At the Queen's Command

by Michael A. Stackpole

  And yet, never did it occur to him to abandon his mission. His duty to the Crown superseded his own wishes. Moreover, the information he’d gather would save soldiers’ lives. It would even create another opportunity for his uncle to swath himself in glory.

  Kamiskwa made a comment in Altashee and Nathaniel laughed.

  Owen arched an eyebrow. “What?”

  “Kamiskwa called you Aodaga. Means ‘thunderface.’ You’re brooding and he reckons you’re dangerous when you do.”

  “I suppose he could be right.” Owen popped a last bite of cheese into his mouth and finished his wine. “Du Malphias is someone I’d just as soon have back in Tharyngia.”

  “I get a clean shot, I’ll be happy to send him to Hell. That’s fair close to Tharyngia, ain’t it?”

  Owen laughed. “I expect it is.”

  The Prince returned and handed Owen the list and a small jar of the unguent for his heels. He gave Kamiskwa a small, leather-bound box. “Your father had commented on my spectacles and I secured him a pair. I thought he might enjoy them.”

  “You are very generous, Prince Vlad.” The Altashee tucked the package into his bag. “He will visit you again when the leaves turn. And now he will find his way easily.”

  “I look forward to his visit.” The Prince started off down toward the wurmrest. “We had a bit of a wind two nights ago. A branch fell and, I’m afraid, damaged your large canoe.”

  Kamiskwa set off with the Prince. Nathaniel grabbed Owen by the shoulder. “One thing you’ll want to be learning about the Shedashee—the Twilight People.”

  “Yes?”

  “Generous people to a fault. Among them, if you say you like something, admiring it like, they’ll give it to you. If you refuse it, it’s a great insult.” Nathaniel nodded toward the Prince. “When Kamiskwa’s father was here last, he took a serious liking to the Prince’s glasses.”

  “You’re not having me on in saying this?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “I’ll still be joking with you about some things, but nothing there’s likely to be blood over.”

  “This mission is very serious. More so now.”

  “You don’t be worrying about me.” He smiled. “I told you before I hate all men equally, but I reckon I can muster a bit more for this Ryngian. We’ll find him, kill him, and then don’t nobody have a reason for ruining my land.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  May 2, 1763

  Prince Haven

  Temperance Bay, Mystria

  The Prince and Kamiskwa dragged a birch-bark canoe, about fifteen feet long and tapered at both ends, from some brush on the river side of the wurmrest. A small hole punctured the left side just large enough for a child to slip her hand through. The two men turned the canoe upright and lay it on the grass.

  Kamiskwa studied the hole for a moment, then walked over to a trio of birches at river’s edge. Using his glassy-bladed knife he sliced off a palm-sized bit of peeling bark. He crouched, placed it in the water, and anchored it with a stone.

  From within the wurmrest, Mugwump sniffed and snorted. In the dimness beyond the barred opening, a golden-eye glowed.

  Nathaniel moved to keep the Prince and Owen between him and the wurm’s gaze.

  Owen smiled. “You’re not afraid of the wurm, are you?”

  Nathaniel smiled wryly. “I ain’t seeing keeping back from something what could take me in a gulp as much of a bad idea.”

  Kamiskwa rejoined them. “Among the Shedashee there are stories of these beasts—much larger ones with wings. They are not good stories.”

  “Wurms can be fierce in battle, but Mugwump is docile.” Owen affected nonchalance, letting his lack of concern get under Nathaniel’s skin just a bit. “Released in combat he’d be pretty nasty.”

  “My point ’zactly, Captain.” Nathaniel shook his head. “I reckon we can get all our gear in this canoe and not have to drag another.”

  Kamiskwa grunted, then returned to the river and recovered the wet bark strip. He knelt beside the canoe and held the patch against the outside. The pink inner bark appeared through the hole. Then he placed his right hand over the hole, pressing it against his left hand on the outside. Slowly he began to rub his hands forward and back, introducing an oval motion that picked up speed as he went.

  He began to chant in a low voice, in his own tongue.

