“Yes.”
“But—meanin’ no disrespect, shipmaster—din’t the shipmaster here call you a Nelwyn?”
“Yes.”
“Can’t be right, then. I mean, Willow’s a great sorcerer, a legend, a hero! He can’t be anything like yeh—not sayin’, y’unnerstand, yeh’re lackin’ courage or nothin’ like that,” he continued hurriedly, fearing he’d given offense, “not the way of it a’tall. ’S just—”
“You were expecting someone taller?” Maulroon suggested, almost beside himself with throttled delight.
“Well, yeh!” Geryn thought the captain had thrown him a lifeline.
“Tell him,” an outraged Franjean hissed in Thorn’s ear.
“He won’t believe.”
“Believe what?” the Daikini asked.
“As far as Nelwyns go, I’m as good as you’re likely to find. And Willow was a Nelwyn.”
“They musta got that wrong.”
“The King appears to be going to a lot of trouble.”
“That’s gospel. Ain’t been no celebration like it since the world began, so it’s said.” Excitement brightened the young man’s tone. This was an event he dearly wished to see. “Ambassadors comin’ from all the Great Domains, even those o’ the Realms Beyond.”
“Be a sight to behold, all right.”
“Aye.”
“Y’r lucky day, then, Trooper,” Maulroon interjected. “Y’r out o’ Bandicour Garrison, y’say?” The young man nodded. “Way these rivers run, by the time we reach a post where y’ can requisition a decent remount, y’ll have near the whole of the northern provinces t’ cross b’fore y’re home. Be just as easy an’ a lot quicker t’ take y’ all the way down t’ the Bay, transfer y’ to another packet tha’ll take y’ where y’re needful t’ go. Don’t think anyone’ll hold it hard against y’ f’r stakin’ y’rself to a coupla days stopover in Angwyn proper while y’ go, since it’s right along the way. Y’ can travel wi’ me as far as the Maraguay, then I’ll pass you on to a captain I trust.”
His tone made his dismissal plain; as far as he was concerned, the general conversation was ended. With a shallow nod of the head, Geryn took the hint and gathered his gear, looking around for somewhere to go.
“Razi,” Maulroon called, “see the lad’s settled up for’ard. Show him the galley an’ the head. An’ the washroom, f’r himself an’ his outfit. We’re a working boat, mind you, Trooper,” he finished to the young man himself, “so I’d appreciate it y’ mind where y’ walk, stay out of the way unless there’s need. Y’ have a question, feel free t’ ask. Elsewise, get along wi’ us, we’ll do same t’ you.”
“I’ve no funds ta pay fer such a passage, shipmaster.”
Maulroon waved the words aside. “Y’ did me a service, y’ helped save a friend. This is the least I can offer in return. Be off, lad, make y’rsel’ comfortable.”
Geryn had to restrain himself from acknowledging Maulroon with a salute, as though in those few words he’d somehow been transported back to the garrison parade ground. Then he hurried after the mate.
* * *
—
“Bit brusque with the trooper, weren’t you?” Thorn wondered a while later in Maulroon’s cabin as he toweled himself dry. He was trembling with cold, despite his sorcerous protections against the elements, from immersion in river water that was mainly highland snowmelt and therefore not so far removed from freezing. The towel, fortunately, had come from a warming rack in the galley. He wrapped it snug about himself until the only part of him left to see was a far too hairy face, and basked delightedly in its glow.
“My nature, don’tchaknow?”
“I was hoping you’d take us the whole way, Jasso.”
The big man poured himself a mug of steaming tea from a flask on his desk, then handed another across to Thorn. It was almost too hot to drink and flavored with lemon, and tasted better than what Thorn carried in his pouch. In return, Thorn rummaged about in the pouch until he came up with the remains of a sandwich, still as fresh as when he’d stuffed it into the pouch…and with a start, he realized he couldn’t recall when that was. He broke off a chunk for Maulroon, smaller ones for Franjean and Rool, kept what was left for himself. Tomatoes and cheese, with a strip of marinated meat, flavored in basil from his own garden. Corn was the crop that always drove him crazy, he mused. It thrived in his rich bottomland, and in good years would quickly grow higher than he could reach to harvest.
