“All right, then let’s begin right at the very beginning, the Crisis Rules. Which, of course, I promptly forgot as soon as crisis started up on our bow with the fire arrows and booms. And that’s why we have to drill them a few million times.”
“Crisis Rules,” Danal repeated. “Drill. Got it.”
o0o
And so, they sailed ever southward, always out of sight of land but not of birds. In the night sky the moons slowly worked their arcs, chasing one another a little closer each night toward Two Moons Night. The days blended one into the other as Wren drilled Danal on the basics, practicing steadily herself.
Each day Wren woke ready for Danal to get bored and give up. She knew how many students showed up at Cantirmoor’s Magic School every season, and how few of them stayed with it.
But when he showed no signs of losing interest, she finally brought out her magic book and showed it to him. Danal crouched over it for a long time, his strong, sailor-rough hands propped on his skinny knees, as he pored over Wren’s early writings.
“I wish I had a book,” he muttered one morning. “I’m gonna get me one. Soon’s we land.”
Wren remembered saying exactly the same thing when Tyron showed her his own magic book. More and more Danal reminded Wren of herself, enjoying learning magic just for the sake of learning it.
After a couple weeks of just Basics, she taught him his first illusion spell. That night he performed his first spell, the two of them sneaking anxious peeks at Patka asleep in the makeshift tent.
When his spell worked Danal was so delighted he could not talk for a long time. He just kept repeating the spell, making a little toad hop round and round the gig’s rail.
When the others woke up, Danal chortled, “Watch!”
Wren backed into the prow, hiding a sigh of regret.
But Danal knew his sister best. Patka watched his illusory frog dance along the rail, her mouth open. When the little image vanished with a soft pop, she pointed at where it had been. “You did that, Dan?”
Danal crossed his arms, his grin wide and proud. “Wren’s been teachin’ me.”
Patka turned to Wren, her mouth still open. Then she looked back at the rail. At last she said, her expression no longer hostile, just puzzled, “You can learn magic?”
“Why not?” Danal asked. “Anyone can, it turns out. You just have to work at it. And, if you go to the school Wren talked about, you won’t be learning magic that hurts anybody, which is all right with me.”
Patka said, softly, “Danal. Mage. Huh!” Then she laughed. “Let’s have that frog again! Only give it the captain’s face, can you?”
“I’ll try,” Danal said. “But I dunno if I can hold the two images . . .”
He tried, failed, laughed, and tried again.
When he finally gave up, claiming he felt a little dizzy from all that expended effort, Patka shook her head. “I can’t get over it. I thought you had to be noble. Or the like. Not just anyone. Like us.”
Danal pointed at Wren. “She’s not noble.”
Wren said, “Some people do have talents for magic. And others have talents that work against the rules of magic,” she added. “Like my friend Connor. When he first was sent to the mage school, he ended up turning a master into a turtle, and no one knew how! They didn’t know about his talents.”
“How do you get those?” Patka asked.
“Well, that’s what he set out to discover. It seems that the talents run in families descended from the Hrethans, or the Snow Folk. Or maybe the Iyon Daiyin. But the wild talents can be dangerous,” she added, remembering Connor lying for two weeks under a tree during the winter of the war. Anyone else would have quietly frozen to death. Even so, it had taken him a long time to recover.
And yet he had—somehow—learned enough to cause an entire mountain range to crumble.
“Very wild,” she repeated softly, holding her book against herself with Connor’s note inside. Where are you, Connor?
“I’ve heard of those Iyon Daiyin. They used to live in caves,” Lambin said. “I’ve learned songs about them. Really old songs. It’s said they came from somewhere beyond the stars.”
“Iyon Daiyin,” Thad repeated, then he shrugged. “That’s for later. Here’s what’s botherin’ me now, where we might be in relation to land. I wish we had a chart. Seems to me we’ve come enough south that we might begin looking for Okidai Island.”
