Chapter 1
The fog clung to the lines and rigging of the tidy merchant vessel, muffling the snap of the sails. It was a damp, restless haze with chilly fingers that crept in at collars and cuffs. It seemed to be growing thicker by the minute, blotting out sight and sound alike.
Marim stood on the deck, hands resting on the rail, staring into the gray air. She could hear the restless waves churning against the prow and feel the rolling of the deck beneath her feet. Over the last two months, she’d grown accustomed to the sounds and sensations of being at sea. She’d also grown used to the view. She’d been staring at the distant horizon for days, that brilliant line where blue sky met blue ocean. Now, she could see only a short distance beyond the rail.
As she strained into the fog, shapes loomed. A man on deck gave a cry. There was an answering call and a thump, then the ship began to bustle with activity. Marim moved off the rail and stood snugged up against a storage crate. She’d been told early on this was a spot she could occupy without getting in the way.
More shapes materialized on the dim air. A smaller vessel appeared down below, ready to guide them into the harbor. Ropes were thrown, men climbed over the rail. Behind her, Marim heard laughter and conversation.
Her heart, already heavy, grew leaden.
“I guess we’re here.” Marim spoke the words under her breath, but Kix couldn’t hear. He was on the other side of the stitchring she wore on its thin chain about her neck. Which meant he was miles upon miles away in the sunny gardens of Tessili Academy, dozing on his brillbane bush.
Not that her tessila would have been any comfort if he had been with her. Kix was erratic, even by tessila standards. Marim’s relationship with him was volatile at the best of times. Still, whenever she grew scared or lonely or uncertain, she reflexively wished for his presence.
There was more laughter in the dim mist and a resounding thud and shudder as the ship snugged up to a pier. A smell of overripe fish rose on the briny air, thick and cloying. In no time at all, the vessel was made fast, a gangplank was run out. They had landed in Cynnes Tarth at last.
Marim’s journey was over. It was time to go.
Still, she stood by the crate. She knew she should return to the closet-like cabin she’d been assigned when everyone had thought she was going to become a permanent member of the crew. She should sling the ridiculous sea bag she’d traded her trunk for over her shoulder. She should go ashore.
But she couldn’t. Marim felt stuck. It was as if her feet were nailed to the deck as surely as the furniture in the captain’s cabin. She no longer wanted to be on the ship. The events that had unfolded over the last three weeks had been deeply unpleasant. Had she been a different girl, with a different history, they would have been the most unpleasant of her life. But Marim had lived through far worse.
Still, she also did not want to go ashore and face this place.
Trying to stir herself to action, Marim ran a hand through her damp hair. It was short – short enough it wouldn’t fall into her eyes. It was an unfashionable cut. She’d had to argue with the barber to get him to do what she asked. When he’d given in at last, she’d felt a heady thrill at the cold touch of the shears as they snipped along at the base of her neck. Her long, dull hair had fallen to the floor. She’d felt reborn.
She’d been excited then, full of misguided hopes and expectations. This journey had been meant to redeem her, to set her on a new path.
It hadn’t worked out at all the way she’d planned.
There was the ringing tramp of booted feet approaching. Captain Tommin’s burly outline approached, made pale by the fog. He was a kind man. Ever since the night everything had gone so wrong, he’d assumed an apologetic air when he spoke to Marim, as if what had happened was his fault.
He stopped well away from her. None of the men came within several feet anymore. He cleared his throat and spoke in an overly hearty tone. “We’re ready to take you ashore, young miss.”
And abandon me to my fate, Marim added silently. Her heart skittered with anxiety. Panic swelled within her. They’re really going to do it, she thought. They’re going to leave me behind.
For a moment, Marim felt the old helpless rage. It bloomed through her like poison, filling her blood with heat, making her vision go red at the edges. She felt Kix stir, coming out of his doze. She needed to get ahold of herself, or he’d come blasting through the stitchring and make everything worse.
With an effort, Marim contained her emotions. She forced her face into a smile. “Thank you, captain. I’ll go and get my things.”
✣
The smell in the butcher’s shop had always made Embriem queasy. When he’d been a boy, he always tried to wheedle his way out of errands that involved coming here, often with success.
