Wren Journeymage

by Sherwood Smith

  Teressa plumped down onto a chair, heedless of her fine gown. “Then scry her now. The party can wait.”

  “No it can’t,” Tyron said. “They are all gathered on the terrace, the servants with the torches, the musicians, the food, the boat-tenders, and your guests. All waiting for you.”

  “I don’t care. Not if Wren’s in trouble.”

  Tyron shook his head. “But you need to care. It won’t do Wren any good at all if word gets out. This matter has to remain ours only. And Halfrid’s, as soon as I can contact him. And I will, when this party is safely—that is, when it’s over.”

  “Ours only,” she repeated. “Who is it you don’t want finding out?”

  Tyron said, “Your guests await you, your majesty.”

  “Stop it.” She took a quick step around the room, then halted directly before him, eye to eye. “You can’t just scry really quick?”

  “I’m not good enough. I need Halfrid’s big stone, with all its magical enhancements. You know my strengths lie elsewhere, not in scrying. But I thought you’d better know.”

  Teressa paced back and forth. “Can you summon Fliss?”

  “No. She’s got to do those spells, and promptly on time according to the guild schedule, or we’ll get complaints from Fil Gaen that we’re trifling with the treaty. You know the treasury cannot afford for us to have to start paying customs on all our shipping.”

  “We need our own harbor,” Teressa muttered.

  “But not right now,” Tyron reminded her. “Anyway, if Fliss had known anything more, she would have let me know.”

  Teressa started toward the door, then whirled around. “Why did you tell me now?”

  “Because I just found out. Because I thought you ought to know. Because . . . because if there is any possible connection with anything anyone might say tonight—and I’m being as general as I can in order to prevent an argument neither of us has time for—you might learn a clue.”

  Teressa compressed her lips against a retort.

  Tyron lifted his hands toward his head, then yanked them down. “Like I said before, I don’t know where Wren is. The last she was seen was at our mage’s place in Hroth Falls, and she scryed me the night she reached the harbor. The night someone else arrived here. The two events might—I’m going to repeat might—not be coincidental.”

  Teressa let her breath out in a sharp sigh. “All right. Fair enough. Let’s go.”

  They descended the last staircase. Tyron left her without another word—no Have fun! Or I hope this will be a great party—and abruptly dashed through a side exit to the terrace. She had to face the truth, that he not only hated the idea of this party, but he’d been put to a great deal of work to prepare for it, even though he knew he wouldn’t have any fun. He and everybody else. But nobody said a word to her—though they probably did, in plenty, to one another—because she was the queen.

  I wanted this party, so I’d better get it started.

  She squared her shoulders, smoothed her damp palms down her gown, and marched alone toward the glass window-doors.

  The waiting trumpeters sprang to attention and blew the royal fanfare. Beyond, in the light of the torches held by tall, impassive servants, her guests stopped talking and performed their courtly bows.

  Teressa looked past them. Hawk stood at the back next to a slim, silver-haired figure in a mage student’s robe.

  Teressa forced her gaze away. The torch bearers all seemed curiously tall; she realized she recognized some of those faces. They were not servants, though they wore the servant livery. They were guards.

  No one had told her about that! Anger surged through her again, but she dismissed it. Too late now.

  She forced a smile onto her lips, though it felt as false as her words when she made a brief speech welcoming everyone. Very brief, and then she nodded to the waiting musicians, who began playing the old melodies associated with double-moon nights.

  The guests parted to the left and right and she walked across the terrace, down the steps, and onto the grassy sward leading down to the lakeside. The air was still warm, but the faintest trace of a breeze stirred whispering through the trees, and brushed against her hot cheeks.

  Little flags had been set up on the boats to indicate which belonged to whom; some were decorated with flowers and ribbons, others were plain. Servants brought out the food in baskets and placed them in the boats.

  Hawk appeared at her side. An echo of anger, and resentment, kept her silent. Though she might be testing him this was, in a sense, his party, too. She’d made it happen partly as a challenge, but also to please him.

