“Traders,” Mahl said in tone of dramatic disgust, and Jerzy had the sense that they were both playing the fool intentionally, to entertain him out of his dour mood. “Do you know what it is like to go anywhere with him? Always finding the price of this, the cost of that, trying to talk people into selling things he didn’t want, and trying to buy things we can’t afford!”
“Negotiations,” Ao protested. “Keeping my hand in. You never know what someone might say that might be useful later.”
“We have no need to know the price of this year’s crop of … whatever it was that you were discussing.”
“Telkberry. A good telkberry crop means the dyers will be able to get their hands on red and purple dyes easily, and that means …” He finally took notice of Mahl’s expression. “Nothing that matters right now. I know.”
Jerzy cut into their wrangling, wanting to hear what they had discovered. “So there’s no alert for us, no reward for my return?” That had been one of their concerns: if the Washers had spread their accusation throughout the Vin Lands, his only freedom would be in one of the Outer Lands, where vines did not grow, and Sin Washer’s Command—and therefore the Washers themselves—held no sway. For a Vineart, a land without vines was a walking death. Jerzy had known that, intellectually. It was only after a week with only water underfoot, and a sense of severed longing in his flesh, that he understood that such a fate was not death, but a more terrifying madness.
“None,” Mahl said. “No rumors of anything involving Vinearts—they were full of a Caul fleet that went missing, which I suppose worries them more. Oh, and fishing’s down. The tides changed, they think, or something’s scaring off their usual catch.”
Jerzy suppressed a shudder, thinking again of that touch on the bottom of his foot. He would be so pleased to be off this ship, never crossing any body of water deeper or wider than the Ivy, ever again.
Finished with her report, Mahault took an armful of the bedding off the rail and carried it belowdeck. She returned a moment later, an expression of rare pleasure on her normally solemn features. “Oh, that looks so much better. Smells much better, too. Now, if I could only take a bath …”
Ao made a face, and Jerzy chuckled. The bathing rooms in Aleppan had been built on the old Ettonian style, sunken tubs that were filled via pipes that ran from a great furnace, giving everyone in the palazzo equal access to steaming hot water. Jerzy shared the maiar’s daughter’s longing for a long soak in water that didn’t smell of fish and salt, even if Ao thought it a foolish indulgence when there was so much bracing seawater around them, free for the taking.
The heated baths were long behind them, now. Jerzy turned away from the others, looking over the railing at the quiet shoreline, wishing again that he could be there, on solid land, not here on this boat, on the endless water.
He realized then, suddenly, that his near-constant nausea had faded, and his legs did not wobble even as the ship bobbed up and down on the gentle swells of the cove. Sin Washer gave small blessings to go with great burdens, he supposed.
“So, no news is good news, yes?” he asked, still watching the shore, but turning so that he could see his companions as well.
Mahault nodded, but Ao shook his head.
“I’d be happier if they were shouting it from rooftops,” the trader said. “It’s when bad news goes quiet that it’s worst news of all. It means that if they catch you, they don’t want anyone to know that they have you, or why. The charges were brought up so quickly, and the accusations confirmed without any real proof, no chance for your master to hear of it, much less defend you. They want to keep this quiet.”
Jerzy had no response to that.
“You think the Washers are involved in whatever is happening?” Mahl perched on an overturned cask next to Jerzy, her skirt, bedraggled and water-stained, gathered around her knees without shame. She was barefoot again, for better footing on the deck, the same as Jerzy, and her toes curled under against the slats of the cask as she split her attention between her companions. “Washers are Sin Washer’s heirs; they’re meant to ease pain and sorrow, not cause it.”
“I don’t know,” Ao said. “We’ve been over it again and again, and I don’t know. They have nothing to gain on the surface, but the Collegium is deep, and anything could be happening below. If this were a negotiation, I would count all my fingers and then count all of yours, and I still wouldn’t swear we had them all still in our palms.”
