Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  It was, in a way, what my predecessor had been trying to tell me. She’d said I had family, and that was what Aaran was talking about, wasn’t it? A family, spread over the world, with people who would take you in no matter whether they knew you or not, because you were theirs. I was, in his eyes, theirs. I bore a little mark on my hand and had in my memory a brief childhood with parents and siblings who had been Tonk, and in his eyes, that was enough. It made me Tonk. Family. Worth sailing through terrible dangers and risking his own life to save.

  That he hoped to find his sister was not, at the moment, the issue. Many a man did not go looking across the world for a lost sister, but instead handed her up to fate. Cried, “She’s gone, alas, alas,” and then went back to his fields or his fishing or his herds.

  Aaran was not such a man.

  He was Tonk. In his eyes, all Tonk were like him.

  I would do better not to let myself think on what sort of man he was. I wanted something that my duty to this family of mine—and his—would not let me have.

  But he had come to rescue me. Because I was Tonk.

  And the traitors were Tonk.

  I told him, “I cannot say why they have done this thing, but three Reform Mindan sailors used the magic of … Hagedwar … to communicate with your enemies. To plan this betrayal.”

  “So they contacted the Iage? How could they have known I would come this way?”

  “They didn’t contact the Iage,” I told him. “Someone else. I got no images. No faces, nothing clear. Only a word, and it from the men on this ship.”

  “The word?”

  “Feegash,” I said.

  “No!” he shouted. “No Tonk, ever, would knowingly aid the Feegash.”

  He stood, pushing away from the berth with angry motions, and he began to pace a short line through his quarters. “Reform Mindan,” he said after a while. “Three of them.” He paced some more. “Feegash.”

  23

  Hawkspar

  I could have tried to follow all he did next, but I did not. I was exhausted. The things the seru were doing to my bones to get them to mend quickly were not only terribly painful, but they were also exhausting. So I slept. I had no idea how long, but the sound of the door to the captain’s cabin banging open woke me.

  “If I stood the men from the ship before you, could you tell me which three were traitors?” Aaran asked.

  “I can. I’ll know them when I see them again.”

  He brought six men before me, all shackled and guarded by marines. I would not have marked them as any different from the other sailors aboard the ship. They were big men, relatively young, healthy. I had passed them all in the time we had been aboard, going through the crew commons and sitting in the attable eating our daily meals. None of them had marked themselves as special in my memory before. But I had no difficulty seeing which of them had marked themselves with treachery, with Feegash, with Iage.

  I could not point. It would have made things easier. Neither could I nod with my head. “First on the left, second on the left, and last at the far right,” I said, and heard the marines gasp, and heard one whisper, “She knew.”

  “We’ll try them,” Aaran said. “The one who helps us most will live, the other two we’ll hang. Chain them apart from each other, one on the top deck, one in the holding cell, and one on the working deck. Keep every other human being away from them. They’re to have water. Nothing else.”

  He had the three innocent men released, and the marines took the three guilty men away. Aaran stayed behind.

  “You had six of these Reform Mindans on board?” I asked him.

  “No. Only three.”

  “Then why did you bring in six men?”

  He sighed. “Because the men I brought were Tonk, and the men I ordered to bring them were Tonk. When we hang them, we’ll be hanging Tonk men. Our own people, accused on the word of one who is Tonk … but who has not been raised Tonk.” He walked over to the side of the bed, and pulled up a chair. Sat, rested his hand on my shoulder. He began to stroke my skin. He didn’t seem aware that he was doing it.

  I said, “You needed to prove to them that I had not falsely accused them.”

  “I had to prove to them that you could identify the three men you had told me about. Either the traitors will accuse each other, or they will go free.”

  I laughed a little. “You’re still not certain of the value of what I saw.”

  “I am. But if I hang three Tonk men without evidence that anyone else can see, I’ll have a mutiny on my hands. From what remains of my officers and the Tonk sailors and marines, in any case.”

  “Three? I thought you were going to hang two, and let the third live.”

  He didn’t say anything for what seemed to me a very long time. Then he said, “This is how it will go. Each of these three backstabbing cowards will offer up some evidence in order to be the one who survives. Each will be told that one of the others gave us more. We will in this manner get everything that we can out of each of them. And each of them will demonstrate his unworthiness to live in what he says about the others; he will prove that he had a hand in the deaths of his comrades and his friends, his brothers and the innocents we had on board. All the men aboard the ship will know what each of the three has said and done.”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Each of the three will pay with his life.”

  I lay there considering that. “But that doesn’t seem right to me. They were told one of them will live.”

  His voice was heavy as he said, “What is right? That I send these men to their deaths before I know everything they know? You say there is some secret plan to destroy the Tonk, and if ever there were a people who would hold such a plan, it would be the Feegash—evil, lying, cowardly bastards that they are. These three traitors are, if my suspicions are correct, enemy soldiers for the Feegash. If that is the case, they are the first such we’ve found, and every Tonk needs to know about them, and know everything they know. I could torture them—I might, if they are not willing to talk to save their own skins. But torture is hard on the men who must carry it out, and I’d rather not put my people through that.”