He shook his head. He could no more banish memories than aches, but he’d gotten ferociously adept at ignoring both. Maulroon was speaking; he decided to focus wholly on that.
“Y’re in a rare mood, Drumheller.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No more’n what it says. Don’t think I’ve seen such a humor in y’ since, hell, I think it was when first we met.”
“A dozen years and more.”
“Near enough.”
“How so, Jasso?”
“Y’re alive, bucko. Top t’ bottom, in an’ out. There’s a sparkle t’ y’r eyes, an’ a passion about y’. Tell y’ true, Thorn Drumheller, tha’s a sight worth the wait f’r it.”
“Stop.”
“I’m talkin’ serious, man. Knowin’ y’, since the Cataclysm, been like walkin’ wi’ a ghost. The form o’ life, an’ a fair bit o’ the function. Precious little soul. Maybe when there’s a healin’ t’ be done, but nonetime else. Never seen anyone build so strong an’ high a wall about themselves.” He sighed, a hearty gust of breath from a face dark with sympathy and sorrow. “ ’Course, ain’t seen anyone in such pain, neither.” A pause, for emphasis. “Nor fear.”
“That bad?”
“Not f’r me t’ say.”
“That bad. It was the healings smashed that wall, Jasso. First the trooper’s horse, then the land itself about the Scar. I don’t think I’d ever used so much power before, or had to give so much of my Self. There was too much at stake, I couldn’t hold back. Anything.”
“Fair bargain, strikes me. Y’ heal the sick, an’ y’rself, all at a go.”
“They were my dearest friends. There should have been a way to save them.”
“Mayhap was, but y’ didn’t know it, is all. No crime in tha’, Drumheller, not even shame. I don’t expect a young’un on his first cruise t’ know the taste of a rogue wind, nor how t’ handle it. Nor a rogue deal an’ how t’ keep it from goin’ wrong. Their job’s t’ watch an’ learn. Tha’ applies t’ wizards, too, I ’spect. If tha’s na’ good enough f’r y’, though”—a casual flick of the wrist sent the stiletto from his hand to the table before Thorn, with enough force to sink the blade an inch deep into its polished surface—“if y’ miss y’r friends so much, then by all means join ’em.”
“I’m not the only one in a rare mood, evidently.”
“Not so rare, lately. Be part o’ the world, Thorn, or find one more suited. Y’r friends need y’ whole.”
“Go on.”
“There’s a scent t’ the air, Drumheller. A taint t’ the rivers where they touch Angwyn Bay. Trouble’s comin’. Those damnable hounds are part of it.”
Thorn held out his mug for a refill, and said nothing.
“If it hadn’t been for the attack on Saginak,” Maulroon went on, opening the rear door of the cabin and stepping out onto the deck, leaning crossed arms on the cabin roof to strike an ostensibly casual pose. Watching, Thorn saw the captain’s gaze sweep one bank, then the other, then the water ahead. Even the smallest ripples caught the big man’s eye; every scrap of movement had to be judged, with an intensity normally reserved for wartime. “I was planning to come for you anyroad. And then close down the station.”
“No more profit in it?”
“Not hardly. Each season’s been better than the one before. I’m inpulling the lot. Everything.”
“You’re afraid.”
Maulroon
looked honestly surprised; the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “Aye,” he said in simple acknowledgment.
“I didn’t think that was possible.”
“You haven’t looked.” And when Thorn asked for more: “There’s change on the wind, everyone with a bit of awareness can sense it. All this damn babble about Elora Danan.” He smiled, but there was no mirth to his expression. “S’pose I’m no different than those folk who fled y’r land after Tir Asleen was destroyed, ’cept I’m not waitin’ f’r the disaster.”
“Have you no faith in the Sacred Princess?”
“A working man has faith in what he can see and what he can touch. The knowledge in his head, the skill in his hands. I’m a sailor: I know the sea and I know the sky. I’m a merchant: I know goods. I’m chief o’ my clan: tha’ means most of all, I know people. And I’ve learned, these past months, I can’t trust any of it. If there’s that big a storm coming, Drumheller, I want my folk out of it. Take ’em to safe harbor an’ hunker down till it blows past.”
