by Holly Lisle
He would not be able to sleep. That kiss had felt so real. Her hand on his chest and her soft voice had made his heart race.
He’d tracked her once, and she was gone. Beyond his reach.
But she’d gone in search of a miracle, and in the dark of night, alone, with only defeat and despair before him, he suddenly had to hope that she had found it. It made no sense. He could not justify what he was going to do; not to anyone. He planned to risk death to search out an answer to a question that he already knew.
“I’m praying for that miracle,” he said to himself, to the Hawkspar who had been in his dream, to his missing sister, to the men with whom he’d worked and trained and fought all the many years who would never accept the suicidal madness of trying to track the dead.
He settled on the floor. Promised himself that he would pull back in his search before he crawled all the way out of his body and left the corpse on the floor for someone else to find. And then he closed his eyes and drew into himself the power of the sea beneath him and the sky above him, the living, breathing energy of the world. He spun out of it the glowing blue sphere, and within the sphere, a fiery red cube. And within that, two intersecting tetrahedrons, one of gold and one of yellow. The powers of the universe flowed through the shapes of his Hagedwar, refracting and separating the energies of all existence the way prisms broke light into rainbow colors.
He expanded the Hagedwar until it was huge, and he sat in the very center of it, enfolded in yellow and gold and red and blue. From where he sat, the light surrounding him was brilliant white, pure and clean. And the songs the universe sang flowed through his skin, caressing, soothing.
He wanted that comfort to keep him anchored. To keep his spirit in his flesh. He wanted something to make the pain he was going to feel not so bad. He needed a miracle. That didn’t mean he was fool enough to think he’d find one.
With the Hagedwar in place, he then let his spirit drift. He was looking for the shape of her; he knew it so well. He had marked her to find her before, and in doing so had marked himself with her. She would always be the only key that could fit into that one lock he had forged.
His search would require time. He started in Greton, in Gerstaggen, in the places where she had been last. Her traces still lingered there; they would for some time yet, at least for him. He could feel several explosions of violence linked to her presence, moments when everyone around her died simultaneously. And then—
He had lost her before, but now he found clear marks of her presence, in the last room with a brutal, instant death. The Feegash diplomat. She’d killed that one, and he had been alive when Aaran sought Hawkspar before. He had been alive and Hawkspar had been dead, and now … the diplomat was dead, and the trail to Hawkspar moved on.
How could that be?
He couldn’t imagine. But he followed.
She was moving east. East.
As if she hoped to cross Greton and meet up with the ships on the other side?
He tried to figure distances—she was more than a month at best speeds from the nearest point on the opposite coast; he wondered if she hoped the ships would sit at anchor, hidden in the many little coves and bays of the Gold Channel, while she caught up with them. He wondered how that would affect their war against the Ba’afeegash, if they did wait.
As it was, they would be arriving after spring had cleared the mountains and passes around the country of deadly avalanches. A month to two months later would put them into summer—which would give the Tonk a safer and more pleasant trip in, certainly, but which would require the war be decided quickly, before the first snows of autumn. The weather at high altitudes could destroy them if they tarried too long.
Still … she’d survived. If she lived, could the Tonk still have hope? The diplomat was dead, the traitor was dead, everyone who had been anywhere near the traitor was dead. Had Hawkspar found—no, had she made—their miracle?
He tried to reach her, as he had reached her before, when she had still been in the Citadel and he had been racing to save her. He wanted to hear her voice, to reassure her that he knew she was there.
He had no great skills as a Communicator—that portion of the Hagedwar was a struggle for him to comprehend and connect with. He tried, but the magic that had connected them through the water and bound them together—the magic that had been born of her desperate prayers and strengthened by the previous Hawkspar’s intervention, was gone. Hawkspar had ceased to pour prayers for rescue into the water. He could find nothing else about her to connect to. He could not move into her, feel what she felt, hear what she heard. He could only find the place where she was, and feel that she was still alive.
He decided he would, as soon as he could, take one of the ship Communicators off the Tonk listening duty and set him to trying to talk to Hawkspar. The fleet needed to know what she would have them do, if she would require them to wait for her to reach them, or if she had some other plan. If she had found their miracle.
He shook off the Hagedwar, and breathed in air that didn’t clog in his lungs for the first time since the Ker Nagile left Gerstaggen Harbor.
And ran up the stairs to wake Haakvar and tell him hope had been reborn.
Hawkspar
Peppika started coughing on the morning of the second day. I’d spent the day before pounding on her back with cups held upside down, as I’d seen the Seru Moonstone do with stubborn cases of lungfill; they did it to break up the congestion. She’d started waking up the night before, desperate for water. I let her drink a little at a time. The first two times she’d vomited anyway, but the third time, she managed to keep it down.
And when she started coughing …
I was grateful I could not see what she brought up. The sounds were bad enough. Still, her sisters and her mother took turns cleaning her up, and letting her drink water. Her temperature still ran high, and she sounded like she might tear herself apart with the coughing. But on the evening of the second day, we had her up and walking, leaning on me on one side and her mother on the other. And her father stood in the hall and wept. Peppika had not been on her feet in months, and every movement hurt her. She was, however, moving again. Awake again. A little walking skeleton, who on the third day started eating greens. And talking.
