She could not help laughing. She had sometimes thought the same thing herself, that the shouting and arguing of these people seemed like harbor birds fighting over fish guts on the dock.
Viscount Matreu dripped wax, then applied his seal. After he had blotted it, he rolled up the letter. Halfway back across the room, he stopped and looked Jesa up and down. She felt her face grow hot. What did he want? What was he thinking?
“You are a beautiful young woman, Jesa of the Wran. It would do my heart good to see a woman like you as part of this household, instead of the pinched, pale faces of my other servants. Do you think I could hire you away from the duchess?” He smiled again. It was like a moment of sunshine cutting through the clouds on a cold day. “I would make you very happy, very comfortable here.”
For a moment her heart beat as fast as Green Honeybird’s wings, to think of spending her days in the company of this handsome, soft-spoken man. But then she remembered little Serasina, how her tiny hand would curl around Jesa’s finger like a baby monkey on a high branch might clutch its mother’s tail, sure of that one thing only.
“I fear I can come not to here, my lord. Not to work. I owe my lady too much. And her baby. I am the nurse, you see. I could not leave her.”
He shook his head, not sternly but only regretfully. “Ah, too bad. But I admire your loyalty. I wish all of the duke’s and the duchess’s allies and servants were so mindful of their duty.” He extended the roll of parchment. “Here. Take this back to your dear mistress. I have kept you away from your duties long enough.”
She did. This time it was something warmed by Viscount Matreu’s hands that she slid into the bosom of her dress, its length pressing against her chest so that she found it suddenly difficult to breathe. “You are very kind man, my lord.”
“I only wish it were true.” He saw that she hesitated. “I’m sorry, have I forgotten something?”
She was ashamed to say it, but a stern little voice inside her would not let Jesa stay silent. “I am sorry, my good lord, but I must have the letter of my duchess back, too.”
For a moment he looked surprised and perhaps just a tiny bit annoyed, but his features quickly relaxed. “Of course. The duchess cannot be too careful. She has chosen her messenger well.” He returned to his writing desk and picked up the message Jesa had brought, then handed it to her. “Take good care of both. Go straight back to the Sancellan and let no one distract you.”
She wondered more than ever now what might be in the parchments, but even though the letter her mistress had written was now unsealed, she did not dream of reading it, and not only because she still had trouble with written Nabbanai. She wrapped the old letter around the new, then returned both to the bosom of her dress. “I will, my lord,” was all she said.
As the servant arrived to show her out, Matreu took her hand and kissed it—kissed it!—as though she were a highborn lady like her mistress. “Farewell, Jesa. You are one messenger who is always welcome in my house. And if you should ever change your mind about the thing we discussed . . .”
The servant, a thin, pale old man, was watching them. She thought she saw a little sneer of contempt curl his lip. “You are most kind, Lord Viscount,” she said loudly enough for him to hear. “Most kind and courteous to me. But my mistress needs me.”
“Of course. And I am glad she has you. Go in God’s grace, Jesa of the Wran.”
She was so taken by the memory of the viscount kissing her hand that she was halfway back down the Avenue of the Saints before she remembered where she was.
Twilight had ended and full night had fallen, but the wolves were still howling in the hills as Unver’s black horse breasted the Littlefeather and climbed dripping onto the far bank. Their cries rose and tangled, eerie as the wailing of wind spirits, before dying away as he spurred his horse toward the northeast.
For a moment, as he turned his back on the camp and the smoldering light of the burning wagon, Unver lifted his head as though he had heard someone calling his name. He reined up and swiveled in the saddle, searching the darkness. But when the wolves began to cry again, he shook his head and put his heels to Deofol’s ribs, leaping forward across the grassland.
Beyond the Littlefeather the land was mostly flat, an ocean of hummocky meadows broken only by stands of low, stunted trees and islands of tall grass, the shared pasture of the entire western Lake Thrithing. The moon was not quite full, but no clouds shadowed its face, and its light made it easy to see for long distances. Anyone who wished to follow him would have found it easy, although they would have needed to ride swiftly to keep up with Deofol. And because the moon was so bright and the land so flat, it was easy for Unver to see the low, dark shapes drifting down from the nearby hills after him, singly or in twos and threes. The wolves were following him.
Any man of the plains knew that a good horse could outrun even the fastest wolves for a time. Unver leaned close to his horse’s neck and let him gallop, no doubt hoping the wolves would lose interest. Deofol had a better sense of smell than Unver did; he didn’t need the spurs to let him know they were in danger.
At last, after an hour’s hard riding, Unver reined up on top of a small hillock. The wolves had not given up. In fact, they were close now, and Deofol was weary, his coat damp with sweat that gleamed in the strong moonlight, his breath making a fog that surrounded them. Unver had his curved sword in his hand, and his face was hard and empty, as if what was ahead of him was merely a transaction, to be weighed and added up by the gods, then life or death distributed to whoever earned them, without regard to any human desires.
The first wolf, a great gray beast with its hackles raised, charged up the slope and began to circle just a few paces below the horse. Deofol danced away from the gape-mouthed, growling beast, but other wolves followed until the hillock was surrounded by ghostlike shapes, swift and silvery in the moonlight, slipping through the bending grass like sharks around a foundering swimmer.