Lambin leaned forward. “Okidai, Oki-Dai, Okan Daiyin. That’s where the Iyon Daiyin first settled when they came through the world gate! It’s called Okan Daiyin Island in the oldest songs.”
Thad sighed, rolling his eyes.
Wren grinned. “We don’t know if the Iyon Daiyin were the forebears of the Hrethan, or different people from a different world. Anyway, my friend Connor was heading to the Summer Islands to find out, and I aim to join him.”
“Maybe he’s there. Maybe not.” Thad stood up to stretch. “I heard the first mate say that the biggest harbor for east-west ships as well as north-south is at Okidai Island.”
“Then that’s the place for us.” Wren put her book away.
Patka threw her hands wide. “But if—”
“What’s that?” Thad’s sharp voice broke in.
Everyone stood up as Thad pointed to three . . . four . . . five . . . six sails nicked the sky. As they watched, the ships split into groups of three, one hauling tightly to the west, the other moving southward in the gig’s wake.
“If we were aboard our old ship,” Thad murmured, one hand shading his eyes. “I’d say they were chasing us.”
“A gig with five young slubs on it who haven’t so much as a copper between them?” Danal scoffed.
“I don’t think they see us yet,” Lambin said, his hand shading his eyes as well. “Sit down again! Thad, you saw their masts first. Just nicking the sky, hulls down below the horizon. That has to mean what you saw were top gallants and topsails.”
Thad nodded. “They’re hull down still, which means we might not be visible to their lookouts yet. Let’s make sure of that.” He looked skyward then seaward, the wind blowing back his short dark hair. “With the wind sitting where it is, we can angle our sail so they won’t see it. Lean on the tiller. Run southwest.”
Lambin added, pointing to Danal and Wren, “You two better catch some shut-eye, just in case there might be trouble, and I don’t mean from them. Look at the eastern sky.”
They all peered at the horizon against the glare of sun on sea, where they discovered the flat gray line of an approaching storm.
“At least if we get rain, my scalp won’t itch so much from this salt,” Thad said, scratching his head.
Patka and Lambin moved to the sail, and Thad to the tiller. Wren and Danal crawled into the little tent, where they helped themselves to their ration of the biscuits, now hard and stale, and the nuts and raisins that were all that remained of the food Patka had raided when they left their former ship.
A good drink of rainwater, kept pure by magic, and they spread out on the clothes they’d piled at the bottom of the gig to make the bare planks easier to sleep on.
Wren was tired from being up all night watching and magic-making. She dropped right into sleep. Her dreams slowly turned uneasy; she kept trying to climb a wall, only the wall tipped, and she was left hanging over a great precipice. Every time she got her feet under her the world would tip again, until she finally woke and discovered the gig leaning at such a sharp angle she’d rolled against their piled knapsacks. She was alone in the tent.
Wren crawled out, to be hit in the face with flying spray. She gasped, her eyes stinging, and stood up, wiping her sleeve across her face.
“Thought you’d be out right after me,” Danal said, laughing.
“What’s wrong?” Wren asked, trying to blink away the salt sting. The world seemed to be gray—sky, sea, air. Rain slanted sideways, thudding into the trembling sail. Thad and Lambin both held the tiller, which strained against their arms. The gig lay at a
slant, speeding over the water fast enough to send spray feathering high into the air on the high side, and foaming to the railing on the low.
“They’re chasing us,” Patka shouted from her place at the sail, both hands on the sheet-ropes.
Danal scrambled to her aid.
“Us?” Wren asked. “Why?”
“Good question,” Patka yelled back with some of her old hostility. “You said you had enemies. Would those include some customer you tricked, or did some bad magic spell on?”
Wren was tired and her eyes hurt, and she was still hungry after the scanty meal. Before she could stop herself she retorted, “No, my enemies would include a very wicked sorcerer king who happened to get deposed after nearly destroying Meldrith. And I was there to see it happen.”
As soon as the words were out she regretted them, but they, like the wind, had sped away, leaving the other four staring at her.
