Dragonfly

by Sylvia Kelso

  I bit my lip. Then I said, “Well, there’s no bank out here to run into.” Azo, water-skilled as most old Amberlighters, almost shuddered at the landlubber’s phrase. “And he said we’d be back before dark.”

  Therkon himself hulled that first comforting premise a bare five minutes later, coming to show me the channel buoys to either hand, twisting an angular serpent’s course among what, he assured me, were sand-bars and shoals dangerous, even at high tide, to ships of sufficient draught. “But have no concern, lady Chaeris. Aspis is shallow draught, and weatherly. They have already taken her right out to sea. And her captain knows the Mouth like the back of his own hand.”

  For all my own nerves I could tell that he was abstracted.

  Unsmiling except when he remembered to. Even while he spoke, his eyes kept turning forward, past the curve of the sail’s edge to the white-sharp line of horizon sky.

  * * * *

  Despite a busy wind on our quarter and the ebb behind us, I had a near headache before black specks nicked the horizon, swelled to a string of net corks, and turned from silhouette to the dour grey of Delta stone. A long, long chain of fortification, sections of boom and palisade replacing land-borne breastworks between the blocks of fort wall, lookout towers perched high above the battlements, staring out to sea.

  A natural reef had bowed out one side of the main channel. The Empire had extended it with countless loads of fill into a mole fit to support the forts, light-houses, slips and ramps for patrol vessels, quarters for the Sea-watch. Even as Two made my head swim with calculations of the incalculable amounts of old building debris and quarries’ waste, I was thinking that Dhasdein could hardly have made clearer its view of the Archipelago.

  We exchanged ensign signals with a couple of small galleys patrolling the channel, then Aspis headed for the right-hand fort. A cluster of glinting metal and flapping scarlet had already formed above the narrow water gate. A portcullis rose slowly. Aspis eased under, still bouncing slightly, and up against the even narrower quay.

  We clambered up stairs for the formal presentations: first Therkon and the fort commander, then, to my embarrassment, “The lady Chaeris of Iskarda,” Therkon announced formally. “A valued ally of Dhasdein.” I cringed in sudden fear he would

  announce what as well as who I was, but he added firmly, “An observer with lore we may not know.”

  The fort commander was a weathered slab of a man with a face like rough-carved cedar. I only realized how anxious he had been when he bowed and said, “The lady Chaeris is most welcome,” with a fervour far past courtesy.

  He had stowed his sea-trove in the infirmary, up on the middle floor. Out of the sea-brume, he informed us, tramping up another broad flight of hewn stone stairs, but not so high the wind could chill, or fumes blow from the great oil-burning lantern, reflected in huge double mirrors, that marked the channel by night. “Here we are, Your Highness. In here.”

  They had left windows, tall lancets full of sunlight from shore and seaward, and plastered the walls. It looked white and clean, but safe, with no taint of ill-health, only a strong scent of lavender. “Burn it for soul’s ease,” muttered the fort healer, half-embarrassed but anxious as his commander. He did not have to add aloud, Not much else we can do.

  The bed had been drawn close under the outer windows, as if they hoped the patient might catch a breath of native air. The shape looked hardly larger than a child’s. The profile on the pillows said otherwise.

  Our first Archipelagan. Two and I could only stare. Coppery skin, through the grey of sickness or privation, gaunt over fine bones, with something like the Shirran fold of skin above the eyes. Carefully tidied, loosely plaited black hair. Hardly a face to stand out, anywhere along the River. Even for what the healer had read from the skin shade, the flaccid mouth.

  “. . . boat grounded on the Horn. Right up past North Shoal. Fair swell running. Storms, maybe, out there.” The fort-commander was muttering too. “Insis saw them go in, but too far away. Pulled two others out after. Ribs stove in, one went there on deck. T’other’d broke his head.” He had died here later, for all their efforts, added the tone.

  “I’d not have troubled you, sir. Except, this one talks.”

  Therkon murmured something. The officer’s heavier voice took him up.

  “Off and on, yes. No. Not to us.”