The largest wolf stopped on the slope just below Unver, well out of reach of his blade. Its hackles were up, the ears forward and tail lifted. The others crowded in behind the leader, less aggressive and less certain, yipping and growling among themselves. The wolf-chieftain looked around—its eyes caught the moonlight in a brief flare of flame-yellow—then it threw back its head and howled again. After a moment the other beasts joined in. The horse danced anxiously as the howls pierced the night, but Unver only stared. His face was still set in a stern mask, but his posture hinted at his confusion: this was not the way wolves behaved, especially not when they had surrounded their prey.
At last, the largest wolf ended his cry and gradually the voices of the rest faded as well. As if under a spell, Unver sat and stared at the great, gray chieftain for a long time, then slowly began to dismount. The wolves watched him. A few of the animals on the outskirts, less confident than their fellows, made little growling sounds of discomfort, but the rest merely watched Unver, eyes bright and tongues lolling.
At last Unver stood with both boots on the grassy hill, not a pace and a half from the biggest wolf. The two of them looked at each other. Deofol whinnied. Unver did not look at his mount, but raised his hand as if giving a blessing. The leader of the pack watched the hand go up, and then, as if a command had been given, the wolf lowered his own head, dipping his chest before lifting his muzzle toward Unver’s upraised fingers. Then, without any further sound, the great gray leader stood up, turned, and trotted away back down the hill. The rest of the pack followed him without a backward glance at the man and his horse, and very shortly they were running back in the direction from which they’d come, across the silvered grasses, until they melted at last into moving shadows and then were gone.
Unver, his face still expressionless, climbed back into his saddle, then rode down the slope and spurred away toward the north.
• • •
When Fremur came to himself, he realized he wa
s kneeling in the wet grass beside his horse, on a slope not two hundred paces from where the wolves had surrounded Unver. He had been sure that Unver would die in the jaws of the wolves, and he had been about to die with him, without thought even for the clan he now ruled in place of his dead brother. Fremur remembered watching the beasts surround Unver, but he did not remember dismounting, as though holy lightning had leaped from the heavens and struck him witless. He had been following Unver since just outside the camp, on the other side of the Littlefeather, and though he had called out to him several times, Unver had not heard him.
Fremur did not know exactly what he had just seen, but he was trembling all over with it, exalted, mad with fear and excitement. Everything he had suspected, everything he had dreamed, was coming true. The man he had followed was no ordinary man—no ordinary chieftain, or even clan-thane.
Fremur struggled into his saddle and turned his horse back toward the camp of the Crane Clan. He could not help himself, and he spoke as he rode, saying the same thing over and over as though someone other than his horse and the bright, sliding moon were there to hear him.
“I have seen it,” he said. “I have seen with my own eyes that even the beasts of the grassland bow to him. I, Fremur, have seen the true Shan!”
46
River Man
As Tiyagar-month proceeded the days remained long, but Eolair and Morgan blew the horn only at dusk, so on this particular day an hour or more of daylight still remained when they finished riding and began to make camp. Bored, Morgan wandered off by himself, down to the water.
They had stopped somewhere near the border between Stanshire and Falshire, in a place where several streams that had their beginnings in the nearby Woodpecker Hills came down to join the Ymstrecca, the tributaries forming a marshy delta between the highlands and the wide river. Morgan walked for a short distance until he found a place out of sight of the camp, then waded out through the shallow water to a single tall stone standing a bit less than man-height above the slow-moving stream, surrounded by reeds and sawgrass. It looked a little like the Hayholt itself looming above the Kynslagh and Kynswood, and once he had reached the top and found a flat place to sit, Morgan turned to survey his new kingdom.
The only one I’ll likely ever get, he thought. If I believe in magic knucklebones, that is. He found a loose stone and tossed it as far as he could. It fell midstream with a muffled ploosh. Gone, he thought glumly. Just like everything else. Out in the sun for a while, then gone.
The river gurgled around the walls of his stone fortress. Somewhere in the nearby reeds a duck quacked, then the splashing grew louder for a moment and the reeds trembled. A moment later all was silence again. The waterfowl did not appear, nor did it make any more noises.
A pike, Morgan guessed. Sad for the duck. He had seen the long, wolfish swimmers many times in the castle moat, water dragons as big as he was, and sometimes older too—much older, if his grandfather knew what he was talking about. The king had told him once that the oldest pikefish lived two score years or more.
What kind of life would that be? he wondered. Forty years, as long as many men’s lives, down in that dark water . . .
“Morgan!”
His companions had come looking for him. He hunched down, hoping the reeds would shield him from whoever it was. It had been a strangely high-pitched voice, though.
“Morgan Prince, please! Please say to me you are here!”
He peered between the reeds and saw a small figure standing a few paces up the riverbank. It was Qina, the troll girl. His first urge was to remain hidden, but there was something about her worried face that shamed him into giving himself away.
“I’m here.” He stood so she could see him past the reeds that surrounded his stone island.
“Daughter of the Mountains!” she said. “Oh, but I am good to see you well. You should not be here.”
