Hawkspar

by Holly Lisle

  The Sinali ships had no windmen. If we, with our one, sailed straight into the wind, they would have to tack to pursue us, while, even shorthanded, we would be able to sail forward in a straight line. Even if we did not make great speed, we would still make better progress than the Sinalis, whose sharply zigzagging path would slow them to a crawl.

  If we could get far enough ahead of them, we could, perhaps, lose them, and then swing around and creep safely out of the Dragon Sea.

  “So the question is,” Aaran said, “will Faryn hold out long enough for us to get beyond their reach?”

  “He moved the ship when there was no wind,” I said.

  “He did. But he had help, and had the Trade Current working with him, and no wind to fight against. This time, he’ll be alone, and he’ll have to create an envelope around the ship and funnel the existing wind into it. The Trade Current will drag us a bit southward whether we want to go south or not. To go due west, which is head into the wind, we will be fighting everything.”

  “You know we could die here,” I said.

  “I’ve lived with that truth since I first sailed away from shore. The sea is no friend of man or ship. We sail in spite of the dangers, always knowing the next minute could be our last.”

  I did not want to push him. I did not. I knew in my heart that what I wanted was something I could not have; yet I knew in my bones and blood and flesh that what I wanted meant the world to me. While the ship sailed west, everyone would be waiting. Waiting and tense, armed, watching. They would need Aaran, perhaps, to check from time to time that everything went as planned. The ship was shorthanded, and I had seen him take the tillers more than once.

  But surely there would be time. A way. Surely he and I could be together once more.

  Our lives rode on a thread, and I looked to see if getting what I wanted would cut that thread. And it wouldn’t.

  I wanted him.

  Standing before him, I unbound my shoes, and pulled off my clothes. Aboard the ship, at these lower latitudes, we of the Order had found all the many layers of our robes too much to bear, and had taken to wearing only a tabi and penitent’s hakan-ara—these being made of light cotton instead of heavy silk or wool. So in an instant I stood before him in just my breastbinder and pantlets.

  “Ah,” he said. “You—what are you doing?”

  “I have seen many futures in which I am used roughly and viciously by many men before they at last kill me. As many more in which the seru and I kill all the girls before we kill ourselves so that we do not suffer the fate they plan for us. I have seen one still unlikely future—the one we pursue now—in which we escape. There are so many ways that we can fail at this, and only one in which we can succeed. We may not have much time. If we survive this night, I know we cannot have each other. But for tonight, we could … pretend that we will love each other for the rest of our lives. If we only live until tomorrow, it will be true.”

  “Even if we lived forever, I wouldn’t have to pretend,” he muttered, and then his hands grabbed my shoulders, pulling me toward him, and his lips pressed against mine, hard and hungry, and he pulled me toward the bed, and pushed me down on it, and leaned over me. “Wait here,” he said, “I have to set Faryn and the steersman our new course, and I will be back. Don’t move.”

  His footsteps rang across the floor, and the door opened, and the humid, hot, salt-tanged air of the southern Dragon Sea wafted in. I could hear him on the other side of the door, telling the marines there, “No one in, no one out. No exceptions.”

  I followed his progress—dark on dark on dark, shapes and weights as he ran the length of the ship, vaulted up the officers’ companionway three steps at a time, charged up the steersman’s castle, stood almost no time, went vaulting down the steersman’s ladder into the empty windmen’s room, and next I heard the ship’s bell ringing. It was a sharp sound, penetrating. It carried without difficulty down to the attable on the working deck, and into the passengers’ sleeping quarters.

  Sailors came running from all directions, managing to reach him at nearly the same time.

  Another moment, and then Aaran was running across the deck again, and back to me.

  To me.

  I shivered, with want and anticipation and feelings for which I had no words.

  He hurried through the door again, and this time dropped the bar into the brackets.

  “You’re still here. You have not changed your mind?”

  “I have not.”

  He stripped off his own clothes as he came to me, leaving them in piles on the floor. For a moment I felt like a penitent again, threatened by terrible consequences for even the slightest infraction against the Order’s endless rules on neatness. And then I felt deliciously wicked for straying so far from them.

  He sat beside me on the bed, and his hand reached out and touched me on the shoulder. Rubbing, stroking. It was a wonderful, glorious thing, the touch of his hand on my skin, and better when he unbound the ties of my breastbinder and tugged it off me.

  “Oh,” he whispered. “Beautiful.” And pressed his lips to mine, and ran his hands over my breasts at the same time.

  His mouth had moved to my breast, and I stroked his hair. Pulled back, braided in a complicated braid. Thick, coarser than mine. His teeth nipped lightly at my nipples, and in spite of trying to be quiet, I cried out.

  He moved over me, touching me until I thrashed and bucked beneath his hands and his lips, his teeth and tongue. I bit the bedclothes to keep from screaming, and wrapped myself around him, and cried out, wild with pleasure. A storm built inside of me, more fierce than the first time, more compelling, more consuming.