  Two’s recall glossed that with a rush, Therkon himself in our council room: the refugees won’t say what drives them out. But if this one were half-conscious, in fever or delirium, that stricture might not hold.

  Therkon said quite clearly, “You’ve kept a record?”

  “Kept a watch. Would keep a record, sir. If we could understand what she says.”

  She. Not merely the slightness of privation or the shrinking of mortal injury, but the physique of a woman beneath. What had she been doing on a boat so off course, so damaged or driven, as to ground on a Delta shoal? Whence had she come, with family, among accustomed crew, or in flight with strangers, to a thoroughly unfamiliar sea?

  The silence behind me broke. The fort-commander said, too evenly, “The best we could think, sir—even if you can’t understand it—was, you ought to know.”

  Still with the hint of final recourse that said, because Therkon was in truth leaned upon and trusted beyond reason, he might have some solution, if all else failed.

  Therkon did not reply.

  It was a dozen breaths before I understood. I all but spun around. They were all looking at me: Therkon, the Imperials’ officer, Deoren and his shoulder-man, Azo and Verrith, the fort-commander and his entourage. All the eyes asking the same. Can you do it, if we can’t? You are the truly last resort. Can you help us, if not her?

  My mouth was dry. It took a moment before it would work. I said, “I can try.”

  * * * *

  I saw Therkon’s jaw relax. But he waited, making no suggestions, giving me command. Until I looked at the healer, and had recourse to Two myself.

  “What was the boat?”

  I suppressed a blink, but the fort-commander answered at once, clearly getting the point.

  “Fishing boat, once. Out of Wave. Trawler, then made over for line-work.”

  “Not their own?” Wave Island, Two’s scanty memories told me, was too close for the language to be unfamiliar. He nodded in acknowledgement.

  “Old? Unseaworthy?” Two was learning naval terms as fast as I.

  “Old, yes. They’ll sell ’em, the worthless ones, to refugees.” He had seen more than one, added the tone. “No telling, though, if it was unfit first, or got that way.”

  “There was a storm?”

  “Nothing here but a southerly buster. Could have been a lot worse, out there.”

  Out there. On the open sea, this side Wave Island. Or the unknown seas beyond.

  A little chill went up my neck. I said, “How often does she speak?”

  If they could not understand her, it was hardly likely they could have any intelligible record. We would have to wait for her next words, whenever they came.

  The healer’s twitch out-paced his words. “She talked a lot in the night. Moved around, very agitated. We got some soup down her.” An apologetic look. “But she’s not been happy, not understanding us. And . . . we’ve no women here.”

  I had no time to tender his own anxiety. “She’s quieter now?”

  His head went down. It was barely audible. “Hardly moved. These last two hours.”

  I looked at Azo, whose eyes spoke the conclusion back. She was sinking, and probably sinking fast. The faintest of chances I could follow anything she said, but we might already be too late.

  I looked at Therkon. He, after all, was in command. He would bear the weight of the choice.

  I said, “Can we wake her up?”

  His eyes told me he understood: if we wanted even a chance at information, we would h
ave to harass a woman almost certainly dying. A woman driven from home, no telling how far or how long ago or at what cost, but long enough to have lost her own vessel, and with it, perhaps, her possessions, her kin. And solely for our own needs, we would disturb her final hours.

  He turned to the healer and said, “Would she wake?”

  The healer understood too. He forebore to protest as any healer should. Just pursed his lips and answered, eyes downcast. “We could try.”

  Therkon shut his eyes a moment. I saw the human behind the crown prince, not merely begging forgiveness for what the prince must do, but feeling with the victim. And then, forming feature by feature, the hatchet man.

  Then he said, wholly without expression, “Try.”

  They brought warm bricks and pillows, and, incongruous in a military fort, a vial of smelling salts. They propped her up, gently as a baby, and settled the bricks under her feet. Then I drew as close as I could before her, and the healer, crouching on the bed behind her, cradled her head on his arm and brought the salts under her nose.

