“The ship’s captain, Ferrin,” Gorian said quickly, not knowing how long the strange mystical conversation could last. “He says three young people are seeking passage on the ship with us. Their destination, like ours, is Stygia. They are willing to pay well, and he would like to let them come aboard.”
Kanilla Rey’s voice was quiet for a moment, and Gorian wondered if the sorcerous link with his employer had already been disrupted. But then the magician spoke again. “I see no problem. Make sure no one talks to them about your mission, and do not fraternize with them in any way.”
“Of course,” Gorian said. Both those things were understood.
“Very well,” Kanilla Rey’s voice said. “This is a difficult business, Gorian,” he added. “Never use it unless it is absolutely necessary.”
“Certainly,” Gorian said. He expected some response, but the voice did not speak again, and the presence he had felt near him was no longer there.
In his bloody palm, the little sliver of rock was dull gray again.
He knew that there had been a time that he would have been terrified of something like the stone—of holding magic in the palm of his hand. Working it himself, by uttering those phrases. He was no wizard.
But he wasn’t afraid now. He was becoming Kanilla Rey’s creature, he guessed, accustomed to strange magics, accepting of whatever orders came his way.
Satisfied, he went topside to tell Captain Ferrin to let the young people board. He would keep an eye on them and make sure they didn’t make any trouble for his men, or his mission.
ALANYA HAD EXPECTED that Captain Ferrin would launch his ship at first light. But once they had agreed on the terms and she had paid half the sum, he hurried them on board and showed them to the cabin they would share. It was cramped, but big enough for the three of them, with four bunks and a single filthy porthole. They tried to make themselves comfortable, all too exhausted to talk much. Donial fell asleep almost immediately, snoring softly. Kral’s breathing was steady and even, and she thought he might be asleep as well. Alanya sat back in her bunk, beneath Kral’s, and tried to imagine what might wait ahead for them.
But she found that she could not even envision what would come. Stygia was a strange and mysterious place, but in her imagination it was all towering sand dunes and dark sorceries, with images of snakes everywhere. She doubted that view was realistic, but knew not what else might be there. She couldn’t quite believe they would have to battle a Stygian sorcerer for the crown.
At the same time, she knew that Kral would do so, if it became necessary. He had already demonstrated that he would not shy away from any task or any fight.
She clutched her magic mirror close to her—not that she expected it to be useful on this journey, but because, having been separated from it once, she refused to be again. She found herself wishing it could show the future, not just the past.
Within an hour, the ship’s gentle rocking changed, and she knew that it had cast off, into the river’s channel. The water flowed from here toward the sea, so the first leg would be the easiest part of the journey for the ship’s crew.
Thinking about Captain Ferrin, she decided that she found him oddly charming. He laughed easily, and he strewed compliments about like sweets at a party. While he looked comical, she had noticed that he worked his crew efficiently yet without malice. Perhaps there was even fondness there, of captain for crew and vice versa. It had been a stroke of luck, the ship being at the dock, nearly ready to set off down the river, at the end of their headlong dash from Tarantia. Their horses had been boarded in a public stable, and they had made immediately for the dock.
And just in time. Stygia waited.
Stygia, and the crown.
10
USAM GRUNTED WITH satisfaction at the scene before him. A hundred fires burned in the night. More. In every direction he turned, he could see sparks shooting into the night sky. His nostrils burned with the tang of woodsmoke. By morning, the smoke would overhang the valley like the fog that often settled there.
He was not even concerned about the Aquilonians seeing the fires. If the civilized fools managed to figure out what they portended, they still wouldn’t know when the Picts were coming or how many there would be.
There had never been such a unified force of Picts. And as he had hoped, the Elk Clan village had become the staging point for the upcoming attack. Which meant that he had become the most important Pict ever.