  Tyron didn’t want me to tell Hawk that Wren is missing.

  “What’s wrong?” Hawk’s voice was low, and completely without its customary mocking edge. She almost didn’t recognize it as his voice.

  She threw back her head—and her restless gaze caught sight of Orin at the inlet near the palace. She was talking earnestly to Tyron, his head bent to catch whatever it was she was saying.

  Why did Orin have to wear that hair of hers hanging down, when all the other mage students wore braids or tails? Because she wants Tyron to see it.

  Teressa turned her back on them. “Nothing.”

  Hawk held out his hand toward the waiting boat.

  She climbed in, skirts carefully bunched at either side and sat all the way forward. He stepped in after, sat on the rowing bench and he picked up the oars.

  Not for Hawk the silent servant sitting in the back to do all the work; he rowed easily, well, as if he’d done it before, many times. They sped through the water, which rilled away in a quiet wake, gleaming with silvery-blue highlights reflecting light from the two moons riding in the sky, one low in the north, one higher in the south. Hawk reached the middle before anyone else did, though they were hardly alone; over the black, smooth water drifted talk and laughter and music.

  Laughter and music. At least the courtiers seemed to be having a good time. Some of her tension faded.

  Hawk lifted the oars at last, and the boat drifted to a stop. “Would you like anything to eat or drink?” he asked, still in that rare, ordinary voice. He sounded so strange, like any other young man, and not at all like the mocking Hawk with his quick, knife-edged cracks that everyone was so used to.

  “No,” she said. “But if you want to occupy the time with food or wine or whatever else is in that basket, feel free.”

  He leaned his forearms on his knees, his hands loose. He made no effort to touch her. “Regrets?” She could see twin gleams of reflected torchlight in his black eyes.

  “Yes. No. Yes. You tell me,” she finally said. “Do I have anything to regret?”

  “It’s almost—almost, I say, but not quite—irresistible to make a gesture to your guardians by whisking you away. Just for a time, to set them all in a bustle.”

  “Guardians?”

  He grinned, his even white teeth flashing in the reflected light of all those torches along the shoreline. “Did you really not know the trees are full of archers, the grounds of mages, and there’s so much protective magic in the air I can smell it?” His mocking voice was back. “Not to mention there must be a hundred guards and horses stationed around the perimeter of your garden, probably cursing me, if not us both, for condemning them to a thoroughly boring night when they could be in town celebrating with everyone else in Cantirmoor.”

  “Cursing? Even the horses?” she asked, to hide the flush of anger she felt.

  “Even the horses,” he stated. “If one could understand their whinnies and whuffs.”

  A sudden image of Connor’s wide gray-blue eyes flickered in Teressa’s mind. “Would you want to understand horses if you could?”

  “No.” Hawk draped a careless arm along the edge of the railing, his hand resting a palm’s breadth from her shoulder. She could hear his breathing. “I don’t care what horses think. I just want them to bear me to wherever I am going, and then they are free to do whatever it is horses like to do. People, no
w, are different.”

  She said nothing.

  “Did you know about the guardians?”

  His other hand lifted lazily, taking in the trees surrounding the lake. The closest ones, Teressa noted, had been hung with tiny lanterns that twinkled prettily, adding to the soft glow of diffuse light. She hadn’t ordered that, though she liked the effect. A military purpose as well?

  She turned her back to them and studied Hawk, whose sardonic profile was etched against that peaceful background.

  “Do you,” she asked, “know why they are there?”

  He mimed surprise at her question. “Of course. They don’t trust me. We already established that they are waiting for me to try to wrest you away, without seeming to realize that I never make the same mistake twice.”

  “You’d win yourself a broken nose if you did,” she replied, doubling a fist and then dropping it into her lap.

  He laughed. “So you’ve kept up your warlike training, then, I take it?”

  “It seemed the right thing to do.”