“And if there’s no safe harbor?”
“Pray the worst of it passes us by. She’s a girl, nothin’ more, spent her whole damn life in tha’ tower the King built her in Angwyn, trotted out when it’s convenient for state occasions and the like. I know storms, my friend, and the ships I’d choose to face them in.
“She may look the part, Drumheller, good and glorious as spun gold, but I wouldn’t count on her to see me through a sunset breeze.”
In all the world, so Geryn told Thorn with pardonable pride, there was no city finer than Angwyn.
Certainly, Maulroon conceded, no finer harbor. Off the Sunset Ocean, you passed through King’s Gate, between a pair of towering headlands, and into a bay that many considered a small sea in its own right. Deep water for near a hundred miles up and down the coast behind the seaboard range and for twenty miles inland. Three great rivers made their terminus here—one above the Gate, the others below—allowing easy access to virtually the entire continent west of the spinal range, and because of the depth of the water within the Bay there was no problem with silting; channels stayed clear and stable, over the course of a season, over the course of a man’s lifetime.
Gateway to both land and ocean, here was a natural place to trade. There’d been established settlements since the dawn of memory, the Daikini being merely the latest to plant roots and sink foundations. Easily a dozen cities—new and old, great and small, living and long dead—were scattered about the Bay, as well as more villages than could be counted, yet a body could still cast an eagle eye shoreward at any point and find a stretch of land as pristine and unspoiled as the day it was made.
Angwyn was where all the elements came together. Named for the ancient fortress of legend reputedly situated on the opposite headland, the city benefited from far easier access by both land and water, the one up the rangy southern peninsula formed between bay and ocean, the other across a gently sloping shoreline, hospitable to craft of any size. The same couldn’t be said for its rival, the northern peninsula—a wilder, far more elemental setting, where cliffs reared straight up from the water like fortress walls, sheer, forbidding crags that topped better than a thousand feet in places. It was thickly forested, old growth and sacred, the trees as formidable as the ground they stood on. There were no man-made paths through that wilderness and permission was only rarely given to follow the trails that did exist. The folk there (none of them human) liked their privacy and had little interest in the affairs of the hustling, bustling Daikini-come-lately across the way.
Which, in turn, ceded effective control over Gate and Bay to the sovereign of Angwyn. Over generations the royal family used that advantage to build a state of unsurpassed wealth and power, renowned throughout the Daikini realms on this side of the world. They called themselves High King of Land and Sea, but if some thought that hubris, none had yet challenged it.
Thorn and his companions had a quick passage downriver, doing better in a week than Geryn had on horseback in three. The trooper proved an amiable companion; within a day, he was volunteering for odd chores—he could peel potatoes as well as any of the crew and only needed to be given instructions once—and Maulroon wasn’t about to refuse the offer of an extra pair of trained eyes on sentry watch. The shipmaster kept his boat in midstream all along the upper reaches of the river, until they were well past the ruined trading town of Saginak; he didn’t anchor for the night, either, but instead trusted the Wyrrn to act as pilots and keep the boat safe from grounding.
Thorn took advantage of the journey to put his own personal house in order, a task as welcome to his companions as to himself; it was long overdue. The beard was the first to go, the sight of bare cheeks and chin a startlement to him after their decade and more undercover. There were hollows he didn’t remember, but likewise a strength to the underlying bone structure that was also new to him. His hair he decided mainly to leave alone, aside from a good trim to neaten its length and some serious and regular brushing to work out an ungodly mess of knots and tangles. He kept the braids as well, in memorial to one lost friend, as his hair’s autumnal coloring was for the other. And for the first time in what seemed an age, he smiled—honestly and truly—at his memories of them.
It wasn’t the battles he recalled, alone in Maulroon’s cabin.