“You can’t tell me what to do, Qina. I’m a prince, remember?”
“No, should not be here because making danger.” She waved her hands in agitation. “Come back!” Her face changed, as if she had thought of something new and even worse than whatever was bothering her. “No, do not come. Stay there. I will coming to you.” She backed a little way farther up the bank, then ran to the water’s edge and leaped across the sizeable distance with her arms spread wide. She landed with both feet on Morgan’s stone refuge, but one of her boots slipped and she began to fall backward. Irritated by the loss of his solitude but alarmed that she might hurt herself, Morgan grabbed her jacket sleeve and kept her from toppling back into the cold water.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. “And how did you jump so far?” He was almost twice her height, but he could not imagine jumping the same distance, not on the first try.
“Where I am living, many are places ice is gave way or path is breaked. Sometimes jump is only way.” She never took her eyes off the water beside them. “Now I will call after Snenneq to help us back. He can be watching.”
Morgan could not understand almost anything the troll girl had just said. “Watch? Snenneq needs to be here to watch us?”
“Ssshhhh!” She held her finger in front of her lips. “Not so much noise making. River Man will hear.”
“River Man? Who is that?”
But instead of answering him, Qina continued to look past him, her eyes fixed worriedly on the stream. “There,” she said in a whisper. “He has smelled of us.”
Morgan wondered if this was some kind of religious ceremony. Was there a taboo on this place? Was this some kind of trollish sacred site? “Who is River Man?”
She grabbed his hand and pinched it with her strong little fingers, then again gestured him to silence. “Watch,” she whispered. “See, there.” She pointed.
Now Morgan saw a pattern in the ripples a few dozen paces upstream, a sort of curved, invisible obstacle around which the water flowed less evenly, an obstruction now sliding toward them through the shallows. Then he saw something else he had missed—a large gray heron, standing in the midst of a nearby patch of reeds, so motionless on its long, thin legs that it seemed to be part of the vegetation.
“That’s just a bird,” he told Qina, who was still staring at the spot with wide eyes. “It’s a heron. They don’t eat anything bigger than rabbits and frogs . . .”
He did not finish explaining about the heron’s diet, because at that moment something massive, long, and flat surged up out of the shallow water and crashed into the reeds. Before he could even make out what it was, it had sucked the large, struggling bird into its impossibly broad mouth.
Morgan shouted out in shock and terror. The long body and wide, flat head was brown and green and gray, mottled like stones on a river bottom, but the belly and the underside of its massive jaw that he saw as it took the heron were white. The head was shaped like nothing he had ever seen, a great, flattened ham with two piggy eyes set far back from the vast mouth and its tiny, sharp teeth, but most upsetting of all were the thing’s forepaws, which despite their mottled shininess seemed to end in wide, flat human fingers that had curled tenaciously in the heron’s feathers, holding it fast even as its wings spread and beat.
The struggling heron swallowed down, the thing slid backward into the river, leaving nothing to mark that either creature had existed, except the agitated water and broken reeds.
“By the Aedon!” Morgan realized he was shaking all over. “Merciful God—what was that?”
“River Man,” said Qina. “River Man by us he is called. He lives in such places. We have him in Blue Mud Lake where my people go, but we know his hiding holes.”
“Qina!” This time Morgan recognized the voice immediately. “You are there?”
“Out here, Snenneq!” she called, her relief plain. “Qallipuk is in this water. We saw him.”
“What are you doing out on the rock?” Snenneq asked as he got closer. “Qina,
dear wife-to-be, I did not know you had such foolishness in you. I am worried.”
“I came. Morgan Prince was on the rock.” She stood. “Do not speak me with the words speaked to children. Help us to shore.”
Little Snenneq cautiously made his way down to the river’s edge and stood on the bank upstream from the large rock, jabbing at the water with the sharp end of his hooked staff. “I see him not,” he said. “Come now.”
This time Qina did not jump, but took Morgan’s hand to lead him back to the shore. As they slid down into the water, he realized that although the cold but gentle current came no higher than his thighs, most of the young troll woman was going to be beneath the water. He bent down and, though she protested, lifted her up and carried her to the shore. As he took his last step in the river, he thought he felt something brush his leg. In a sudden panic, he tossed her onto the bank and scrambled out of the water as swiftly as he could.
• • •
Back at the camp, Binabik and his wife Sisqi came to make certain their daughter and Morgan were unhurt.
“It is a sobering thing to be meeting the Qallipuk,” said Binabik as he examined bloody scratches on the prince’s ankles. “Do not give yourself hard words, Prince Morgan. They have great fierceness, and attack from where they are not being seen first. And some of them are having twice the length of a man your size—perhaps more.” He patted him on the knee. “I see nothing but small wounds coming from rocks in the stream. You have been having a luckier first encounter with the water monster than is given to some!”
Morgan didn’t understand how the troll’s comments were supposed to make him feel better—so the River Man he’d met was only a small one? Binabik’s use of the word “sobering” troubled him too, as if the little man might be repeating something he’d been told by Morgan’s grandparents.
Have they told him to keep an eye on me? That I’m a drunkard who can’t be trusted?