“Yes. That is, I think—”
“Break their teeth? You have to break teeth, or they don’t take you seriously.”
“No, I—”
Uncle Stalgrid’s eyes widened. “You what? Were afraid? Of the boys? Of King Willow? If you’re afraid of a smack or two, then I’m going to have to waste the winter season toughening you up again.”
Dauvid braced for the expected smack. It was too hot for much more, and Stalgrid wanted to keep his eye on the harvest, so he sent Dauvid away.
Dauvid’s head hurt as he trudged back to the castle, where he found the women in the far yard, pumping lake water in to soak the flax.
As soon as she saw him, Aunt Imand beckoned and took him inside. “I promised your mother you’d get food and drink first thing,” she said, and while he sucked down cold water, she pulled a knife from her wrist, sliced some fresh bread for him, and stuffed the bread with cheese and smoked turkey.
She stood over him while he ate, and when he was done, she said, “What did you learn this year?”
He told her, a jumbled rush of words divided equally between bragging and complaining about lessons, the Fox drills, scragging, the fights he got in, who won, who lost, who cheated. He hated the name they stuck on him, Honeyboy.
“There’s worse,” she said. “There are far worse names.”
Dauvid had been afraid that he’d end up Dogbutt because his uncle was Horsebutt, so he did not argue. “How’s my cousin?” he asked, referring to Horsebutt and Imand’s baby.
“He’s got about ten words, and just started walking.”
“Should I be teaching him something?”
“Next year,” she said, with a pensive smile he did not understand. “There’s time. Soon’s you’re done, you go to the armory. The scythes always need sharpening.”
Chapter Twenty-four
THE first sliver of the rising sun sent golden ribbons of light from the east to the captain’s gig that Fox sailed alone. Directly south, Ghost Island blocked the stars, a dark mound against an equally dark sky.
As the freshening breeze lifted the gig’s sail, the strengthening light and increasing proximity gave the mound texture, color, and finally dimension, its features sharp and clear in the pure morning air.
Fox glanced back. A thin, faintly glistening white line began to coalesce between him and the main island. It lay too low to be a white squall, which was good, but he’d never seen a fog form so rapidly.
Wait. Yes, he had. Signi the Mage had once made one by magic when Inda’s small fleet stumbled into the entire Venn armada.
Damn.
As the wind kicked up he leaned into the tiller and sped toward the island. There was the rocky promontory, and the three trees twisted round one another.
He sailed into the cove, its tranquil water a deep aquamarine. His wake rilled out, disturbing the mirror-smooth water.
Fox anchored in as close as he could, flung his boots, socks, weapons belt, and wrist sheaths to the beach, then dove from the rail. The air was already heating up. The water was just cool enough to be refreshing, waking him up from his all-night sail.
As he waded ashore, the light changed subtly. Drifts of vapor veiled the mountain above and wreathed through the feather-edged fronds growing in profusion right down to the edge of the sand. Fox sniffed the air. The familiar salt tang of the sea surrendered to the complex aromas of vegetation growing, blooming, and rotting, enriched by pungent spices, sweet fruits, and fragrant flowers. The thick foliage rustled, but Fox figured the cause was hidden birds and animals. Not ghosts. He had to admit that ghosts seemed to exist, perceivable to some, but no one had ever claimed they could do anything but drift about. Fine. They could drift all they wanted, if that’s what kept the people on the populated island away from this one.
He climbed onto the sand and sat down to pull on his boots. He belted on his weapons, checked the fit of his boot knives, then started up the trail.
He still did not know why he was here. What was he going to do once he’d determined that the treasure was intact? Fight all comers? He cursed under his breath as he walked, the familiar rage seething in his gut.
Halfway along the trail to the waterfall that hid the entryway to the treasure cave, the crawling sensation of being watched had settled into conviction.
He reached the last bend before the waterfall. There waited a man dressed in white shirt, riding trousers and boots. His hands were bare, his brown hair tied back. He was seated on a rock, his attitude one of patience.
“Good morning, Savarend.” The man smiled in welcome.