“I owe you her life,” Beckgert said. “That’s of more value to me than any number of crossings of Greton.”
“She’ll be a long time getting better. And it will be painful for her. Don’t let her linger in bed, though. Make her use her arms and legs, make her lift things and carry. Her body will give her back only what she’s willing to take.”
He patted me on the shoulder. “We’ll do all of it. Would you stay to see Danrgard die for his crimes?”
“No,” I said. “I long for friends and familiar food and talk of familiar things.”
“Then you shall have it,” he said. “Where do you wish to go?”
“The east coast of Greton.”
“It’s a long coast.”
“I know. But the place I want to go is not much of anything, I’ve been told.” I dared not tell him the place I truly wanted to go, which was called the Pirates’ Dance. It was a dangerous stretch of coast on which a line of sharp cliffs full of caves fronted, not on rough and crashing seas, but on cypress-clogged marshes full of poisonous snakes, huge insects, grotesque flying monstrosities, and other hideous beasts. It was the first place I could see the Tonk fleet pulling aside and resting.
So I told him I wanted to go to the town nearest it. “Specifically,” I said, “I want to reach Bragguiydshevhurd. If word I received is correct, three of my Order’s sisters are there, but will not be there much longer.”
“Bragguiydshevhurd?” He chuckled. “We call it Brurd. I know the place. I even have friends there. It’s a decent enough town to do business in, though it’s still a bit small.”
“What I don’t know is how you’ll get me there in time.”
“It would be poor repayment for my daughter’s life i
f I did not get you there in time.”
I’d thought the same thing, but hadn’t said it. He’d not given me much choice, and the time rivers suggested that I would make it to the coast in time if I stayed the three days and helped him.
But I could not see how I would make it.
“You’ll be going by courier,” he told me. “You’ll ride along one of the courier routes that cross Greton in several directions. You’ll use my passage account, and be accompanied by my son-in-law, Weggnrad, whom I would trust with your life as with the lives of my children and grandchildren. By day you’ll ride the courier routes, on courier horses. You’ll be tagged as cargo, with guaranteed delivery. You’ll be in Brurd in six days. You could not have gotten there in less than twenty by any other means.”
Six days.
If he could get me to where I needed to be in the time he claimed, I might even find myself with time to wait.
Six days, and I would discover whether or not Aaran had looked for me. Had tracked me. I prayed he had, because if he had not, he would not know I was waiting for him.
I had to tell him that we had won past despair. That we had hope.
Beckgert told me I would be tagged as cargo. I was to impersonate Beckgert’s oldest unmarried daughter, Seperka, who had received word that her husband-to-be had to sail to his plantation in northern Tandinapalis, and who would have to leave her for more than two years if she was not able to meet and marry him in the short time he still had in Greton. I was told that, because of threats to the family, various security measures had been put into place, and that part of that security in getting her to her wedding on time would be me pretending to be her, and going by a public and different route.
It was, I understood, a mildly risky proposition. Beckgert told me he was confident I would be safe, considering the way I’d demonstrated my talents to him. I was inclined to agree. In exchange for this final favor I was doing him, I would receive free passage on what Beckgert claimed was the most expensive, but fastest, transport route in the entire world. And a disguise that would keep me safe from people who would have much more cause to hate me than Beckgert’s daughter.
Beckgert’s wife, Lebettis, gave me special bride-to-be garb called a culappe to wear that was traditional in her culture. It completely hid the outlines of my body, and every bit of exposed skin, including my hands and face. The hood came with a gauze mesh face cover that I was not to lift except when I was completely alone. Lebettis said the fabric was dark green, and that it hid my features, especially the strangeness of the Eyes. This was important to me.
She showed me how to wear the culappe, and told me that under no circumstances should I let my face or any other part of me be seen.
I quickly checked my future. Whitewater all around, countless things that could happen, none that seemed any more likely than any other. I could see it all ending in success, in failure, in death. But I could see nothing clearly, no event I must be wary of, no person I must not trust. I saw danger, danger everywhere, but nowhere reliably, so that I might know what to avoid.
Beckgert introduced me to his son-in-law, Bont Weggnrad, whom I had not met before, and we exchanged bows. He was a wiry man, not much taller than I was, but tight-muscled. He’d broken a few bones, I could tell, though a long time ago. They’d healed with big knots in them.
Finally, it was time to go. I had to face the fact that, save for my short ride with Beckgert, I had not been on a horse in a very long time. I was strong and healthy and flexible and fit, but even that short trip had left me aching in unusual places. I was uncertain how my body would tolerate a long, hard ride.
We mounted up on Beckgert’s horses, which one of his grooms would keep at the first station to maintain until Weggnrad delivered me and rode back.
We rode that first evening at a leisurely pace.
