by Holly Lisle
So I studied the cliff, and found several caves of varying sizes in its face. Some were just holes that went back a ways. They all seemed to be full of live things, and I was suffering enough from the biting and stinging insects already. I didn’t want to dislodge a cloud of bats, or something even less savory.
One cave, though, was large, and had been hollowed out by men, who had built dock structures inside. It was empty, and it looked like it would be an excellent hiding place. I worked myself down the face of the cliff carefully, testing each handhold and foothold, and with not too many bad scares managed to get myself into shelter.
I found a good ledge inside the cave, put the horse blanket down, and settled in to wait. My best read of the future suggested the Taag would find harbor in my little cove before the sun rose. That I was almost through with running, almost through with waiting, almost back to my home and my people. I suffered greatly to sit still, so anxious was I to hear their voices and be among them again.
I spent my stillness in fretting about Aaran.
I wondered how things stood between him and me.
Would we be nothing but colleagues and comrades at arms after this separation?
Would his heart have changed toward me?
I was surprised out of exhausted reverie by the sound of oars dipping into the water at the cave mouth. It was on me before I could even think about the meaning of it. It glided beneath me, and the men in it kept silent, working their oars. I wanted so much for it to be sailors from the Taag. But I dared not assume.
A small ship lay at anchor outside the cave. I could barely make it out—the rock all around me played havoc with such vision as I had. It did not seem large enough to be the Taag, but some of the other Tonk ships had been about that size, and size in a place like the Pirates’ Dance, with trees that seemed too huge and tall to be real poking out of the water, with insects as big as my hand, and with nothing normal or known to measure against, is tricky. Things that seem near can be far, and things that seem far can be near, depending on what size the mind thinks they might be.
I wanted one of the men to say something. I wanted them to speak in Tonk, and when they did I would shout my joy.
But they proceeded at steady pace right by me, and I made no sound. Perhaps they were my people, quiet because they were moving through unknown territory with possible enemies before them. But perhaps not.
I had no wish to kill those I could simply avoid.
Neither had I any wish to be killed, and with my exhaustion, hunger, and physical pain, I did not know how long I would be able to freeze a moment should the need arise. I could very well find myself dead. I was using the Eyes as little as possible, but I dared an instant for checking on the progress of the Taag, which with the rest of the Grand Pack was almost to me, and an instant to check the progress of the army that pursued me—they were scattered by trying to cover as many of the coves as their numbers would allow, but five had found some sort of barge hidden along the shore, and had worked their way down the cliff face to it. They were at that moment setting out to reach the hidden ship.
I came out, chilled to the bone, feeling strange and light-headed. The ship hidden in the cove was not the Taag, but it could be a threat to the Taag, as could the five men, Gretons or Feegash or perhaps both, who slid quietly across the water.
Behind me, I hear the sound of the longboat bumping against the dock.
And then voices. In a language I did not know.
I could not risk the Eyes again. My weakness, my hunger, my pain, my exhaustion, the wearing effects of the cold, the light-headedness that suddenly plagued me—all could permit Ossal to take over. Or perhaps not even Ossal. Perhaps the madness that would one day devour me might devour me right then. I could not guess whether the sailors in their little sloop would be more of a danger to Aaran than the loss of whatever help I might give to the Tonk fleet, should I be lost in the madman’s hell. Or should I die.
I stopped being cold. I started sweating.
I decided that I could crawl out of the cave the way I had crawled in, and hide along the cliff face, and see what I could find out about that ship. Perhaps it was harmless.
Perhaps I could even get onto it long enough to get some water. My canteen was empty, but the smell of the water in the swamp made me retch.
So I focused on the handholds and footholds in the wall. These had been carved by men, not the sea, so they all angled down into the rock, and they’d been roughened to provide some traction against the slimes and mosses that grew in profusion on the rock face. I kept my ears open. The men behind me at the hidden dock sounded like they were moving crates. I hoped they had a lot to move, and that they would stay busy a long time.
I crept across the rock wall, grateful that the handholds were above the tide line. After encountering some sort of crab in one of them on my way in, I’d ripped the veil off my outfit and tore it into two pieces. These strips I’d wrapped around my hands before going farther. And my hands were still well wrapped on my way back out. I didn’t want to encounter any of the sea’s stinging, biting, poisonous little creatures.
Outside, I crept down to where the ancient cliffs gave way to the snake-tangles of the sea cypress roots. They were ugly trees, and that they and this bay and estuary backed up against a cliff face that had been battered and cut by an ocean spoke to me of rough changes in this land. Violence between ground and sea, and shifts in currents. The silting of the channel.
I wish I could have truly seen the place—light and color and radiance—and not just read it by its density and the way the bogs and knobs and roots reached like clutching hands toward me. It might have been beautiful, had I still had eyes.
I could make out the ship hidden between the trunks, though. It was long and lean, and without the solid stone of the cave between me and it, I could see that it was armed heavily. I did not recognize its style, but it clearly was not Tonk. It had no fanciful prow, no graceful curves, no multiple masts and complex spiderweb riggings.