Then, for a time, he all but forgot about this place. During the days of his brief, happy marriage, his wife, Chalsia, had cheerfully taken over the responsibility of fetching the household meat. But now Chalsia was gone, and Embriem was no longer a boy with indulgent parents who would allow him to worm his way out of what needed to be done.
So he stood at the counter, keeping his breath shallow and trying not to let his discomfort show on his face. His eyes settled on the hanging loops of sausages arranged in tidy rows along the ceiling. He pointed. “And a string of those.” He tried to keep his tone casual.
The butcher’s boy, Tobb, gaped for a moment, staring at the already formidable pile of wrapped meat on the counter.
Embriem waited, fixing his face in a bland expression and resisting the impulse to offer some explanation. It would be easy. “I’m having a party,” or “I’m shopping for my parents as well as myself,” would be simple explanations. But they would be lies. And lies, Embriem had learned, always caught up with you in one way or another.
So he stood in patient silence as the boy scrambled around behind the counter, unhooking a string of sausages and coiling them up so he could wrap them in paper. He set the package on the counter with the other lumpy shapes and spoke in a hesitant tone. “Will that be all then?”
The butcher’s shop was a tidy place with a sanded counter and large, clean windows to let in whatever sun could make it through the fog. Embriem looked at the other cuts on offer, but he supposed this had to be all. He should have brought a basket. Or his old pack. He could only imagine how the boy would gawk if he loaded all that meat into the worn leather bag he used to carry with him when he spent his days tending his family’s herd of goras. The thought was so ridiculous, he almost began to smile.
But the smile stopped as soon as it began. As it always did when his mood lightened a fraction, Embriem’s grief came roaring back like an angry bull guarding its herd, charging into his chest to trample on his heart, to remind him he was a terrible man to even think about smiling after what had happened to Chalsia.
The desire to smile died. He considered the meat. How long would it last? A day? Less? He had no way of knowing. “Yes, that’s all.” His voice sounded gruff and harsh. It made the boy twitch, as if Embriem had struck him.
“I think I’d better go get the master.” Tobb was still staring at the mound of packages. “I’m not sure I can calculate it all proper, you know. For the price.”
Embriem closed his eyes in a slow blink. He knew rumors would fly, were already flying, about his strange new shopping habits. Whether or not the butcher saw his pile of purchases would make little difference as to who eventually found out about this. Still, the thought of having to see the man’s reaction was exhausting. Embriem had to resist the urge to turn on his heel and leave the shop. He wanted to abandon the smell of this place, to leave his pile of meat on the counter and go home.
But he couldn’t do that, of course.
Embriem reached into the soft leather purse that hung on his belt and drew out a copper sliver. “Speak with your master,” he said. “Bring me the final tally and the meat both within the hour. This is for you, for helping. All right?”
&nb
sp; The thin coin gave a click as Embriem set it on the smooth counter. The boy blinked several times in rapid succession. Embriem didn’t give him time to argue. Doubtless, the lad was needed here in the shop. Doubtless, Embriem could have taken the meat and settled up with the butcher later. He’d known the man his entire life. Everyone knew Embriem had come from one of the wealthiest families on Cynnes Tarth, and then made his own fortune as well.
So he could get away with this kind of bad behavior. The only person who would have scolded him for it, who would have reminded him having money didn’t make you better than other people, was dead. All that was left of her, their son, was now perhaps on the verge of death as well.
It was the thought of Tassin that spurred Embriem on. The butcher’s boy was staring at the coin, hesitating. “Within an hour,” Embriem repeated. Then he turned and strode out, causing the small bell on the door to jingle as he stepped into the thin fog that hung beyond the threshold. As he stepped outside, he heard a larger bell. Its silvery notes pealed out over the town, three brisk rings, letting everyone know a merchant ship had come into harbor.
Embriem paused on the threshold, a desperate hope sparking in his chest. He turned to hurry towards the shortcut up the hillside that would take him to the harbor.
✣
On the sea, the fog had been chilly. As Marim walked up the rise from the small harbor, that changed. As she crested the hill and began to descend, the temperature rose. She got the feeling she’d have had a grand overlook of the island had the fog not obscured her view.