  I could not say that I had seen any evidence of fairness in the universe to this point. I’d watched children whipped to death, and fed to rats, and sold to slavers who would rent them as whores until they died.

  But I had not thought the captain a man who would not keep his word, and it seemed to me that this put him, at least a little, into the company of those I had just escaped. Those I had refused to become.

  “You’re disappointed in me,” he said, and I realized that he’d withdrawn his hand from my shoulder.

  “It isn’t my place to be disappointed,” I told him. I was trying to find words that would let me say what I was thinking, and not make myself a fool in the process. “If you kill all three of them after saying you would kill only two, do you not … make yourself the same as they are?”

  And he laughed out loud. “That’s what you think? Three men betray their own people and cause the deaths of a third of my officers and near half of my crew. I see to it that the three men guilty of this horrific crime prove themselves guilty before I see them executed. Then I see them executed. And I am like them?”

  Put that way, I seemed to have made myself a fool anyway.

  “This is war,” he told me. “War is never pretty, it is never kind. It is not won by the gentle or the thoughtful, or by those who would keep themselves above their enemy in spirit. It is won by those men and women who are willing to do what has to be done.” He said, “You are the Eyes of War, you say.”

  “I am.”

  “Then what war have you seen where the kindest prevailed by being kind?”

  I had seen the flashes of the wars that were and that would be tossed at me by the Eyes. And I’d read the histories in the knot-books, and had learned the oral histories.

  “There are no such wars,” I said at last. “There are only wars in which those
who were stronger, or had better weapons, or who were better deceivers, overcame their enemies. Any kindnesses came after, when the conquerors had the choice to destroy their enemies and all that their enemies held dear, or to let them live. Mostly what came after was as horrible as the war itself.”

  He sat with his face turned toward me, restless. “You have charted the courses of other men’s wars?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m too new for that. I had an opportunity, but the man who sought my advice was an evil man, and his enemy was more worthy. So I kept him in place awaiting my word until his chance to conquer his enemy had passed. Then I gave him very good advice. I told him to leave off his warring or he would lose.”

  Aaran leaned forward. “What happened?”

  “He warred with his neighbor anyway, and he lost most of his army. The rest came after the Citadel, and this petty prince was busy attacking us when you arrived and rescued us.”

  “That was him?”

  “That was him.”

  “So your experience in guiding the outcome of a war has been to prod a king to lose one.”

  “My experience has been to save a decent people from genocide at the hands of a vile monster.”

  His voice dropped so low that I could almost not hear it. “And if I execute all three of the men who caused the deaths of your people and mine, will you think me a vile monster, and seek to help my enemies?”

  “No,” I said. “Since my childhood, I have been able to feel the Tonk with me each sunrise and each sunset. I felt a bond with them that gave me hope, that kept me from despairing or giving up or accepting my fate. I called out for my people, even if I did not know who you were. And my people came. You came. I know you are no monster. I do not know the Feegash. You speak of them as if they are evil incarnate. But even if the Feegash were not wicked, but for some other reason sought the destruction of the Tonk, still … you are my people. My family. Should I help those who would destroy you?”

  He leaned over and placed a kiss on my forehead. “You’ll find your way through this. As will we. I cannot ask you to simply trust me when I tell you that those of our people who would assist the Feegash against us have earned death many times over. But when we have time, I’ll tell you what the Feegash did to the Tonk, not so long ago. It may help you understand.”

  He left, and I lay in my pain and thought about war, and the Eyes of War, and what I was to be about.

  24

  Aaran

  Aaran conscripted the stronger and more agile of Hawkspar’s girls as help, to fill in for the missing crew. They were tough girls, used to hard, thankless labor and long hours, and they caught on quickly to the business of lines and sails and winds.

  He felt strange seeing them scrambling up the rigging and onto the masts like boys. They’d gleefully disposed of the robes of their order for sailors’ clothes, and had taken to the heights with a joy that he could well understand.

  Freedom waited up there in the riggings, looking out at a world curved round the edges and spread before your feet like you were a god. The far horizons beckoned, and the scraps of land promised adventure. And these were girls who had been caged up the whole of their lives, and adventure sang its song to them as it did to men.

  Counter to everything he had ever known about women, the girls complained less than his men. They weren’t as strong, but they were twice as willing to take risks. He wondered about that. About their fearlessness that bordered on the edge of recklessness.

  Hawkspar was up within days, and hobbling. The Seru Moonstone insisted that she would be completely sound a few days hence; their work was easily as good as anything his healer could have done.

  The Taag av Sookyn was making its way north-northeast with the plan to turn due east as soon as they were well away from Iage territory. They’d had to backtrack a bit, but Hawkspar’s information on the areas suggested that a relatively safe corridor lay not far out of reach. They might slip through it without running afoul of any locals. And outside of Fallen Suns, they could pick up the Trade Current and run south toward Greton. Then west again.

  And home.

