From Whence You Came

by Gilman, Laura Anne

  The seas were quiet.

  But whatever had ended the attack, Bradhai thought it might not have been him.

  o0o

  While the two crews recovered from the near-attack, he asked to speak with the woman, Deshai Harini. The Captains of both ships, busy overseeing repairs and calming their crew, were more than happy to turn their troublesome passengers over to each other. Harini’s bodyguard, a roundly muscular solitaire, had come, but settled in for a pot of tai, just beyond earshot but well within reach, should something threaten her charge.

  The moment the two women were escorted onto their ship, the younger woman nearly assaulted him again. This time, however, it was with barely pent-up energy and enthusiasm rather than anger.

  “Did you hear it? Did you?”

  “Hear what?” He was caught off-guard, not expecting that to be her first question.

  “Their singing. All right, maybe not song. But it sounded like singing. Didn’t you hear?”

  He had heard…something, but he would not call it singing. But he didn’t want to anger her, and so hedged his response. “I was a little busy.”

  Her enthusiasm turned back into anger. “That’s right. Busy. You lured them to your ship, and attacked them when they came.”

  She was at least a decade younger than he, at a guess, but he did not underestimate the strength of her anger “My purpose here is to find a spell that drives them off. You knew that.”

  “Spells.” She said it with a sniff, dismissive. “Magic makes us weak. It distracts us from the world around us, thinking that we can bind everything to our will. I will not have it on our ship.” She suddenly recalled her manners, and added “No offense to your work, Vineart.”

  He had heard of those attitudes before; the madmen of Caul refused to use spellwines, and the Trader-clans – while acknowledging the usefulness of vin magica – chose not to partake themselves, save where their clients insisted. He had not expected it of her.

  “You use windspells,” he pointed out as gently as he could.

  “We do not.”

  They had managed to maneuver the ship so tightly, without spells? Bradhai didn’t know enough about sailing to know if this was unusual, but he was impressed anyway.

  “You study things,” he said, changing the subject. “You watch, and you observe, and you draw conclusions.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him sideways, suspicious. Her father might have seen no harm in such things, but clearly others in her life had.

  “As do I.” A Vineart’s existence was tied up in awareness: knowing the feel of the soil, the health of his vines, the turn of the weather, the moment in time. “And like you, I have been studying these beasts.”

  “To kill them.”

  “To keep them away from the ships that must travel the sea’s roads,” he corrected her. “I’ve no desire to kill anything, if it will stay off our wake.” He stared out at the endless waves, but his gaze was somewhere else, too far away. “In truth, my sole desire is to return home, back to my vines, where I belong. But I cannot do that until I have accomplished my task.”

  She seemed distracted by his words. “I’ve been gone from home two – no, three moons now. Some days I can barely remember it, what it’s like to be on land.” She looked at him, and he felt uncomfortably scrutinized. “Do you miss it? Your home, I mean.”

  He was awestruck by her question, that it could even be asked. “A Vineart is not meant to be far from his roots,” he told her. “It hurts, to be away.”

  “They think I’m mad.”

  It seemed to come out of nowhere, an admission torn from her unwilling, and Bradhai didn’t know how he should respond. This was not the conversation he had expected to have.

  “The Captain, his crew, my nurse – even the solitaire, for all that she hides it better. They think me mad for this voyage, mad for thinking that the serpents are somehow more than dumb beasts, set here to eat and swim and nothing more.”

  “Dogs and horses, even cattle, they all make noises. Even birds sing to each other. It does not indicate….” He made a helpless gesture, not sure what she was expecting.

  “They’re different. Serpents, I mean. I don’t know how. But they are.”

  Mad, indeed. But the silent gods were known to watch over the innocent and the mad, and she seemed to be both, no matter her family or training.

  He was not sure how much that protection would extend over the rest of them – or her, for long, either.

  Then something struck him, landing in the middle of his thought, and scattering everything else. “Different.”

