King's Shield (33 page)

“You were happily burning up some smaller country’s entire year’s allotment of wood,” Evred explained, and then lifted his brows. “No one reminded you?”

Inda spread his hands. “Dhalshev of Freeport Harbor made a comment about Khanerenth’s fleet growth once. How limited it was, I mean. But I thought it referred to the empty treasury after the war. Because the old king and his sisters didn’t just run, they ran with a good deal of the kingdom’s gold. I do know that they used to burn everyone’s ship who’d fought on the other side as revenge.” As he said it, Inda considered his time on the sea. He’d never thought about the building of ships. He’d been put in one, and when it was taken, he took whatever he needed from his enemies.

It was a hard realization, because beneath the temporizing of necessity, worthy goals, and the rest was the truth: he really had been a pirate in others’ eyes.

Evred, watching carefully, sensed the direction of Inda’s mood shift. “The biggest problem in the north has been this.” He gestured toward the circling men. “Once the dragoons smash through the enemy front line, they give chase, which has drawn our second and third lines behind them, and the lines usually break. That hasn’t mattered much because the Idayagans always gave way, and then our men went into a frenzy of chase-and-strike before we got them back under command. I don’t think the same will happen with the Venn.”

“Right.” Inda’s head jerked up. “So let’s put the captains in the second line, then.”

“What?” Evred’s horse shied. “But we’ve never—”

Inda jerked impatiently. “Tradition that can’t be changed, or that won’t be changed?”

Evred did not answer. Instead, he beckoned Cherry-Stripe and Cama over. Then opened his hand to Inda.

Inda said, “Try commanding from the second line. Most experienced dragoons in the first line. See if you can keep ’em tight that way. I want all the smackers shot at the first and second lines, and the ‘Venn’ are to ride wild.”

Cherry-Stripe waited for someone else to say it was a crazy idea—captains didn’t hide in the second row—but Cama fingered his bad eye under his patch, looked around, at the horses, the ground, and then grunted. “Good notions. Let’s do it.”

 

 

 

They pushed northward into Khani-Vayir, where true to his word, Nadran Khani-Vayir, Noddy’s cousin, sent them men as reinforcements, wagons of dry grain, and sacks of spring vegetables. Not long after they were grounded for three days under pounding rain, and Evred had them out riding evolutions signaled by a single dripping pennant.

The men were furious, but silently so, because all the Sier Danas were right there among them, the king and his temporary Harskialdna as well, everyone equally sodden, mud-smeared, and cold.

A last line of reinforcements and supplies caught up with them, having encountered each other on the road and combined. They were sent by the Jarl of Hali-Vayir and by Horsebutt Tya-Vayir; Evred met the latter’s Runner in silence, listening expressionlessly to Horsebutt’s message of flattery and loyalty. At the end, he said only, “Inform the Jarl that I appreciate the spirit of his message. So much so that he is chosen for the honor of hosting the triumph when we return.”

Inda listened to that in mild amazement. Return? Appreciation?
Horsebutt?
But from the Runner’s attitude, he recognized that a lot more had been conveyed—and understood—than Inda had perceived.

Well, asking about that could wait till after the battle. Assuming they survived, triumphant or not.

Far to the west, just past the jut of Toar called Land’s End, a last hissing of rain departed quickly, the drops leaping back up from the deck of the
Sable.
The strengthening spring sun, regaining its southern height, shone under the fleeing clouds, lighting up the drops with crystal fire.

Eflis and her crew ignored this moment of beauty. They were too busy cleaning the deck and repairing the damage after this last fight.

Eflis swept the deck, pleased with the speed of repairs. They wouldn’t have to slosh down the forecastle where the pirates had tried to board, as the rain was scouring away the last of the blood, a rose-colored flow down the sides and into the sea.

She stepped into the cabin, where Sparrow was about to turn in, having stayed awake through a day and a night.

“It worked again,” she crowed. “Weren’t we fast? Think Fox was impressed?”

“Nothing impresses that soul-ripper,” Sparrow muttered, flinging her wet clothes to the deck and climbing into the hammock. “He expected us to be there, and we were there. End of conversation.”

But Eflis’ mood was not to be doused. “Quick as a fiddle, right down the middle.” She chortled. “Naughty pirates, too greedy to have sense. That’s a beautiful trysail, too, if on the narrow side. Hold’ll be small. But Tcholan will love it, just like you always love your first ship. Seems right it was his and Dasta’s plan, ha ha!”

Dasta had created that wounded ship ruse not long after Eflis and her fleet of schooners had joined the supposed Elgar the Fox. In those days, he, Tcholan, and Gillor had been trading off wearing black clothing like Fox. Eflis still found it hilarious, that one woman and two men as different as Dasta and Tcholan could have fooled everyone—and still there was another layer to the ruse, because in those days Elgar the Fox wasn’t Fox at all, but Inda.

Who was now gone. Her smile turned pensive.

Sparrow, watching through heavy eyelids, misinterpreted and said, “You going to do it this time?”

It.
Eflis made a comical face. “I’d better.”

Sparrow said, “It’s none too soon. Before she affects the rest of the crew.”

Eflis turned on her. “I don’t suppose you would—”

Sparrow gave a hoarse chuckle. More of a gloat. “You’re the captain, my dear.”

