It was late on the tenth day when Xanni cried out at last, ‘Land ho!’
Calwyn rushed to the side of the boat and shaded her eyes with her hand, dazzled by the low sun. After a long time she was able to make out a smudge of dark to the north-west. ‘The Elbow,’Tonno said.
‘The Elbow is the first sign of the approach to Mithates Port,’ said Darrow. ‘It juts out far into the Bay. We must sail along its flank to the harbour.’
‘We might even reach it by morning,’ said Xanni. ‘With luck and a lick of wind.’
Slowly, the dark smudge grew larger, until just before sunset they were close enough to make out the flickering of lights from watchtowers perched on the clifftops. Eager to be helpful, Calwyn hurried to light their own lanterns in the dusk.
‘No lights!’ growled Tonno.
‘There are archers in the watchtowers,’ said Xanni. ‘Their idea of fun is to set their arrows alight and rain them down on strange ships.’
‘I thought you said that the colleges of Mithates sold their weapons to whoever came calling? Flaming arrows are a fine welcome!’
‘The towers are nothing to do with the colleges,’ said Darrow. ‘They belong to bandits who try to take tolls from every ship that passes. If we’re careful, we can get by without their knowing.’
Nearer and nearer they drew, gliding so silently in the darkness it seemed as though it was the cliff that crept toward the boat, not the other way around, a huge hulking beast looming closer and closer, blotting out the starry sky. The lights from the watchtowers vanished as sheer black cliffs reared high above the boat. The water was deep and still here, and they made slow progress, Tonno steering carefully as they crept along. It was vital that they reach the safety of Mithates Port before sunrise, and Darrow still kept up his tired drone of chantment, though his song barely rose above a murmur. Even when Calwyn at last went below, she found herself tiptoeing about the cabin, as though the archers in the watchtowers might overhear a dropped shoe or a whispered goodnight.
Calwyn woke early to the sun flooding in through the fore portholes, and an unfamiliar sensation. She lay still for a moment, trying to work out what it was, and then she realised: Fledgewing had stopped moving. They were lying at anchor. For the first time in days, she could no longer feel the rush and dip of the prow surging forward. She dressed hastily, and ran up onto the deck, blinking in the sunlight.
Fledgewing lay in a narrow inlet, flanked by the steep black cliffs they had sailed beside all night. The little town of Mithates Port clustered about the mouth of the river Amith where it met the sea; the cottages and inns were built from the same gleaming dark rock as the cliffs, as if they had all been carved out of the stone where they stood. Tendrils of smoke curled over the dark roofs and drifted out over the bay, where boats jostled in the shadow of the cliffs.
Tonno was leaning over the rail, packing his morning pipe, while Darrow and Xanni lowered Fledgewing’s tiny dinghy over the side. Xanni looked up. ‘We were going to wake you,’ he said guiltily. ‘Before we went.’
‘You were going to leave without me!’ Calwyn cried.
‘Someone should stay with the boat,’ growled Tonno, taking an extra pinch of tobacco from his special pouch. ‘This place is full of thieves.’
‘You will be safer here,’ said Darrow. ‘Mithates is a dangerous place.’
Calwyn hardly knew whether to cry in frustration or stamp her foot with rage. ‘I can help, you know I can! You can’t leave me behind like – like a piece of old rope!’
‘A piece of old rope would be useful,’ muttered Tonno.
‘A piece of old rope will not burst out with a chantment at the wrong moment,’ said Darrow, but there was the slightest crinkle of a smile around his eyes.
‘I promise not to sing any chantments.’
‘It’s not possible,’ said Darrow firmly. ‘You cannot come with us, it would hamper us very much. There are no women students in the colleges.’ He saw Calwyn’s eyes widen in indignation. ‘Just as there are no men permitted to study icecraft in Antaris. Your people are as bad as theirs.’
