Stormwarden (31 page)

* * *

Jaric appeared by the dockside at the appointed hour. Cocooned in an early fog, he boarded the dory with Tavish and his brother, and on the way out to
Gull's
anchorage, set hands to a pair of oars for the first time in his life. His initial effort was clumsy. With his back to the bow of the boat and the darkness obscuring the landmarks, he had difficulty maintaining a straight heading. But the same perseverance which had endeared him to Telemark and an uncompromising desire to learn soon stilled the dry remarks the fishermen of Mearren Ard customarily inflicted upon a greenhorn. If Tavish resented the loan of his dead son's oilskins to a stranger, he made no comment. For the next three days he applied himself to teaching Jaric the difference between sheet lines and halyards. Even to his impatient eye the boy learned quickly. Come evening the fishermen laid bets on his progress in the tavern. Yet sooner than any of them guessed.
Gull
raised full canvas and left the coastline behind to ply her nets in the ocean far from Mearren Ard.

For a day and a half,
Gull
plowed close-hauled through the swells of the northern Corine Sea, driven by the brisk winds of earliest spring. Foam jetted off the bow, white as combed fleece, and gulls dove in the sloop's wake. Jaric suffered a brief bout of seasickness.. Yet he eased sheet lines and changed sail with white-faced determination, never once complaining. Shortly his body adjusted to the toss of a sloop's deck at sea. He stood his first full watch at the helm with a vivid sense of exhilaration, and presently even Tavish's dour brother accepted him as crew.

The nets were drawn in heavy with fish. Jaric pulled twine until his shoulders ached and slept dreamlessly in his berth during off watch hours. The cold air and the wild expanse of open sea agreed with him, yet the boy took care not to love his new life too much. He knew his time aboard
Gull
could not last. Inexorable as the turn of the tide, his promise to the enchantress must be completed; the sorcerer Anskiere would someday claim his service. Yet the fate Taen had promised came upon him suddenly, in a manner not even she could have anticipated.

Two weeks out of Mearren Ard, Tavish steered
Gull
on a southeast tack. Off watch at the time, Jaric dreamed of restless winds and towering waves with thundering crests of spume. He woke, chilled and sweating, and not even scalding hot tea and a cloak of oiled wool could calm his shaken composure. He clenched icy fingers around his mug, feeling as if some alien presence tugged at his mind. The sensation left him edgy, unable to contain his straying thoughts.

Tavish shouted impatiently down the companionway. Jaric roused himself with an effort. He yanked on his boots and went topside to tend the nets. But the odd sensation which plagued his mind would not relent even in the fresh air above decks. Instead it increased through the morning, until he worked with the muscles of his jaw clamped tight to keep from crying aloud.

Noon came, sunlit and pleasantly warm. Jaric bent over the rail, hauling in the first flopping burden of codfish. Drenched twine dug into his fingers and his shoulders quivered as he strained to raise the laden weight of the net. Suddenly a sharp tingle swept across his skin. Dizziness coursed through his body. Jaric flinched. Stunned by horrified recognition, he recalled a horse and a dusty summer road and a punishing vortex of wind which had once driven him forward against his will. His disorientation deepened, drowning the memory under a singing storm of force. He fought it, even as the net dragged at his wrists; echoing down a tunnel of darkness, he heard Tavish curse in exasperation. Jaric struggled to clear his head. But his vision slipped relentlessly out of focus, and his breath went shallow in his throat.

That moment the air above his head split with a crack like lightning. Jaric staggered, eyes blinded. Power pierced his mind, cruel as the harpoons the fishermen used to gaff sharks. The net slipped out of
Jaric's
fingers. Cod tumbled back into the sea. Their bellies carved silvery crescents into the green of the waves.

Tavish shouted in anger from the helm. He flung the tiller down, bringing
Gull
into the wind. Patched canvas banged aloft, punched by a freshening breeze, and spray flew in sheets over the bow. But the curses died on the fisherman's lips as he looked up and saw Jaric. For an instant the boy's slim form seemed almost incandescent, haloed by a triple ring of blue-violet light; the image of a bird of prey hovered over his head, tawny gold with feathers barred in black.

"Stormfalcon!" shouted the brother in a tone gone treble with panic.

Tavish clamped the tiller in the brake and bolted forward. He reached Jaric's side just as the boy crumpled unconscious onto the deck, salt-crusted hair fanned like frayed silk over the collar of his oilskins. The fisherman met his brother's eyes above Jaric's still form, his mouth set with rare and desperate anger.