Dasta and Gillor, being the tallest, half carried the groggy Barend down the hill to the shore. No one dared to speak until they were out of earshot of any locals.
When they reached the sand Dasta, Gillor, and Jeje started talking at once.
Barend just winced, shaking his head woozily. Jeje realized she’d never seen the color of his eyes, they were so squinty. He paid no attention to the others’ questions.
Jeje ran straight into the low breakers and swam powerfully out to the Vixen. The others followed, keeping a firm grip on Barend, who was thoroughly awake by the time they all heaved themselves up over the rail onto Vixen’s deck. Moving fast, they got the anchor up, the mainsail raised and sheeted home, and began skimming out to sea.
Jeje took the tiller, which prevented her from kicking and punching everything in reach. “I’ll kill him,” she kept saying over and over.
Gillor rolled her eyes after the fifth or sixth repetition, and slipped below into the cramped living space to poke about the tiny galley. She laughed when she thought about how furious Nugget would be to discover she’d missed a possible adventure. Eugh. Maybe it wouldn’t be an adventure but a slaughter. Fox would not like being chased.
Gillor located the stash of Sartoran coffee beans, now half a year old. If they lived through whatever was going to happen next, she’d buy new beans, she promised herself. The local coffee was the best she’d ever tasted.
She snapped the Fire Stick into flame, set water to boil, then vaulted topside. Barend sat on a coil of rope, water dripping off his nose onto the deck. Dasta was handling sail, Jeje at the tiller.
“Barend, if you do want to get trade going, it just came to me. You could get a fleet o’ traders. Sail these islands, buy up the coffee now’t the Venn are gone. The Venn used to get it all, selling it to merchants along our coasts at a stiff price. Then they slapped their tariff on top of that.”
“I know,” Barend said without glancing up. “Thought of that last summer, when Flash was grinding his last—” He turned his head to the side, then shook it, fingers brushing the air as if pushing something away.
Gillor hunkered down directly before him. “You were there. Marlovans against the Venn. Weren’t you? Jeje gave us a report on what happened, but she didn’t see any of it.”
Barend squinted up at Gillor. “Yeah. I was there.”
“And you’re going to be just like Inda, aren’t you?” Gillor exclaimed, throwing her hands wide in exasperation. “What is it with you people? Someone will come along and kill you if you talk about your past?”
“You didn’t see ’em die,” he said to his interlaced fingers. “I don’t mean crew. Or warriors. Or Venn. I mean friends. Kin.” He squinted up at them. “Don’t you remember how many of Inda’s first crew Walic killed before Inda was brought aboard? Did Tau talk about that fight? He was a jabberer, but he never talked about that anywhere I heard.”
“He only did once,” Jeje said, elbow hooked round the tiller. “Right after the mutiny. And I think he did only because he’d had wine on top of two or three days of no sleep. And just to me, because I knew ’em, too.”
Dasta eyed the sagging mainsail, then raised the jib. As he worked, he called over his shoulder, “What I want to know is, are we going to jump Fox? He broke your arm, Barend. Your call, is what I’m thinking.”
Barend snorted. “Nah. I should’ve seen that coming.”
/> Jeje snarled, “He’s a wolf’s arse.”
Barend waved impatiently. “Could have been worse. I figured out a heartbeat too late he wasn’t pulling back, but that was all he needed. Made sure the deck crew all heard the snap. How much trouble do you think that warded?”
“He’s a pig’s butt,” Jeje stated. “I’m sick of him calling the plans. No more. He can’t fight us all. If you are squeamish, just help me get him down. I’m going to be teaching him a lesson for once. He’ll be in his hammock for a year.”
“And that solves what?” Gillor sat back, eyebrows lifted.
“Fog coming.” Dasta pointed at the slowly tumbling white line obscuring the other islands.
“Great. Watch us sail in circles.”
“We won’t sail at all.” Dasta flipped up the back of his hand at the sagging sails.
Gillor swung to her feet. “Well, my water’s boiling. At least we’ll have coffee.”