Not that Marim was much in the mood for grand views. The very word island filled her with an unpleasant sensation of dread, and the uncomfortable reality only sank in a little more with each step she took.
She was on the island of Cynnes Tarth. Here she was, a girl who had never so much as seen the ocean until a few months before, and she was stranded on a small piece of land surrounded by water and shrouded in fog.
The merchant vessel would stay in the harbor for a few weeks. Knowing this eased Marim’s discomfort slightly. Though she doubted the captain would change his mind about her now, there was always a chance. She would go back tomorrow and speak with him again. Every day, she would go back. If she was persistent enough, perhaps he would relent.
It was the only plan she had.
For now, Marim needed somewhere to stay. The town of Lan Dinas, she’d been told, could be reached by following the road that left the docks. So she walked alone in the strange silence brought down by the fog. The harbor was not far behind. She’d left it mere moments before, but she could no longer see or hear any evidence of the activity that surrounded the ship. She walked in a bubble of quiet, the salt tang fading from the air. Around her, the landscape was a riot of green dimmed by the gray air.
When she’d first stepped off the ship, Marim had felt unsteady. Now she was adjusting to the sensation of being back on solid ground. But that was little comfort. With each step she took, her sense of dread grew.
The problem was, this was not the outcome Marim had foreseen. She’d intended to stay with the ship for months, or maybe even years. Masidon was rebuilding. Trade with the Fog Isles was flourishing again. There were fifteen major islands, Marim knew, arranged in an arc. The merchant vessel she’d chosen had plans to stop at many of them. She’d wanted to be with the ship, to see the exotic edges of known civilization before returning to the shores of her own country.
Cynnes Tarth, where she was now marooned, was the largest island in the string, and the nearest to Masidon. That was all she knew about the place.
She walked on. The track bent this way and that, smaller tracks splitting off at intervals. There were no signposts to point the way. The landscape hardly changed. Marim experienced a feeling of vertigo accompanied by a flash of irritation. She repressed the urge to swipe her hand in front of her face in an attempt to clear the air. How did people find their way when they couldn’t see more than ten feet in any direction?
The irritation was only partly her own. Some of it came from Kix, who was curious about this new place. Her tessila hadn’t liked the ship at all. He’d found it boring, her desire for him to stay near her restrictive, the lack of vegetation unsettling.
Now, Kix wanted to come through the stitchring and see the island. Marim was keeping him persuaded to stay where he was with some difficulty. His desire to defy her wishes was a needling burr in her thoughts. She was fairly certain the majority of the people here would be unfamiliar with tessili. After what had happened with the sailors, she was determined not to show Kix to anyone. She needed introductions to go well if she was going to be stranded here.
Still, as Marim walked, she couldn’t help but think it would have been a comfort to see her tessila’s small bright yellow body flitting and darting about, adding a tiny spark of brilliance to the muted palette of the landscape. She would have liked to feel his uncomplicated fascination with his new surroundings. Kix had nearly died once, years ago. He’d been different since then—a little simple—his emotions superficial and changeable, his thoughts shallow, his magic crippled. In spite of all their years at the academy, he never seemed to learn anything. Marim had never been able to get him to change size like all the other bound tessila could do.
Kix was damaged goods. Just like Marim herself.
At this thought, Marim’s hand strayed to the top of her cloak. The scars around her neck were faint. She knew that. She also knew the light in this place would work to her advantage. Anyone she met was unlikely to notice her disfigurement. Still, she pulled her bunched hood a little closer around her throat.
She kept walking. The road flattened out. And then, all of a sudden, there was a building ahead of her. It loomed out of the fog so quickly, Marim came to an abrupt halt. She blinked and saw more buildings beyond the first, only the faintest of outlines.
She had reached Lan Dinas.
There was only one town on the island. The captain, in his apologetic attempts to convince her his decision to leave her here was for her own good, had stressed it was a nice town, prosperous, with a large cloister that educated the children and a thriving upper-class made up of merchants and tradesmen.
Now, the fog lent the street a fairytale quality. Recovering from her surprise, Marim continued forward, following the road as it widened into a cobbled street. The structures were tidy, painted bright white with colorful accents, as if trying to overcome the gray air. She couldn’t see very far in any direction, which made the street seem deserted. She felt as if she’d stumbled upon a ghost town.
