Paulan recovered the last few words and said hastily but with feeling, “No.”
“You really want to live?” the Pirate asked. He had brown eyes. They were wide. His face was too scarred; Paulan couldn’t tell if his expression was some kind of trick—if he was playing with the prisoner or he was asking a real question.
So stick to the truth and keep it short. “Yes.”
“Right. Then we’re going to put you on the next trader going out. You learn a new trade. And never come back, because if you do, you’ll go up against the wall.”
“I don’t know anything about ships,” Paulan said. Then wished the words back inside his throat.
The Pirate snorted. “Neither did I, when I was put on one. But one thing about ship life is you learn fast.”
He waved a hand, and Paulan was hauled summarily away. Inda said to the grizzled Rider Captain, the former Jarl of Tlennen, “See to it he’s not put on an Idayagan trader.”
The captain thumped his fist to his chest and withdrew, taking the prisoner problem away. Inda got up from the Jarl’s desk. At least Zek’s assassination team had fought; these other fellows like Ebetim, throwing down their weapons before a truce or a surrender, how could they ever expect to win? They weren’t warriors, they were playing at being warriors. Paulan Ebetim had spoken with the flat weariness of disillusionment.
“Maybe I should change the plans,” Inda said to Cama. “See what you think.”
As they talked they walked downstairs, through the hall where the children were practicing. Radran supervised the smaller boys and Captain Han Tlen the little girls as everybody worked through knife drill.
“They’re not going to execute that Idayagan horse apple,” Radran said, his face sour. Then, louder, “Do it again,” to the waiting eight-year-olds.
Han scowled down at her feet. She admired Radran, and liked him, except when he talked about torture and killing. Though she wanted all those Venn who had killed her family and the Jarlan dead, dead, dead—and the Idayagans who maimed or killed someone’s dad or brother or cousin, too—she didn’t want to talk about it all the time, especially about flogging away their flesh and laughing while they screamed.
Radran had stopped doing it so much after he came back from the royal city, but he’d started again when the Harskialdna arrived, bringing that Olaran Resistance leader. Nobody knew what to do with prisoners. If people attacked, you killed them or drove them away. If people were brought in having done something wrong, you punished them. Not much of that, as Cama-Jarl hated flogging; he thought hard work much better, so mostly they were chained together and put to work on the stone-shifting gangs, rebuilding the walls. There’d been an abrupt drop-off in cut purses and the like since they’d begun that.
They didn’t do that with Paulan Ebetim because he was a Resistance leader.
Prisoners, especially a leader, meant torture, Radran had said, grinning with glee. But days passed. Now, whatever the Harskialdna had decided, it wasn’t on any execution, or they’d all hear the bell for gathering in the court. Han was relieved. She didn’t want to hear Radran’s bitter disappointment, so she said to the girls, “Shooting practice.”
“But it’s sleeting out there,” Lnand protested, hands on her hips.
“So the enemies will wait around for a nice day if they attack?”
“They won’t even see the target.” Lnand pointed at the little girls, who promptly began shrilling, “We can, too! We can, too!”
“Then they may as well learn. Right?” Han said over their squealing.
“I’ll take them,” said sixteen-year-old Ingrid.
Lnand whirled around, making a dramatic start. Han jerked, then hated showing that much reaction, because she despised how Lnand yapped on and on about how being startled gave her nightmares, After All They’d Endured During the War.
We didn’t endure anything, Han thought. Our mothers did. She didn’t say that, either. She hated talk about any of it.
So she ignored Lnand, as usual, and stepped back so that tall, calm Ingrid Tlennen could take her place. Ingrid was from Nelkereth. She’d helped to bring in the horses for Castle Andahi the spring before, as the Venn had taken all the Marlovans’ horses after killing the defenders.
All the younger girls admired Ingrid. She was fast with bow and knife and had won all the competitions at the Summer Games her first year at the queen’s training. She’d only had the one year, because she and her family were sent north by Hadand-Gunvaer.