The evening breeze set the boat to creaking and groaning, reminding him of the little grunts and groans an old man makes trying to settle himself comfortably to bed for the night, the river gurgled alongside, keel and rudder churned a small, hissing wake behind them to mark their passing. It was their laughter that came most easily to him, the delight each took in tangling with the other, testing their wits as enthusiastically and joyfully as they did their skill with swords. Madmartigan was a hair better with the blade, but Sorsha had no equal on horseback. He could dance, but she had a way with songs that could set a room alight with passion or make a heart break. His personality shone with such blazing determination that there appeared no room in him for shadow, even though Thorn knew it was there; the shadow in Sorsha’s soul, though, was plain for all to see. To outsiders, they seemed like polar opposites, with absolutely nothing in common. Thorn knew better, that in fact they were the most kindred of souls, fulfilled and made whole by the love they’d found for each other. It wasn’t just happiness that sparked between them, but joy.
He missed them terribly. And yet, looking their memories full in the face after so long denying their existence, he found what he should have realized all along that they weren’t really gone.
He dreamed of them that night, and Kiaya and the children, and slept more soundly and more peacefully than he had since last he saw them all.
* * *
—
As promised, Maulroon placed them in good hands, a close cousin, one of the senior captains of his clan; fair winds and a fast current made this last leg of their voyage from the fork of the Maraguay an uneventful echo of the first. Strangely, only a single Wyr worked this boat—a young male, the equivalent, Thorn decided, of Geryn’s age, named Ryn Taksemanyin—and Thorn noted that others of his seagoing kind were increasingly few and far between in the water as they approached the Bay. The brownies saw him and Daquise—the ranking Wyr on Maulroon’s vessel, who held the post of second mate—talking while Thorn and Geryn were moving from one boat to the other, a conversation punctuated by sidelong glances in Thorn’s direction. There was no chance to ask what that was all about; by the time the brownies reported what they’d seen to Thorn, the two boats were well on their separate ways, and afterward Ryn kept his distance from the Nelwyn. He was always in sight, though, and Thorn suspected always watching.
Ryn’s natural pose was to stand slightly hunched in on himself, thus making it hard to determine more than a sense of his true height, which Thorn guessed was also of a piece with Geryn’s; sleek, lustrous mahogany fur equally camouflaged shape and strength. He had a human arrangement of limbs, although not quite
in human proportions, most notable for lively, questing eyes and fingers to match. The brownies’ opinion was that he was as natural a pickpocket as they, though of course in no way their equal. He wore no weapons that Thorn could see, nor clothes; his sole adornment was a satchel slung casually off his shoulder and across his body. There wasn’t much bulk to him—the Daikini Pathfinder cut by far the more imposing figure—but Ryn carried himself with the ease of a trained distance swimmer, his power focused in his shoulders and legs. He was at home in the shrouds or on the deck as in the water—which was saying quite a lot—and his surface air of madcap abandon belied a fundamental maturity that far outstripped his years. His role aboard was that of a common sailor, yet from the measure Thorn had taken of him, Thorn would have assumed him to be captain or mate.
The Nelwyn took a taste of the river himself, and regularly smelled the breeze—with his own nostrils and the eagles’ as well, just to be sure—but found none of the taint Maulroon had spoken of. That bothered him. Never for a moment did he doubt his friend’s word, nor the big man’s sensitivity—the lack of Wyrrn was proof of both—but in absolute terms his own awareness was far greater. A taint for Maulroon should have been like a stench to Thorn…
…yet he sensed nothing.
They’d thought the keelboat large but there was no comparison between it and the ocean-capable dromond they were aboard now. Three times the length of Maulroon’s vessel, displacing hundreds of tons to the score or so of Maulroon’s keelboat, each of its two masts supporting a huge, triangular lateen sail whose yards were themselves longer than the masts were tall, she was built to carry a tremendous weight of cargo through the roughest of seas. The line of the hull was curved like a scimitar blade, from its elegantly raked prow built close to the water up to the looming stern castle. Here, as on the river, Wyrrn normally served in a multitude of capacities: they acted as pilots, they watched the vagaries of wind and water, warning well in advance of storms that might threaten the ship or keeping it from being becalmed, they made sure to keep the hull swept clean of barnacles and other marine growth. They were an integral part of the ship’s defenses and their greater-than-Daikini strength made them a godsend when it came to humping cargo. Water was their element as much as the Cascanis’, where one lived and the other made their livelihood; the smartest move the two nations ever made was to forge the age-old alliance between them.
Shadow Moon Page 11