  He rolled us over again, and lifted me, and my legs wrapped around him, pulling him against me. He laughed, and slid into me, and began to move in and out, slowly, carefully, and all that came before faded away. I clutched at the bedclothes, clawed the bed and his back, shoved myself against him. Inside me the storm rose higher, waves crashing, winds howling, thunder roaring, lightning cracking. I screamed, and he moved faster, and I begged for more. More. Heat and hardness and slick wetness, pounding and arching and pounding together and pulling apart.

  He drove into me, then, and I moved with him until everything collided at once, the storm crescendoed, my body locked tight and the universe inside my head blew apart. He kept moving, driving, hammering, faster and harder, and I locked tighter. Nothing had ever felt so good. Nothing had ever been so loud in my mind, so much, so strong. I was outside of myself as he stilled, as his back arched, as he cried out and we clung together, suspended as the universe fell around us in pieces.

  Then came silence, and he moved slowly to lie upon me, his weight a blanket, while the storm in me subsided.

  “I keep not expecting that,” he whispered after a while.

  “What?”

  “You,” he said, and turned his face toward mine, and kissed my cheek. Gently.

  I kissed him back. Lips, no tongues, just the merest brushing of skin to skin, like butterfly wings in a lightly cupped hand.

  We lay together a little longer, and then he kissed me again. “Dress,” he said. “And sleep here if you would like. I have to go back to the ship, and make sure all is running as it should be.”

  “I won’t sleep,” I told him. In truth, I was so full of energy that I felt as if I’d never need to sleep again. And I, too, had duties I needed to be about. “I’ll look a little forward in time and see what I can tell you.”

  “You’re wonderful. Wonderful.” He pulled away, and started for the door. “If we’re both still alive tonight, I’d like to share dinner with you. Here. Alone.”

  I thought about him in me, and us together.

  “Yes,” I said.

  27

  Aaran

  Jostfar help him, he was so in love with her.

  Aaran went about his duties on the ship, but she was the only thought in his head. People kept talking to him, and he kept not hearing them—not the first time or the se
cond time they spoke, and sometimes not even the third time.

  His men made pretense in mistaking the cause of his distraction.

  The boy up on the higharm had all three ships in sight up until darkness fell. At last sight, they’d been falling badly behind. All three had their lanterns hanging unused and cold, to hide their positions in the dark, and to make seeing the Taag easier, should someone carelessly let light show for a moment.

  Aaran caught a change in the scent of the air, and a twinge of pain in his forehead. He frowned.

  He sought out the steersman. “Still heading due west?”

  “We are.” Young Nemick, not much past wharf rat, had the rudder. The ship was shorthanded, and the boy was holding. Aaran bit his lip, but said nothing. Nemick said, “Making as good headway as could be expected, though I could wish for better. It helps a bit knowing that the Sinalis are beating to follow us.”

  “It does.”

  “Faryn says he’s having a hard time of the headwind, though.”

  Aaran looked down the latter-hatch and said, “You going to hold?”

  “Headwind’s bad and getting worse,” the windman shouted up at him. “It’s a bitter fight I’m having here. I think we may be pushing into a building storm.”

  That was what he’d smelled and felt in his sinuses. He smiled a little. A storm might not be the worst thing that could happen to them, if they could get well into it. Ships could hide in storms. Enemies could end up scattered or reefed or sunk entirely—especially those that didn’t have trackers and windmen. He could hope for a storm, perhaps, in which he could double back and sail the Taag right by the pursuing Sinali ships and out the easiest point of the Fallen Suns, where it looked like he would only have to run through a single chain of small islands, and those decently far apart.

  He watched the western sky, and saw it flickering in the darkness. Lightning, a ways off. But coming.

  He breathed in and smelled the change.

  It was big, he thought. Pushing wind a long way out.

  Aaran slid for a moment inside the Hagedwar—long enough to see that the Sinali trio was tacking southward at the moment. He said, “All right, then. Set us east northeast under sail, and let Faryn have a break. We’ll put a bit more distance between us and them, then turn hard and double back with the wind due west when the storm hits. We’ll give it everything we have, and hope we get around them and lose them for good before they catch on to our trick.”

  The ship’s bell rang the hour; one shift of sailors changed places with fresh ones, the officers on watch gave their reports and handed off to the next watch.

  Aaran called to Ermyk, who was getting off watch, “Have the off-duty officers meet in my quarters for dinner.”

  And he went down to the galley to instruct the cooks to send up meals for five right away, and to make two special meals to send up on the next bell.

  He had to talk with his officers. But he had to be with Hawkspar again, too.

  The surviving officers gathered in his grand hall, a grim and silent group. Aaran suspected it would be some time before they could look at the empty places around the table and not think of how some of their own had betrayed the missing to their deaths.

  When everyone was seated, Aaran opened a half-nob keg of fine black ale, and poured the mugs to full. When each man held his drink in hand, Aaran lifted his glass and said, “To the honored dead.”

  “To the honored dead,” the voices around the table echoed.

  “And to making the guilty pay,” Aaran said.

  “To making the guilty pay.” They sounded stronger and surer that time.

  He drank, and they drank, and then he sat.

  “We’ll not dance around this issue. We had four traitors on this ship. Three of our own, and a Feegash assassin who chose this day, for Jostfar only knows what reason, to try to kill me. He could have had a part in other deaths on the ship. We’ve lost a lot of good people this voyage, and we’re still a long way from home.”