One of them, anyway. Mara, his wife, kept telling him not to get carried away with himself, and he tried. But he had pulled off an incredible feat—with the help of whichever Aquilonian had stolen the Teeth of the Ice Bear, and Mang of the Bear Clan, who had gone from clan to clan persuading them to unite at the Elk Clan’s village.
Not every clan was represented, but most were. Enough. When their combined force swept out of the forests and into the villages filled with soft, spoiled settlers and their families, the Aquilonians would realize what a mistake they had made by trying to move into Pictish country. The Picts had been docile too long, entering into truce negotiations with Aquilonia when they should have been swarming their villages, burning their people alive, collecting their heads. That was about to end, and the piles of skulls around Usam’s camp would be replenished ere long.
Usam heard a noise behind him, and turned. It was Mara, an elk skin over her shoulders, clutched tight before her chest with one hand. Her hair, almost entirely gray now, hung unadorned on both sides of her broad face. She rarely smiled. She was not smiling now.
“Admiring your army?” she asked, her tone mocking.
“That is what they are, like it or not,” he replied. “The first real Pictish army.”
“But not your army,” she pressed.
“Whose, then? Mang’s? He has gone back to the Bear Clan village, or what’s left of it. He knows we will force the Aquilonians to give back the Teeth. He is preparing himself to become the new Guardian. Klea continues Kral’s work, making sure the wall of Koronaka does not grow fast enough to be an obstacle to our attack. Kral himself has not been heard from. I fear that he is dead. So whose army would it be?”
“Perhaps it is no one’s army,” Mara said. “Or it is everyone’s. Every Pict’s. You will truly know if it is yours when it’s time to lead them into battle. If they follow and obey only you, then I suppose it is your army after all.”
“Who else would they follow?” Usam wanted to know. There had never been such an army, so there was no familiar form for it to take. They would have to create it as they went, and he intended to mold it the way he wanted, like so much riverbank clay. “They gather in my valley, eat my meat, burn my trees for warmth.”
“If you take responsibility for them, then you own them in failure as well as success,” Mara warned.
“I do not expect failure,” Usam countered. “We will find the Teeth and return it to the Bear Clan.”
“And if you fail?”
“Then tragedy befalls the Pictish people, and anyone else in the way, with the Ice Bear’s return. But before that happens, we’ll take plenty of Aquilonians to the Mountains of the Dead with us,” Usam said. “We may all die in the effort, but we will not die alone.”
ALONE IN HIS sanctum sanctorum, Kanilla Rey prepared for a monumental undertaking. He had fasted for two days, sitting inside a room with three fire pits burning, dripping water onto hot stones to generate steam to sweat the impurities from his system. He had chanted and prayed. He had meditated for hours on end, until his muscles cramped.
He stood in a fresh purple robe, with clean gold linens wrapped about his limbs, above a map that he had unrolled on the floor. Using a piece of soft, pale rock, he inscribed lines on the map, making a rectangular shape just off the coast of Shem, which lay between the mouth of the Tybor River and Stygia. As he drew, he muttered complex incantations learned from a book called The Forbidden Mysteries, penned by the long-dead wizard Xuatahul Divierus. He had purchased the tome from a Nemedian vendor of rare arc
ana, after long and strenuous negotiations that followed months of searching. The quest had resulted in the deaths of three men, which Kanilla Rey felt was a reasonable price to pay.
The initial incantations done, he turned to a pail of water to which he had added certain ingredients. With a ladle, he scooped out some of the liquid. Speaking words over it in an ancient tongue, he splashed it on the map, in the area he had marked off. He turned to his right, made three complete circles, then splashed more of the water. The map curled and wrinkled under the dousing, but still he continued, first circling to the right again, then dripping more water, always muttering his spells.
As he did so, he felt a sudden weariness overtake him. He had not slept or eaten in days, so some degree of exhaustion was not unexpected. But the fatigue was much more than that. It was bone deep, utterly consuming, as if he had walked all the way to Stygia and back without a break for rest or nourishment. He could barely keep his eyes open.
