Royal Assassin (50 page)

By noon the next day, I knew how much I had hurt her by not coming straight to her to find comfort. I could understand what she felt. But I also knew that what I had carried that night was nothing to take home to someone you loved. I wanted to explain that to her. But a boy came running up to me to tell me I was needed on the
Rurisk
, and right now. I gave him a penny for his troubles and watched him dash off with it. Once, I had been the boy earning the penny. I thought of Kerry. I tried to remember him as the boy with the penny in his hand, running at my side, but forever now he was the Forged one dead on a table. No one, I told myself, had been taken for Forging yesterday.

Then I headed down to the docks. On the way I stopped at the stable. I gave the crescent moon over into Burrich’s hands. “Keep this safe for me,” I asked him. “And there will be a bit
more, my crewshare from the raid. I want to have you hold it for me … what I make at doing this. It’s for Molly. So if ever I don’t come back, you be certain she gets it. She doesn’t like being a servant.”

I hadn’t spoken so plainly of her to Burrich in a long time. A line creased his brow, but he took the bloodied moon. “What would your father say to me?” he wondered aloud as I turned wearily away from him.

“I don’t know,” I told him bluntly. “I never knew him. Only you.”

“FitzChivalry.”

I turned back to him. Burrich met my eyes as he spoke. “I don’t know what he’d say to me. But I know I can say this for him, to you. I’m proud of you. It’s not the kind of work a man does that says he can be proud or not. It’s how he does it. Be proud of yourself.”

“I will try,” I told him quietly. I went back to my ship.

Our next encounter with a Red-Ship was a less decisive victory. We met them on the sea, and they were not surprised, for they had seen us coming. Our master stood the course, and I think they were surprised when we began the engagement by ramming them. We sheared off a number of their oars, but missed the steering oar we had targeted. There was little damage to the ship itself; the Red-Ships were as flexible as fish. Our grapples flew. We outnumbered them, and the master intended to use that advantage. Our warriors boarded them, and half our oarsmen lost their heads and jumped in, too. It became a chaos that spread briefly to our own decks. It took every bit of will I could muster to withstand the vortex of emotions that engulfed us, but I stayed with my oar as I had been ordered. Nonge, at his oar, watched me strangely. I gripped my oar and ground my teeth until I could find myself. I muttered a curse when I discovered that I’d lost Verity again.

I think our warriors let up a bit when they knew we had reduced our enemy’s crew to where they could no longer manage their vessel. It was a mistake. One of the Raiders set fire to their own sail while a second one attempted to chop through their own planking. I guess they hoped the fire would spread and they could take us down with them. Certainly at the end
they fought with no care for the damage they took to their ship or their own bodies. Our fighters finally finished them, and we got the fire put out, but the prize we towed back to Buckkeep was smoking and damaged, and man for man, we had lost more lives than they had. Still, it was a victory, we told ourselves. This time, when the others went out drinking, I had the sense to seek out Molly. And early the next morning, I found an hour or two for Nighteyes. We went hunting together, good clean hunting, and he tried to persuade me to run away with him. I made the mistake of telling him that he could leave if he wished, meaning only the best for him, and hurt his feelings. It took me another hour to convey to him what I had meant. I went back to my ship wondering if my ties were worth the effort it took to keep them intact. Nighteyes assured me they were.

That was the last clear victory for the
Rurisk
. It was far from the last battle of the summer. No, the clear pleasant weather stretched impossibly long before us, and every fine day was a day when I might kill someone. I tried not to count them as days on which I might be killed. We had many skirmishes, and gave pursuit many times, and it did seem there were fewer raids attempted in the area we regularly patrolled. Somehow that only made it all the more frustrating. And there were successful raids for the Red-Ships, times when we put into a town but an hour or so after they had left, and could do no more than help stack bodies or put out fires. Then Verity would roar and curse in my mind that he could not get messages more swiftly, that there were not enough ships and watches to be everywhere. I would rather have faced the fury of a battle than Verity’s savage frustration racking through my brain. There was never any end in sight, save the respite that bad weather might bring us. We could not even put an accurate number to the Red-Ships that plagued us, for they were painted identically, and as like as peas in a pod. Or drops of blood on the sand.

