by NS Dolkart
There were twelve councilmen in Atuna, but only nine were present today. That was still too large a group for Phaedra to know whom to look at when she spoke, so she swept her eyes over them all as she waited for one to speak.
All the councilmen were dressed in the garb they had earned at their election: the stylized servant’s tunic with its patterned gold lace and red dyed thread on a background of white. If she remembered correctly, both colors officially represented Atun the Sun God’s blessing, not wealth or blood. But she was sure the colloquial meaning was different.
“You told Platana that you were here to talk of piracy,” a balding shorter man said. “We would hear you speak.”
Phaedra nodded, calling up the appropriate term for addressing the council. It had been a long time since her father had spoken to her of his trade meetings in Atuna. Even so, etiquette was one of the things she rarely had trouble remembering.
“Esteemed Citizens,” she said, “the piracy problem has grown worse over the last decade, to the point where no merchant feels safe. I have heard the rumors as I traveled, of how pirates have snatched ships right out of port, how they’ve overtaken them at sea. Nobody knows where they disappear to. The seas, which had been so safe after the Treaty of Belinport, have become treacherous once again.”
“You sum up the problem nicely,” another of the councilmen commented. “Go on.”
“Thank you,” Phaedra said. “Esteemed Citizens, I know these pirates intimately. They captured me once, and I was barely able to escape them. I know where they have made their home, and how they have evaded the Atunaean navy up until now. I know how to eliminate them, and I want to help you do just that. I only ask that I be allowed aboard the flagship that brings them to justice.”
The councilmen glanced at each other, looking far less skeptical than Phaedra had feared.
“Tell us everything you know,” said the first.
“The leader is a man named Mura, a sorcerer who has used his terrible magic to command complete authority both among his own men and the many slaves he has captured. I say this as a practitioner of magic myself: this man is inhuman, and his magic is no less so. He has made his base on Tarphae, my former homeland, and bought his safety there with human sacrifice. Karassa has a new people, and they are all pirates.”
There were audible gasps. “I see,” said one of the councilmen, perhaps the oldest. Unlike the others, he was seated on a stool, a cane at his side. “The people of Tarphae were formidable back when Karassa still favored them. With Her favor, these pirates will be no less so.”
“I agree,” Phaedra said. “I am from Tarphae myself, and the favor I saw the Goddess bestow upon Mura I had never seen before. The priests of my youth did not have the kind of connection with their Goddess that this sorcerer has. Defeating these pirates will not be some simple naval operation. So long as Mura retains Karassa’s favor, the Goddess will try to protect him. There may well be storms when Atuna’s ships sail for the island, and who knows what else She and Her servants will throw in our way. That’s why I want to go with the flotilla, so that my magic might counter Mura’s and my God may counter his.”
“Oh?” asked the old councilman. “And who would that be?”
“God Most High, the God of Dragons and God of the Dragon Touched, He who created the first world out of the Yarek’s carcass and made room for the second with barriers of sky. It was He who protected me from Karassa when I was trapped on Her island eleven years ago, and He who protected me again when I sailed east from Mayar’s territory into Hers. With God Most High on its side, Atun’s navy has nothing to fear from Karassa even in Her own domain.”
She could see how her words were impressing them, and it made her feel giddy. This couldn’t have gone better – she had chosen the right course.
“We will confer in private,” the balding councilman said. “Where will you be staying, so that we may call you when we’ve made our decision?”
Phaedra made a quick calculation. Should she stay at an inn, knowing the exposure she would have there? Was it safer to remove herself from society, despite her yearning for a good bed?
“I will be back tomorrow morning,” she said. “You can tell me your decision then.”
As she left the council building, Phaedra took one of the square Ksadan coins out of her pocket and rubbed it against her temple. The coin carried her disorientation at being in a new land, passed jovially from one court to the next; it carried her old unfamiliarity with the Estic language and the foreign sights and smells of Essisha’s many ports. Stopping on the steps, she stuck the coin between the toes of her left foot. “Confound my pursuers,” she whispered to it in Estic.
There were still the remnants of a crowd when she descended, but they parted for her, and despite their best efforts could not follow. Those who tried kept peeling off with vague looks on their faces, heading away toward their homes or the fish market before stopping in confusion and trying to remember what they were doing there. Phaedra’s progress was slow, so the process kept repeating itself with new onlookers, but eventually she escaped the bounds of the city and found herself a flat spot in the woods in which to rest until dawn. She hadn’t eaten since that morning, but she was too nervous to eat anyway: soon enough she would confront Mura, and if her God was good, she would defeat him and return to Psander. She put the coin back in her pocket, warded her resting spot against dew and rain, and lay down.
The sky was already beginning to brighten when she finally fell asleep, and the sun had barely risen when she woke again. She rose and stretched uncomfortably, but soon she was on her way back to the city.
