“Aye,” he said heavily. He considered filling his glass again and managed—barely—to think better of it. Drink on an empty stomach, even at his obvious size, was ill advised, and he had lost the appetite for food.
The boy, this Angel, had not, but ate slowly.
“Do you know why your father left?”
Angel shrugged, but it was not a casual motion; it was forced. “He didn’t like to talk about it,” he said at last, after an audible swallow. He lifted his water glass, and took his time drinking, as if to hide behind it.
“He wouldn’t,” Terrick replied. “No more do I.”
“I didn’t ask,” the boy began.
“No,” Terrick said, lifting a hand. “It’s why you’re still alive. But if you’ve sense enough not to ask, you’ve got the wits you were born with. Why are you here, boy?”
“For the Ice Wolf.”
“Yes, I understand that much. But your father—” He hesitated, and then seeing the hair that the glass couldn’t obscure, surrendered. Surrendering with grace was not a skill that Terrick had seen a need for in his youth, and he had mastered it in his later years with difficulty and reluctance. “Your hair, boy,” he said, keeping his tone even and quiet. “It marks you. It’s a statement.”
Angel nodded, but he grimaced.
It took Terrick a moment to understand what it meant, and surprise kept him from comment. “There are men who would kill to be allowed that style,” he said instead. “Even if it sets them apart. The inconvenience would not be an issue.” He spoke stiffly, and more significantly, in Weston.
“They probably didn’t grow up in the Free Towns,” Angel replied. But after a pause, he added, “I didn’t wear my hair like this when I was growing up.”
“No, you wouldn’t. It’s not for children.”
“That’s what he said,” the boy replied. “My father,” he added, as if his meaning were not plain.
“Did he style his hair that way?” Terrick asked, striving for casual.
“No.” The boy looked up as he answered, his eyes the color that steel would be if it were blue. They saw everything in a moment, those winter eyes; they saw the surprise that Terrick could not keep from his face, if only for a second. “You knew him.” It wasn’t a question.
“Aye,” Terrick replied. “I knew him. And if I had to guess, this fool errand was undertaken on his behalf. He’s dead,” Terrick added quietly. “Don’t look so surprised, boy—if he were alive, you wouldn’t be here.
“But he didn’t send you to kin. He didn’t send you to keep you from starving. If he asked you to make this journey, he wanted—”
“He sent me,” Angel said, his soft voice breaking the flow of Terrick’s accented Weston, “to speak with Weyrdon.”
Smoothing the accent out of his voice, and freeing it, in the process, of any signs of agitation, Terrick said quietly, “Think on it, boy. Think again. Reconsider.”
“Why? Do you think he’ll try to kill me?”
“There is every possibility he will do just that.”
“Why?”
“Does it matter? The Ice Wolf is his ship, and if you’re on it, you’re his.”
The boy’s face, carefully neutral, gave little away, but he didn’t seem surprised. Nor did he seem afraid. He was set on this course of action, and while it was admirable—after all, the death of kin was at the foundation of many great men—Terrick found that he was not yet ready to acquiesce.
He should have been, of course. Perhaps the Empire did, in the end, change more than just complexion.
“Take your hair down,” Terrick told Angel. “If you’re determined to do this, take your hair down.”
Angel refused without opening his mouth. Or rather, without speaking; he had continued to eat while Terrick spoke. Only when he had finished did he speak again.
“If you knew my father,” he said, with a dignity beyond his years, “you would understand why I can’t.”
“The man I knew would have cut off his own hand before he let his hair down. You said he did just that. Clearly, time makes its changes.” He did not attempt to tell the boy that he might be mistaken, that the boy’s father and the man that he knew might not be the same. Had he believed it—had there been the possibility of belief—he would have.
“The right to bear a sword,” Angel replied, “isn’t an obligation to use it; it isn’t even an obligation to carry it all the time.”