While I was an oarsman on the
Rurisk
that summer, we had one other encounter with a Red-Ship that is worth telling for the strangeness of it. On a clear summer night, we had been tumbled from our beds in the crew shed and sent racing toward
our ship. Verity had sensed a Red-Ship lurking off Buck Point. He wanted us to overtake it in the dark.

Justin stood in our prow, Skill-linked to Serene in Verity’s tower. Verity was a wordless mumble in my mind as he felt our way through the dark toward the ship he sensed. And something else? I could feel him groping out, beyond the Red-Ship, like a man feeling forward in the darkness. I sensed his uneasiness. We were allowed no talk, and our oars were muffled as we came closer. Nighteyes whispered to me that he had scent of them, and then we spotted them. Long and low and dark, the Red-Ship was cutting through the water ahead of us. A sudden cry went up from their deck; they had seen us. Our master shouted to us to lay into our oars, but as we did, a sick wave of fear engulfed me. My heart began to hammer, my hands to tremble. The terror that swept through me was a child’s nameless fear of things lurking in the dark, a helpless fear. I gripped my oar but could find no strength to ply it.

“Korrikska,” I heard a man groan in a thick Outislander accent. I think it was Nonge. I became aware I was not the only one unmanned. There was no steady beat to our oars. Some sat on their sea chests, head bowed over their oars, while others rowed frantically, but out of rhythm, the blades of the oars skipping and slapping against the water. We skittered on the surface like a crippled skater bug while the Red-Ship forged purposefully toward us. I lifted up my eyes and watched my death coming for me. The blood hammered so in my ears that I could not hear the cries of the panic-stricken men and women about me. I could not even take a breath. I lifted up my eyes to the heavens.

Beyond the Red-Ship, almost glowing on the black water, was a white ship. This was no raiding vessel; this was a ship, easily three times the size of the Red-Ship, her two sails reefed, riding at anchor on the quiet water. Ghosts strode her deck, or Forged ones. I felt no hint of life from them, and yet they moved purposefully, readying a small boat to be lowered over the side. A man stood on the afterdeck. The moment I saw him, I could not look away.

He was cloaked in gray, yet I saw him limned against the dark sky as clearly as if a lantern illuminated him. I swear I
could see his eyes, the jut of his nose, the dark curly beard that framed his mouth. He laughed at me. “Here’s one come to us!” he called out to someone, and lifted a hand. He pointed it at me, and laughed aloud again, and I felt my heart squeeze in my chest. He looked at me with a terrible singleness, as if I alone of our crew were his prey. I looked back at him, and I saw him, but I could not sense him.
There! There!
I shrieked the word aloud, or perhaps the Skill I could never control sent it bounding off the insides of my skull. There was no response. No Verity, no Nighteyes, no one, nothing. I was alone. All the world had gone silent and still. Around me my crew fellows rattled with terror and cried out aloud, but I felt nothing. They were no longer there. No one was there. No gull, no fish in the sea, no life anywhere as far as any of my inner senses would reach. The cloaked figure on the ship leaned far out on the rail, the accusing finger pointing at me. He was laughing. I was alone. It was a loneliness too great to be endured. It wrapped me, coiled about me, blanketed me, and began to smother me.

I
repelled
at it.

In a reflex I did not know I had, I used the Wit to push away from it as hard as I could. Physically, I was the one that flew backward, landing in the bilge atop the thwarts, tangled in the feet of the other oarsmen. I saw the figure on the ship stumble, sag, and then tumble over the side. The splash was not large, but there was only one. If he rose to the surface at all, I did not see it.

Nor was there time to look for him. The Red-Ship hit us amidships, shattering oars and sending oarsmen flying. The Outislanders were shouting with their confidence, mocking us with their laughter as they leaped from their ship to ours. I scrabbled to my feet and lunged to my bench, reaching for my ax. Around me, the others were making the same sort of recovery. We were not battle ready, but neither were we paralyzed by fear anymore. Steel met our boarders and battle was joined.