  “What?” He had startled her – she turned around so violently, broken out of whatever deep thoughts she had, that her braid swung out enough to hit him on the shoulder. It was knotted with something heavy at the end; he winced, and rubbed the bruised bone.

  “They’re different, you said. That’s what Hernán said, too. That these serpents were different. Different how?”

  “I… they look different. The ones here, and the ones at home. But I thought – sheep and horses have different types, and dogs – I thought they were just…different.”

  “But Hernán saw it, too. Different from what he’d been seeing, looking differently, behaving differently. They’re larger, more active, more aggressive…”

  “Only toward you,” she said.

  “Toward anyone not-you,” he countered, dismissing her objection. “But it almost seems as though using spells on them makes them more aggressive.”

  “They didn’t hurt anyone,” she said.

  “No. They didn’t.” They could have – the nearest serpent was large enough, and close enough, that it could have done serious damage to both ships, rather than merely splintering a few planks. It could easily have plucked crewmen from the deck, had it desired.

  It had not.

  “What does it want? What draws it? Not food, even though it took the bait. And why so many? They’ve been solitary, or in pairs, in all reports.”

  “Maybe that’s part of the difference,” Harini said. “I saw pairs, back home, but here, they’re larger, and they travel together, almost in packs. Never five, as we saw, but never one alone, either. Three, mostly, and almost… they almost seem to be working together to drive fish when they fed.”

  Her dark eyes widened in realization as Bradhai spoke the words.

  “They’re forming packs.”

  A new argument broke out almost immediately.

  “We can’t tell anyone,” he said, instinctively hunching his shoulders and speaking more softly, as though someone might overhear.

  “What? But it’s an amazing discovery!”

  She might be more worldly, more educated, but Bradhai had paid attention to the men around him more than the beasts. “Not while we’re at sea – not to anyone who goes to sea, or might speak too freely. Think! One serpent terrifies them. A pack, as we saw today, will send them into a superstitious frenzy. The idea that every time they go out to sea, they must contend with not single beasts, but three, or four, or five, working together?” Bradhai shook his head. “Confirmation of that would be chaos.”

  “But this should reassure them! Herd animals, and pack animals, they have a strict order of behavior.” Harini shifted her entire body to face him, tucking her skirt under her for ease of movement. “Horses follow the lead mare, a single male dominates a dog pack. No matter what they look like, they’re the same inside. If there’re forming a … a pack? A school? Then there should be a similar leader for the serpents. If you can identify it, and drive it away, it will take the rest of them to safety.”

  She meant the serpent’s safety, away from firespells and arrows. Bradhai decided not to argue the point.

  “It’s not just me. I mean, even if I could manage to do it again,” and he veered away –already he could tell that she would be like a hound on the scent, if she even suspected the existence of blood-magic – “it needs to be something that anyone can decant, from the prow of a ship, unde
r any circumstances. And I haven’t figured out how to create that, yet.”

  “Magic.” She said the word as though tasting it. “That’s what a spell is, isn’t it? A repeatable experience, clarified and codified, with set results following set actions, each time.”

  Bradhai wasn’t listening, already deep into his own thoughts, trying to determine an incantation that could turn something so fierce and determined away from a ship without also endangering the ship and crew itself.

  The two of them stared silently out at the waters, while the crewsmen, accustomed to the Vineart’s peculiarities, and cautious about this strange woman who commanded her own ship, ignored them.

  “Harini. Vineart.”

  The solitaire approached them quietly, then coughed once before addressing them both.

  “What is it?” Harini asked.

  “I have been listening to the crews speak. Both crews. They are perhaps more free with me than they would be with either of you to overhear.”

  Bradhai did not doubt that. For all that she was a female, the leathers and sword of her profession made her a more understandable figure than an unarmed male whose entire life was spent set apart from others.

  “They are frightened.” Harini sounded resigned.

  “No, lady. Or, no more than any wise man would be, in these circumstances. But they are looking to the Vineart to accomplish something, and soon.”