Fox stopped at the head of the trail, leaving five or six paces between the seated man and himself. Drifts of fog obscured the jungle, which had gone oddly silent.
Fox addressed the man. “You’re familiar.” His hands flexed once, then he crossed his arms, fingers within reach of the hilts of his knives.
“By sight, perhaps.” The man’s Marlovan was accentless. “You and I have never conversed. But I know who you are. Life, death, and power, that is all there is. Is that not the wisdom you attempted to inculcate in your friend Inda? Or was it sex, money, and power? Perhaps it was youth, beauty, and liquor?”
Fox flushed.
“Reducing the range of existence to three elements does impress the young,” the man observed with mild amusement.
Fox’s heart thumped like a war drum. “If you had the eye patch—which anyone can wear, I realize—and the purple scarring I’d say you are Ramis. Not, it seems, of the Knife.”
“The ship is here. On the other side of the island. We will discuss it presently.”
Fox flicked his fingers toward the waterfall. “After discussing what first? The treasure?”
“What do you intend to do with it?”
“Why,” Fox drawled, shifting his stance to readiness, “do you need to know?”
“I already know. I want to hear you articulate your reasons. Ah. I forgot how very young you are. I see that you need convincing in the conventional manner. Are you always so predictable, Savarend? Never mind. Come on.” Ramis sat there, hands on his knees.
Fox flushed at the indulgent tone, for the first time in his life feeling like a scrub. It just made him more angry.
Ramis sighed. “Do you not solve all your problems with violence? Here I am, willing and ready. I’ll even give you a little needed training. You should appreciate the offer.”
Fox no longer heard the scratching of little claws on branches, or the rustle of fronds. No soft-throated murmur of birds in the underbrush. The world unaccountably had gone silent as that eerie fog drifted overhead, etching the foliage faintly against the blank white sky.
The ground crunched under his heels, his blood rushed to the beat of his heart. He was real. Was this man real?
Fox sprang.
That was his last offensive move.
From the moment he reached the other he was on the defense. Ramis was a full hand shorter, and no stronger and faster, but he was unnerv ingly prescient. Fox tried a series of increasingly nasty tricks in rapid succession to find a block or deflection or counterstrike waiting. Each exactingly graduated to be more painful than the last.
But Fox did not give up, though his senses swam and his body was wracked with agony. He never lost! He had to fight harder.
Finally the world whirled and he crashed to the ground, bones jolting. He blinked until the red dazzle faded.
He lay pinned, immovable, Ramis smiling down into his eyes. “Shall I break your arm?”
The fog pressed round the Vixen, thinning and thickening in slow undulations. The four sat on the deck, eating a breakfast made up of the odds and ends left over from their long journey. The wind had completely died. The sails hung slack, the scout wallowing with no vestige of way. They sipped Gillor’s coffee at leisure and, after a half-year’s wait, got caught up on one another’s news at last. Gillor gave Jeje and Barend a detailed report on the fleet’s actions since Inda had left for Iasca Leror. Jeje was amused by the discrepancies between Gillor’s succinct account and the tangled, emotion-charged, highly exaggerated narratives Nugget and Mutt had given her. From there they passed to gossip about Freedom Harbor, as related by Fangras and the new fleet.
Jeje was just composing herself for a nap (grab ’em as you can was her firm rule) when Dasta, who had been frowning skyward, cut through the conversation and pointed. “Look up.”
Obediently they turned their eyes skyward, which was flat white except for a thin pinpoint of brightness.
“That’s the sun,” Gillor said. “So?”
“So it’s the same place it was before the fog closed in,” Dasta said grimly. “It hasn’t moved.”
“That’s impossible,” Jeje stated.
Barend shook his head slowly. “It was impossible to see a hole ripped between sky and sea after the fight with the Brotherhood. But we all were there, and we saw it.”
“Time has stopped?” Jeje asked. “Why?”
Nobody answered as seawater splashed against the hull.
Ramis held Fox immobilized and waited for an answer.
Shall I break your arm? That couldn’t possibly be a reference to Barend. “No.” Fox discovered that his lips were numbing fast.