She had nothing to say to that. She stood on the deck, lonely and disconsolate, watching as the dinghy drew away. Xanni gave her a cheerful wave, but she was too miserable to return it. It was not fair. Had she come all this way, braved all these perils, to be left behind on the boat just when the most important part of their quest was beginning? Why, it had been her own idea to join together with other chanters, and now she was being left out. She stared across at the shore, but Fledgewing’s dinghy was lost in the crowd of other boats.
Mithates was half a day’s walk from its port; Darrow had said that they might be gone for several days. ‘You might practise swimming,’ he suggested. ‘The waters of the harbour are calm enough.’
She scrubbed the decks and ordered the lockers, which were overflowing with the provisions they’d bought in Kalysons. She cleaned out her own cabin until the last traces of the fishy smell had vanished, and found other places to stow the ropes and sails and nets. And she did practise swimming, cautiously at first, and with much splashing, securing herself with a rope that trailed from the bow. By the second day, she was bold enough to swim round and round Fledgewing until her arms and legs ached, though she still couldn’t quite bring herself to duck her head under the water. Then she practised her chantments, the most difficult feats she could think of, singing up elaborate models of trees or castles of ice. Once she sang up a miniature Fledgewing from the sea, complete with masts and sails and little figures on the deck. But that reminded her that she was the only figure on the deck at present, and she hastily melted it again.
By the third day she was as bored and frustrated as she had ever been in Antaris. Now she didn’t even have the bees to occupy her. And she was tormented by questions about what was happening to the others in Mithates. Had they succeeded in finding any chanters? Would they persuade them to fight against Samis? All afternoon she sat on the deck with her back against the cabin wall, rolling the wooden globe idly up and down, looking up hopefully whenever a movement on the water caught her eye, in case it was the dinghy returning. But every little boat she saw was bound for another vessel; no one came near Fledgewing.
The sun went down, the moons rose, and still she sat there, watching the smoke from the chimneys drift across the harbour, and the lamplight glitter on the water. Then one by one the lanterns winked out. The town was folding itself into sleep. It was late; the others wouldn’t be returning tonight.
She got up, stretching the stiffness in her limbs, and was about to go below, when she noticed a ship coming through the mouth of the harbour from the open sea, gliding silently across the moonlit water. It was quite unlike the sturdy Fledgewing or any of the other boats she’d seen in Kalysons. This was a long, sleek vessel, barely rising above the level of the waves, with a prow shaped like a snake’s head, and long banks of oars that dipped and rose in a steady rhythm, gleaming at every stroke as water poured off them. Two masts rose from the centre of the boat, but the sails were furled tight; clearly the oars were the power that moved the ship. This must be one of the Gellanese galleys that Darrow had spoken of, with a slave in chains hauling at every oar. Calwyn stared with horrified fascination as the ship moved slowly deeper into the harbour.
But then, as the ship drew closer, she saw that the benches where the slaves should have been sitting were deserted. There was not a sailor or a slave to be seen anywhere on that long, eerily silent boat; it could have been a ghost ship, gliding without a sound across the ocean. And yet the oars moved; without a hand to move them, they rose and fell, and now at last she could hear the whisper of their movement. Another sound came to her, too, faintly, across the water: the sound of singing, low and strong, a powerful rumbling song that made her skin prickle. She knew these notes now; she had heard them from Darrow, day after weary day as he sat by the tiller, though this song vibrated with a greater power than he had managed to summon. It was a chantment of ironcraf
t.
And as she listened, pressing herself instinctively into the shadows, the oars lifted for one final time, and locked, and rested. The last throaty growl of chantment drifted over the water, and ceased. Silence settled over the harbour.
Calwyn stayed in the shadows, her heart pounding. That sinister ship could belong to only one person: Samis, the captain of an empty ship, whose oars creaked and dipped through the water by the power of chantment. Though the night air was still warm, Calwyn clenched her teeth to stop them chattering. Could he have followed them here? She felt sick; only the friendly timbers of Fledgewing at her back kept her from sliding to the deck in despair.