  “I know.” Bradhai had felt their uncertainty when he came aboard. Every failed incantation had grown that uncertainty – when the spell worked, their hopes grew likewise. Now, held between success and the creeping awareness that that success once would not be enough…

  “Sailors are fickle as the wind,” the Solitaire said. “And they were the last to give up on the silent gods.”

  Bradhai frowned at her, not certain what she meant by that. Harini, however, did.

  “You think they would return to making sacrifices, to placate some half-forgotten sea god?” She sounded less horrified than fascinated, and Bradhai felt an urge to move away from her on their shared perch.

  “They would not think it, now. They are civilized men.”

  But, her voice implied, if you leave them uncertain for too long….

  “You need to find a way to disperse them,” Harini said again.

  o0o

  “Fire works. It’s the only thing that does. But why?“

  “It didn’t burn them.”

  “What?”

  “I was watching,” Harini said, defensively.

  “We all were.”

  “No. You were looking to see what they did. I was looking at them. And it startled them, maybe even scared them, but it didn’t burn.”

  “That flame should have burned everything.” Bradhai had felt the intensity in his mouth, he knew how sharp that flame had been.

  “Water quenches fire?” The solitaire and Harini had followed Bradhai back to his workspace, the fighter pulling one of the water barrels over to sit on, while Harini stood at a distance, clearly fighting the urge to look over his shoulder as he worked.

  “Perhaps it was diluted too much, even with the changes. Spellwines do not work well over long distances of water. Sin Washer made it so.”

  “Why?”

  He had ever met anyone who asked why so many times, of so many things. “Who knows why a god does anything? Perhaps he did not mean to, perhaps he had some greater purpose, perhaps the sea god had some hold over him we cannot understand. It simply is.”

  The Solitaire laughed. “Harini does not understand ‘is,’ Vineart. I am told even as a child, she insisted why.”

  “The growthspell I put into the incantation should have carried even that distance, and still been hot enough to burn.” The fact that he had failed dug at him like a stone in his sole, enough that he was careless what he admitted in front of others.

  “Water quenches fire…” Harini was caught on that idea.

  “It should have been enough to set the sea itself on fire,” Bradhai snapped. “I know the strength of my own skills.”

  “No, I am thinking… Have you ever handled a fish, Vineart?”

  “I have a cook for that.”

  She sighed and shook her head, as though bemoaning the limits of his knowledge. “A fish has scales. They keep the flesh intact, able to move through the water the way we move through air.”

  “And?” He turned to watch her, recognizing the tone of voice, if not the words. “A fish, if put to fire, will burn.”

  “Scales keep them safe from damage. Their scales are thin, though. The leviathan has a thick hide.”

  “And no scales. So?”

  “Serpents are deep-water creatures. Their scales would be thicker, like a leviathan.” She frowned again. “Should be. None have ever washed up on the shore to study, and I’ve never been close enough to a live one to tell.”

  “Thick scales. Hard, and thick enough to be a shield against even magefire. Rot and blast, you’re right.” The fact depressed him. “I’m no closer to a solution than I was at the start.”

  “No, but it did work. You did make them go away. I think…. Do you remember how that serpent looked at us? How large its eyes were?”

  Bradhai didn’t, but he kept silent.

  “I think you blinded them. An animal that’s blinded is vulnerable. That’s what your spell needs to do: blind them temporarily, make them associate ships with not being able to see. Teach them it’s a bad thing to go near them!”

  Like waking up in the morning, and knowing that Harvest was ready, Bradhai’s thoughts cleared. “Coldfire.”

  o0o

  The next two days, Bradhai worked every moment he was awake, and slept only briefly, curled in a blanket on the decking of his workspace. Like Harvest, the urgency of the moment consumed him, and he barely noticed the passing hours, or the exhaustion, focused on the work in front of him.