Atuna’s walls were vestigial things, buried more than halfway into the city. Its seven gates were always left open, though theoretically a bad enough military loss could force them shut if the city’s core was ever in need of protection. Phaedra passed through one of these gates on her way to the council building, trying to look commanding rather than aching and sleepy. A crowd was waiting for her at the base of the council building, staring at the Tarphaean wizard who wanted to invade Tarphae. The nine councilmen stood at the top of the steps, joined by a tenth man who was dressed not as a councilman, but in a sea captain’s formalwear. Phaedra was only halfway up the steps when the tallest councilman spoke, his voice booming.
“We have conferred regarding your request and have one last question. Merchant Kespha asked it at our evening meeting, and it deserves an answer before we can entrust our ships to your God’s protection. If your God is as powerful as you say, tell us: is He also responsible for the shaking of the sky? We presume that as a wizard you have knowledge beyond the realms of men.”
For a moment, Phaedra panicked. There was no way to answer his question without betraying her lack of knowledge and losing face before the crowd. She was asking the city to entrust its warships to a foreigner who openly admitted to wizardry – persuasion depended upon her ability to project power and knowledge. She was about to fail.
She thought of Psander, of how disgusted she would be if she knew how her student was flailing at this most crucial of moments. The wizard would probably say something terse and devastating about lowering her expectations for Phaedra.
Wait, that was it! Psander never oversold her abilities, she used her natural terseness to her advantage and made anything beyond what she could provide seem impossible. It was a technique worth mimicking.
“You presume too much,” Phaedra answered the council and the crowd, trying to speak just as Psander would have. “Wizards can do many things, but we aren’t prophets. I mean to go to Tarphae precisely because I don’t know why the sky shook, because I believe the answer lies somewhere on the island. Help me get there and you help yourselves. Turn me down, and we may never know the reason for the skyquakes until it’s too late. The piracy will continue, and the next quake might tear the world in two for all I know.”
She put a hand on her heart. “I respect the people of Atuna and the council they chose, and I am sure
you’ll make the right decision. The choice is yours.”
The crowd went silent, watching the council quietly deliberate. The tall one turned back to Phaedra. “Shipping is the lifeblood of our city,” he said. “Piracy harms us all. We will do as you say.”
Phaedra couldn’t help but smile. “Thank you, people of Atuna. You have done a great thing today. My God will not forget.”
10
Dessa
Sooner or later, everything washed up in Atuna. Dessa certainly hadn’t meant to end up here when she’d run away from home so many years ago. She had meant to find Vella and Bandu, wherever they had gone off to, and learn how to do magic the way Bandu did it. But she had never found them and could still barely do more with her magic than when she was a child. Instead she had spent a decade lost among beggars and thieves, always a meal or two from starvation and one piece of bad luck away from violence.
She had come to Atuna with a friend – it was always safer to do anything with a friend. But the friend had gotten himself killed breaking into a storehouse, so now she was back to the dangerous work of finding a new friend. She had been too trusting in the past and had scars to prove it. Choosing poorly was worse than having no friend at all.
If only she had found Bandu and learnt magic from her, Dessa’s life would have been different. With the power to raise people from the dead, to make houses weep and force people to take her seriously, she would not have had all these troubles with dangerous men. She still lived with the hope that she might someday find Bandu, though deep down she knew it was a false hope. Dessa was no less determined at twenty-two than she’d been at eleven, but she knew now that determination wasn’t everything. You needed luck too, and Dessa had precious little of it.
She should never have run away from home. Bandu and Vella couldn’t have gone far – if she’d only stayed and waited for news instead of wandering off on her own, she might have found them years ago. She often wished she could go back and shake some sense into herself. How far could two teenagers and a baby really have gone? But once she had left home, once she had gotten herself involved with the sorts of people she had met along the way, it was impossible to go back. What could she say to her mother? To face the pain on Mother’s face when she saw what a mess Dessa had made of her life – no, she just couldn’t. Anything would be better than that.
Dessa had left Mother with so little. A dead, disgraced husband; an angry, confused, slowly dying mother; a missing daughter. The decision to leave home at eleven hadn’t just been ill-advised, it had been unspeakably selfish. That was why she could never go home. As hard as the last ten-plus years had been, they’d been easier for Dessa than facing all the pain she’d caused Mother. Better to stay away, to be the mysterious lost daughter forever.
She’d had dreams once of returning home with her father in tow, having rescued him from death just as Bandu had rescued Criton. She understood now how ridiculous a dream it had been. Father wasn’t a hero like Criton, he was a murderer. Nobody wanted him back but Dessa.
But even if she couldn’t have that dream, she could still aspire to Bandu’s magic. Nobody cared what kind of life a witch had had, or what mistakes she’d made in her youth. People like Bandu were mysterious, distant figures that people admired and feared. Nobody came close enough to see their flaws.
Dessa was sitting in a corner in the main room of a sailor’s hostel, thinking about Bandu and her invisible flaws, when a man came over and offered her some honey wine. That was one good thing about Atuna: the best wines came through its port. Sailors were not the sort of people who saved up for things – they would arrive in some harbor with more money than expenses and no more responsibility than they had sense, and a few good drinks and trinkets later they were off to sea again. This particular sailor was toting two undersized bottles made of yellow glass, which must have been extremely expensive and come from far beyond the sea. Dessa knew the beers and wines of the continent all too well, and nobody out here put their wine in glass bottles. The bottle would have been ten times as expensive as its contents.