Lnand marched away, nose in the air. Han knew she should go out and practice as well, but she lingered near the accessway, peering into the garrison’s command center. As she tried to pick out the Harskialdna from all those gray coats and swinging horsetails, she remembered when Ingrid had arrived. They heard them first, hundreds of horses galloping down the pass toward Castle Andahi. She remembered Ndand-Jarlan standing on the south wall, looking up the pass, smiling despite the dust rising halfway up the cliffs and the pungent smell of the herd on a warm day. Han remembered that smile because she’d felt it, too. She and the other children had run around screaming, just because it felt good to run hard and to yell until her throat burned, because no Venn could hear, no Idayagans would shoot; she felt safe that day.
She’d felt even safer when the Harskialdna appeared just a few days ago. It was like someone had dropped a rock into a pool, only instead of rings going out they came in to circle around him, and no matter where he went, he was the center of everybody. You could hardly see his face because he wasn’t tall like some of the men. You could hear his voice. He had a nice voice, Han thought. It was a deep voice, but he didn’t sound husky and rough like Cama-Jarl, he sounded like he was almost going to laugh.
A rustle and quiet step next to Han caused her to look up. Ndand-Jarlan stood next to her. “Something wrong?”
“No. Just . . . watching him.”
Men shifted, some clattering off in the direction of the stables, obviously having received an order. Others had broken into small knots, but Cama-Jarl and the Rider Captains stood around Inda. “. . . and we ride around looking strut. Me in the front, so if they want to take any more shots, well, there I am, and I’ll be glaring around as if we’ll strike ’em dead if they so much as fart. You, too, Cama. But you get your toughest dragoons into civ, and they’ll take the wagons over the pass and up to the Nob and to Lindeth. If you and I go with those wagons, everyone suspects there’s something else in those barrels. But if you and I ride around looking like we want a fight, all the talk is about us, and who would bother traders?”
The group closed up again as the knots shifted, and they could no longer hear Inda’s voice above the hubbub.
“I remember when he and Flash were ten,” Ndand-Jarlan said in the slow voice grownups used when thinking back. “Flash came home full of stories about him. Inda changed the rules on the scrub shoeing. Inda commanded the games. Flash talked about them all, but mostly Inda, then the next summer Inda was gone, and the next thing we heard was he had taken over a pirate ship soon’s he left us and had pirates running away at the gallop.”
“When he was eleven?” Han asked, remembering that big, frightening-looking black-sided pirate ship a few months back. “He took over the Death when he was my age?”
Ndand-Jarlan chuckled. “That’s what they say. You can ask him, if you like.”
The thought of speaking directly to Inda-Harskialdna made Han’s tongue dry. When she was ten, she had command of a few children, and four had died because she hadn’t kept control. And she almost, almost, pushed a baby off a cliff. When he was ten, he was commanding the boys at the academy and the next year a pirate ship, and she just knew he never almost pushed any babies off a cliff just because they stank and yelled.
Han slunk away, determined to practice harder. But beneath that determination guilt and failure gnawed at her heart.
Chapter Thirty-two
IT was inevitable that Bren Harbor was more interested in the reappearance of the Fox
Banner Fleet than in the cargo they carried.
To their immense surprise (and widespread disbelief) the narrow-hulled, rigged-for-speed pirate ships were actually acting as real traders, the colorful Captain Fangras declared. What’s more, they brought islander coffee, the first anyone had seen in many, many years. The king’s customs officials who went on board (watched with intense interest by most of the spyglasses in the harbor) could smell the cargo before they inspected it. Chim arranged for a warehouse, the Fleet Guild in association with the Adrani Ambassador set up accounts, the barrels were offloaded, and the fleet sailed away—with Cooperage Guild Mistress Perran in company.
Chim was aware of the general disappointment that this infamous fleet had tamely turned trader. He kept his opinion to himself, especially his uneasiness at the fact that Captain Fangras had already known about the alliance forming off Ymar at The Fangs, which everyone had worked hard to keep secret. But when asked how he knew, the wily old independent (pirate, rumor insisted) just said, “Fox told us.”