No matter. It only meant that his spell had taken effect, he knew. Great works of magic drew energy from the magician and cast it into the world. He let the ladle sink into the pail and set the whole thing down on the stone floor, beside the map. He shook his head vigorously, flapped his hands and arms, trying to relax them, to stimulate the flow of blood through his extremities.
He was done. The Stygians sent by Shehkmi al Nasir to steal the strange Pictish crown out from under him would find that their voyage home would not be as easy as their surreptitious trip here had been. Kanilla Rey’s agents had left considerably later than the Stygians, but that disadvantage would be minimized by this spell.
As he headed for his sleeping mat, Kanilla Rey smiled.
NONE OF THE Stygian acolytes had seen the storm coming. One minute they had been sailing clear seas, with bright stars twinkling overhead. The next, dark clouds roiled in the sky, blotting out those same stars. The wind that had filled their sails shifted suddenly, whipping canvas around, shearing lines, finally cracking the jib.
The sea, which had been calm, bucked and swelled beneath them. Standing on the deck, water stung their faces. As they dipped into a trough, the steering oars jerked from the hands of the men who had been holding them. The bow dropped, turning away from their course.
One of the acolytes who had been at the oars swore to Set. His oar continued to flop around too fast—if he were to grab it again, it would break his wrists, maybe even take his hands off altogether. “We are being blown off course!” he shouted.
“Correct it!” the third acolyte returned. The first could barely hear over the roar of the wind, the snap of the sails, and the thunder of the waves. If it were that easy, the oarsman thought angrily, I would have done it already. Shehkmi al Nasir had promised them an easy journey, with ensorcelled winds that would carry them along quickly and safely.
Something had gone very wrong with that plan. Cold water slashed at him like the strands of a whip. Ship’s lines flew in the wind like a kraken’s tentacles, wet and heavy. The acolyte was no sailor—none of them were. Tend the steering oars, Shehkmi al Nasir had said. Keep the sails taut, and you will be fine.
Instead, they were adrift in a sea that seemed determined to swallow the bireme whole. Had they sufficient oarsmen, they could still have rowed their way to shore, or to safer seas. But their master had determined that oarsmen would not be necessary, save one for steering. A wave crashed across the port gunwale, nearly swamping them, trying its best to drag them under. The acolyte swore again, and grabbed a line lest he be swept off the deck.
Cold, wet, discouraged, he shivered and bailed water uselessly with his free hand. It was turning into a very long night.
SAHRING A SHIP with strangers was ... well, strange, Alanya thought. The men who were the Restless Heart’s primary passengers were obviously mercenaries of some sort. But she didn’t know where they were bound, or what they planned to do there, although her guess was that they were meant to fight someone, or worse. She had known men like them at Koronaka, and, though her brother had tried to befriend them, she had found her sensibilities disturbed by them. They were hard-looking men, raw at the edges, surly and tough. She heard them speaking among themselves from time to time, usually in Aquilonian, but she never caught enough to discern their mission. They never spoke directly to her, or to Kral or Donial, except to acknowledge them if they passed in the passageway or on deck.
Well, they did not know what she and her companions were up to either. They shared a hull that kept them dry and safe, and sails and oars that had sped them down the Tybor, passing barges and fishing craft and other, slower vessels, in only four days’ time. The same trip, on horseback, would have taken many more. But the winds were with them, Captain Ferrin said, as was the current.
And, just possibly, the captain had added with a rakish grin, the gods. A speedier journey he had never known.
Alanya wasn’t sure she believed that, but she would not have been surprised if the ship had assistance from some unnatural source. It moved with a speed and agility that seemed suspect to her, cutting through the water like a great serpent. Its sails were always full, its oarsmen always strong. A drummer kept a steady beat going, and the oars, eighteen on each side, dipped into the river, drew, and rose, to his rhythm.
Alanya did not know who, or what, had interceded on their behalf, if indeed there was any intercession at all. Nor did she care. She only knew that speed served her purpose, so she was not inclined to question it.