Ramis lifted his hands and moved away, leaving Fox to roll painfully to a crouch, and then—it took effort—to his feet.
He touched a careful finger to his mouth, which was beginning to swell. His teeth ached. He couldn’t even remember the blow, but he tasted blood; he’d bitten the inside of his lip.
Fox’s head pounded sickeningly. Up close Ramis was a hand shorter and looked maybe ten years older. His lack of conventional threat or posture somehow made him seem all the more menacing. “What now? The black door to Norsunder?”
“Why should I exert myself?” Ramis dropped on his rock again, one foot propped on a hassock-sized flat stone, fingers laced loosely around his knee. “It appears to me that, given another few years, you will make your way there on your own.”
Fox recoiled, the reaction too swift and too intense to suppress.
“When,” Ramis asked, “does the use of violence shift from moral imperative to convenience?”
So the arm question had been deliberate provocation. Fox wiped the back of his hand over his bleeding lip. “When does a Norsundrian have anything at all to say about moral imperative?”
“You will discover”—Ramis flicked his fingers outward—“that discourse on questions of morality is a favorite amusement in the Garden of the Twelve.”
“Implying that I am on my way there?”
“That right now is up to you,” Ramis said, palm up. “If you catch their interest, you will find yourself summarily invited. As soon as you cease to be entertaining, you cease.”
“To . . . ?” Fox asked, knowing that Norsunder lay beyond time. Therefore, presumably, beyond death.
“Exist. Memory by memory. Wit by wit. Your identity stripped away in thin curls.” Ramis made a sharp gesture, like the flick of a blade. “And savored as each is consumed.”
Terror crowded inside Fox’s chest. He knew he was outmatched. All that remained was pride. “So get it over with.”
“My warning? I am not constrained at the moment to act as agent of invitation.” Ramis’ voice was unremarkable, his countenance not expressive, yet Fox suspected his choice of words was not idle. That he had been so ordered and had so acted.
Ramis whispered a word, traced an arc in the air that glowed. Ramis stepped through. Fox was drawn inexorably after him. He found himself standing on the deck of a ship he’d only glimpsed twice.
They were alone. Fox took in the
gold leaf along the rails, the beautiful rigging and pure black canvas of the sails, as new as if the ship had launched yesterday. Fox had heard that magic transfer was a wrenching experience, but he’d felt only the briefest sense of unbalance, no more than a lee lurch in mild weather, and the strangeness of passing from the warm, spice-redolent air of the cliffside waterfall to this cooler, shadowed bay with the sun on the other side of the isle.
Ramis led him into the spacious captain’s cabin. The bulkheads under the ceiling were edged with fine-carved fretwork in complicated, overlapping circles composed of three curved arms. Those circles were interlocked in triangles, two low, one high, and then the pattern reversed. A marquetry tree wound and wound upward along bulkheads in twists from the inlaid deck, its many-wooded grains pleaching around the stern windows and ending in leaves of vein-embossed gold.
The Tree of Ydrasal appeared again in a gnarled candelabra with nine branches ending in candleholders. The candelabra was built into a shelf above a desk. Over the captain’s table hung a chandelier of intertwined branches into which twenty-seven candles would fit.
Fox had studied the Venn. He recognized in these silent signs that this craft had once belonged to a Venn king. He yanked open the door to the cabin and gazed down the length of the deck to the prow. Instead of coming to a vaguely shaped figurehead with mere slashes that resembled eye sockets, the prow rose to an elaborately carved dragon’s head, slanting eyes at either side, the long, scaled jaw parted. That dragon’s head had not been on the prow after the pirate battle.
Fox whirled around. “Dragons. Did they exist?”
Ramis looked amused. “I never saw any. They were here thousands of years before my time. But sources that were unfortunately burned while I was elsewhere indicated that they were present in this world, though they did not originate here. They came to an agreement and vanished again, taking the more innovative and creative people out of what later became the Land of the Chwahir.”
As he spoke, Ramis opened one of the many small, carved doors in the desk, and took out a book bound in fine blackweave edged with gold.