“Andreus of Senna Lirwan?” Lambin asked, his eyes wide.
“That’s the one,” Wren said, and was going to scoff at the very idea of Andreus coming after her. But then she remembered those words the kidnappers had said that day in Hroth Harbor, and she shook her head. Stranger things were possible.
Lambin was whispering to Thad and the others. When Wren realized they were all looking at her, she sighed. “What now?”
Lambin said, tentatively, “King Andreus was the one who stole Princess Teressa Rhisadel of Meldrith. There was a Wren who got her back. In the form of a dog. I know two songs about it, in two different languages.”
Wren looked away, her face and neck prickling with heat.
Thad said, in a careful voice, “You wouldn’t be that Wren, would you?”
Wren opened her hands. “I wasn’t the only one who rescued Te—ah, the princess. I had two friends with me.”
Patka said slowly, “So you know that princess. That must explain—”
Wren groaned. “Never mind about princesses! What should we do about them?” She pointed at the ships out there on the ocean.
“The wind is on our side,” Thad said, sure of himself again. “That will help the gig. As long as the wind stays strong we’ll be faster than they are.”
They faced the ships bearing down from the north, masts aslant, and three racing southward to box them.
“What if the wind dies?” Patka said, tugging on her kerchief fringes.
“What can we do?” Thad spread his hands. “The question really is, what will they do to us?”
Wren squared her shoulders. Well, so they were being chased, six to one. Six to one-half.
But that one-half had magic, and a lot of imagination.
And—
Remember the chickens, Wren!
With a grim smile, she ducked back inside the tent, pulled her pack from the pile, and yanked her book out from the center of her clothes.
Danal poked his head in. “What are you going to do?”
“If they catch up,” Wren said, “I plan to be ready for them.”
Thirteen
From the harbormaster’s rambling house atop a ridge in the northernmost harbor on Okidai Island, there came a loud bellow. “Where’s that blasted Eye-Reader?”
The sound carried to the long, low building below, where aides, runners, and assistants from the military, naval, guild, and harbor branches of the government were housed. In the big central room their usual custom was to while away the time playing a complicated local game with tiles, colored pebbles, and coins.
Prince Connor Dareneth Shaltar gambled along with the rest. He had little interest in gambling, but his friends always had a game going. He liked being able to talk and laugh with the others as they played—and he’d discovered that the never-ending game was the best place to hear all the local news.
“Uh-oh, they must have caught themselves a bad one,” the stable-master’s assistant observed, chuckling deep in his chest.
“Last night,” said a spotlessly uniformed naval third mate. She yawned. “Admiral himself got involved.”
“Who? What?” several voices rose.
The new stable hand shifted his massive body so he could study Connor from under a truly impressive brow ridge. “Aren’t you the Eye-Reader?”
“Noon to evening shift,” Connor said. “And evening meant late last night. Every thief and fraud on Okidai Island must have been asleep yesterday, they caught so many. But none of ‘em were anything important.”
Faces turned toward the young naval mate, who self-consciously smoothed her already-smooth green tunic. “We had a brush with pirates, a few days to the north. We took a single prisoner and came straight here. The flagship docked at midnight last night.”
Hoots and cackles of derision sounded around the table. “Throw a coin out into the water and you hit fifty pirates,” said one of the off-duty guards. “You ship wights bring ‘em in by the boatload every day.”
“But most of ‘em don’t catch the Admiral’s eye,” the mate retorted, tossing a black braid back over her shoulder. “Hey. I see three and ten. I get two blues.”
“Four greens here—my four tops your three,” one of the other guards put in, leaning a long arm down to move markers on the table.
Several others started to speak as the betting began on the next round of play, only to be drowned out by the Harbor Commander’s angry roar, “I don’t care whose shift it is, I want Red! Someone roust out that stumblebum oaf! Now!”