“So what do we do, Jerzy?” Mahl turned to him, her brown eyes intent. “We took on enough supplies today to last us another tenday, if we’re careful. Do we head back toward The Berengia? Or do we keep heading south? Or west?”
“We can’t go west!” Ao protested. “Once past the tip of the Outer Lands, there’s nothing for weeks, and this ship isn’t made for that kind of travel.”
The ship was a sleek, sweet vessel, just as the previous owner had promised, but they had already pushed her limits just coming this far. Ao was right: more would be folly.
Jerzy shifted on his perch, uneasy with the way the question again weighed on him, the others looking to him to make a decision. Ao had more knowledge of sailing and foreign lands; Mahl was the more practical one, with better understanding of how the world worked. He was bare removed from a slave, torn too early from his training … and useless without his spellwines, his quiet-magic weak and suddenly strangely unpredictable. Panic threatened to rise up and engulf him, as it had while he was in the water, not allowing him to think, only react.
And into that swirl of panic came a stone-cool voice. You Are Vineart.
The Guardian could not reach him over this much water; he had, reluctantly, accepted that. Even in Aleppan the stone dragon’s voice had been muted, its range limited beyond the borders of Master Malech’s vineyards. And yet he heard the Guardian’s advice, its cool reminder, and it settled him, allowed him to think clearly, without panic.
Even as an echo of memory, the Guardian protected him.
“If the Washers are involved, we will need proof that someone has been stirring trouble. Proof that even the Collegium could not deny.”
The three looked at one another, all at an obvious loss.
“Let me see the map,” Jerzy said, and Mahault went to the wheelhouse, where it was tacked to a post, and brought it back. Jerzy skimmed it, trying to fix locations in his mind. “If we continue south, we pass Atakus.” Something about the name stirred his memory and made him uneasy. It was an island principality, he knew that, and home to a powerful Vineart, in addition to being one of the safe ports for ships traveling to the Southern Isles. But what …
Jerzy closed his eyes, trying to remember. He did as his master had taught him, opening all his senses, letting taste and smell and sound bring forward the missing memory the way a decantation pulled the magic from vin magica.
Something had happened in Atakus. He remembered his master speaking of it: They had closed the port, withdrawn? That was the sort of mischief and out-of-ordinary occurrence he had been sent to Aleppan to discover. It did not matter now, save that they would avoid Atakus. They needed to find the source, not where it had already done damage.
“Traveling farther south leads us to the desert lands.” His master hailed from there, before the slavers had taken him up and left him with Master Josia in The Berengia, decades past.
“Is that good or bad?” Ao cocked his head, waiting for Jerzy’s response while seated next to the Vineart; Mahault did the same, making them look like a pair of inquisitive cats.
Jerzy considered the question, looking down at the map again, comparing it to his memory of Master Malech’s maps, and his history of the Lands before the Breaking. “The grapes there took a full dose of Sin Washer’s blood: firevines and aethervines, fierce and bitter.” He tasted firewine in his memory, tried to remember what he knew of aethervines. “The taint … yes. It might have come from there.”
“Might … and might not.” Ao sounded dispirited. “Either way, I don�
��t think this girl could make it there, Jer.”
Ao was right. There was no way their little ship could make it to Atakus, much less past there, even if the harbor were open. They would have to take larger transport, which meant interacting with others … and where would they find the money to buy passage for all three of them? Not even a master trader could transform this ship into that much coin, and Ao had been third in his delegation, a self-described fetch-and-carry boy, before his actions had cast him in with Jerzy’s fate.
“We could go east,” Mahault said doubtfully. East was back to Corguruth. Aleppan was only one city-state; there were others who had no ties to Aleppan, no obligations—and who would in fact be just as happy to shield someone or several someones running from Aleppan’s maiar. But Corguruth was a Vin Land.
“If we go east, through Corguruth, we would reach Altenne,” Jerzy said, thinking out loud. “The city of scholars, they hold the entire history as we remember it, the study of the First Vine and all its legacies. They might protect us … but Altenne is also home to the Collegium. Rot and blast.”