  Alwyn said, “We could lose more. We could lose everything tonight.”

  “No,” Aaran said. “We might all die, but we won’t lose everything. Whether we live or die, all the communicators in Tonk lands around the world have by this time received our messages about the treachery of the Reform Mindans and the involvement of the Feegash. Our own communicators are under marine watch in case we have yet another traitor somewhere in our midst, and they’re already receiving reports that confirm what we discovered. The conspiracy was big. But now most of it is in the open. At least we think it is.”

  “Then the Feegash truly have been working with Tonks?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that possible?” the master of arms asked. “How could any Tonk side against his own people with those villains?”

  “There’s no knowing,” Aaran said. “Maybe these are men who were twisted during the time the Feegash held their minds in thrall. Maybe they are simply men without spines, or convictions. Minda has never been a saint who inspired great things from her followers.”

  “No. Perhaps we should cut all Mindans from our number.”

  He couldn’t deny having thought the same thing. The Mindans had always been the Tonks who wanted to push all other Tonks into the Mindan fold, to make everyone into a nation of merchants and shopkeeps who valued gold and peace above freedom.

  But Minda was a part of the Five, and had been for the history of the Tonk. Jostfar needed shopkeeps and merchants. He just didn’t need to have them running things, in Aaran’s opinion.

  Traitors, though? No, Jostfar had no place for traitors.

  “So what do we do to find any other traitors among us?” Ynyar, the master of the day watch, asked.

  They ate in silence, and Aaran considered the question. “We ask some of the women of the Order to look for us. To use the Eyes. They share our fate; perhaps they need to be taken on as full crew in this journey, and share our rewards along with the risks.”

  Each man around the table considered the effect this would have on the size of their shares at the end of the voyage. “The men might raise objections. Part of their shares are going to come from risking their lives saving the women you’re considering as crew.”

  “Women aboard a ship are unlucky,” Ermyk said.

  Aaran stared at his kor daan. “They’re already aboard the ship,” Aaran said. “They’re already working. They aren’t going to become any unluckier if we pay them.”

  Ermyk grinned. “Less money for each of us is a bit of bad luck.”

  Aaran swore. “Are you Mindan, too, kor daan, that your heart is in your pocket with your gold? We’ve discovered a conspiracy against our people, and we have what might be a new weapon to help us fight this conspiracy, and you’re going to mention the lessening of your share?”

  Ermyk made a face, then laughed. “Jostfar forgive me, I’d blame my Mindan mother but I know better. Even she pulled a sword and fought the Feegash when we ran them out of Roovintaak at last.”

  “There’s your answer then, or should be,” Aaran said.

  They ate a while longer, and then Ynyar said, “But maybe not full shares, eh? Since they weren’t aboard for the first half of the voyage.”

  Aaran sighed. “Half shares, man. Did you take me for born yesterday? Is mine a fool’s face?”

  “Thought you might have been looking to pull your woman in for a full cut.”

  “She’s not my woman. She’s her woman.”

  “Well, anyway. It was what I thought.”

  “No. I’m not trying to give shares you’ve earned to someone else as a gift.”

  They discussed the day, then—executions and the attempted murder, their run from the pursuing Sinalis, which might yet end in their destruction. They were weary, all of them and afraid more than they cared to admit. Hopeful, too, especially with a storm building that would both make them harder to pursue and let them run out of sight of even the sharpest-eyed sailors.

  The Sinali had no trackers
. At least these Sinali had none. Considering that they were allied with Tonks—Reform Mindans though they were, there might still be men trained in the use of the Hagedwar and capable of taking their training aboard enemy ships for the benefit of the enemy.

  That was a worrisome thought.

  28

  Hawkspar

  I wish I could say that I withstood the storm like a seasoned sailor. But I didn’t, and neither did most of those with me. We’d had our feet firmly underneath us for most of our lives, and finding ourselves climbing waves big as houses sent almost all of us to our beds, puking and retching in between long stretches of being terrified that we were going to die any minute, or wishing we were already dead.

  I’d never experienced such a thing in my life. I tried to imagine living on a ship, and facing storms like these as a matter of course. It made my belly knot. What kind of life did these men live? How could they bear it?

  Aaran had been living like this since he was just a boy, to fulfill a promise he’d made. To find his sister.

  I’d known he was a brave man. An honorable one. But I’d never imagined how much courage keeping his promise must have taken.

  The wind sounded like demons loosed from the hells. The thunder roared so loud it seemed the ship should blow apart just from the sound of it. With every crash, the children would scream, and by Jostfar and the Five Saints, I wanted to scream with them. We lay in the dark, clinging with both hands to our berths, terrified to let go lest we be tossed to the floor like beans shaken from ajar. It was all I could do to keep breathing steadily.

  I was quite sure I never wanted food again. And that was when I realized I’d missed the captain’s dinner.

  Well, I hoped he would understand, that he would forgive me.

  And then the next wave of nausea hit me, and I just hoped I’d fall out of my bunk and knock myself unconscious so that I didn’t have to know how horrible I felt.