Connor’s friends among the players assumed the wooden faces of people pretending they hadn’t heard the boss yelling. Connor was very popular—he was friendly, generous with his pay, and he was also quite handsome, the girls all agreed when he wasn’t around to hear it. They liked his tall, broad-shouldered form, and his pleasant, open face framed by waving red hair.
“Looks like you’re the one wanted, Red.” A scrawny little courier nudged Connor.
“So it seems.” Connor gathered up his markers. “Think it means extra pay?”
“Extra trouble’s more like it,” the naval mate said sourly, “from all the running around I saw on the Admiral’s flagship last night.” She quirked a wry smile. “If you’re an oaf, why’s the Harbor Jaw want you?”
“Because he’s your good-at-his-job oaf, as opposed to the rest of us stupid, lazy, rotten, thieving, and so on types of oaf,” the tall guard retorted, and everyone who was used to the Harbor Commander’s insults, which were both plentiful and equally spread about, nodded in agreement. “But Red, here, is your rarity: your real oaf, of the sort that trips over his own feet.”
Connor left on the others’ good-natured laughter, smiling and shaking his head.
You’re seen just once stumbling on the cobblestones, and everyone calls you an oaf. That was all right. He was used to it. People had been calling him an absent-minded oaf, a fool, a stumbling fumbler, all his life, because only a very few knew the truth: that when his gaze was turned upward in seeming vacancy, he was listening to the speech of birds. Or when he was standing in the stable looking as if he’d lost his wits, he was listening to the rumbles and whuffs of the horses, and what they had to say about their riders. Most of which he would never repeat.
He’d understood the speech of animals and birds all his life, and only within the past couple of years had he come to perceive the long, slow rhythms of thought shared by trees, plains-connected grasses, and other silent, living things.
But to his fellow humans he was absent-minded, maybe a little slow, who could fight well with a quarterstaff but refused to carry a sword. He also had a knack for using artifacts of the very old, very mysterious magic left behind by the Iyon Daiyin.
And so he had an easy life here, with good pay. All he had to do was sit with the magical object called the Eye, and determine through its changing colors if those the Commander had cause to question spoke the truth as they knew it. It turned out Connor was the very best at that.
He reached for the staff leaning against the door and hurried out into the court. The day was hot. Su
n glared off the stones. In the distance, sea birds squabbled over food. He looked about for the pair of jackdaws that had so unaccountably appeared on his travels the summer before, and several times since, usually when his life was about to change.
Uh oh. There, and there. One perched on the roof of the Commander’s headquarters, the other on the roof of the thick stone building used as a holding cell for prisoners. Their black jackdaw heads twitched from side to side, first one eye, then the other, but the birds did not cry out.
Extra guards had been posted at every pathway leading up or down, as well as around the building. As he passed, they nodded or flicked hands in greeting, and Connor nodded back.
Connor reached the doorway just as a tall older woman emerged, the other Eye-Reader. “There you are. Commander wants you for this one.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “This is a stinker, everyone’s sayin’.”
Connor lowered his voice. “One of the Skull Pirates?”
“Near as bad. Some say worse. One of the rowers told us they think they caught one a’ Black Hood o’ Tomad’s fleet.”
Connor whistled softly as the woman gave him a grateful smile and retreated to the scribes’ chamber, which had been her first job until the Commander discovered that sometimes she could “read” the Eye. But it always gave her a terrible headache. Connor was the only one who could read it all the time.
Connor slipped past the waiting room where all the first-year runners waited to be sent on errands. He ducked past the extra guards, and the sea captains in the green of the Okidai Navy.
As soon as Connor reached the doorway, the Commander, a short, squat man with a long gray beard, sat back in his chair. “There you are!”
Connor rested his staff just inside the door.
The tall, thin Fleet Admiral was also there, his lined, sour face impatient. His fine green coat was freshly brushed, and his scarlet sash of office meant he was going up the mountain to the royal castle for an interview. The Admiral, everyone knew, hated being on land, and he also hated dressing up, so his appearance meant not just urgent but royal business.
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