Sitting at anchor, it reminded me of a thief hunkered and hiding in shadows, low against the ground. I didn’t like it. It was trouble, clearly. And trouble that would be here waiting when the Taag and other ships of the Tonk fleet came sliding in.
I watched the five men on the raft work their way closer to it: I was interested in their progress. The men might be Greton or Feegash, but either way, they were enemies of me and mine. I wished them ill in their encounter with the ship they approached.
And then I caught movement and shifting weights and densities at the edge of the Eyes’visual range. The mouth of the bay was, I knew, some distance from this estuary. The Taag and at least some of the other ships of the Grand Pack were seeking shelter. And me.
I wished then for something I could do to reach the hidden ship and reveal it to my people. I wished that I might somehow disarm it. I wished I might disable the five Feegash cronies who sought me.
If only I had a bow and arrows, a bag of quicklights to fashion a flaming arrow to launch into the enemy’s furled sails.
And a stable platform from which to fire.
I could not be everything, or do everything. I knew that. But I was stuck like a dizzy bug on the face of the cliff, with tangles of roots my only possible path across the water to the enemy ship, and that path not one I could follow to a clear end. I tried to untangle the maze, but every route I tried to plot out led inevitably to a blockage, or a huge open sheet of water, and either way, beyond those obstacles I could not pass.
I began to shiver and heard my teeth start to chatter. I hoped that the sound wasn’t as loud as it sounded to me.
Meanwhile, the Taag sailed closer, and behind it a goodly string of other ships. I could not yet feel any hint of the sun on my face, so I suspected nothing would warn my people about the hidden enemy.
Behind me, from inside the cave, I heard the echoing of voices. That unknown language again, and the splashing of oars. I might do something with them, perhaps. Maybe
I could force them to reveal themselves.
I was close enough I should have been able to throw something and hit one of them. If I could cause shouting—especially if I could do it without revealing my own position—I might prove of some use.
I felt around on the cliff face and worked loose a small stone. Then I shifted my position to get steady holds for my left hand and left foot, and slowly swung the right side of my body out from the cliff.
I didn’t have the chance to throw my rock to alert my people.
One of the men on the raft coughed, and on the darkened sloop, lights suddenly shined over the side, illuminating the raft and its occupants.
The sloop opened fire. I heard the twang of bowstrings, the thump of a catapult, various splashes, and screaming. The raft began to burn, and the men on it. I saw them jump into the water—and saw monstrous creatures I had mistaken for fallen logs erupt out of the water, spread massive jaws wide, and drag them beneath the surface almost too fast to see.
I shuddered. Under no circumstances did I dare go into the water. My grasp on the cliff face suddenly felt weak, and untenable. My light-headedness got worse.
I was hot again.
And then catapults on the deck of the Taag launched lit tarballs into the mast of the hidden ship, and Greton fire onto its deck, while arrows from my Obsidians up in the masts rained into the longboat that had raced out at the first sound of trouble to get back to its ship. The men in the longboat screamed and rowed faster, but one by one the oars stopped. Then the longboat stopped.
Meanwhile, the men aboard the low ship tried to mount a resistance, but all the ships in the bay fired in on them.
I tried not to hear the screaming from the decks of the burning sloop. It didn’t last long. None of it lasted long.
While the sloop yet burned, I saw a longboat from the Taag lowered into the water, and saw a dozen men get in. They rowed straight toward me.
And at long last, I heard Aaran call out, “We’ll get right under you, Hawkspar. Don’t move near the water until we’re there.”
Even with them beneath me, I almost didn’t make it in. My arms and legs were shaking, and as I tried to let go, the dizziness overtook me, and I lost my grip and began to topple forward.
Many strong hands caught me, and voices I knew said my name.
Redbird.
Aaran.
I sagged against one of the gunwales and closed my eyes.
“Hawkspar? Are you all right?”
I needed water. Food. To warn Aaran about the possibility that other enemies on land might find this position before morning or during the day, in spite of my care in hiding my trail. I needed to sleep knowing that my back was guarded, and that I could truly trust the people I was with. But words would not form in my mouth. In that moment, when I needed to say so much, all I could do was touch the wood of the Tonk-made longboat and know that whatever happened to me, I’d found my way home.
Aaran placed a hand against my forehead and said, “She’s feverish. We need to get her back to the ship and the healers.”
The sailors rowed, and Redbird held my hand, and I just lay there, grateful. I didn’t feel sick. In truth, I didn’t feel much of anything at all. A sort of blissful numbness and lethargy stole over me. I didn’t have to fight anymore, didn’t have to think, didn’t have to act. I could simply be still and breathe, and no one would try to kill me. Or if they did, someone other than me was on hand to stop them. I cannot begin to explain how pleasant that sensation was.
Home. Home, sweet home.
I spent the entire week that we sailed up the coast toward Danaskataak, however, hideously sick. I’d gotten some form of swamp fever common to the area, and apparently I was lucky it didn’t kill me, or maim me, or turn my mind to pudding. I’d never heard of such a thing; Aaran’s healer told me locally it was known as the pirate madness.