“And you’re a stinker for laughing,” Eflis said, bent, kissed the tip of Sparrow’s nose, then left her to her well-earned slumber.

She walked through the ship to the forward crew quarters, where the mids and lower mates bunked. Mostly empty, except for one wounded young fellow, and two from Sparrow’s watch who’d been dismissed from cleanup, as they’d served four watches in a row. And then fought.

Eflis handed out praise where deserved, helped shift a barrel here, held a hammer for a moment there. But she kept moving until she reached the hatch to the aft portion of the hold—and then backed up as a furtive face topped by wild (and dry) honey-colored curls peered round. Then up. The eyes rounding in dismay.

Nugget was caught flat. No excuses this time of being somewhere else, covered for by her sympathetic mates. Nugget had definitely abandoned her battle station, had gone down to hide, and there’d been no chance yet to concoct a story.

“Right,” Eflis said. “It’s time for a talk, Nugget.”

The captain did not lower her voice. Forward in the hold, above, there were quiet rustles and slaps of feet on deck as crewmates dropped what they were doing and listened.

Nugget hooked her arm more firmly round the rung of the ladder she’d been sneaking up, and said wistfully, “Right here?”

Eflis crossed her arms. She was tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed, good-natured—not the sort you’d expect to find a-pirating, but that was where circumstance had placed her. She had found a way to become a privateer. And she was going to keep that place.

“Why not right here, among the crew who protected you while you didn’t do your share to protect them?”

Nugget’s large, pretty, wide-spaced eyes lowered. Eflis fought the instinct to feel pity, suspecting that if Nugget had been born plain as a walnut, there wouldn’t be nearly the impulse to sympathy on everyone else’s part. “I can’t,” she said, lips pale and drawn. “I just can’t.”

“Right,” Eflis said again, not wanting to argue with poor Nugget, who it seemed was fast becoming better at being poor Nugget than being a crew member. But she’d apparently been a kind of mascot to Inda, whose rep among the older crew members was still so strong it was more like legend.

So Eflis just said, “Unfortunately, after this fight, I have to shift my watch bill about. You’ve got to go back to the
Death.
I just don’t have room on
Sable
for everybody who wants to be here.”

“But Fox hates me,” Nugget protested. And, in a lower voice, “I hate
him.
”

Eflis felt that burst of sympathy again, but did not give it voice. Fox did absolutely nothing to make himself liked by the crew, but she had to admit that within his clearly stated rules, he was fair.

He would be fair to Nugget—within those rules.

“You can ask someone on free watch to row you over,” she said.

Chapter Twenty-nine

INDA bent over his food, deaf to the fireside talk. He had been staring at Evred’s map so often he could pretty much draw it himself, but there was something he knew he wasn’t seeing. He hated that uneasy sense of meaning just out of reach. Maybe if he thought about something else, he could catch it . . .

To his friends, it was like boyhood again, Inda hunched at the plank tables in the academy mess hall, his body present, his mind galloping off somewhere distant. They never paid him any heed when he did that.

But during a pause, just as Cherry-Stripe tossed back some wine, Inda jerked his chin up, looked vaguely around, and asked, “What’s a claphair?”

Cherry-Stripe spewed wine into the fire, which hissed and steamed. Rat uttered a coarse “Hah!” Cama thumped Cherry-Stripe, who was now coughing and laughing. Evred did not react.

Noddy handed his empty plate to his young Runner, who bore it off to dunk it in the magic buckets at the cook tent. “Horsetail slang,” he said matter-of-factly. “Original meaning: in the baths, when your hair gets caught between your butt cheeks as you’re getting out.”

Inda smacked his hands on his knees. “But why didn’t I ever hear it? Tanrid never said it at home. I’d remember. Don’t
you
remember, how we’d strut around using horsetails’ slang? And anything about butts had us laughing ourselves sick.”

Cherry-Stripe snickered. His sense of humor hadn’t changed much since those days. Rat flashed the sharp-edged Cassad grin.

Noddy gave a faint, one-shoulder shrug. “Has several meanings.”

Cama muttered roughly, “You can look to my brother for that. Before Horsebutt got there, it also meant sporting in the baths. Which’s why your brother didn’t say it in front of you at home—we were all still in smocks before you left.”

Inda had been frowning, but now his brow cleared. “In the
academy
baths? When did you have time?” He remembered being hustled in and out of the stone pools, the splash fights, shoving, soap flung around, towel-cracking at your butt if you weren’t wary, scrambling into your clothes (and having to unknot your socks, and finding out who did it so you could get suitable revenge later), then running to the barracks for callover, your short hair wet and dripping nastily down inside your collar. You wouldn’t think anyone would feel the least urge for sex
there.

“When you’re seventeen and you wake up with saddle-wood, you find the time. And anyplace is good. Especially for Flash,” Cama added, and they all chuckled.

“Flash?” Inda asked, remembering the grubby boy with wild brown hair, a lopsided grin, and a taste for scrapping out behind the barracks. Flash never walked, always ran.

The others laughed. “Flash liked everybody,” Rat explained. “And he always seemed to be able to find a place. He was first for most of the girls over in the queen’s training, we kept hearing. I don’t know how he even got near them, rules being what they were.”