The sooner they reached Stygia—or caught up with the Stygians on their own voyage home—the sooner Kral could get his crown back. Then she and Donial could return to Tarantia to stay. She was the mistress of a house now, an estate, and she needed to be there. Cheveray had agreed to run their father’s business interests during their absence, but he could not be expected to do so forever. Besides, she still had not even had a chance to tell her friends that she was alive.
She stood at the ship’s bow, watching the seas ahead, almost glassy in the morning sun. She wished Conor had come with them on this quest instead of disappearing. She blamed Donial for that. His idea had been sound, but settling for the first muscular fellow they had run across, instead of taking the time to choose one who would be loyal and responsible, had been a mistake. As soon as they had paid him a little something, he had vanished. So they were on their own again, following a faint trail, hoping against hope that they would be able to find the missing crown. And able to take it away from those who had it.
“I have never seen so much water.”
The voice startled her, and she spun around. It was only Kral, though, having come up behind her with his quiet Pictish tread. He smiled at her discomfort. “Sorry,” he said. “I did not mean to startle you. It’s just . . . I am not used to traveling on a ship.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not either. But we make much better time than we would have on land.”
“Yes,” Kral agreed, nodding.
“Do you think this will work, Kral?” she asked. She had been gripped by a sudden bout of despair. “Do you think we can find the crown? What if it is already in Stygia? It’s such a tiny thing, in such a huge place.”
Kral shrugged and furrowed his brow. “I know not,” he admitted. “I hope that we can. If Stygian priests did indeed steal it, as Conor reports, they must have some reason for wanting it. I think that reason, whatever it may be, will be what leads us to it. If you and Donial wish to return—”
Alanya cut him off midsentence. “Kral, you know better than that. We are here. We are in this with you. However long it takes. Yes, I would rather be in Tarantia than on this ship. But only once you also have what you seek, as I do.” What she left unsaid was the knowledge that once he had the crown, he would return to the Pictish wilderness with it, back to his savage ways, full of undeniable hardship and casual cruelty. When they had successfully completed their journey, he would be gone from her life, probably forever. Powerful and handsome, feet widely spaced to brace him against the rocking moti
on—even as out of place as on the deck of a sailing ship heading out to sea, he was a source of strength to her, an inspiration.
A friend.
Maybe, someday, more than that.
But only if she could keep him close.
“I know, Alanya,” he said. “I only meant—”
Again, his sentence was interrupted.
But this time, not by her.
11
“CLEAR THE DECK! Get below, you lot!”
It was Captain Ferrin, shouting at them and gesticulating wildly. Alanya had to grab the railing, because the ship lurched suddenly. Cold spray drenched her and Kral, who reached for Alanya to steady her. She was nearer the rail than he was, and he didn’t want to lose her overboard.
“Captain, what is . . . ?” she began.
“It’s a squall!” he answered tersely. “Came up from nowhere. Get below, now. It’s going to be a bad one!”
Kral looked at the sky, steel gray and glowering, and at the rain that had begun to sheet down on them, as if some malicious god emptied enormous buckets. Even the waves had changed. The peaks grew white and choppy, and the gulfs deep and dark. Captain Ferrin had already turned away from them and shouted orders to the crew, demanding that the sails be struck immediately, lest they be torn or the masts broken. “He’s right,” Kral said to Alanya. “Come on.”
Her grip on the rail was fast, white-knuckled. But he took her other hand and she released the railing, moving unsteadily toward him. “Kral, this is not . . . this cannot be natural.”
He was inclined to agree. The sea had been calm just moments before. There had been no indication of a storm, no warning. But he was not familiar with the sea. Maybe it happened all the time.
That seemed unlikely, though.
He helped Alanya to the hatchway and down the ladder. Their cabin was belowdecks, and Donial had been inside, brooding in his bunk, a little seasick, when Kral had gone up looking for Alanya.
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