  Hawkspar joined him in his cabin.

  “You sent for me?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  She gave him that half smile he had come to recognize as wariness. “Better. I’m no longer tied to a bed, which has done wonders for my mood.”

  “I have a favor to ask of you,” he told her. He’d debated asking her this, but he needed to have her on his side without doubts on her part or his. From what he’d been learning from the traitors, the Tonk were in more trouble than he’d ever guessed. She could be a weapon that could even the balance for them. She couldn’t move the Tonk ahead—they’d long ago fallen behind in this war they hadn’t even suspected. But to win more than her half-hearted acquiescence, she had to see what it was she was fighting for, and why she mattered.

  “I’m going to do a questioning of each of the three traitors today. I want you to come with me and listen to what they say. You’re to act as if you can tell when they’re telling the truth.”

  To the wary half smile, she added raised eyebrows. “To some extent, I can.”

  “Truly?”

  “If I submerge myself in the time river, I can see if what they’re telling me lies within the channel of the past, or outside of it. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to give you my judgment on all three men in one day—the pain from the Eyes might be too great for that.”

  “They all say much the same thing, varying in only small details. If you can verify the words of one, you will have come close to verifying the words of all.”

  She added, “It would be good, perhaps, if I heard their stories. I would like to … understand.”

  He took her to the holding cell, where the most talkative of the men was being held.

  “We’re going in to talk with Kerwyn,” Aaran told the marine guarding the door.

  The marine said, “I’ll chain him, then. Wait here, please.” When he came back out, he stepped aside, and Aaran led Hawkspar into the dank, foul-smelling cell. The man inside sat on one of the two benches, manacled—wrists and ankles—to the wall behind him.

  “Have you decided?” Kerwyn asked Aaran as soon as he was through the door.

  “I’ve brought the Eyes of War with me. Her Eyes can tell whether you’re lying or not. You’re to tell me everything you know, and she will judge the truth of it. She will then listen to the stories of the other two. And then I will decide who lives and who dies.”

  “But I’ve given you the best information, haven’t I?”

  “You have if it’s all true,” Aaran said. “So tell her what you told me, and watch your words. Today is not the day to lie.”

  The traitor swallowed hard and looked nervously from Aaran to Hawkspar. Aaran wondered how many lies he’d told in his previous confessions.

  “I was brought into the plot against my will,” Kerwyn started, and Hawkspar interrupted him right there.

  “He’s lying,” she said.

  Kerwyn’s head whipped back and forth, and sweat beaded on his forehead.

  “She can see your lies, you fool,” Aaran snarled.

  Kerwyn shuddered, and started again. “None of us were brought into the plot against our will.” He paused, and when Hawkspar didn’t say anything, his shoulders slumped and he continued, “The Reform Mindans broke off from the Mindans following the Feegash War. Minda was good to us when the Feegash were in charge of Hyre. Trade was good, ships came into our ports from around the world, and gold flowed in like water. Shops flourished, the taaks could afford to rebuild, and the Mindans gained immense power within the Hends.”

  “What he says now is true,” Hawkspar said.

  “He has managed to leave out a great deal. While the Feegash ruled Hyre, slavery came to Tonk lands for the first time. Daughters and sons were sold into concubinage, perversions made their homes with those who held power, the Feegash attempted to erase all Tonk culture,
and eventually many of our people were consumed by a twisted magic that held their minds prisoner within their own bodies.”

  Her face was turned toward him. “And everything you say is also true.” She looked both stunned and horrified.

  “The greddscharf—the mind-slavery—was the work of one man, and he was eventually killed. The Feegash who remained could have stayed and made us rich,” Kerwyn said. “Instead, they were chased to the last man from our lands, and the trade ships and the gold followed them to other shores. The Confederacy of Hyre was once again a pariah among those who traded on the sea. And if we had a new alliance with the Eastils, what of that? Endless warring had impoverished them as much as it had impoverished us.”

  “You see the truth of this,” Aaran asked Hawkspar, and she nodded. “Keep going, then,” he told Kerwyn.

  The man said, “Some of the Mindans were satisfied to see the Feegash go. Others, however, wanted them to return, so that we could be rich and powerful again. It was over that issue that the Mindans split. Minda is clear in her teachings: that war is evil, that those who pursue it for any reason are evil, that peace and prosperity are the true signs of her favor.”

  Aaran remembered hearing something about a schism in the Mindan ranks, but Mindans never went to sea in privateers. They were aboard merchant ships often enough. And he’d lived at sea since he was sixteen. So if he’d thought about it at all, he’d simply thought it an odd bit of news about Tonks who, following Minda as they did, were just barely Tonks in his mind.

  He’d never imagined that the Mindan schism might be Tonks fighting over the right to support Feegash interests over those of their own people.

  Kerwyn said, “We joined the Reform Tonks because what they said made sense to us. That peace was always a better path than war. How could anyone disagree with that? That war was always evil and always wrong. That everyone deserved prosperity, and that whatever we did to bring prosperity would bring Minda honor.”