"Knew he was too good to be true, then," he said after a moment. A wave thudded against the sloop's side, tossing spray in the sunlight, and gulls swooped on stretched wings above the main yard. No trace remained of the sorcery which had manifested above the decks barely a moment before; except Jaric lay motionless as death against the aft stay, and no mortal remedy would rouse him.

"Should toss him overboard, then," said the brother.

"No." Tavish was adamant. "We daren't."

But neither of them cared to try more fishing that afternoon. Reluctant to touch Jaric even to move him, the brothers tossed an old blanket over his oilskins. Then they hauled in the nets and headed
Gull
about, setting course for Mearren Ard. Their family had seen a streak of bad luck since the death of Tavish's son last season; they wished no further curse to fall upon them for keeping a lad touched by a sorcerer's powers.

Late in the afternoon,
Gull's
anchor settled and bit into the sea bottom, once more within the safety of the harbor. The boy still breathed. Tavish and his brother slung Jaric between them on the blanket and loaded him into the dory along with the rest of
Gull's
catch. After tense debate, they returned to his room at the inn, where they dumped him in a limp heap on the bed. Tavish raised crossed fists in the sign to avert evil sorcery while his brother counted out the coppers Jaric had earned aboard the fishing vessel. They left the coins in a neat pile on the boy's knapsack and left the room, hurrying back to their boat without speaking. But word of the incident spread swiftly throughout the village.

Traders from the south arrived that afternoon, the first to reach Mearren Ard since the roads thawed. The bustle of unloading wagons and preparing stalls for their oxen lent the tavernkeeper an excuse to avoid the boy who lay in his back garret. By the time sunset traced the rooftrees in gilt and copper, the taproom stood packed with the bodies of fishermen come to hear the news brought by the traders. The room grew noisy with talk. But no one mentioned the boy who had fallen ill of a sorcerer's curse on the decks of Tavish's boat. Curious, the traders inquired about the mysteriously occupied back room, but received no reply. For not one villager present dared risk the ill fortune which might result if Jaric's name were spoken aloud.

* * *

"Jaric!" Taen's call plunged deep into his mind, reached him where he struggled, overwhelmed by a vision of storm-tossed seas and darkness. "Jaric, let me help you."

But he ignored the dream-weaver's call, no longer dependent upon her knowledge. During the moment Anskiere's summons overthrew his awareness, he had remembered his past in entirety, even to his desperate flight from the Sanctuary tower at Morbrith. Old memories slashed like torturer's knives, tore his last precarious peace to ribbons. The months the geas had Jain fallow served only to redouble its power; now reconnected with its intended subject, its forces struck with a resonance far stronger than Anskiere intended. Raging tides of power coursed through Jaric's body. Each second he deferred the call which pulled him southeast, he suffered agony.

Yet this time he endured. With the strength he had learned from Telemark he fought to regain his will. Slowly, carefully, the boy constructed a framework within his mind to bring the punishing directive of the sorcerer's summons under control.

"Jaric, let me help." Taen's image appeared before him in the darkness. The flowers were gone from her hair, and her face was drawn, brows gathered in poignant concern. "Anskiere was to summon you, but not even the Vaere guessed the power would strike so hard.
I
beg you, let me help."

But wounded by her betrayal, Jaric shut her out. She had known. She had let him sail, aware the geas waited to snare him at sea beyond Mearren Ard. All along she had watched, Jaric realized, but never once had she trusted him with the truth.

"How did I dare?" The enchantress's voice lanced into his mind, sharpened by pain. "I could do nothing but follow the orders of the Vaere. No one intended to hurt you. Believe me."

But Jaric would accept none of her help. Lashed by an unwanted memory of Kencie's pity, he unleashed his frustration against the dream-weaver whose promise had brought him to such torment. Rage burst like flame across his mind. Taen's presence dissolved with a pang of regret, leaving him alone in his struggle. Slowly Jaric knotted the shreds of his self-control back into balance. Power flared and sparked, resistant as cold iron against his will. Yet the boy persisted with the same rugged determination he had shown the night Telemark had been injured by the beaver dam. Gradually he dominated the effects of the geas sufficiently to regain consciousness.

Dull light filtered through a single tiny window. Sunset had passed well into the gloom of evening. Jaric saw that he lay on his bed above the taproom, clad yet in his damp wool tunic. Someone had removed his oilskins, most likely Tavish. But he still wore his boots, and a coarse, fishy-smelling blanket had been left twisted in awkward folds around his body; it bound at his shoulders, making movement difficult.