Be strong, she told herself. The fact that Samis was here didn’t mean that he had followed them. The Power of Fire was one of the great Powers; it made sense that Samis should want to master it as soon as he could. That was the very reason why they themselves had come here first. It was a coincidence, that was all.
But even as she argued with herself, doubts began to trouble her. What if Samis had come to Kalysons and heard the story of how a witch-girl in yellow robes had frozen the tongue of a young lout down by the docks? He would have learned from the sisters that Darrow had taken one of the priestesses with him when he escaped from Antaris. Darrow and Tonno had been talking with the old sailors around the harbour, asking how to steer to Mithates. If Samis had begun to ask questions, it wouldn’t have been difficult to discover their plans.
It was her fault. He was here, and it was her fault.
Quickly, without pausing to think, she rushed down into the cabin and rummaged about until she found an oiled bag that Xanni used to keep their loaves dry. She shook out the bread and the crumbs inside, and shoved some clothes from Xanni’s locker into it. A few moments later she slipped into the sea, holding the bag carefully out of the water, and then she kicked as hard as she could toward the shore.
The road to Mithates – the only road out of the port – ran beside the river, so that it looked as though two broad ribbons, one black and one silver, wound their way along the valley side by side. Calwyn tried to run, but the ground seemed to heave and swell beneath her feet; after so long at sea, she couldn’t balance on dry land. And then the borrowed trousers threatened to trip her up at every step, and the cap that hid her plaits kept slipping over her eyes. She cursed the colleges that wouldn’t allow girls within their walls, and cursed the treacherous road that refused to keep steady, and forced herself to go more slowly.
Afterwards, she would remember that journey as a waking nightmare, stumbling through the barren valley, scorched by a thousand fires where the colleges had tested their weapons. Swirls of ash rose before every breath of breeze, and here and there the remains of a blackened tree twisted up through the stony ground like a ghastly figure of warning, pointing her onward.
It was almost dawn when she reached the end of the road. First she saw the black spires and thin towers rising like a small forest along the riverbanks, and then she turned a bend and saw the whole of Mithates spread before her: the twelve colleges, each with its bell tower and spire built out of the same dark, brilliant stone, and the narrow cobbled streets that threaded between. It looked just like Antaris, except that Antaris was built with grey stone instead of black. Her breath caught in her throat.
There was no defensive wall around the city. As the sun rose, she walked right down into the town without anyone to challenge her. But then she saw that the twelve colleges divided the place into twelve small villages all clustered together, each with its own high wall of stone. The streets were almost empty so early in the day; one or two frowning students hurried by in their soft cloth bonnets, a different colour for every college, and a tired-looking woman with a basket over one arm and a baby in the other. There were no open squares, no markets, and no houses lined the streets. It was as though each college were an island, separated from the others, with the streets acting like rivers to keep them apart. There were many little iron gates set into the walls, through which Calwyn could glimpse green quadrangles, or stone stairs winding upward.
She had no idea how she was going to find the others and deliver her warning. Darrow had said that Mithates was the same size as Antaris, and she had vaguely thought that it would be set out in the same way. She’d expected to come across her friends soon enough, in a dining hall or a courtyard – one of the places where people gathered to be together. But there was nowhere like that here. Darrow and the others must be somewhere behind these high walls; there was only one way to find them, and that was to go inside the colleges one by one. Nervously she tucked her plaits up more firmly under her cap, and tried the nearest of the little iron gates. It was locked; so was the second, and the third. Each gateway was topped with the carving of some beast or crest, an eagle or a leaping fish or a sheaf of wheat, the symbol of the college. There was a fierce-looking bee above the fourth gate she tried. She hoped it was a good omen, and sure enough, the gate swung open at her touch.
Calwyn plunged from the sleepy silence of the streets into a world of bustle and clamour. A babble of excited talk echoed through the cloisters as the students hurried between lecture halls, and bells were ringing to mark the next part of the day. Shouts and footfalls reverberated between the ivy-covered walls, and from somewhere far off came the sound of a muffled explosion, followed by loud cheers. With all this noisy activity taking place behind the high walls instead of in the streets and squares, it was as though the city had been turned inside out. Never at her ease in crowds, Calwyn ducked her head and pulled her cap a little further down over her eyes, but no one challenged her.