  She took one breath, hardly visible. Two. Gave an audible gasp. He snatched the vial back. She coughed. Coughed again, half choked, cried something, with the force of shock or pain. Opened her eyes.

  Two took both her thin, knotted, sea-battered hands and said, “Mother, can you hear?”

  She did hear: she recognized me too, as a woman if nothing else. I saw open relief. She tried to grasp my hands, got out something else, with her hoarse, gasping pronunciation. And neither Two nor I could understand a word.

  “Wave Island?” I said.

  She understood that, and made a nod, a minute head motion, flicker of eyelids. Two said, in what must have been Wave Island patois, “Where before?”

  She struggled for words. Someone put a cup over the healer’s shoulder, he laid down the vial and held it to her lips. I could smell warm, salted broth.

  She managed one sip but her eyes never left mine. I closed my fingers a little, signalling in body talk: You are safe, all is well as it can be. But I have a question I must ask.

  Two said, “Greenhill?” Her eyes stayed blank. “Summertree?” Nothing. “Redrock?”

  The look changed to shards of scorn. She said something, repeated it, clear enough to work out the syllables.

  “Carsia.”

  Two had caught it. I said it back. “Carsia? Is that it?”

  The slightest motion of her lids spoke assent. Mild complacency. Again, the husks of scorn.

  “Beyond sea,” Two said. “Whale road. Swan’s path.”

  I knew the sense, but the words I never heard before. She had. The eyes widened, in recognition, faint delight. A thankful smile.

  “How,” Two went back to the patois, “here?”

  Delight, animation vanished. I held her hands tight and tried not to shake, not to urge her beyond the limits even of need. “Mother, tell me? Let us try—let us know where to help. At least, try to let us know.”

  She had caught the plea, if not the sense. Her look paused on me. Two said, more urgently, “How? How here? Carsia. Wave Island. Dhasdein. Why?”

  She was going to refuse. To close her eyes and everything else with them, and die with whatever it was untold. I tried not to over-tighten my fingers, but I could not deny our own need.

  “Mother, please?”

  She shivered sharply: the inception, if not the execution of a cough. Her eyes rolled up, I almost groaned aloud, and she got words out, the rasp of a whisper, on the cough’s impulse and little else.

  “Maer,” she gasped. “Sthassa—” Her eyes clung to my face as if it were a rope. “Sthassa . . . maer . . .”

  The cough overtook her. Her body spasmed, choking, the healer supported her, I held her hands as long as she could feel it. As long as there was need.

  Chapter VI

  “I killed her,” I said.

  The wind howled over the lantern platform and whipped ice down my cheeks before it could dry the tears.

  “I didn’t mean—I didn’t want—I never saw—” Anyone actually die before. Before my living eyes, rather than in Two’s double-distance memories.

  “And it wasn’t any use—we still c-couldn’t understand.”

  Azo put her arm around me. It should have dried my eyes from simple shock.

  “Heads’ work,” she said.

  “Head’s—? How can that be Head’s work? To kill—!”

  “To decide.”

  My mouth shut on, Killing’s your work. Troublecrew’s.

  “To decide what?”

  She still had her arm around me. Hard, impossibly unaccustomed shield against the cold, even as she stared out to the sullenly darkening sea.

  “The hard choices,” she said. “The ones no-one else can make. Not just for the blood. For the—capacity.”

  She hitched a shoulder to the stairwell behind us, where Verrith was standing guard. “Like him.”

  Like Therkon. In that moment when he had deliberately chosen, with pity and grief and anguish, to take the weight of a life on his own shoulders. The blood on his own hands.

  I looked at my hands, clamped on the gritty stone. My mother’s palm shape, my father Sarth’s long, strong fingers. The blood, as on Therkon’s, invisible.

  “Know it,” Azo said. “Rightly, be unwilling. Rightly, grieve. And then, do what must be done.”

  Know what I did, I slowly understood. And carry the weight of that memory, as much a Head’s as the responsibility for House or empire, and as necessary, if you are to rule. And if your rule is to be good.

  Azo said, “Like Tellurith.”