  “Breakfast, Vineart.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Po placed the wooden dish on the worktable, as far away from the collection of vials, wine sacks, and small clay bowls as he could manage, and fled. His curiosity had soon turned to boredom when nothing else exploded, and the Vineart’s conversation turned to irritated grunts.

  Bradhai ignored the food. His stomach was tight, but not from hunger. The more he worked with his wines, the easier it was to ignore how far he was from his vines – and yet, at the same time, it made the distance more painful.

  “Into one, from three

  Vin rise, carry and burn.”

  Intent was more important than words, the framing of thought and desire what shaped the magic, seeing what the final form would accomplish, molding the power to a specific end and convincing the magic to follow along. But the vina was stubborn, refusing to give in.

  “Aetherwine,” he said with a sigh. Perhaps….There was a trick he had heard of while working with the notes from the scholars at Altienne. Bradhai held his hand palm down over the vial, and with his horn-handled knife nicked the soft flesh so that a single drop of blood emerged and fell into the vina.

  “And be,” he told the magic. “And Be.”

  He could feel the incantation moving within the wine. It should settle, accept the structure put on it, infuse itself with the incantation and change from vina magica to spellwine proper. Should.

  “Oh, rot,” he muttered, feeling the vina instead expand around the incantation. He had only time enough to regret that Po had left – this would be an explosion worth of his fascination – when the magic did something he hadn’t been expecting.

  It arced. Out of the clay bowl, through his hands, a shimmering, glittering spray of deep red that caught the sun like some kind of bloody rainbow, reaching high over the railing and into the sea itself.

  And no-one saw it but him.

  He felt a moment of awe – whatever had happened, it was probably horrible, but the effect was so beautiful, so unexpected, so magical that he couldn’t even worry – and then something hit the side of the lad
ysong so hard that he crashed to the deck, only training and reflexes saving the bowl in his hands from spilling.

  Chaos exploded around him as the ship shuddered again. The Captain barked orders, and the crew raced to carry them out, swarming up the masts and taking up weapons alongside.

  Serpents! At least two, probably more. Bradhai couldn’t see them, but he knew. He could sense them beneath the ship.

  And with that sense came the knowledge that their arrival was not coincidence. The magic he had incanted, the spellwine hitting the water, had summoned them somehow. Connected them, serpent and Vineart, in this instant. How long? He didn’t know, didn’t want to know. The awareness pushed at him, thick and oppressive. Serpents were not restful beasts.

  He tried to focus, clear his thoughts of distraction, but the chaos around him was too much, and then something grabbed his shoulder, shaking him.

  “Gather your things.” Hernán shouted in his ear. Bradhai half-turned, blinking out of his daze. The Shipsmaster had a rough-cloth pack slung over his shoulder, and his ice-grey hair was in disarray. “Now, Vineart!”

  His hands unsteady, Bradhai carefully poured the new spellwine into a vial, and corked it. He should seal it, but there was no time; he had to put everything else back, make sure that it was secure…

  The ship rocked again, and there was a noise that made his blood chill in his veins. He looked up, and saw that the tallest mast was shaking in a way it hadn’t even in the worst storm.

  Then he realized that the crackling noise had not come from the mast, but below his feet. He stared down at the wide planking, confused. Hernán grabbed him by the shoulder. “Take what you can, but we go, now!”

  There was another crack, this one too much like bones breaking. A horn sounded from above, a sharp cry of warning, and Hernán swore, pulling him away from the table, his things half-gathered.

  “But-“ Bradhai protested, grabbing another wine sack at random and slipping the strap over his shoulder even as he reached for another.

  “Rotted Vineart, there’s no time! If you value your life, move!”

  Crewsmen had stopped whatever they were doing, abandoning their tasks and moving for the railing, too. Hernán shoved his way through them, dragging the Vineart. The longboats were being lowered. Bradhai looked down and blanched. Just above the waterline, there were a handful of breaks in the smooth wooden sides of the ladysong. She’d been hit hard enough to be taking on water, and fast.