She soon found that as long as she moved purposefully and kept to the shadows of the cloisters, no one paid her any attention. She strode through the teeming quadrangles, across galleries and along bustling corridors, but she never saw or heard any sign of her friends.
By late afternoon, she had searched four of the twelve colleges without success, and with growing apprehension. Surely Samis must be in Mithates by now; she was so tired and hungry, she had left Fledgewing unguarded, and it would all be for nothing.
At last she found herself where the wide placid river cut through the centre of the town, with a broad swathe of green bank on either side. Spander trees spread their branches in a shady canopy over the grass, and she sank down beneath one of them. The declining sun sent shadows chasing down the narrow streets between the colleges, though the riverbanks were still golden with light. Perhaps she should go back to Mithates Port, Calwyn thought dismally; she was still scrutinising every passerby, but now she was as fearful of seeing Samis as she was hopeful of seeing her friends.
Suddenly she was startled by shouts and hooting from the other side of the river. The strangest procession was approaching: a group of students running along, whooping and jeering, some brandishing sticks, others waving their bonnets in the air. Calwyn stared hard, but she couldn’t see what was at the centre of the parade. Then suddenly something broke away from the pack and began to cross the nearest bridge, moving quite fast, though unsteadily; she could just make out the head of a boy, a year or so younger than herself, with untidy brown hair blown back under his red bonnet, scowling with tremendous concentration as he skimmed along through the air, though still close to the ground. The rest of him was hidden by the bridge. The other students remained on the far side of the river, shaking their sticks and bonnets; some of them, bored, gave up the chase altogether. ‘Curfew’s getting close!’ Calwyn heard one of them call as he wandered away.
The flying student grew closer and closer, then suddenly he was across the bridge and in plain view, and Calwyn saw that he was not flying after all, but mounted on a strange contraption with three wheels, his feet pumping furiously, and dragging behind him a rickety cart laden with firewood. But she barely had time to take in this sight before the boy lost control of his machine. The front wheel wobbled mightily and plunged off the path, gathering speed as it hurtled down the slope. Calwyn gasped and leapt to her feet, certa
in that the boy and his machine were about to plunge into the river together. But with a desperate effort, he hurled his weight to one side and the machine collided violently with the trunk of a spander tree, flinging the boy to the ground, as limp as a doll. Firewood clattered over the grass. One back wheel spun slowly, whirring, in the air.
Calwyn hurried down the bank to where the boy lay unmoving. His eyes were open, and he was blinking dreamily up at the sky. ‘Steering pin must have come loose,’ he said. He sat up.
‘Are you hurt?’ cried Calwyn.
‘Hm.’ He considered the question. ‘I don’t think so.’ He put his hand to his face. ‘But I’ve lost my lenses.’ He began to feel around on the grass.
Calwyn spied something shining on the grass a little way off: two round pieces of glass, held together with a bridge of wire, with two long wires protruding from either side. ‘Is this what you’re looking for?’
‘Oh, thank you.’The boy placed them on his freckled nose so that the long wires rested on his ears. A pair of vague blue eyes blinked at her solemnly through the glass. But he was more concerned about his machine; he bent over it gloomily, inspecting the damage, which was considerable. The front wheel was bent almost in half, and a piece of broken chain trailed forlornly on the grass. ‘I knew that chain would never hold. How will I get it back to my college?’ He shook back his untidy hair and pushed the lenses up his nose in despair. ‘Look at that wheel.’
‘I can help you,’ said Calwyn automatically, but she was suddenly trembling. Perhaps it was the fright of witnessing the collision, but she felt she would like to sit down for a while beneath the trees. Her fingers prickled as though she were about to faint. She gave herself a shake, and bent to straighten up the cart.