  Another fury of air screeled over us while I worked out all that meant. Not simply a recourse to precedent. Full understanding of what I felt. Comfort, of the hardest sort. That I had done the right thing, however it hurt. Had done what my mother would.

  When she felt I had mastered myself, she took her arm away. Reading her body language in turn, Verrith glanced from the stairwell. With an impassivity that carried its own signal, she said, “Chaeris, can you see them now?”

  * * * *

  Thankfully, they took us back down to the first floor, where the fort-commander and his staff evidently convened. A somber room with no adornment but the maps and charts on the walls, the piles of signals and reports on the commander’s table-desk. We all stood, whether by custom, or respect. Whether for me, or Therkon, or something else.

  “My lady,” Therkon murmured, before the silence could grow painful. Very quiet, very formal. Knowing better than to express either sympathy or gratitude. “My lady, is there anything you would wish to say?”

  Like Azo and Verrith, the officers were waiting. Trying not to appear greedy for whatever grains of value might have been won, but waiting, and hoping. That there might be worth for Dhasdein, at whatever the price.

  When I could not answer immediately I felt Therkon give me one swift up-under-the-lashes glance. And turn to the fort-commander before he said, “The last word. Words. Did anyone recognize them?”

  I only realized I had let my breath out when a voice among the officers replied, “‘Maer’. That means Shadow. On Greenhill, anyhow.”

  The stifle of tension eased. Someone else added, “Most of the Archipelago. At least, where we know.”

  “And the rest?”

  A wave of mumbles to which I could add visual signals: Not me, unsure, Can’t tell, Never heard before. Then, hesitantly, another voice.

  “‘Thassa.’ I think—that’s something like ‘sea.’ On the Mel’ethi coast.”

  “Thassa,” Therkon repeated slowly. “Not ‘Sthassa’? Does anyone know . . .”

  “Sthassa,” Two said. “Like ‘S’hurre’. Something of the Mother. Sacred. Different.”

  Sounding startled, Therkon said, “Holiness?”

  “Not . . . necessa
rily.”

  In the tumbling pause I had time to think, Just another riddle with no answer, no sort of useable information. Just more loose, stray, uninterpretable words.

  “Sea. Shadow. Something, perhaps, more.” No way to tell if Therkon shared my despondency. But after a moment, more tentatively, he added, “My lady. Can you tell us? The other words? Carsia? And, whatever you said?”

  “Beyond sea. Whale road. Swan’s path.” I could translate them now. I was thankful Two let me have the say. “I must have remembered them. From where, I can’t tell, but they’re names. I think maybe poet’s names. Names for her island. Carsia.”

  The fort-commander stirred and let out a sigh. “At least we have a name. Or another name. If it’s only one more,” grimly now, “nobody’s heard before.”

  I looked up and he saw more than I wanted, for his face changed abruptly and he almost gestured to me. “My lady, whatever we can find’s a gift. We’ve begun a map, we can add on these. Beyond sea, it has to be a long way from whatever they call Centre in the Archipelago. Swan’s path, I swear I’ve heard that before.”

  “West,” somebody said. “The sea-songs, on Grey and Greenhill, they’ll sing that. About losing, um, your girl. Or somebody like Deor or Ciannan, heroes. Taking the swan’s path. Going away, lost, dying. But properly it just means, going west.”

  Another gust reverberated in the floorstone and the hair crept sharply on my neck. The woman from Carsia had indeed taken the swan’s path, far past her own island. Further than any of us could go.

  Therkon must have been intensely aware of every breath I took, for he shot me one almost invisible sidelong glance and asked softly but firmly, “And the center? Where’s center, for the Archipelago? I thought maybe Phaerea?”

  Phaerea meant nothing to Two, but it brought a rumble of general agreement. “Phaerea,” summed up the commander. “At least, t’was in our day.”

  “Ah.” I just had time to silence Two’s, Where is it? What is it? Not now, I berated her, he’s balancing this group, this meeting, this entire fragile consensus like a half-blown bubble of glass on his fingertips. Wait.