  “I wish I could see you at it.” He flashed a grin.

  “Why? To laugh?”

  He waved his free hand lazily; the one still lay along the boat’s rail. His breathing was slow and steady. Not quick, like hers. “When I first came here several years ago, you were merely a target, meek and solemn and boring as you were. When you pulled that knife on me that very last day, it took me by surprise. Few ever take me by surprise. My early survival, you might say, depended on my not being taken by surprise. During the war, when I saw you with your dirty hair short and tangled, that chin of yours jutting out, and a sword in your hands, you became interesting.”

  His voice was low, soft. Reflective. The mockery was not gone, but it was faint, enticingly faint.

  She shook her head, not wanting banter, or even compliments. They were too easy. “What I want to know is whether or not you can be trusted. And please don’t mouth out any easy lies.”

  “But I never lie.”

  “Which could be a lie.”

  He laughed, his teeth flashing again, and this time the nearer hand flicked up in acknowledgement of a hit. “Lying is easy. I did it all the time when I was small. Part of the survival I mentioned. It was easy, and I never regretted it. But at length it became too easy. The battle of wits is the sweeter when both sides tell the truth—though sometimes they do not tell all of it.”

  “So that’s it? We are at war, you and I?”

  “War?” He laughed softly, and moved at last.

  She heard his breathing change, and knew what would come next, for the heat of promise kindled inside her, the same flare of heat she felt when he touched her, when his smile was sudden and genuine, but now the heat was a steady flame and she sat very still as his hand came up to caress her cheek, trailing along the edge of her jaw to her chin, that big square chin that would have been so handsome on a prince, but on a princess she scorned as merely awkward.

  From there his hand drifted around the back of her neck, and she gazed steadily into his dark eyes, until his face was close, and she could feel his breath on her forehead. She made a tiny sound and put her hands on his shoulders, pulling him close, closer, until their lips met, warm and sweet, and the flame ignited into a glory that burned the lake, the kingdom, the world and its worries all away.

  Seventeen

  “They’re lulling us,” Lambin said. “Putting out those lanterns one by one.”

  Patka leaned out of the boat so far that she was in danger of falling over the side.

  Thad hooked her fingers in the crook of her elbow and yanked her back. “You really can’t see any better that way.”

  Patka let out a loud sigh. “I don’t think they’re going to wait until morning to attack.”

  No one disagreed.

  A faint patch of light behind a thin band of clouds showed Little Moon rising slowly on the northern horizon and another glowing patch high in the southern sky marked where Big Moon was.

  Wren tucked her book back inside her tunic.

  She’d done a long session of spell-practice, watched anxiously by Danal and warily by Patka. That ended when the pirates began dousing their lights.

  Patka and Danal sat at the sails, tense and still. Thad waited at the tiller, Lambin with his bow. They had furled their sail so they wouldn’t catch any reflected glow, no matter how faint, as the wind was still dormant.

  Wash-wash, wash-wash. The water lapped against the hull, and here and there fish splooshed up from the water and back down again, vanishing beneath the ripples.

  Patka asked sarcastically, “Do those rockheads really think we’re stupid enough to believe six attacking ships are just settling down for the night?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Thad replied shortly. “Since they aren’t.”

  Everyone fell silent, watching, waiting. Wren’s stomach growled from time to time. She drank more water. So did the others.

  “They’re still lulling us,” Patka said a long time later, when the light patches behind the clouds were balanced in the sky, one low in the north, the bigger one low in the south.

  “Keep your voice down,” Thad whispered. “Remember. Voices carry a long way over water when there is no wind.”

  Not long after, Danal gasped. “Look!” He whispered.

  “Where? Where?” everyone muttered at once, looking around.

  “There. Just now. A dark thing. I dunno, it was just on the edge of my sight, and when I turned, it was like, I don’t know—”

  “Like a mast passing in front of the moonglow?” Thad leaned forward, talking in a low, urgent voice as he squinted sternward.