“What’s the occasion?” she asked, handing him her cup.
“Been away for three years and come back to find my wife hasn’t been pregnant since I left! This other bottle’s just for her.”
Dessa smiled despite herself. “You didn’t have that good news when you bought it, though.”
“No, but there’s always special occasions. Here, drink it! You’ve never tasted anything like it.”
He was right. She had expected something sweet and cloying, but instead her tongue met with an incredible subtlety of flavor that made her wish she’d taken a smaller sip. This wine was too good to drink quickly.
“Where did you get this?”
“Antaka. It’s an island halfway to the other continent. This is an Essishan wine.”
His names meant nothing to her, but she tried to look impressed. “It’s amazing.”
“Drink of kings,” he said. “I’m going to treat her like a queen. She usually likes them sweeter, but you can’t beat Essishan honey wine.”
“Well if she doesn’t like it, you know where to find me. What ship did you come in on?”
“The Sunbeam. Good Atunaean ship. Same one that brought that witch here.”
Dessa had to put her cup down so it wouldn’t spill while she coughed out the wine she’d inhaled. “What witch?”
“Called herself Phaedra. You hadn’t heard? She made a big scene when she got here about going to meet the High Council.”
It wasn’t Bandu, then, but the name Phaedra did have a familiar ring to it. Besides, a witch was a witch. Dessa wasn’t picky who she learned from, just so long as she got to learn.
“What does she look like? How do I find her?”
The sailor looked a bit surprised at her urgency, but he didn’t say anything rude about it. “I don’t know. She can’t be at the council building anymore, that was hours ago.”
“You don’t know what she looks like either?”
“Oh, I know what she looks like. About this tall, real dark skin, almost black. An islander, or maybe even Essishan herself, though the name isn’t eastern. Real beauty though. If she wasn’t a witch they’d have all been cramming into her cabin. Talks like a councilman, with big long words. She’s hard to miss, really.”
“Thanks,” Dessa said, rising to her feet and almost forgetting her honey wine. She made a quick decision and drained her cup, not swallowing until she absolutely had to. He hadn’t given her too much, but she still felt like she’d wasted it. She raced to the door and away from the hostel, ignoring the stares. She didn’t even know where the council building was, but she imagined it was further from the docks than this. She’d ask on her way.
She knew where she’d heard the name Phaedra now – the description had been all she needed. Phaedra was dark-skinned like Bandu or Criton because she was their kinswoman, a Tarphaean islander. Dessa had seen her just the once, the day they had stoned Father. She’d had no idea Phaedra was a witch, but she had been there when it happened, and afterward she was gone.
Dessa couldn’t let her disappear this time. She raced through the city, her head pounding, stopping often to ask how to get to the council building but only able to follow the directions of people’s pointing fingers. She was drunker than she’d realized when sitting there in the hostel. It was very noticeable, to judge from people’s reactions, but she didn’t mind the embarrassment; she minded that it was making it harder to find the council building on the one day in her life when she really needed to be somewhere in a hurry.
By the time she got there, the witch had gone. Dessa was nearly sober now, but it didn’t help much because everyone she asked about Phaedra acted as if they themselves were drunk. Nobody seemed to know where she had gone or even how long ago. Dessa’s questioning only got her half-answers and vacant stares, which were so much worse than the judgmental stares she’d grown used to. Had anyone tried to follow Phaedra when she left? Oh yes, defi
nitely. Some of those Dessa asked had tried it themselves. But not one knew where she’d gone in the end, and every one of them pointed Dessa in a different direction. It was maddening.
Dessa couldn’t believe that it was a coincidence. She had asked six different people in the vicinity of the council building, and none of them agreed with each other. It had to be a confounding spell. For whatever reason, Phaedra didn’t want to be found.
Well, that was unacceptable. Dessa didn’t care what Phaedra wanted. It didn’t matter whether she was covering her tracks to avoid an enemy or intentionally persecuting Dessa for some reason, which was certainly what it felt like. The important thing was that Dessa would not let her slip away, not when they were in the same godsforsaken city! One way or another, she’d find her and make her reveal her secrets.
One way or another. If only she knew how.
That was the trouble with Dessa’s life: she was all determination and no plan. She had always believed in herself, believed that if she just threw herself at a problem without reservation, it would yield to her. So far, it hadn’t really worked that way. Too often she had confused her faith in herself for the protection of her God, and too often she had been disappointed.
God Most High had yet to intervene on her behalf, no matter how scary things got. She’d spent years on the road searching for Bandu and all she had to show for it was a decade’s worth of bad experiences, a handful of Atunaean coins, and a taste for wine.
Everything would get better after she found Phaedra. It had to. There was nothing that magic couldn’t fix once she knew the trick of it. Bandu had proven that much.
For an hour Dessa wandered around the city, asking after Phaedra and going in whatever direction people suggested. It wasn’t a logical plan: the city was too large and the trail too cold. But it didn’t get in the way of devising a better plan, it just gave her feet and mouth something to do that didn’t feel as useless as pacing and mumbling to herself.