Marim scanned the houses and shops as she passed. “White house, yellow trim, porch with a double staircase.” She muttered these words under her breath, her heart beginning to pound with uncertainty. The captain had suggested, delicately, the pub near the harbor was not a place a respectable female would prefer to stay. He’d told her of a private home in town that took only female lodgers, but he also conceded it had been years since he last sent someone there.
What if the house the captain had described was no longer accepting travelers? She supposed there was always the cloister, but Marim would only go there if she grew desperate.
She had made it past half a dozen structures when she heard footfalls behind her. Resisting the urge to whirl around, Marim stopped and looked over her shoulder. She saw a man approaching. He walked with purpose, his strides long and energetic. He was breathing heavily, as if he’d been running. She stopped walking, unnerved by the intense way he was looking at her. She was certain she’d never seen him before, and yet he approached without hesitation.
Startled, even a little scared, Marim took a step back. The man, seeing her expression, stopped a few paces away. He spoke in a breathless voice, not bothering with any kind of preamble. “Are you the healer?” he said. “From the ship?”
✣
Tassin hadn’t meant to disobey his father. Or his mother, for that matter. What his mother might have wanted him to do was harder to be certain of, sin
ce she was dead now, and had been dead for Tassin’s entire life, excepting the few minutes between when he was born and she died.
The problem was, Tassin was hungry. He was so hungry he couldn’t think of anything else. The hunger was like a lathe turning inside his belly. Tassin knew about lathes because his grandfather had one. It had taken Tem Cutter months to build the machine. While he’d been doing that, he’d had the blacksmith work on crafting him all sorts of special knives. Tassin’s grandfather used to be a woodcutter—the most successful one on the island—but he’d retired at last. Now he worked wood younger men brought in from the forest, safe in the workshop attached to the back of his small home.
Tassin had seen the way the sharpened blades in his grandfather’s hands sheared through the spinning wood as if it were soft as butter, scoring off long shavings that flew into the air to land in papery coils. He found it fascinating to watch the raw chunks of wood transform into delicate shapes as if by magic.
Tassin felt as if the same thing was happening to him. Something invisible was working away in his own stomach, whirling and biting and clawing and making him smaller.
They’d run out of food at home. They’d run out of food because Tassin couldn’t stop eating. He ate and ate as if he’d grown a hollow leg, like his grandmother said. At first, it had been kind of funny. His father had said he was going through a growth spurt. He said he could remember being a boy himself and the long days watching the goras. Sometimes he’d eat his lunch too early and by evening think he couldn’t get any hungrier.
But Tassin wasn’t growing. He was doing the opposite. Day by day, the hunger raged through him and his body withered. A few days after it started, his other grandmother, the scribe, came to visit. She’d taken one look at him and sent word to the cloister.
Tassin did not like the cloister. His father took him there sometimes to light a candle for his mother’s spirit. The boy found it hard to settle his thoughts like he was supposed to. The sisters of Delari unnerved him with the way they stared and smiled, showing their teeth.
The physician from the cloister was a lean woman with sharp eyes and strong, blunt hands like a man’s. She examined Tassin and said he had the wasting disease, or maybe worms. He must eat as much as he could, and drink a tonic twice a day.
That had been three days ago. At least, Tassin thought it had been three days. It was getting hard for him to separate days from nights. He couldn’t sleep properly. He couldn’t wake properly either. All he seemed able to do was look at things and think about whether or not he could eat them.
This morning, he’d had a massive breakfast. His father had watched, his face growing pale, as Tassin devoured anything put within reach. “It shouldn’t be possible,” he said. “Where is it all going?”
Tassin didn’t know where it was going, only that he was hungry unless he was eating, and he was hot as well. His skin seemed to burn. At night he lay in his sheets with the windows open, sweating and trying not to whimper with the pain of his empty belly. During the day, he ate everything his father could bring him. It was never enough.
This morning, Tassin had eaten his way through the eggs his one grandmother brought and the bread his other grandmother brought and the slab of smoked ham his father had purchased the day before. When the food was gone, his father had said, “Come here.”