  “That’s what it was,” Danal whispered. “It was thin. Hard to see. I thought it was just my eyes.”

  “The big ships must be rowing,” Lambin murmured. “Should we row, too?”

  “No,” Thad whispered. “Remember those longboats they put down at sunset? We don’t want to row right into ‘em.”

  “What do we do?” Patka turned to Wren, her face a pale round shape in the darkness.

  Wren frowned. “I wish I knew how well they can see us. Right now our best chance is to be as invisible as we can.”

  “Our hull is dark, our mast small. How about another of your illusion spells?” Thad asked.

  Wren shook her head. “I daren’t hold it long. It makes me too tired, and I want all my strength for the real fight.”

  Thad said, “Now that I think of it, maybe we’d better lie flat. If they’re peering through their spyglasses, our faces might be visible.”

  They hunkered down, leaning their elbows on the benches and peering over the rail. “Now we really can’t see anything,” Danal muttered.

  Thad said, “How about this? If we spot anything the least bit suspicious, Lambin, you send up a fire arrow. It’ll show us where everyone is.”

  “Including us.” Patka sighed softly.

  “Can’t be helped,” Lambin put in. “And if they’re slowly closing in, they pretty much already know where we are.”

  They fell silent once more.

  Wren peered down the length of the boat. It was difficult to see where Thad was, except as a vague shape, dark against an even darker background. “You have the most experience on the sea of any of us. What would you do if you were in charge of those pirates?”

  “I’ve been thinkin’ on that,” Thad said. “I’ve only been on the one cruise, and there weren’t no pirates. I don’t know their tricks, except what I’ve been told. I think them longboats are circling around to come at us from the other direction. So all of ‘em can attack us at once.”

  Silence once again.

  Wren crossed her arms on the bench and laid her head on them. The wood smelled dank, salt mixing with mold. She could feel as well as hear the steady wash-wash of the water on the hull. She knew the others would keep watch. She would soon need every bit of her strength. She closed her eyes, drifting into a light doze, for she was hungry as well as tired from the magic making
of the morning, and her preparations during the long afternoon.

  So when a hand grabbed her shoulder in an urgent, tight grip, she jerked upright, trying not to yell.

  “I heard something,” Thad whispered into her ear. “Oar splash. Close.” The boat rocked a little as he clambered his way back again.

  Fear and tension snapped through Wren as she reached for the first of the arrows she’d worked on that afternoon. There was the tiny notch she’d made to distinguish it from the others.

  “This one.” She barely breathed the words as she handed it to Lambin.

  Everyone took their positions. Thad was at the tiller, Patka and Danal scrambled to one of the rowing benches in the middle, oars to hand, and Wren and Lambin scooted as far forward as they could get, to give the rowers room.

  Lambin pulled the arrow back. Wren whispered the fire spell, and Lambin shot. The tiranthe string he’d sacrificed to make the bow hummed softly in the still air as the smoldering arrow arced up, and up, then burst into a small fireball.

  Wren had warned everyone to shade their eyes against it or the fireball would keep them from seeing anything. They flattened their palms over their eyes until after the flash. For a heartbeat they could see clearly all around them. There were nearly twenty longboats grouped to the west of them, one just within arrow shot. The longboats were closing in on some sort of debris in the water, not on the gig, but they were still horribly close.

  Somebody on the closest pirate longboat gave a yell, pointing violently toward the gig as the burning arrow fell into the sea.

  Darkness promptly closed in, but they could hear the excited splash of oars.

  Simple spells, one at a time, Wren reminded herself. A clear mind.

  “Crawlies first,” Wren said.

  “Don’t waste any,” Patka muttered.

  “I won’t,” Lambin promised, groping for the arrow Wren was handing him. Without taking his gaze away from a long dark shape just slightly darker than everything around it, he fitted the arrow to his bow, raised it, took careful aim—and shot.

  Wren held her breath. No splash—

  “Auuuuugh!” The pirates in the closest boat started howling.