“Right.” Chim snorted. “Ye best take someone from the Guild along to show you where the alliance is meetin’.” And to explain your presence to the others, was implied.
So, when two weeks later five more of the Fox Banner Fleet appeared, there was somewhat less interest, except in the black-sided trysail Death, which always drew the eye.
Spyglasses watched the Death for sight of its captain, but no one paid the least heed to the boats and boats of coffee and wine barrels Barend off-loaded from the five, or even in the chests brought out of the little scout ship. Those contain islander spices, packed in sealed ceramic jars, Barend told the boat crews: Gillor and Jeje had personally rubbed several eye-wateringly pungent spices into the wood.
The Death stayed in harbor for two tides. During that time Fox actually left his ship. Spyglasses tracked him as he rowed around his ships on inspection, apparently unaware of the intense interest he caused.
But then he clambered back aboard the Death about the time the last cargo boat was dispatched to the warehouse. Two tides after his inspection was finished they sailed away, Barend having asked Chim for the location of the massing force. Once again Chim said, “How did you know? Only the Fleet Guild has been told.”
Barend shrugged. “Ask Fox. See if you get any more of an answer than I did.”
Chim didn’t waste the time rowing out to the Death. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer.
He showed Barend where to go on his master chart, mentioned that Perran had sailed ahead to clear their way. I smell trouble, he thought, as he watched the wicked low, rake-masted ships beat out of harbor into the harsh east wind. He just hoped that the trouble was meant for the Venn still holding Jaro Harbor.
Captain Mern Deliyeth, head of Everon’s branch of the Fleet Guild, hated pirates. She had spent her entire life scrupulously obeying laws and rules. Land laws, trade laws. Ship rules.
So the sight of the Fox Banner Fleet arriving to swell their forces was more troubling than welcome. And when the rowboat splashed down from Fangras’ wall-eyed Blue Star turned out to have a tall, stout woman seated in the stern sheets whom Deliyeth suspected was the Cooperage Guild Mistress everyone knew was a friend to pirates, she knew the woman was sent for one purpose: to cajole, wheedle, and outright lie, to get the allies to accept the pirates. Why?
Perran had not wanted to come on this journey, but Chim had talked her into it. “When we were behind bars, you were the only one Kliessin listened to. People like you,” he’d said to her.
Perran’d had to acknowledge that. She and Kliessin had found common ground faster than she’d dared to hope, in spite of the long, tense period she’d been kept waiting in an anteroom, tall footmen on guard.
But within moments of climbing aboard the Everoneth flagship, Perran and Deliyeth each got that prickle of antipathy toward the other.
They tried to fight it. They knew they should work as allies.
Perran eyed the tall, gaunt Captain Deliyeth, who (it was said) would not eat until her crew was fed, which had not always happened during their long history of evading the Venn. From a distance she’d admired Deliyeth, but in person, all the little signals the eye takes in, some conscious, some not, convinced her that the Everoneth captain was judging her—and finding her very much wanting.
So Perran spoke with more warmth than she usually did, smiled as hard as she could, in an effort not to show her distrust, which fast grew to dislike.
And Deliyeth found her efforts affected. Even worse, she suspected she was being jollied, if not lied to, by this well-dressed, stout woman obviously used to easy living. This caused her to stiffen, and to speak in a clipped, wary tone. Why should Perran lie? Deliyeth found it too easy to come back to the question of piracy.
Though she, too, was aware of the importance of the alliance, and so she did her best to communicate with Perran. “I understand that you and the Bren Guild feel that this . . . Fox Banner Fleet has turned to trade. But there remains the visual evidence. Not one of those raffees and try-sails is built for trade. Only navies and pirates run long narrow ships, and those people did not get those ships by legal means.”
“They took them from pirates,” Perran said, keeping her voice calm and smooth. “You will have heard nothing whatsoever of them attacking traders. Not since they formed up into this fleet and began flying that banner with the fox face on it.”