They’d been in the kitchen, which was a large clean space kept spotless by Secha, the cook. Until recently, Tassin’s nurse would have been the one mostly taking care of him, but she’d left a few months before to help with her new grandchild. He was five now. His father said he wouldn’t get another nurse, but a proper governess to see about his education.
For now, though, the large house Tassin and his father lived in had three servants. There was Secha, who lived up the street but came every day to make lunch and dinner, and there was Baret, who lived in the room off the back hall and kept the gardens and all the rooms that weren’t the kitchen in working order. Finally, there was Krisin, a young lady who came every day to clean anything that needed cleaning and handle laundry and mending and making the beds and things like that.
There were Tassin’s grandmothers as well. They were forever stopping by to bring fresh bread or fruit, to sit or play with Tassin and tell him stories. Sometimes, they asked him questions. Was he lonely? Did he have friends? Didn’t he want to go outside more often?
But Tassin didn’t mind his quiet life. He wasn’t prone to mischief, as his grandmother said his father had been as a boy.
Which made what he was doing this morning exceptionally strange.
Tassin’s father had gone out not long after breakfast. He’d left after he’d told the boy to come to him. He’d wrapped his fingers around his son’s wrist and felt how little flesh there was on top of the bone. He’d lifted the boy’s shirt and stared at his jutting hips, his protruding ribs. Then he’d surged out of his chair in a rush, saying, “I’m going to the butcher’s. Stay here.”
His father had gone, leaving Tassin to stare at the closed door. Neither Secha nor Krisin had come yet. Baret was out in the back garden. It wasn’t the first time Tassin had been left mostly to his own devices, but it was the first time he disobeyed his father’s direct orders.
When Embriem left, Tassin waited a few minutes, the hunger curling and clawing through his body. Then he slid out of his seat, went into the front hall and stood staring for a time at the large front door. The house was silent and empty and large. There was no one to stop him. So Tassin did what he’d been wanting to do for days. He opened the door and left the house, determined to go to the warmlake.
Tassin didn’t know why he wanted to go to the warmlake, only that it was in his thoughts almost as strongly as the desire to eat. He wanted to walk down the long grassy slope to the spit of sand where his father told him his mother had used to take her washing when she was just a girl. He wanted to wade into the warm water and hear the small cries and plops of the brinlins as they climbed about in the reeds and dropped into the water. He wanted to stand in the water and … what? He didn’t know what he wanted to do, only that it was important.
His mistake was not putting on his shoes. He didn’t think of it until he left the house, and then he didn’t want to go back for fear Baret would hear him. So Tassin kept going, feeling the cool, rough cobbles of the long drive beneath the soles of his feet, walking along at an energetic rate and trying to look as if he was doing something his father had told him to do rather than exactly the thing his father had told him not to.
The fog was thin and warm. He made it to the end of the lane his house was at the top of and onto the road that circumnavigated town. He sped up, growing excited as he made progress towards his goal. At last, he made it onto the narrow track that led down to the warmlake.
It was there he passed Layne Gordom. He didn’t stop when he saw her, only kept on walking. He did nod, though, to be polite.
Layne did not keep walking. As he went past, she stopped and turned around to look at him, eyes narrowed. “Tassin,” she said before he could get far enough away to pretend he couldn’t hear her. “Where are you going?”
Tassin was an honest boy. This fact was his downfall. He should have thought about this possibility. He should have had an answer prepared. But he hadn’t, and now his mind was stuck. He stared, mute, unable to think of a lie. All he could think about was how he didn’t like Layne Gordom. His father said she was unhappy, but Tassin thought she was just mean.
When he couldn’t answer, the woman frowned, stomped up to him, and took him by the wrist. She began to walk back the way he’d come, all but dragging him along beside her. She told him his father would be angry and his mother, had she been alive, would have been disappointed. She said this over and over as she hauled Tassin back up the lane.
Tassin went with her, but he stopped listening to her words. All he could think about was how they were going the wrong way, and he was so very hungry.