Which made me wonder, if they knew they risked such a disease, why anyone would be a pirate. Of course, at the time I was wondering that, I was also seeing huge insects crawling around inside my head and cringing from tentacles that writhed toward me from the ceiling. Everything I thought that week made perfect sense at the time.
When clarity returned, none of it did.
Redbird had been with me all along. The other Obsidians said they thought she never slept. She told me how she had tried to reach me using the Hagedwar—Aaran’s magic. How the other Obsidians had, and the rest of the Ossalenes. Something about that bothered me, but I could not figure out what. Freed from fever, I was not yet well, and thinking was hard.
Finally upright, I learned from Tuua that the ship hiding in the bay was a Pergassak spy ship, from Pergas, one of the dozens of little countries on the east coast of Velobrina. Pergas has long been a friend of the Feegash, and unlike most of the countries under Feegash influence, Pergas had a well-disciplined communications system. If they’d been permitted to spot us, they could have destroyed our mission.
Because Aaran and the captains of the other Grand Pack ships were constantly in conference with each other, Tuua took upon himself the task of getting me back on my feet and walking again.
“The captain has been distraught the whole time you were gone,” he told me.
It was good to hear. Knowing you’re needed is always pleasant. I wanted to think that I’d been missed for myself, though I had to assume that the loss of my skills to our mission had been his real concern.
I told Tuua as much.
He laughed. “I think you were his concern. You don’t know about the charts he kept, tracking your progress across Greton, estimating our time to you, trying to find ways to make sure we could get to you.” He tucked his arm under mine as I lost my balance—I was not yet back to being comfortable with the movement of the ship beneath my feet. “He hasn’t eaten well; he hasn’t slept much. And you do not know how happy he was when he became certain that you were alive.”
“Since I have been back, he avoids me.”
“He went to your room to check on you constantly while you were sick. He got so little done he has been running to catch up ever since.”
“I don’t remember him in my room.”
“That’s because you were sick. You don’t have a clear memory of how sick you were. You danced a bit too near death’s edge.” He turned to face me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “I speak for my cousin, but I have no doubt as soon as he has his preparations made for this war, he’ll speak for himself.” Tuua turned again, and as I leaned on him, we strolled along the clear spaces on the deck. Both the ship’s healer and the Moonstones insisted I get fresh air. “He loves you. He told me he said as much to you, and that he wants more than anything to spend the rest of his life with you.”
“That cannot happen, you know. I have … I have only a little time left.”
“I know. He knows, too. He has already told me that, while we are in Dananskataak, the kor daan will run the ship, and he and you will be occupied elsewhere.”
My heart filled with hope. It shouldn’t have, but I could only imagine the two of us together, away from everyone else. Would so much happiness make the pain of what would follow even worse? I hoped not.
“Tell me about him,” I said. “Things he would not think to tell me.”
We walked in silence for a while. I thought perhaps Tuua had decided to tell me nothing, that perhaps he viewed my request as asking him to betray Aaran. But suddenly he said, “He and I were yearmates in our clan. When we rode off to our coming of age, both of us had already fallen in love, he with a girl the same age as him named Rokaanis, and me with Denee, a year older than me, already a woman of the clan. I had sworn to Denee that I wanted to court her if I passed my tests of manhood. Aaran had already been secretly courting Rokaanis, and was determined that he loved her above all women, and always would.”
“And these girls were taken slaves,” I said, a painful comprehension settling over me.
But Tuua said, “No. They were among the dead and violated w
hen we returned. We did not vow that we would never love again. Pain, I think, made us believe no such vow would be necessary. It seared our hearts with the images of how we had failed them. How we had not been there to save them. They’d fought for their lives, and they’d lost. And he and I and the other boys of our clan who came back men built our dead a fair pyre, and put their bodies atop it with the rest. And then we stood there, a dozen sixteen-year-olds trying to be brave, and lit the fire, and watched everything we had ever known and everything we had ever loved go up in smoke.”
I closed my eyes, feeling tears sting. So many of us had so much loss behind us. A generation of adults murdered, a generation of children vanished.
And Aaran had lost more than I. He’d been old enough that he realized more of his loss. He’d had family, but he knew them as people, not just as a vague forest of legs, the frequent hug or kiss, a memory of laughter. Aaran had a girl he’d loved. Friends he’d lost. I’d been so young the whole thing was a handful of sharp images for me, and a sense of confused emptiness.
“I’m so sorry. For both of you, for your losses. I don’t know how people would be so willing to do what the Feegash have done—to try to destroy an entire people.”
He gave me a quick hug. “We don’t need to understand evil. We need to recognize it for what it is, and destroy it.”
I walked with him for a while. “Is there good among the Feegash? Is there something there we should save?”
He turned to me. “Save? The Feegash? Are you mad?”
I walked with my head down, wishing that I could not see the layers of the ship beneath my feet, the creatures swimming under the ship, the sand and rock beneath the creatures.
I remembered the world when it seemed solid. When time was a simple, steady thing, when walls were trustworthy and floors had a comfortable heft, when I did not feel like bone and gossamer moving through a world of spirit and liquid. I remembered when the world seemed real.