There is no place so dark as the open water at night. Fellow and foe were indistinguishable in the dark. A man leaped onto me; I caught at the leather of his foreign harness, bore him down, and strangled him. After the numbness that had briefly clenched me, there was a savage relief in his terror
beating against me. I think it happened quickly. When I straightened up, the other boat was pulling away from us. She had only about half her oarsmen, and there was still fighting on our decks, but she was leaving her men. Our master was shouting at us to finish them and be after the Red-Ship. It was a useless command. By the time we had killed them and thrown them off our decks, the other ship was lost in the darkness. Justin was down, throttled and battered, alive, but incapable of Skilling to Verity just then. In any case, one bank of our oars was a splintered mess. Our master cursed us all soundly as the oars were redistributed and shipped, but it was too late. He shouted us down to stillness, but we could hear nothing, and see nothing. I stood on my sea chest and turned slowly in a complete circle. Empty black water. Of the oared vessel, no sign. But even more strange to me was what I spoke aloud. “The white ship was at anchor. But she’s gone, too!”

Around me, heads turned to stare at me. “White ship?”

“Are you all right, Fitz?”

“A Red-Ship, boy, it was a Red-Ship we fought.”

“Speak not of a white ship. To see a white ship is to see your own death. Bad luck.” This last was hissed to me by Nonge. I opened my mouth to object that I had seen an actual ship, not some vision of disaster. He shook his head at me and then turned away to stare out over the empty water. I closed my mouth and sat down slowly. No one else had seen it. Nor did any of the others speak of the terrible fear that had gripped us and changed our battle plans to panic. When we got back to town that night, the way it was told in the taverns was that we had come up on the ship, engaged battle, only to have the Red-Ship flee us. No evidence remained of that encounter but some shattered oars, some injuries, and some Outislander blood on our decks.

When I privately conferred with both Verity and Nighteyes, neither had seen anything. Verity told me that I had excluded him as soon as we sighted the other vessel. Nighteyes was miffed to admit that I had completely closed myself to him as well. Nonge would say nothing to me of white ships; he was not much for conversation on any topic. Later I found mention of the white ship in a scroll of old legends. There it was an
accursed ship, where the souls of drowned sailors unworthy of the sea would work forever for a merciless master. I was forced to set aside all mention of it or be thought mad.

The rest of the summer, the Red-Ships evaded the
Rurisk
. We would catch sight of them, and give chase, but never managed to run one down. Once it was our good fortune to chase one that had just raided. She threw her captives overboard to lighten herself and fled us. Of twelve folk they threw in, we rescued nine, and returned them unForged to their village. The three who drowned before we reached them were mourned, but all agreed it was a better fate than Forging.

The other ships had much the same luck. The
Constance
came upon Raiders in the midst of attacking a village. They didn’t manage a quick victory, but had the foresight to damage the beached Red-Ship so that the Raiders could not make a clean escape. It took days to hunt them all down, for they scattered into the woodlands when they saw what had been done to their ship. The other vessels had similar experiences: we gave chase, we drove off Raiders, the other ships even had some few successes at sinking raiding vessels, but we captured no more intact ships that summer.

So, the Forgings were reduced, and each time we sent a ship down, we told ourselves it was one less. But it never seemed to make a difference in how many remained. In one sense, we brought hope to the folk of Six Duchies. In another way, we gave them despair, for despite all we did, we could not drive the threat of Raiders from our shore.

For me, that long summer was a time of terrible isolation and incredible closeness. Verity was often with me, yet I found I could never seem to sustain the contact once any sort of fighting had begun. Verity himself was aware of the maelstrom of emotions that threatened to overwhelm me each time our crew engaged. He ventured the theory that in attempting to defend against the thoughts and feelings of others, I set up my boundaries so firmly that not even he could breach them. He also suggested that this might mean I was strong in the Skill, stronger than he was even, but so sensitized that to let down my barriers during a battle drowned me in the consciousnesses of everyone around me. It was an interesting theory, but one that
offered no practical solutions to the problem. Still, in the days when I carried Verity about, I developed a feel for him that I had for no other man, save perhaps Burrich. With chilling familiarity, I knew how the Skill hunger gnawed at him.