Clouds End

  Rope frowned. “We found the Maid’s Ease,” he said slowly. “Took it back to his cottage. Ash held the herbalist while I gave it to his wife. I thought . . .” His eyes were troubled. “I thought others should know. They have no Witness here, so I took them to their neighbors. I told Lily the story and asked her to care for his wife. She took Rowan Berry inside. I followed her, to talk to her father. And then . . .” He glanced over at Ash. The spirit gazed down with eyes darker than a cedar’s hollow heart.

  Ivy’s eyes gleamed. “And then?” she said, winding her arm around Ash’s waist.

  “I killed him,” Ash said.

  “I knew it! You have the soul of a gardener, Ash. Forever weeding. You cannot let nature take her course. Poor fellow.” Ivy patted him softly on the back. “I shall take good care of you.”

  He laughed bitterly. “I don’t doubt it!” He wrapped his long arms around himself. “So cold. So cold.”

  Rope did not tell of how Rowan Berry had cursed them for murdering her husband. He did not speak of the flies that drank his sweat as he and Ash dug a shallow grave. He did not show them the ring, Pine Quill’s bramble ring, torn loose in the moment of his death. Rope had grabbed the ring of thorns, washed it at Lily’s well, and hid it at the bottom of his pouch. Not because he thought it was magical, or valuable. But it was important, somehow, to take something solid, something as real as wind or rain away from that dreamlike scene of madness and death.

  They made supper quickly and ate it in silence.

  Afterward Rope and Brook lay down and held one another against unquiet dreams. Ivy roamed noiselessly through the surrounding forest. Ash sat up, late into the night, staring at the fire.

  Some presentiment kept Jo awake, listening to the old moon sing a song of bones and whispers. When brightness glimmered against her lids she opened her eyes.

  Ash had thrust his long fingers into the embers. He sat, hunched above the rising flames, like a man staring at a secret treasure. Serpents of fire slid along his arms. A wind sprang up and a wave of flame broke over him, rolling across his shoulders and catching at his nose, eyelashes, ears. Hissing leaves curled and smoked upon his chest. He staggered to his feet and screamed. Huge and passionate, his cry scared the islanders to their feet. It was a roar of loneliness and torment and the pain of being alive.

  The flames engulfed him. He jerked horribly, scattering the firewood, and fell to one knee. Sap dripped from his eyes and ran hissing from his fingertips.

  Rope ran to the fire pit, seized a log, and clubbed Ash to the ground. Desperately he kicked dirt over the flaming giant, trying to smother the flames. But Ash swirled up in a shower of sparks and stinging smoke. Brook pulled Rope back from his smoldering corpse.

  And still Jo sat, unmoving. She understood Ash as the humans never could. How right, how easy it would be, to give way to a spark eating you out from the inside.

  How much better to be the flame than the shadow.

  The fire was only soot and embers by the time Ivy returned. “I am sorry,” Brook whispered. “I am so sorry.”

  Ivy shrugged. “It was going to happen.”

  “You are . . . very calm.”

  “The strong survive, the weak perish,” Ivy said. “I am not too proud to drink the rain.”

  SEVEN’S LINE

  CHAPTER 11

  THE HERO OF LEGEND

  “GET UP. War waits for none of us.”

  Shale woke.

  The man who had spoken squatted by another sleeper farther down the hillside. It was the morning after their escape from Delta. In the darkness someone moaned in pain.

  Here was her adventure.

  She smelled pine and chill sand and the sea. Her tunic was cold with dew. She wished the sun were up. Other sleepers lay bundled under the broken-backed shore pines. Stars still shone in a nightblue sky overhead. Only in the east was the sea rimmed with dawn.

  Brook and Rope were gone. And the haunt.

  “Delta lies in irons while you sleep.” A man moved among the sleepers, waking each with a shake or a prod of his foot. He crouched for a moment by a pallet where a woman with a white kerchief knelt, spreading salve on a wounded man. The patient hissed through clenched teeth.

  What was this island called? Thumbtip? Shale watched the shadow rouse his troops. Her skin felt tight over her hard cheekbones. Her shoulder still stung where she had caught a nail during the storm. Her legs and sides were bruised where woodlanders had kicked her.