✣
The Roos
ter’s Comb did not typically open until noon. Cockram was unloading a crate of whiskey bottles when he heard the bell announcing the arrival of a merchant ship in the harbor. It was mid-morning, but he turned with a sigh and a grunt, glancing around the common room. “Tilde,” he barked, “put down the fresh rushes. Now.” Then he strode across the room and unlocked the door, swung it wide, and leaned out to flip the little sign outside from “closed” to “open.”
He heard a rustle as he turned back around. Tilde was there, walking across the room with a rag in her hand. His daughter favored her mother, with her long neck and her willowy way of walking. She’d been a sweet child, but lately she’d gained a new aspect. There was a certain sullen, rebelliousness to the way she looked and spoke to him. It was subtle, nothing he could call her out on, but it grated on his nerves and made his temper shorter than usual.
“The reeds, girl,” he snapped as she wandered past the tables. She never hurried, no matter how he prodded. Sometimes he could swear she was carrying out her tasks as slowly as possible with a focused deliberateness that set his teeth on edge.
Tilde did not respond. She tossed her rag onto the bar and headed for the back door. In the yard behind the pub she would pull a bundle from the stack of fresh reeds, maneuver their bulk through the door, and scatter them across the floor.
Cockram began pulling chairs down from the tops of the tables and setting them upright. Taking the chairs down first would make Tilde’s task more difficult, but that was her own fault for dawdling. Cockram was a firm believer in consequences. Everything a person did in life had consequences – a ripple of effects spreading out from each action. That day in the wood yard, for instance, so long ago, he’d first seen the woman he would later marry. He’d approached, smiling. She’d smiled back. That moment had brought him here, step by slow step.
Cockram heaved the last chair off the table as his daughter pushed through the back door carrying the reeds. Her eyes flicked over the chairs. He could have sworn her expression curdled a little. But she said nothing, did nothing but carry her reeds to the farthest corner of the room and begin to scatter them. They were good for this purpose. Soft and papery after drying, they were able to soak up spilled beverages and keep the floor from going slick as the night wore on.
Cockram returned to the bar, tossed Tilde’s abandoned rag into the hamper, and fumed as he watched his daughter’s lethargic efforts. Halfway through, he told her to go make sure all the water barrels were full and took over the job himself.
The first sailors began to arrive moments after he finished with the reeds. They pushed through the door in small groups, eyes sweeping over the taps and bottles arranged behind the bar. Cockram assessed the men as they settled at tables, pleased to see they all shared a tidy appearance. The port masters had standards, of course, and didn’t allow ships with unruly crews to remain docked. But there were a lot of new vessels on the waters these days, and many seamen behaved differently when out from under the captain’s eye.
Cockram didn’t like sailors. He thought there must be something inherently wrong with any man who chose such an unmoored life. But you didn’t have to like something to make a living off of it.
On a normal night, the Rooster’s Comb was a quiet pub. The men who worked in the warehouses and on the docks would often stop for a drink or a meal on their way home. On fine days when the fog wasn’t too thick, townsfolk would walk up from high street to have a beer and sit on the patio, where they could watch the waves heave in and out of the harbor. And of course, there were the small crews from the light luggers that scampered from island to island. They often took a room for a few nights, and Cockram knew dozens of them by name.
But on nights when a merchant vessel was in port, the place filled up. What would seem the entire crew would come in at once, cramming into the Rooster’s small common room, filling tables, ordering drink after drink. Sometimes Cockram would send to town for the city guard. He’d give two or three of them free drinks their next day off in exchange for them hanging around the common room, visible in their uniforms. Their steadying presence helped keep the crowd less rowdy.
It usually worked, but not always. Sometimes fights would break out. A man had been knifed once, fatally. He’d bled out right there on the floor. It had taken Cockram months of sanding to get the stain out.
The men here today, however, were subdued. Most of them ordered food only, then retired to the tables with their stew and bread. They spoke in low tones. A few of them asked for beer as well, but sipped the foamy brew at a slow pace. As the common room filled, it remained strangely quiet. There was none of the raucous joking and high spirits that making landfall typically gave rise to in men like these.
Cockram circulated among them, collecting empty dishes and keeping his ears open. He caught snatches of conversation that piqued his interest.
“… be glad when we’re back at sea.”
“It’s not a natural thing …”
“… can’t believe the captain ever let her on in the first place.”