“It depends,” Terrick replied, “on your duties and your responsibilities. Boy—”
“He was asked to leave,” Angel said.
Silence. Terrick was not a man who was uncomfortable with silence, and he often privately despised those men and women who were—they filled it with useless noise and inane babble simply because they were afraid of what might be noticed if the words ran dry. But some silences were merely a lid over words. This, he now removed.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that you do not understand Weyrdon—or any of the clans—if you can say that. It’s possible your father chose, for your mother’s sake, not to explain too much. But Weyrdon does not ask men to leave. If he feels that there is reason for them to do so, he kills them.
“Not all men serve the clans; not all men are born to them. Some that are not are elevated to their ranks. They’re not Northern ranks,” he added. “They’re simpler, cleaner, and more absolute. Take your Barons,” he continued. “They serve the Kings, but they rule their own lands. They cannot secede; secession is called rebellion here and it is a matter for war.”
“He wasn’t a Baron,” Angel said, and this time, his eyes rounded in surprise. The red flush that spoke of anger, so obvious in the pale-skinned, colored his cheeks.
“No. It is not an exact analogy. But to leave is to be forsworn. Your life is forfeit, because without the fealty of your sworn oath, your life is meaningless.”
“You’re here.”
“I was not Weyrdon’s,” Terrick replied.
“You didn’t serve the clans?”
Terrick was silent for a long moment. At his back the horn began to blow; lunch—and this unexpected conversation—was drawing to a close. “No,” he said, as he rose. “Lunch is over,” he added. “And if we’re lucky, the Ice Wolf won’t dock before—”
“Before?”
Terrick met the boy’s steady gaze, seeing both his evident youth and a hint of the steel that would serve him should he survive to be, in truth, a man. Without preamble, for the horn sounded a second time, and the wicket had to be filled before the end of the third, he said, “I served Garroc.”
“That’s—that was my father’s name.”
“Yes,” Terrick replied heavily. He rose. “Leave the cups,” he said, not looking over his shoulder, “and meet me here when my shift ends.”
Terrick watched the docks. The ships’ masts loomed, flags flying, over the surly crowds. The Port Authority boasted both large windows and tall ceilings, and he could also observe through the open doors—unless there was sudden summer rain, a distinct possibility in this humidity, they were not closed while the docks were in use. Over the heads of the people pushing past each other in their rush to stand in line—something Terrick was certain he would never understand, no matter how many years he spent in the City—he could see which ships had approached, and which had been given permission to cast ropes and lower planks.
The Ice Wolf was not among them.
Although he seldom concentrated on future work when so much work was demanded right now, he kept an ear out. The younger members of the Order of Knowledge watched the seaway; the merchant ships owned by The Ten—as well as those owned by Houses less distinguished by history and political power, but not by money—often employed a ship’s mage, and they made their reports and asked their permissions when they were miles from shore. These reports were often taken to the Portmaster or his harried attendants, and he stopped one such young woman to ask about the Ice Wolf.
The Ice Wolf, of course, carried no mage—had th
ere been one foolish enough to set foot on its decks, they might preserve the body—but the mages in the port’s tower often called out the names of the ships that were approaching. No considerations were to be made for these ships, but the warning was appreciated nonetheless.
He asked the girl to keep an ear out for any mention of the Ice Wolf, and although she was surprised, she nodded and offered a brief half smile as the Portmaster bellowed her name.
But while he listened, he also kept an eye on the boy. He could see none of the father in the son, except for the coloring of his skin; even Garroc’s hair had been a bronze that tinted gold in the sun’s light. Garroc had been large, and Angel, at fourteen, was of medium height; neither too short nor too tall. He was slender, although Terrick’s practiced eye could see the definition of muscle in his exposed lower arms and his wrists. He carried only an Essalieyanese short sword. A long sword would have been beyond his reach.
But he did not carry his father’s ax. And he did not carry his father’s name.