  When they had sailed from Delta’s lagoon last night their shipmates had been full of relief and nervous laughter. Then the word spread that several Deltans had been hurt in the raid. One captured or killed. The laughter had died, and Shale knew she and Foam were being compared to a friend who would not be coming back.

  She leaned over and shook Foam until he groaned and blinked. Someone had thrown a blanket over them; smoothest silk, embroidered with a knotwork border. Foam wrapped it more tightly around his shoulders and shivered. “Gorgeous. But whoever brought this along didn’t know much about sleeping outside.”

  “Nor will he ever learn.”

  It was the commander, the man who had held Jo hostage mistaking her for Hazel Twist. Seven. He was pale for an islander and his eyes were the color of oak leaves. A long-handled sword was sheathed at his side. He wore woodlander pants and a sleeveless eelskin vest. The muscles in his bare arms were shockingly defined, as if they had been created not by the growth of flesh but by an act of will, and this was true, for he was a young man ardent, of high ideals, with a young man’s belief that anything in this compromised world not worth paying for in blood was not worth having. He carried like a curse the hero’s capacity for tragedy and terrible violence. Beholding Seven at that moment, Foam saw that some men were the tools of fate, and some were its weapons.

  “Chain bought you this blanket with his life.”

  Foam said, “What can we do?”

  “Die for the next man,” Seven said. “There will be chances soon enough.”

  He walked away. Somewhere out of sight a thrush warbled a few notes, thought better of it, and fell silent. The darkness was paling.

  Foam shivered and reached for the blanket, then stopped and let it be. His elaborately embroidered tunic sleeves were ripped; ribbons of cloth fluttered as he rubbed his arms to keep warm. “Spit. I hope I don’t look like I feel.” He glanced at Shale. “I hope you don’t feel like you look! I wish Rope were here. Do you think they made it?”

  “They made it.”

  “I suppose Jo could get them out of trouble, if she had to.”

  “Jo!”

  “It wasn’t such a bad plan,” Foam said. “Taking the form of Twist was rather clever. If only—”

  “Without telling us!”

  “—she had told us.”

  Through the channel they could just see Spearpoint, the closest of Delta’s three islands. “I would know if Brook were dead,” Shale said.

  “There were a lot of soldiers, Shale.”

  “I would know.”

  She climbed stiffly to her feet and walked a few steps toward the shore. The wind was out of the east, heading inland. “Probably making for the Arbor. I wonder how they will get off Delta? Steal a boat, I suppose.”

  “Or Jo might turn into a dolphin, and tow them off. Or become a boat herself!”

  “She’ d leak.” Gingerly Shale bent down to touch her toes. Her straight black hair hung beside her cheek, tangling with her shark’s tooth earring. Foam was hit with the reality of her. How alive, how there she was.

  So often he felt so unreal—a crawl of white froth hissing across a wavetop and then gone. But Shale was as real as grass and shells. She kept herself always square to the winds of the world, while his sails luffed and his bow wavered with every breeze.

  He grimaced at the image. There he was again, spinning his heart-knowing out into a messy cobweb of words. Shale touched her toes, groaned, then reached down to lay her palms flat on bare ground scattered with pine n
eedles. She was not lovely, but he thought she was as beautiful as a sea bird, a flower or a flame.

  Do I love her? Is that what I mean? He tried the words. Saying them in his mind sent a shiver down inside himself, a feeling very like fear. Could he dare to love a woman as strong as Shale? Because he wasn’t up to her, he knew that. He would break around her like spume around a rock.

  Love? Do I love her?

  Sometimes, despite his unreality, he thought there was something inside himself. But like a faint star it disappeared when he looked directly at it. And saddest to him that morning, he found that when he looked inside to see if he loved Shale, he could not tell.

  “Someone’s coming.”

  A man walked up from the shore toward them. He was tall and slender; his split black braid came almost to his waist. His eyes were grey and honest as stream-polished stone. “Do you like our dock?” he asked, gesturing at the barren beach.

  Foam smiled. “It suits our boat.”

  The Deltan settled himself on a fallen log beside them. Grey hair threaded his beard and braid. “I am a singer. My name is Reed.”