Jaric sat up. He drew a ragged breath and shrugged the blanket aside, then pressed his hands to his aching head. The geas drove remorselessly against his mind; it required a supreme effort to stay the urge to leave the inn and run blindly down to the harbor. He could not swim the ocean; and the road which led along the coast turned southwest, out of line with the geas' summons. Bereft of alternatives, Jaric dragged his knapsack across his knees. Something metallic fell, ringing across the floor. Jaric swore, and in the half light caught the faint gleam of coins scattered at his feet. The boy interpreted their significance with a heavy sense of sorrow. Here, as in Gaire's Main, the sorcerer's geas marked him; not even Tavish would welcome his presence now.

Heartbroken, Jaric pulled the ice otter cloak from his knapsack. He buried his face in the silky fur, hoping he could maintain control of the geas long enough to buy passage out of Mearren Ard. Then he braced up his courage and rose to his feet. One last coin tumbled from his lap struck the bedstead with a bright, pure clang. Jaric winced. Smoldering with resentment, he slammed the door open. Telemark would forgive the sale of the furs intended for his son's bridegift. But Jaric swore by the air he breathed he would make Anskiere pay for the sacrifice. With his fingers clenched around the hilt of his knife, he descended to the taproom.

XVIII
Callinde

Jaric paused at the foot of the stair. Every sconce had been lit in the taproom, but the increased illumination added little; trestles and roof beams loomed through a blue haze of smoke. The close press of people hampered what ventilation the chimneys provided, and more than one fisherman smoked a pipe as he sat over his beer. The talk was loud, dominated by a black-clad trader Jaric had not seen previously. Daunted by the stranger's presence, the stale air and a falsely boisterous atmosphere, the boy hung back in the doorway, listening.

"Oh, aye," said the man in black. He leaned back in his chair, stretched like a bear, then bellowed for the barmaid to refill his tankard. His listeners shifted restlessly while he wet his throat. "There's rumor enough from ports beyond the Straits. Heard it from a sailor who'd been there. Kielmark's crazy, he said. Tribute won't satisfy him, not since some white-haired witch twisted Anskiere's power about. They say Cliffhaven got smacked by a storm so mean she damned near cracked the light tower in twain. Now every ship bound through the straits gets boarded, assessed, taxed and sailed fully fifteen leagues on her way, manned by the Kielmark's own. Then she's turned loose and no apologies for it. No sorcerer, says the pirate, damn his arrogance to the Fires, no sorcerer will get close enough to Cliffhaven to meddle with his fortress of thieving renegades, sure's tide."

The trader paused to quaff his ale. He wiped his mustache on his sleeve and resumed. "Can't blame him, though, not entirely. Who'd trust a sorcerer? Not me. I recall my father telling how Ivain Firelord burned a hostel to cinders, all because the roof leaked and woke him from sleep."

The trader belched and rubbed his belly. Beside him a drover with sly eyes added a second tale of Ivain's cruel exploits, and in words framed by the consonants of an eastern accent another man recounted the drowning of Tierl Enneth by Anskiere. Hidden from view beyond the stair, Jaric overheard. He felt suddenly as if darkness itself had reached out and marked him where he stood. Morbrith's archives held testimony enough of the Firelord's mad viciousness. Jaric had read the accounts of those wronged who had appealed to the Duke's mercy for shelter; but the stories repeated in the dimness of Mearren Ard's taproom were colored with human emotion no written record could express. In the rough words of strangers, the boy received his first understanding of the stigma in the fate Firelord and Stormwarden had mapped for him.

"Fires, now,
we
understand. " The bearded trader gestured to his audience of fishermen with conspiratorial brotherhood. "Nobody with a jot of sense would wish a sorcerer making spells on folks who lived on his own green turf. That boy will bring no good should you continue to shelter him, there's a promise. But talk can't hurt."

But the trader's expansive suggestion left the villagers close-mouthed as clams. The tension in the taproom suddenly became too much for Jaric to endure. Sobered by the knowledge that he could lose his life should his parentage be discovered, he left the shadow of the stair and entered the taproom, the ice otter cloak clutched like a dead animal between clenched fingers. Quietly as he moved, the nearest man looked up from his tankard and pointed. Heads turned. Conversation stilled abruptly, as though something intangibly evil entered through the door behind the boy's back.

Jaric continued his advance, though the silence unnerved him. Oblivious to the spilled beer which splashed under the soles of his boots, he took another step. The barmaid started and dropped a tin jug. It struck the trestle beneath with a crash that jangled every nerve in the room. The man beside her swore and raised crossed fists in the traditional sign to avert malign sorcery.