He got up and started to pace, feeling the deck move under his feet and noting again how his body adjusted to match it, smooth and steady, the same way Mahl and Ao seemed to have picked up after their first day. Had it been his dousing in the seawater that had accomplished that? Or was it related to his sudden use of magic, that soaring into the air? He still had no idea how he had managed that, and no resources or time to study it, to understand the structure of the magic the way a Vineart should.
Priorities. In a storm, the vines were protected first. In this storm, he needed to ensure his safety—and the only way to do that was to wipe clean Sar Anton’s accusation, and the Washers’ penalty of death.
“We don’t know what’s happening,” he said finally. “We don’t know if they’re still looking for me—if they’re looking for all three of us. It doesn’t matter. My master sent me to discover information, track down some truth in the rumors, a source to the trouble. That hasn’t changed. If I can’t return home, then I need to follow the taint. So that is what I will do.”
“Then we will go with you,” Ao said, and Mahault nodded, her face set in determined lines. “We will see this through.”
Jerzy should have felt satisfaction, or relief, but his stomach roiled in a way that had nothing to do with the motion of the ship underneath him. It all came back to the taint, the odd, unpleasant scent of magic that seemed to underlay every attack, every oddity, every uncertainty they had encountered, the way the taste of the soil ran through every spellwine, identifying its origin.
Jerzy had sensed it first in the flesh of the sea creature that had attacked the Berengian shore—the flesh that Master Malech said was spelled into life, but by no winespell he could identify—and then again in the court of the lord-maiar of Aleppan, Mahl’s father. There, the taint had been centered in an aide, a man of no importance, no status within his own right … no magic within his soul. In order for him to carry it, the way the serpent had, someone had imbued him with it. Someone, or something.
Merely the thought of that moment when he had tasted the taint, as others argued his fate around him … it took him back in the swirl of fear and anger and despair. Of being dragged by the arm down corridors, others stepping back and staring at him, whispering; the fear when the servant had attacked him, trying to steal the mirror that was his one connection to Master Malech; the confusion when Sar Anton killed the servant to save him, then warned him to stay silent; and the realization that it was not he they were after, but Vineart Giordan, for reasons he still did not understand … and then Giordan’s raising a storm within the council hall itself, and Ao dragging him to safety, and flight …
The sound of Ao’s voice, normal and steady, was a path out of those dark and unnerving memories, and Jerzy followed it gratefully.
“Follow it? You can … sniff it out? Like a dog?” Curious as always, Ao looked at Jerzy as though he might suddenly have grown a longer nose, and a tail.
“Like a Vineart,” Mahl told Ao, rolling her eyes at him. “The way they know when the vines are ready, the grapes are ripe. Right?”
“Something like that,” Jersey acknowledged, clinging to the familiarity of their voices to keep him anchored in the present, letting their trust restore some of his own confidence. In truth, he did not know how he had found it or, absent a direct source, if he might ever find it again. He had been hoping for some message from Malech, some sign of what he was to do, even hoping silently, secretly, that the Washers would find them, give him no choice. In the end, though, there was no choice. If he did not want to be useless … he had to be useful.
And he knew what the taint tasted like. Not Master Malech, who had only tested the dead, near-rotted flesh of the serpent, had not touched it in living, breathing form. Only him.
Jerzy faced into the wind, and his nostrils flared, trying to take in as much information as he could, although it wasn’t a smell he was seeking, exactly. The taint could be found only with the Vineart’s Sense, something that was neither taste nor smell nor sight, but something combined and beyond.
A Vineart was both born and made, Malech had said. The skill, the Sense, had to be there, honed by the harsh conditions of slavery, enhanced by the constant exposure to the vines themselves, the Harvest and the pressing, until it expressed itself somehow, enough that the Vineart noticed and brought the slave forward. Jerzy had known that the mustus, the juice of the press, was off. He had not reacted when the vat overturned, when every other slave scurried to salvage some of the spill. Master Malech had seen that and taken him in, tested him.