  “Foam. This is Shale.” Foam looked at the Deltan and smiled. “Well? Sing. How came Delta to be caught in such a net?”

  “I cannot yet name this story’s knot, for the tale has only begun.” Reed looked out over the wide grey-backed sea. “It was ten days ago that we first saw the rafts. I was one of the first to see the strangers’ fleet drifting down the Vein like leaves on a stream. Deltans gathered to marvel at the crudity of those little rafts, but they troubled me. Anyone coming to trade would have stopped at the shore and let us ferry them, I thought.

  “Now, we islanders don’t think much about war, but I had heard enough woodland stories in my travels and seen enough of their strange shadow-plays to know that soldiering is as natural to them as sailing is to us. So instead of trading breezes with the crowd on the dock, I promised a free night’s song to anyone who would run me over to Spearpoint. I meant to find Seven.

  “I had made fun of him, like everyone else: Craft the shipwright’s crazy son, who spent seasons thrusting at imaginary foes on the Spearpoint beaches, or listening to the lessons of that exiled woodlander, Switch. He was training in a solitary place, and it took me long to find him. By the time we returned, Hazel Twist had seized the major docks and markets. The surprised citizens of the Foot had no chance of resisting an army so well-equipped and so skillfully led. By the time we had a fleet ready to leave Spearpoint, the woodlanders had their fire-slings ready: terrible engines that hurled balls of burning pitch. We lost half our boats before we could beat back to safety, and all the time more rafts were landing on the Foot. Those willing to fight for Delta fled with Seven to the island of Mona, and thence to here.

  “We meant to return the next day to scuttle all the boats we could find, before Hazel Twist could use them to move on the archipelago, but Fathom proved stronger than either side. We were pinned on Thumbtip by a terrific storm, and many boats were damaged.”

  “We weathered that little blow at sea,” Shale said.

  “That says much for your seacraft! It was a week before we had made repairs enough to risk coming in to Delta.” Reed grinned. “You were an afterthought. I saw you marching down the street as I was sneaking back to the docks. Seven could hardly believe his luck. Twist—with only two guards around him!

  “ ‘Don’t forget there are soldiers in the streets,’ someone whispered, but Seven would have none of it. ‘Victory goes to the bold,’ he said. ‘Would the Gull Warrior turn down such a chance?’ So off we went, tacking after you. But even as we plotted our ambush, more soldiers gathered. Seven was undaunted.”

  Reed paused, and shrugged. “You know what happened next. There were many soldiers, too many, and Twist was a haunt. Chain was killed and four others were hurt.”

  Foam shifted on his driftwood bench. “Your Seven has his share of, um, boldness.”

  “I would have done it.” Shale stooped to lace up her boots. “It was worth chancing. Life is risk.”

  Reed nodded. “Perhaps Seven is too bold, but he is the only warrior we have. He was trained by a woodlander, but even among the forest people I have never seen his equal.”

  “No doubt, no doubt! But you don’t leave the best swimmer to helm your boat, as we say on Clouds End.”

  Reed laughed. Behind them, someone began to beat on a hollow stump, and the singer slid off his log. “Breakfast! And after food, a council of war.”

  * * *

  The fifty islanders on Thumbtip held their council where they had begun to build a makeshift barracks, sitting on the foundation stones or lying under the gnarled pines at the edge of the clearing. Foam and Shale introduced themselves, and were introduced in turn, though they remembered only a few names: Seven and his lady, Pond; Brace the carpenter, Glint the physician, scruffy Catch; elegant Brine and his sister Rose, heirs to one of Delta’s largest merchant houses.

  Seven sat on a big cedar stump by the fire pit. “How are the injured men?”

  Glint was a small woman in her middle years. “They will live. Tusk has a bad cut and a broken wrist. Fin lost his left eye to the blue spray. I put him to sleep for the day. Tell me, what knowledge did we buy with their blood?”

  Catch the longshoreman stirred and scratched the back of his neck with grimy fingernails. “That it’s easier to scuttle ships than to build ’em.”

  “We sank all the big boats and most of the smaller ones,” Seven said.

  “Poor Salamander scuttled! Oh, well.” Foam coughed delicately. “Shale and I would like to believe that at least some good came from your trip. We are both deeply in your debt for last night’s timely rescue.”