Hurt to the quick by the gesture, Jaric stopped. A half circle of wind-burned faces confronted him. Across the length and breadth of the room, not one expression held the slightest trace of welcome. Poised and alone, the boy caught impressions like acid imprints; here a chin jutted aggressively forward and there a veined fist gripped a chair back, spaced between pair after pair of hostile eyes. But the geas granted no quarter. Doomed as a hare before mastiffs, Jaric at last set his request into words. "I need a boat to cross the Corine Sea. I can pay handsomely for my passage. Is there a man among you willing?"

Movement rustled like a sigh through the room, as every fisherman present turned his back. The last bit of color drained from
Jaric's
face. He seemed a figure made of paper, slight and brittle and pathetically vulnerable. "This cloak would buy an army for a king!" he shouted. "Have you no pity?"

But his pleas stirred the villagers at Mearren Ard not at all. They stayed rooted, stony and stubborn as a fortress wall, even when Jaric flung the magnificent fur down on the nearest table, his cry of disbelief stifled with his knuckles. The geas pressured him with the persistence of a tidal current, near to drowning all reason.

The boy felt his control slip. Anger flared through him. Touched by a trace of his father's madness, he longed to blast the rooftrees of Mearren Ard with flame, until charred beams smoked like blackened ribs against the sky. But the passion ebbed as swiftly. Bitter and trembling and sickened by the vindictive turn of his thoughts, Jaric tossed sun-bleached hair from his face and glared at the backs of the villagers.

"Is there no man present who dares to remember the meaning of mercy?" He spoke no louder than a whisper, but his outraged accusation carried to the farthest corner of the room. "Give me nothing but a boat. I'll find a way to sail her."

"Hey, boy!" The black-haired trader rose from his seat near the bar. Respectably clad in wool embroidered with scarlet, he wore a dandyish beard. Sharp features and slitted eyes lent him an expression crafty as a rat's. "I'd give you gold for that cloak, boy." But the price he named was an insult.

Jaric closed his eyes, anguished by the memory of
Telem
ark's face on the morning he had opened the old cedar trunk and pulled forth his only treasure. The boy's straits were desperate; every man in Mearren Ard knew it. Anyone marked by Anskiere of Elrinfaer had no fate to bargain.

"Boy!"

Slowly Jaric turned his head and located the drover who had addressed him.

The man leaned on the bar, pudgy knuckles crimped around a wine flask. His lips parted with amusement. "Mathieson Keldric has a boat he can't sail any more. Why not ask the old relic if he'd swap his craft for your fancy cloak?"

By the fellow's derisive tone, Jaric guessed the advice was ill spent, a crass effort to poke fun at his predicament. But the geas blazed like magma through his flesh, making each separate moment an agony more terrible to endure than the last. He had no choice but attempt the trader's suggestion.

Jaric's reply fell without echo in the packed stillness of the taproom. "Who is Mathieson Keldric?"

The trader grinned, displaying a jumble of stained teeth. "There, son." And he pointed to the arthritic elder who inhabited the corner table by the hearth, as if he intended to die there. Half crippled by age and disease, the old man was the only villager who had not turned his back on the boy from Morbrith Keep.

Jaric gathered the ice otter cloak from the tabletop and reluctantly moved toward the fireplace. A chair scraped at his back. Someone whispered an obscenity. Evidently Keldric's boat was the butt of a well-worn joke, repeated out of pity for the old man's plight. But Anskiere's summons left no space for inquiry. With cautious steps Jaric approached the corner nearest the hearth. And Mathieson Keldric watched him with eyes the light clear gray of rain pools, his lips pursed in alarm.

Suddenly the old man straightened in his chair. He stared in open-mouthed amazement at a point just past Jaric's shoulder and his twisted fingers flew to his face.
"Callinde!"
He spoke the name barely above a whisper, but to Jaric the sound felt louder than a shout against the blighted stillness of the taproom. Yet none of the bystanders appeared to overhear.

"The trader mentioned you have a boat you might sell." Jaric ran his fingers anxiously through the silver-tipped fur of the cloak. "I have no coin to offer, but perhaps you would consider a trade?"

But Keldric acted as if the boy had never spoken. He gazed unresponsively into the air. His lips moved, but no word emerged. For a moment it seemed he would ignore Jaric's need as the others had, leaving him powerless to answer the geas' terrible summons. The boy swallowed, feeling desperation well up inside him. Pressure beat against his ears, savage as the whistle of air off a stormfalcon's wings, and the threat of unending pain raised sweat on his temples.