The Imperial notion of beauty was absent, as were the things that compensated for its lack: he obviously owned neither land nor title. He was not ugly; he could, if it weren’t for the utter stillness of his presence and the existence of his hair, have been one of a hundred boys his age. But he had once again taken up position on the docks from which he might watch ships come into port, and he managed, with economy of movement, to avoid the men who might have cursed him for standing in the way. He waited, this boy.
Terrick, better than most, knew both the cost and the value of waiting.
Had he not waited the better part of two decades, trapped by the Port Authority wicket and old vows that had, as the years passed, become increasingly foreign? It was almost done, the waiting. One way or the other, it was almost done.
And what would he do, when it was?
When the sun began to sink, the boy entered the Authority building. The Authority building did not face west; the whole of its bank of windows, and its tall, wide doors, were oriented to the east, where the docks, and beyond them, the sea, lay. But the lengthening of shadows and the slow darkening of bold azure were enough of a sign—that and the thinning of the crowds. As people ceased their endless surge from ship to land, the wickets slowly closed, and the clerks began to make headway into the paperwork that any ship docking produced; they would work well into lamplight hours before they stumbled back to their respective homes. At the height of summer, the working day was long, but it was not the length of the day that had wearied Terrick.
It was the uncertainty caused by a young boy. That boy allowed himself to be ushered toward the doors, but Terrick shouted a quick Weston request, and the guards, sweltering beneath the weight of chain hauberk and its underpadding, let him slip free of their subtle net. He slid between them with easy grace and approached Terrick.
“I’ll be an hour or two,” Terrick told the boy. “But there’s dinner at the end of it, if you’ve nowhere else to be.”
Angel waited in silence. One or two of the dozen guards the Port Authority employed gave him an odd look, but they held their peace. Terrick’s barked order—or request—had carried the weight of the Authority, and as the guards and the rest of the clerks took down the frail, velvet barriers that somehow managed to keep frustrated men and women in narrow, straight lines, Angel stood beside the walls nearest the now closed doors, watching. Lamps were lit, and in the ceiling beams closest to the back room in which he and Terrick had shared lunch, magelights began to glow brightly; unlike simple lamplight, they did not flicker or dim.
The floors here were stone, and at that, a marbled stone that, when mopped and dried, reflected light as if it were glass. In the day, Angel hadn’t noticed, because in the day, the floors were anything but clean; too much dirt, too much dust, and far too many people all but hid them from view.
Empty, the Authority now seemed like a vast barn, and the distance from door to wicket seemed to grow as he watched people leave. In ones and twos, the younger runners dressed in the two-tone teal and silver that graced all of the men and women—even the guards—made their way to the doors and let themselves out, nodding to Angel, some with obvious curiosity. He nodded in reply, but said nothing; nothing was safest.
Least said, his mother had once told him. He couldn’t remember the rest. Found that he didn’t want to, here. His mother would have hated this noisy building, with its angry visitors and its tired clerks. She would have hated the language, although her own could be colorful when the need for it arose. And she would, he knew, have feared Terrick, because she had always been uneasy with her husband’s kin.
In all of Angel’s early life, he had seen evidence of his father’s people only three times, and twice, it had ended in a death. It hadn’t been his father’s death—but it could have been, and his mother knew it.
It was the only time that his mother, when urged to silence by her husband, had actually obeyed. But she didn’t trust the Rendish.
The third time, there had been no drawn sword. His father had not left the fields upon sighting the visitor, nor had he instructed his wife and child to go—and stay—indoors. He had looked up—he always did, and usually before his wife had even heard the distant movement of horses or men on foot—but he had again bent his back to his work, and he did not leave it until the man was almost upon the house.
That man, pale- haired and only slightly shorter than his father, had approached his father in the flats of fields that were not yet sown, and he had waited in silence for his father’s acknowledgment. If his mother was the talkative one, if his mother was the hospitable one, his father was rarely rude, and Angel, working by his father’s side to dig and turn the earth that would grow vegetables for their own use, had been surprised at how long it took his father to finish.