I hadn’t forgotten riding. I knew the moves, the way of reins and knees and heels and throat. The horse responded easily to me, and I quickly found my way through his gaits, from walk, to trot, to canter, to gallop.
“The fact that you can’t see makes me wonder how you ride. But you do seem to know how to do it.”
“Hard to explain,” I told him. “I can see, after a fashion. Everything is black to me, but it’s different weights of black. I can tell where the holes are in a field, and where you broke your right arm a little above your elbow. I can tell rock from paper painted to look like rock. I can tell which men are mostly muscle, and which are all fluff.”
He cleared his throat. “You can … see through clothes?”
I shrugged. “Clothes and skin. I see people as bone and muscle, and not much else.”
“That can’t be very pretty.”
“It’s all black on black, and it’s better than seeing nothing at all. When they first put the Eyes in me, I thought I would be true-blind for the rest of my life.”
We rode for a while in silence, going at a steady trot because there was no real hurry. We would not be logged in and traveling the Courier Road until morning.
“Did it hurt?” he asked.
I didn’t have to ask what he meant. “Yes. A lot. It still does. They drugged me when they took my eyes and put the stone ones in, but when the drugs wore off, it was nothing but pain for a long time. Now … it can still be so bad sometimes that I think I’ll go mad from it.”
“Why did you have it done?” he asked.
I wasn’t sure if I should answer. When at last I did, I said, “I did it because it was the only way I could protect my family.”
Weggnrad was quiet for a long time. “I understand that. I would do anything to protect mine.”
We rode at an easy trot for a while, and then Weggnrad, my companion for the next six days, said, “You’re wearing sheepskin thigh pads, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I thought Beckgert would remember to outfit you with them. Did he see that you had powder?”
“No.”
“I’ll get you some at the station,” he said. “If you haven’t been in the saddle in some time, this is going to be a painful experience for you. We’ll be covering about twenty-five long leagues a day, running daily through four to five stations, and changing horses at each station. You’ll hurt.”
I turned my face to him and said, “I’m used to pain. But thank you. I appreciate those things that make it less.”
He didn’t say anything else for a long while.
The station turned out to be a small building with large stables. I walked around it, getting the feel for the layout and trying to understand the pattern underneath what felt, at first, like chaos. Weggnrad said he was putting me down on the Courier Road log as “cargo, bride, Beckgert’s daughter” and explaining that I had to be delivered at fastest speeds to one of Master Beckgert’s favorite clients, who had requested me as a wife, and who wanted me to accompany him on an expedition into the small nations of northern Tandinapalis to locate and discover interesting trade goods. Since this mission did fit with the fact that Beckgert’s second daughter would be marrying the aforementioned client and going on the described trip, anyone checking the story would find it matched the truth in every checkable detail. The fact that she was traveling in secret, heavily guarded by a sea route, Beckgert wanted to keep hidden.
This trip would be beneficial all the way around.
So I kept to a stretch of wall behind a fence, pacing and watching. Men and horses galloped in, grooms raced to take the horses and then spent tremendous time and care in cooling them down, rubbing and cleaning them, tending their feet. The men got less attention. They went inside to seek out the source of the delicious smells that rolled out from the station’s open doors. More men arrived, and more horses, more grooms scurried. No one left, though, and at last I realized that these men would be bound to the station until first light; they did not have eyes like mine, that could identify the emptiness of a leg-breaker hole in tall grass in darkness. I had only darkness, ever, but I was no longer ever truly b
lind.
Having paced along the wall until I got my legs working again, I went to find Weggnrad.
The men around me deferred to my special status, either tapping their foreheads in polite greeting or bowing while wishing me “Gold and healthy children in equal abundance.”
I said nothing—I’d been instructed that women who wore the culappe never spoke to any but their intended, or to the one responsible for guarding them in public.
I bowed instead, and finally located Weggnrad with two other men, getting information on the state of the road ahead of us. When they saw me, the men told my guardian they would speak with him later. I started toward the room where food was being served, but Weggnrad caught my elbow and surreptitiously swung me toward a set of stairs that lay in the opposite direction. “Up,” he whispered. “I have to move my hand quickly.”
Because, of course, no one could touch me.
I climbed the stairs, reached a landing, and waited for him. The corridor before me ran the length of the building, with dozens of doors on either side.
“Tenth on the left,” he said, and I walked along the corridor, thinking how very much like ship’s quarters it was. The spaces were tiny, and when I opened the door, I found the room that I would have to myself, with my unfortunate guardian sleeping on a cot outside the door, to be far more cramped quarters than those aboard the Taag.
“The beds are not bad,” he told me. “And the food is good. You’ll have to eat up here, though. You can’t be seen with your veil lifted—and that’s the only way you’ll be able to eat at all.”
So I waited, and Weggnrad brought me food—a lot of it.
I took off my gloves and threw back my veil, and took the tray he proffered, and thanked him effusively. It smelled wonderful, nor did he skimp on portions. Then he sat in the hallway on his cot and with his back to me and ate his own meal, while I sat at a table no bigger than an apple crate. He’d kept the door open, though, so that we could talk over our food.