Cockram returned to the bar, setting the dishes in the tub for Tilde to haul to kitchen. He began to wipe down the counter, his attention on the shifting conversations all around him. Something had happened on their voyage, something that hung over these men as surely as the fog hung over Cynnes Tarth.
Had Cockram’s wife still been with him, she’d have picked up on this as well. She’d have inserted herself among the sailors already, making them feel easy and welcome. She’d have collected all the ship’s gossip over the course of the evening. Then, when they went to bed with the pub settled and quiet for the night, she’d have passed it on to him.
Cockram couldn’t rely on Tilde for such things. She was as sullen with the guests as she was with her father. And while Cockram could talk to men, it wasn’t the same. Gossip needed a woman’s touch.
He was staring at a table of subdued sailors when the captain arrived. He walked through the door quietly, flanked by his mate. His presence was instantly noted by his crew. There was a ripple of subtle movement as men sat up a little taller in their seats, straightened collars that might have gone rumpled. The sailors dropped their voices further, or fell silent.
Captain Tommin was a man of middle height and middle years. He had sad eyes and the rolling gait of one who has spent his life on the deck of a ship. His shoulders, while broad, were a little stooped. He walked to the bar and pulled out a stool. Cockram knew him. He’d been in an out of this port for the last thirty years. His ship, up until recently, had been one of less than half a dozen left that could make the crossing to Masidon.
The captain spoke before Cockram could greet him. His words were strange, as was his tone. “There’s a house in town, isn’t there? White, with yellow trim? That takes women to lodge?”
Cockram considered the question. He looked at the tidy sailors with some uncertainty. “Captain Tommin.” He smoothed his neck scarf, adjusting the golden rooster pin he wore there. “I’m honored by your presence in my humble establishment. We have rooms for any passengers you might have aboard.”
His was the only pub on the waterfront. While there was no hard and fast rule against sailors going into town, they were discouraged from doing so. The people of Lan Dinas were not keen on outsiders.
“She’s not my passenger.” Tommin spoke with an odd strain in his voice. “She was to be healer on my vessel.” He trailed off, not explaining further.
Cockram’s curiosity was piqued now. He pulled a draft of beer and set it before the captain. “Any physician would be more than welcome at the cloister,” he said. “We have a fine ….”
The captain cut him off. He didn’t do it in an aggressive way. Rather, his words were so quiet Cockram could barely make them out. “She’s not a physician.” There was a pause as Cockram tried to decide what to make of this. The captain repeated, “She’s a healer.” Then, in the growing silence he added, “I thought she might make me a globe runner, eventually, though she
’s young yet, and inexperienced.”
It took a few moments for Cockram to parse what this meant. When he understood, a bolt of fear and shock shot through him. He stood up straighter, feeling his temper spark.
He’d heard rumors, of course. It had been a dozen years, maybe more, since brand new ships from Masidon began to arrive in Cynnes Tarth, bringing trade and stories. The sailors spoke of the war that had ravaged their distant homeland. The tales were varied, many of them incoherent, but everyone agreed on one thing – the Tessilari had risen again. It was their magic, after all, that allowed vessels to navigate the Two Trials.
Still, knowing a ship operated with the help of a guideglobe was one thing. Learning a Tessilar had made landfall, was right here on his island, was quite another.
Cockram leaned forward, trying to catch the captain’s eye. But the man wouldn’t look at him. He was staring at the foam on the beer as it sighed and sank. Cockram spoke anyway, not even trying to keep the horror out of his voice. “You brought one of them here? I tell you now, she’ll find no welcome in Lan Dinas. Keep her on your ship, and take her with you when you go.”
The captain did look up then. Something had gone hard in his eyes. “She’s a person, same as any other. She’ll do you no harm.” He reached into his jacket and drew out a folded piece of paper to slide across the counter with a coin set on top. “Give this to Vailria, will you?”
Then he left, pushing back from the bar and leaving the beer untouched.
In response to some invisible signal, his crew followed. They stood, one after the other, some only halfway through their food or drink. They filed out, silent to a man.
An hour later, Cockram heard the single toll of the harbor bell that meant the great ship had left.