  The elegant Deltan, Brine, flipped his braid behind his shoulders, avoiding Foam’s eyes. “Islanders must hang together.”

  “Then I wish we had more Rope!” Foam muttered. More loudly he said, “We are two travellers from Clouds End, at the Mist’s edge, and we like the hospitality on Thumbtip better than what we found in Delta.”

  Pond laughed. She was of middle height, with four long braids of dark brown hair that hung to the bottom of her back. Her tunic was the deep, luminous blue of the twilight sky. At her wrists were wide bracelets of knotted silver, and a silver torc was clasped around her throat. “But I am sure they would have loved to keep you. If I heard the story rightly, though, you were fairly on your way to freedom without us. Your gratitude does credit to your courtesy, easterner. Or your discretion.”

  “The woodlanders are building in Delta,” Seven continued. “Twist is putting a wooden wall around the Foot. Traces of it on Spearpoint too. We also saw several rafts, tied to the lagoon dock on the Foot. They were stepped for a single mast with a small sail.”

  “Sorry-looking little boats,” Catch muttered.

  Brine shrugged, patting his braid more perfectly into place with a plump hand. “Such may be the only craft these forest people can sail.”

  “They’re not good for much now, but if the woodlanders put in daggerboards they could make way,” Seven said. “Only in good weather, I grant you, but they could fit eight men and a fire-sling on one of them. They would be slow, but they would do the job.”

  “Will the woodlanders think to add daggerboards?” Pond asked. “You’ve been in the forest, Reed.”

  The singer nodded. “All they have to do is pull up a dinghy to see how we build them. They are toolwise folk.”

  “So what do we do?” Glint asked.

  Seven slipped his throwing knife from its arm-sheath and flipped it as he thought, toss-catch, toss-catch. “Switch would tell me to stop them now before they spread. Once they have a base beyond Delta, they can come at us from two directions. We can’t let them take those rafts out of the lagoon.”

  Brine nodded slowly. “What if we sailed in under cover of darkness and burned the rafts?”

  Pond frowned. “You would be seen as soon as you set the first one alight.”

  “Won’t they h
ave sentries down by the water?” Catch added. “And those fire-slings?”

  Seven jammed his knife into the ground. He pulled it up, clotted with dirt, and wiped the blade off on his leggings. He sighed. “Consider this, then: we sail in fast and quiet for the lagoon dock. We lace the rafts with oil first and throw in a salvo of torches as soon as the alarm is raised, burning all the rafts at once. If the woodlanders spot us before we have finished, their own fire-slings will set the rafts ablaze.”

  Catch spat. “I ain’t going back into the fire, friend.”

  Brine and Rose knelt on a square of sailcloth beneath one of the pines. They were both immaculate, wearing matching purple tunics with intricate gold embroidery fetched from their yacht that morning. Softly, Brine said, “Is that how you repay the people who rescued you?”

  “The sweat ran down my arse-crack all day yesterday, building this barracks, Brine. I didn’t see you humping rocks and I doubt your sister did enough work to get her armpits damp. I’d be quiet when it came to paying debts.”

  Rose colored and stared fixedly at the ground. “We were not raised to do your sort of work.”

  “What in Tool’s Box are you good for?” Catch said, staring insolently at her. “Other than the obvious.”

  “Catch—” Seven said.

  “I’m not sure I like this plan,” Foam said.

  The Deltans looked at him aslant, but he was following his thoughts and did not notice. “Too simple. It’s just what I would expect if I were Hazel Twist.”

  Shale groaned. “You always make things too complicated.”

  “But so do the forest people! Hazel Twist has spent years thinking about military strategy. Do you think he doesn’t know that getting off Delta is the key to his invasion?”

  Catch said, “Whoever goes back will end up cooked if we aren’t careful.”

  Seven frowned and fed another twig to the fire. “We can’t sit on Thumbtip forever, fearing to act because the enemy might outguess us.”

  Glint grunted. “If you go ahead with this, then barracks-building will have to wait! I’ll need help tomorrow, gathering herbs and making up medicine. If you sail to Delta, there will be more wounded.”