  Owen opened his mouth to ask what he was doing, but Nathaniel held up a cautionary finger. Owen caught a scent, the sweet scent of green wood that’s been split open. It shifted a little to become the loamy scent of a forest after a soaking rain.

  After a minute Kamiskwa grew silent and stood. There’s no hole. Owen stepped closer. He could see no sign of the hole. No scar, no discoloration, nothing. Try as he might, he could not see where the hole had been.

  He shivered. He’d heard rumors of tailors and seamstresses fashioning clothes without seams for nobility, but when he’d had a chance to view their handiwork, he’d always found that needle and thread had been applied generously. One of the Coronet’s sailors had always used magic to reinforce sail patches, but he secured them with thread regardless. As good as his work might have been, picking out the patch had never been difficult.

  But this, what Kamiskwa had done, it simply couldn’t be done. It would require him to be more powerful than any mage in Norisle—and that mage would have been exhausted after accomplishing so much. The Altashee didn’t even look the least winded.

  The Prince, however, looked delighted. “Every time I see that, it amazes me.”

  Nathaniel smiled. “Our canoes do seem to be in the accidental way lots around here.”

  Vlad shot Nathaniel a sharp stare. “Mr. Woods, were I wishing a demonstration, I would prepare one so that I could fully measure what happens and seek to replicate it myself. I am sure that Prince Kamiskwa would oblige me if I asked.”

  Kamiskwa nodded, but smiled as well.

  Vlad held up a finger. “That reminds me.” He turned, and scurried off into the wurmrest.

  Woods placed his pouches toward the canoe’s front end. “Good craft, these. Sturdy and not so delicate as you might be wanting to imagine. Still, you have to be careful. You don’t want to put a foot or an oar through the sides.”

  Kamiskwa went back to where the canoe had been stored and returned with three leaf-shaped paddles. He handed one to Woods, but didn’t give Owen the second.

  Owen frowned. “I may not be in the navy, but I can paddle.”

  “The spare is just in case we need it. This canoe only requires two. It would steer funny if you was paddling.” Woods pointed toward the middle of the boat. “You’re just self-loading cargo, Captain.”

  “Here is more cargo, for your father, Kamiskwa.” The Prince returned with a burlap bag. He pulled out one of Mugwump’s scales. “There’s four. He’ll find something to do with them, I hope.”

  Owen held a hand out and accepted the scale from the Prince. “Did you have this painted and lacquered?”

  “No. I just pulled four from a pile.”

  The soldier traced a finger along a scarlet stripe. “Wurmriders paint and lacquer scales. Even when they do that, they’re never as pretty or polished as this.”

  Vlad took the scale back and slipped it into the sack. “While you’re gone, I shall experiment. I’ll leave some in the sun and see if that has any effect. Another mystery to explore. I shall be pleased to share the results upon your return.”

  Kamiskwa accepted the gift. “The Prince again proves himself to be a good friend of the Altashee.”

  “Merely returning kindnesses the Altashee have showed me.”

  Kamiskwa stowed the scales with his other gear, then he and Nathaniel hefted the canoe and carried it down to the river. They slid it into the water, then pulled it around parallel to the shore.

  Nathaniel looked Owen up and down. “You’ll be wanting to take off your boots and stockings. Your feet will get wet, but will dry off faster. Help your feet heal, too.”

&nb
sp; That made sense, so Owen went barefoot. The cool water and oozing mud actually felt good as he put his gear into the canoe. A small deck made of gapped cedar planking kept him from thrusting his feet through the canoe. He arranged his pack so he could use the back of it as a desk, and slid his musket in on the right, keeping it close at hand.

  Prince Vlad held on to the canoe’s stern as the other two men got in, then gave it a shove into the current. He waved from the shore. “Good luck!”

  They headed upriver. Though the Benjamin didn’t have a strong current, Nathaniel and Kamiskwa paddled steadily to make headway. Both men glistened with sweat after a short time, but made no complaints about their labors.

  “I reckon, Captain, you figgered that rivers is our roads. Work fine going up, better coming back. Canoe full of pelts make a man rich down to Temperance.”

  “I can see that.” Owen studied the shore. Mostly forests, with the occasional swampy meadow full of cattails, long grasses, and bright flowers. “Do you know the river’s speed?”