"I beg you," he said hoarsely, distressed that his anguish was turned to a public spectacle. "I must have a boat."

Mathieson Keldric stirred. He looked up at Jaric as though fully aware of his presence for the first time. "Trade? Fer that?" He inclined his head toward the cloak, and tangled white hair fell, obscuring his face. But Jaric thought for a second that the clear old eyes showed a glaze of tears. He started to move away.

"Well, then," said Mathieson Keldric gruffly. "Ye'll have to come to the docks. My
Callinde's
a lady, straight down to her keel, an' I'd not let her go to a man who never set eyes on her. Fair?"

Jaric struggled to suppress the tremor which arose in his knees and traveled the length of his spine. "Fair," he said softly.

An ugly murmur arose at his back, threaded through by the louder voice of the trader and sibilant whispers of sorcery. Jaric heard; he realized old Keldric's attachment to his boat was legend in Mearren Ard. The fact the man had considered parting with her earned the boy nothing but suspicion from the villagers.

Forced to move before their muttering metamorphosed into threats, Jaric extended his hand toward the old man. He spoke without urgency, his phrases shaped with the courtesy learned at Morbrith's great hall. "Come, then, and perhaps the lady will approve."

The voices grew louder. As the old man pushed himself to his feet, Jaric felt the villagers' resentment rise against him, menacing as the rush of breakers over rock. But Mathieson Keldric's lame old body could not be hurried. He walked with painful, halting steps, steadied by Jaric's arm. Bystanders moved grudgingly aside, leaving a wide berth as the pair made their way through the door.

Jaric drew a deep breath of relief. The night was damp and chill after the close heat of the tavern, braced by the tang of salt. But the cold calmed the boy's nerves. He shortened stride to match old Keldric's limp, grateful for the fog which smothered the lane leading down to the harbor; murky weather at least spared him the accusing observation of the villagers. Soon the last cottage passed behind, lighted windows eclipsed by the black hulk of a warehouse.

Surf boomed distantly off the barrier point and the air smelted sourly of tide wrack and fish. Mathieson Keldric lifted a lantern from a hook on a piling driven deep into the sand of the strand. He fumbled with crooked fingers to manage the striker, but something about the resistant set of his back warned Jaric not to offer help. Although Keldric was ruinously crippled, he was not incapable; Jaric sensed that the boat he needed so desperately to buy was inextricably interconnected with the old man's pride. To interfere even in kindness would offend.

The spark spat against the dampened wick and hesitantly caught. Flame quivered behind panes patterned with crystalline whorls of salt as Keldric raised the lantern. The boy stepped behind the old man onto the wet planks of the east dock. Mist rolled past, breaking like ghostly surf over his feet; it seethed through the black teeth of the pilings, stringing droplets on Jaric's hair and clothing. Keldric moved forward, silhouetted against the fuzzy globe of lanternlight. Through the formless darkness ahead, Jaric saw the gleam of a braided painter, then a high curving prow and the angled line of a headstay. But the rank smell of decayed wood warned him, long before the antique shear of the thwart stood exposed in the lanternlight;
Callinde
was ancient and rotten, and nothing close to seaworthy.

Painfully aware the derelict hull was Keldric's sole treasure, a shrine preserved in memory of the brighter days of youth, Jaric's first thought was not for himself. For one stunned moment he ignored the inhuman wrench of the geas directive and stared at the elder who waited at his side, gnarled fingers gripping the ring of the lantern with an air of desperate self-sacrifice.

"Why?" The boy searched for an answer in the clear pale eyes. "Why would you give her up, after all these years?"

Mathieson Keldric shrugged. "You've the need in you." He glanced at his hands and spat. "I can't so much as plane a timber any more, and
Callinde
looks sloppy as a whore."

But Jaric knew there was more. Silently smothering an anger he could ill afford to express, he waited to hear the rest.

Old Mathieson shrugged again, then glared defiantly at the young man's face. "Well, then. My wife, I saw her standing at your shoulder, back there in the tap. Black-haired she was, full of her youth, and prettier than ever I remembered when she was alive. Seems the old lady would have it so." Suddenly his expression changed to worry. "Ye won't want to be changing her name, then?"

Jaric turned abruptly away, poisoned by sudden revelation. Taen had intervened, plied her dream-weaver's talents upon a defenseless old man to help buy him passage. But bitterest of all was the recognition that he had no choice but accept; the battered old hull represented his only alternative if he was to escape the insufferable pain of the geas.