But he had risen, wiping his hands on the heavy tunic he wore in the planting season, and he had straightened his shoulders. He hadn’t said a word.
Neither had the man. But the man’s hair, rising above his head in an almost unnatural spiral, marked him clearly as Northern. As clearly as his father’s hair sometimes did, it was almost identical. They had exchanged a glance, and then, as if that glance were words, they had walked together toward the copse of trees that served as a windbreak. Angel wanted to follow. He started to, but his mother called him back, and when he obeyed with reluctance, she caught both his shoulders, one in either hand, and gripped them tightly enough to cause pain.
But she hadn’t said a word.
His father, from a distance, spoke with the stranger for maybe two hours by the fall of sun; he did not invite the man into his home, and he did not introduce him to his wife or his son.
The man, however, had walked toward them both, stopping far enough away that Angel’s mother could see he meant no harm.
“You are Garroc’s son?” he asked, in Rendish.
With his mother’s hands curved like claws across the ridge of either collarbone, Angel had contented himself with a voiceless nod.
The man had said nothing else. Instead, he had nodded once to Angel’s father, a brisk nod, and he had retraced his steps, leaving the field and all sight of the farm. His father had waited until the man had vanished from sight, and then, in silence, he had picked up his hoe, motioning for Angel to do the same.
He had not explained the stranger’s visit, and Angel knew better than to ask. But it had been hard, then.
He glanced at the magelights. There were magelights in the Free Towns, but only in the Town Hall and the mayor’s residence; they were rare, there. Everything was. Here? They seemed to be everywhere; on long poles that, evenly spaced, were spread across the City, street by street, no matter how poor the buildings seemed to be; on similar poles that ran the length of the docks; in the windows of merchant shops in the Common—everywhere. Magic, it seemed, was common, so ordinary that the citizens of Averalaan didn’t even pause in wonder at the evidence of it.
Was it any wonder that it was in this city that th
e Ice Wolf docked?
Terrick was the last to leave the back rooms. This was not always the case, but tonight he worked more slowly, forcing himself to be methodical. He checked manifests against ships, and signatures against signatures, setting aside one bill as suspect. In the quiet of the Port Authority building, he could work without interruption, and in truth, he often looked forward to the end of day, when the streets were dark and the long, long stretch of building at last fell silent. One or two guards would weather the night hours, but they knew all of the clerks, as well as the runners and the portly man who served as Portmaster in any season that wasn’t the rainy one. They would not disturb him unless an emergency arose.
Nor, he thought, grudging it, would the boy. Glancing out of the door, he saw Angel standing quietly beneath the magelights. He was not sitting, and he had not chosen to lean against the wall; he did not fidget, and his expression was carefully schooled.
Can you use that sword, boy?
He shook his head. The wrong weapon, the wrong man. But still, the boy waited. Just as Garroc would have waited, in his position. Aye, Terrick thought heavily. Garroc’s son. He signed off on the paperwork, tidying it into a meticulous pile in the center of his desk. Then he rose, removing his key ring, and made his way past the thin wicket wall and into the building itself.
Angel looked up when Terrick entered the room, and Terrick nodded. Together, they approached the front doors by which the two guards were stationed.
“Late night for you, eh, Terrick?” one said.
Terrick shrugged and grimaced. “And an early morning, come tomorrow.”
“Trouble?”
“Not worse than usual.”
The guard snorted and grinned broadly. “I’ve seen your definition of ‘not worse.’ ”
Angel did not know the way to Terrick’s home, and Terrick had intended to lead him there; at the end of any day in which ships docked continually, only the very young had energy for much else. That Angel was among the very young was not in question, but in a city the size of Averalaan, strangers with no coin to spend often found very little to occupy their time. Or at least very little that the magisterial guards did not frown on.
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