  Nathaniel shook his head. He’d removed his buckskin shirt, baring his upper torso. The man’s muscles worked fluidly beneath tanned skin. A few scars stood out. Owen recognized the raised welts of a whip, a couple of knife cuts, and one gunshot wound, but asked about none of them. If Nathaniel wanted him to know, he’d tell him, otherwise it was none of his business.

  “She flows as she flows.”

  “I need to know speed to calculate rates of movement for troops.”

  “Miles per hour, then?”

  “Yes, that sort of thing.”

  “You won’t be finding that of much use here, Captain.” Woods smiled back over his shoulder. “Ain’t really how fast the river goes as how fast a man can go on the river.”

  Owen frowned. “Meaning?”

  “Well now, supposing the river goes five miles in an hour. A man going from dawn to dusk could go pretty far.”

  “Sixty miles. Knowing that, I can estimate how quickly du Malphias could deliver troops to Temperance.”

  “But if his people all got in canoes and paddled fast, they’d go farther, and your figuring would be wrong.”

  “Yes, but…”

  Nathaniel shipped his paddle and turned halfway back toward Owen. “The Altashee don’t worry none about miles. For them it’s all ‘walks.’ Right fine system.”

  Owen frowned. “Let me be clear. I need to know distances so I can put things on a map.”

  Kamiskwa cleared his throat. “Captain Strake, how long does it take a man to walk one of your miles?”

  Owen looked back at the Altashee. “Flat road, easy pace, a third of an hour.”

  “And in the rain, no road, through the forest, heavily laden?”

  Owen laughed, remembering more than one similar march in the Low Countries. “One in a day.”

  “Distance does not matter. Speed of arrival does.” Kamiskwa smiled indulgently. “We have many walks. Your flat road would just be a walk; though we have no flat roads. A hunting walk would be slower. Garrahai—warwalk—much faster. Then there are wet and dry walks, and light and heavy walks. We have words for all of them.”

  Owen was about to complain that this system was highly impractical, but he stopped. For a people that migrated seasonally, in a land where no roads existed, the system actually did work. And while it seemed impractical to his mind, it suited the land. He might have to calculate distance backward for mapping purposes, but absent a surveying crew, his measurements were going to be inexact. While his sextant would allow him to track latitude, but without a pair of timepieces, determining longitude couldn’t be done.

  He frowned. “If you measure in walks, how do you measure travel on the river?”

  “This river is a two-three: twice as fast as a walk paddling up, three times floating down.” Kamiskwa dipped his paddle again. “The system has worked for all time.”

  Owen nodded. “And the charts sent back from those who came before me? Their distances?”

  Nathaniel shrugged. “Made up mostly, I ’spect. Ain’t never run into any of the Branches outside Bounty. Only true distance they know is between alehouses and stills.”

  The Altashee chuckled. “They measure in dizzy-walks.”

  Owen fell silent and listened to the sound of paddles in the water. A dragonfly zipped over, paced them for a bit, then lighted on a gunwale. Its iridescent wings sparkled in the sunlight. The insect’s mahogany body hue reminded him of Catharine’s eyes for a moment, then his thoughts abruptly shifted to Bethany Frost. He thought she would be entranced by the insect.

  Catharine would want me to save her from it.

  The dragonfly took off, zigzagging toward the shore. Owen followed its flight, then looked up and gasped. “My God, what is that?” He reached for his musket.

  Nathaniel turned and signaled for him to leave the gun alone. He lowered his voice. “It’s a tanner. This range your ball would bounce off.”

  Owen stared. The creature appeared to be an elk, but one of prodigious proportions. It stood taller than he was at its shoulder, and he was certain he could have lain straight out on its vast rack of antlers with plenty of room for his head and feet. It grazed, still chewing, as it lifted its head to regard them.

  “A tanner?” The brown coat with white throat blaze provided no clue about its name. “Why do you call it that?”

  “One of the first explorers through here, Blackston, I’m thinking his name was, called it the ‘Titan Elk.’ Cumbersome name.”