Perran’s false tone sounded condescending to Deliyeth, who had never been an attractive woman, and years of weather and worry had grooved her narrow face into a habitual frown of reproof.
They stood at the rail, looking at the low, rakish ships lying in the water near their compatriots as boats plied back and forth. “I don’t accept rumor as truth,” Deliyeth said slowly. “But the persistence of rumor has to be taken into account. One of the rumors we heard over and over is that the leader of the Fox Banner Fleet was a Marlovan. The same one who destroyed one of our own allies and caused the Venn to exact terrible retribution against Ymar.”
“I’ve heard that rumor as well.” Perran softened her voice, smiled. “But I find the stories about one fellow burning down a city single-handed too fantastic to believe.”
Deliyeth took her words as sacastic rebuke, and reddened. “It wasn’t a city. I saw with my own eyes the destruction of Limros Palace. As far as we have been able to ascertain, the Marlovans have not only extended their empire over the west end of the Sartoran continent, but they beat back the Venn they descended from. Like father, like son, the saying goes. You cannot call it mere rumor that both peoples seem set on empire building.”
“No,” Perran said, in a make-peace tone.
“Therefore it makes sense that this Marlovan pirate no one could beat is looking to create a seagoing empire.”
“We don’t believe that,” Perran said steadily.
“So I understand. Well, whatever happens in Bren is your business. But I want it made clear to them that we will fight alongside them if we must. We cannot defeat the Venn without numbers and training. But if they try to land in any of our harbors, we will meet them with fire and sword.”
“Fair enough.” Perran waved for the boat crew to move beneath, so she could disembark. There was no use in staying.
Deliyeth couldn’t help adding, as Perran climbed down into the boat, “Do not be surprised if you meet with the same from my allies.”
Unfortunately, she was the one surprised when her misgivings were not shared by the coalition of Sarendan independents. They welcomed Fangras’ return.
And so did the Chwahir, which was an even greater surprise.
She watched the ship visits through her glass as the independents and the Fox Banner captains traded news. Where the Chwahir approve, trouble follows, Deliyeth thought.
Until the Fox Banner Fleet arrived, the captains had agreed to meet aboard Captain Deliyeth’s own flagship to plan the attack. Deliyeth heard less planning than arguing.
Everyone agreed that Ymar’s main port
, Jaro, was the most important at that end of the strait.
They agreed that this was the reason the last remaining outpost of Venn held it.
They agreed that the small but effective fleet of Venn warships that had appeared to reinforce Jaro when the winds had changed that summer had to mean more were coming.
The Venn themselves had put out the word that they would return in force. But the long summer season with its driving west winds had brought no more Venn. That fact, coupled with rumors of the Venn defeat by the Marlovans the summer before that, had caused this gathering: Deliyeth knew that despite all the trumpetings about freeing the strait from the oppressors, everyone wanted to make sure no one else got control of Jaro.
What they couldn’t agree on was how to get rid of the Venn once they drew them out into the water. No one wanted a land battle, as rumor had it there were far too many Venn warriors left in Ymar.
The flat-faced, black-haired Chwahir insisted they fight in battle lines, because they always fought in line. The flamboyantly dressed east coast independents wanted to try running attacks, which might work against a haphazard fleet but not against Venn. You didn’t frighten Venn by sailing down their sides shooting fire arrows. They sent their swift, maneuver-able raiders to surround you, and next thing you knew, you were either dead or floating in the water, hoping the undersea folk didn’t drag you down and put fins on you.
The half a dozen determined Ymarans, whose entire kingdom was on the verge of rising in a last and desperate attempt to win free of the Venn yoke, watched everyone. They had not had a good navy for two generations, the last two queens having relied on trade and diplomacy to ward off trouble.
This unwarlike policy, all knew, had drawn the Venn to occupy Ymar as their first step in taking all of Drael. So the Ymarans were forced into alliance with Everon, which still had a semblance of a navy—mostly converted fishers that had taken refuge with the rest of the Fleet Guild off of Bren. The rest had been burned or taken outright.