Jerzy lifted his left hand. Where once there had been a slave-mark on the inside of his wrist, placed there by Master Malech when he bought Jerzy as a child, now the top of his wrist bore a smaller, darker red stain. Malech had not put it there; it had appeared after his second testing, when he had not drowned in the mustus but breathed it in. Only by relaxing and letting the mustus enter into him, allowing it to blend with his own body, was he able to survive. When he had emerged, the mark had been there. Sign of a Vineart. Sign of the quiet-magic resting within him.
The deep sea, so far from the root of the Vine, was unkind to Vinearts. Master Malech could not find him here. And yet … the taint came from beyond The Berengia, traveled throughout the Vin Lands … the sea serpents had swum through this sea, through waves that passed from shore to shore. Had they left their mark? Could those same waves and winds help him now?
The thought stirred the faintest flicker of hope. Help. He had spent time among Giordan’s weathervines, yes, at the Vineart’s invitation. The act Sar Anton and Washer Darian had used to accuse him of in their plot to snare Vineart Giordan … he had sought to ask the vines only if their master was tainted. Had they known he sought to clear their Vineart? If he had not taken but been given … if the quiet-magic were freely offered …
And if they had let him in once, would they allow him use once again?
Jerzy went back to one of the new water casks, dipping his hand in and wetting his tongue with the handful of fresh water, trying to summon the wind-driven magic. Caught up within his own senses, it took him a moment to realize that there was something else in his awareness. Like the smell of distant smoke on a clear day, or the taste of rain in the wind: quiet-magic, so quiet he had not even sensed it rising to his summons, natural as breathing.
He turned back to the railing, his face lifted to the afternoon sun, his mouth open as though tasting vina, letting it settle on his tongue and touch the roof of his mouth, drawing air in to spread the sensation through all of his senses. There was no space for distractions or doubts. A Vineart must never show weakness, his master said.
“There.”
“Where?”
Jerzy was only vaguely aware of Ao now standing behind him, turning as he turned, trying to catch sight or sound of what the Vineart was following. Mahault stood very still, just watching.
“Th
at way.” Jerzy followed his instincts, walking forward and to his right until he was up against the railing once again. “That direction. Faint, so faint … but I can … that way.”
“Are you sure?”
Doubt entered, and the connection broke, the quiet-magic fleeing. Jerzy felt his shoulders sag, his head dipping forward so that his chin rested on his chest, his hair flopping into his face until he shoved it back with a distracted gesture. “No. I’m not sure of anything. But there is no taint to the east, nothing I can detect. It’s west and southward, like a … like the trail a snail leaves. I can see it glisten.”
“In the air?”
“No. Not … I don’t know. I just know it’s there. Or I could. It’s gone now.”
Mahl was obviously dubious, but a glare from Ao kept her silent.
“Can you follow it?”
“No. I can find it again, I think.” The feel, the Sense of the taint lingered within him, a deep hole filled with an impossibly smooth darkness pressing against him, like being surrounded by mustus, but slicker, heavier. It was as familiar as the feel of earth under his fingers, and as foreign, as unthinkable as …
His imagination failed him. Like the feel of rot in the vines, or a blight in the grapes, he simply knew that it was wrong.
“We need to go west,” he said finally. “West and then south.”
“West … past Ifran? Jerzy, do you have any idea how long that would take us?” Ao had a trader’s memory for maps, and his normally sleepy-looking eyes were wide as he calculated the distance in his head. Ifran was a place shrouded in mystery and legend, populated with wild beasts and nomadic people who ate their elders and sacrificed their young, and other impossibly wild tales. While Iajan sailors, noted explorers and cartographers with a powerful prince funding their discoveries, had ventured onto Irfan’s coastline in recent decades, none penetrated deeply. It was an entire land outside Sin Washer’s solace, untouched since the days of the ancient Ettonian Empire—and even then, the Emperor took tribute in the form of exotic animals and precious stones, and left the people unconquered, and unknown.
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