  “Ti-tan becomes tanner, I see.” Owen shot Nathaniel a sidelong glance. “And I could hit it from here.”

  “Hitting ain’t killing.” Nathaniel nodded toward the elk. Tanner’d take more than one ball. Wounded, it would run a fair piece. We’d be all day finding it. If it tried to find us, well, we’d run a fair piece our own selves.”

  The guide sighed. “Now, iffen we was out trapping or hunting, beast like that would be worth the shot. Meat’d feed a village for a week. That hide would cover Reverend Bumble. Worth a pound or three down to Temperance.”

  Owen dug into his coat pocket. “Perhaps it’s on the Prince’s list.”

  The other two men chuckled. “You’ll be finding a lot on his list. Half of it don’t exist.”

  “But the Prince…”

  “He’s a smart man, belike, but some of that learning has come from books that ain’t worth the time to open.”

  Kamiskwa cleared his throat. “My people related stories to early explorers, who paid them with a variety of baubles. The more fantastic the story, the better the pay.”

  Owen nodded. “How will I know what is real and what is not?”

  “Only know what I see, only believe what I touch.” Nathaniel smiled.

  “I get the feeling, Mr. Woods, that this will be a very long trip.”

  The other men chuckled and bent to their paddles. Owen continued to watch the elk until it vanished around a river bend. That the creature dwarfed any similar Auropean beast impressed Owen. Its magnificence made him smile. But there was something else there, too. The tanner, and maybe even the way the Twilight People accounted for distance, seemed so primitive.

  Others would take primitive to mean backward, but Owen intended a wholly different sense. Mystria seemed a land that slumbered, still young and vital. Norisle and Tharyngia had been worked long and hard. He couldn’t have gone a fraction of the distance he’d traveled in either without coming across someone or at least a signpost that indicated people lived nearby.

  The earliest Mystrian settlers and explorers had called the natives the Twilight People because they tended to keep to the shadows. They’d been seldom seen except at twilight, and even then only in silhouette. They were part of the land and their reticence to be seen had been explained away as their fear of the white men and their magick.

  Owen suspected it was something else entirely. The Shedashee were part of the land. They lived with it, reaping its bounty, not tearing its flesh and breaking it to their will. They’d
watched that behavior in the settlers and wanted nothing to do with them, thinking them evil or insane.

  And greedy, to them, is insane.

  That first afternoon, with nothing but the sounds of wind, water, birds, bugs, and fish leaping, made Owen realize how far he was from Norisle. Not just in miles or walks, but in the very nature of the land. Mystria wasn’t a place to be broken easily, though war could do that.

  And it was his mission to lay the groundwork for that war. He would do his duty for the Crown. He had no choice. War was inevitable, especially with du Malphias somewhere out there. But, if there was a way to mitigate things, a way to save Mystria, he would seek that out, too.

  If he did anything less, his failure would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  Chapter Seventeen

  May 6, 1763

  Grand Falls

  Bounty, Mystria

  They continued up the river another four days through country that slowly rose toward the mountains in the west. They encountered rapids around which they had to portage. They brought the canoe to shore, unloaded it, carried it up around the rapids, then reloaded their gear and proceeded on upriver.

  Travel was not arduous. They started out at dawn, would rest for a couple of hours during the heat of the day, then push on until dusk. Kamiskwa proved adept at hand-catching fish—what Nathaniel called “tickling”—and Nathaniel shot a tom turkey on the second day out. They roasted some of it, smoked the rest in a makeshift smokehouse, and didn’t even think about hunting until they’d finished the bird.

  Kamiskwa cleaned and plucked the turkey, and found a use for the various parts. The feathers went into the bag with the wurm scales. The innards got tossed into the river for fish, and after leaving bones out overnight for insects to clean, he collected them up too. Owen presumed they’d be ground for bonemeal and used for fertilizer.

  He’d watched Kamiskwa work. The Altashee used the smaller of two knives. Each had an antler handle and a black, glassy stone blade. Though only three inches long, the butchering knife’s blade had a triangular shape and two very sharp edges. The point where blade and antler met had leather wrapped around it so he couldn’t see how it was joined.