But I pushed anyway, and with my efforts came the pain. I ignored it, looking for the moment when those aboard the Taag were betrayed, and the method by which that betrayal had been effected. I pushed, and pushed—and three days back, found what I sought, though it was not where I would have sought it, nor was it what I would have expected.

  Three men huddled together in a deep hold in the Taag, hiding where they had no business being, doing what they had no business doing. They were in contact with someone far away, and I could not push that far. It was not the Iage … and yet somehow it was, for from what they did in the hold, the Iage came. Three men—if I reached hard and clung to them against the current that battered me, I could catch a few sharp images. “Hagedwar,” I said, as foreign words formed in my mind. “Reform Mindan. Three traitors. Sailors all.”

  And then I lost my grip, and smashed downstream into the present, and enveloping fire.

  Cool fingers held my head, and pressed against my closed eyelids. Voices murmured, and someone put a reed to my lips, and I sipped. Fire on the inside, in my mouth, down by throat, into my gut, and the hottest edges of the pain in my skull cooled. Just a little.

  The voices took on shape. “Is it like that for them every time?” That was the captain.

  “No. She’s a very new oracle, and she hadn’t any training from the previous Hawkspar before she inherited the Eyes. She’s pushing herself too hard—pushing into time too deeply. With experience her pain will lessen. Will become, in most cases, bearable. Now, though …”

  And the captain’s voice again. “Can she do herself any permanent damage?”

  “She can. She runs close to doing it, I think. Sometimes oracles fall into their time river and cannot find their way back. They live in the pain, and drown in it. They either go mad, screaming of spirits haunting them, or sometimes they simply die.”

  “Oh, Jostfar. I didn’t know.”

  “She knows.” Seya said. “If she looked for whatever it was you sought, it was because she thought it was important.”

  “It … was. Is. Though I can’t believe what she said.”

  “The future is a tricky thing.”

  “I asked her about the past.”

  “That you can believe without question. The oracles are ever complaining about the many seductive wanderings of the present and the future. But the past, they say, is a hard, deep, single channel. If she found what you sought there, it is exactly as she says it is.”

  No one said anything.

  My pain ebbed further, and I realized
that the captain had given me more of that fire-drink of his. The Moonstones had done their best for me, too.

  “I’m … better,” I told them.

  My voice was a pitiful croaking thing, but they all seemed glad enough to hear it.

  “Is she safe?” Aaran said, not to me, but to them. “Is she well enough that you could leave us for a while?”

  “We can dare a short absence,” a Moonstone said. And I heard the door closing, and knew we were alone.

  “You … do you remember what you told me?”

  “Of course,” I said. It was a whisper.

  “You … said … traitors. Reform Mindans. Three of them.”

  “Yes. And the blue sphere with the … blocks in it. Triangles and squares.”

  “That’s the Hagedwar. It’s a … a sort of magical tool. But … Mindan?”

  “Reform Mindan.”

  “But that’s Tonk,” he said. He sounded hurt. Bewildered. As if what I was telling him was so near to impossible that he could not bring himself to even consider it. “You’re suggesting we were betrayed to our enemies by … Tonk.”

  “I’m not suggesting. The past is what it is.”

  I lay there, with the pain ebbing and flowing like the tides of an angry sea, and waiting for him to explain why the idea of Tonk traitors was so impossible. Everyone had traitors, didn’t they?

  “Tonk,” he said, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

  And I realized that in not understanding his bewilderment, I had discovered the truth about myself I didn’t want to admit. I knew a lot about the Tonk. But I had no idea what it meant to be Tonk.

  “You say this as though it ought to mean something to me. As if I should understand. But I don’t. Why should the traitors on your ship not be Tonk?”

  “Because we are a people,” he said. “We have stood together since the dawn of recorded history. Before that, even, when all we had were the rotes and the long sagas. We have been everything to each other. We would cross any ocean, fight any battle, to save our own from outsiders. Tonk, no matter where they might be, no matter what clan or what saint, are always Tonk.”