Stormwarden (8 page)

* * *

Caught by a rising wave,
Crow
pitched, and the wheel clattered with a rattle like old bones as her helmsman strove to hold her bow to windward. Although Tathagres was land bred, she braved the quarterdeck on braced feet, white hair lashed into tangles by the gale. The cling of sodden velvet shamelessly accentuated her femininity; but the captain who confronted her had little appetite, no matter how alluring her curves. His gesture of protest withered under her scornful regard, and his mouth gaped speechlessly open.

Tathagres laughed. The oath she uttered belied her delicacy, as did the command which followed. "Slaughter them, then, but get those oar-ports
closed."
Her violet eyes narrowed angrily. "They're only slaves. If they drown, they'll be just as dead. So will we all, if you don't act quickly."

A gust slammed into the spanker, which men still labored to furl. The captain lost his balance. Testily, he grabbed a stay, and barely missed jostling Tathagres. He began a plea for temperance. "Lady-"

The woman returned no threats. Yet the captain felt a quiver in his knees. "I'll see it done," he said quickly, though he had intended different words. Reduced to subservience on his own vessel, he hastened toward the companionway and almost collided with Hearvin, who had just arrived topside with the boy.

Tathagres transferred her displeasure to the sorcerer. "By the Great Fall," she exclaimed fiercely. "You owe me an explanation, Hearvin. Anskiere's possessions were scuttled, you said. How in Kor's Name could that stormfalcon get a homing fix on us?''

A wave smacked
Crow
onto her beam ends. The quartermaster wrestled the helm, and Tathagres slammed into the rail, knocked breathless. As Hearvin fetched up beside her, she noticed that Emien seemed strangely passive in the sorcerer's grip. She began at once to comment, but Hearvin interrupted.

"I did tell you. At the time I knew of no means by which the stormfalcon could track anything other than its original key of return." He regarded the woman without apprehension. "I also counseled caution, which you unwisely ignored. My two colleagues are dead."

Tathagres flung her head back, drenched by spray as
Crow
wallowed, lee rails awash in the waist. The galleass recovered sluggishly. An officer shouted frantic orders; the deckhands abandoned the spanker and slashed the halyards. But not even the pandemonium and canting decks disrupted Tathagres' obsession.

"Anskiere? Has he defied me?"

Hearvin's mouth twitched. "He has escaped. At what cost, I cannot guess. But this much I promise: the frostwargs are roused, but not free, and the stormfalcon circles Kisburn's fleet. Your plans are balked."

"Not balked." Tathagres released the rail as the galleass swung level. "Never that. We have the boy." She detailed two deckhands to ready
Crow's
pinnace for launch, intending to sail directly and confront Anskiere at Cliffhaven.

Hearvin watched her until rain fell in sheets and quenched the stern lantern. Familiar with her temper, he had prudently avoided telling Tathagres how close she had come to losing the boy. Neither did he mention the fact that he guessed the pinnace would not make landfall at the Kielmark's isle.
Crow
quivered, battered by ever steepening waves. The wind skirled like demonsong through her masts. Hearvin heard its violence, and was not fooled. Unlike his dead companions, he did not underestimate the threat Anskiere's falcon had unleashed. The Free Isles might condemn the Stormwarden whose powers had leveled Tierl Enneth; but Anskiere's loyalty would never change. Kisburn's warships would be smashed like toys.

* * *

The gale worsened. Towering whitecaps tumbled across the galleass' decks, sweeping gear and human life into the sea with equal abandon. The effort to launch the pinnace soon became a struggle for survival. Awash up to her oar deck,
Crow
plowed clumsily into the waves, unresponsive to the helm. Despite the efforts of her crew, the galleass could not be saved. Hoarsely, the captain ordered the longboats unlashed. But no man would board until the King's officers were away in the pinnace. Beaten and tired the captain left the quartermaster at the helm and sought Tathagres.

Thigh-deep in the foam-laced flood of the waist, Crow's best seamen labored with the pinnace. The sea sucked and thudded, and the masts traced dizzy circles against the sky. The captain found Tathagres with her sorcerer, clinging to the companion way rail. He touched her shoulder even as the pinnace jerked, freed at last from her cradle. Tathagres returned a slitted glare of annoyance.

The captain was too pressured to be cowed. "Get to the boat. If the seamen panic, I cannot ensure your safety."

A gust shivered the rigging, and something gave way aloft, streaming a snarl of lines to leeward. Tathagres' reply was obliterated by a sailhand's shout and the booming crash of a fallen yard. She made no move toward the pinnace.

Hearvin caught her arm. "Go at once."

Tathagres resisted. "Where is the Constable?"

Exasperated, the captain shouted warning. "You'll lose your chance!" He pointed forward.

A great sea reared above the galleass' bows. For an instant, the bowsprit rose, a glistening spear aimed at a sky which smoked with spindrift. Then the wave broke, avalanching water across the forecastle. A thunderous cascade of foam spun the pinnace in the waist. The seamen strove to hold her but the sea unravelled their grip like crochetwork. The boat struck the rail. Beaded wood exploded into wind-borne fragments. The next wave would likely tear the pinnace loose, empty of passengers.

"Go!" Hearvin thrust Tathagres and the boy headlong down the companionway. Moving hard on their heels, he shouted, "It's too late for the Constable!"

The sea swirled up to receive them. Belted chest-high by cold water, Tathagres stumbled. A seaman caught her. The deck tilted; he lost his balance and shoved her roughly into the arms of another man. Tathagres was lifted and dumped rudely onto the floorboards of the pinnace.

The next wave struck. Spray geysered overhead. Kicked by bare feet as the seamen tumbled into the boat, Tathagres had no chance to struggle upright. The pinnace slewed. Water bashed and hissed under the keel, and a gust tore the shouts of the seamen into unintelligible scraps. Then with a bump that knocked Tathagres against a thwart, the pinnace broke free.

"I have the boy," cried Hearvin from the stern.

A sailor lost his footing and fell, clutching desperately to the gunwale. The boat rolled under his weight and threatened to capsize. Another seaman pulped the man's knuckles with an oar. His screams were quickly lost astern as the pinnace lifted like a chip over storm-maddened crests. The seamen fought her steady. They bent over the oars. Spray slashed their backs and washed stinging runnels into their eyes. If the pinnace broached, even once, all her passengers would drown.

Tathagres pushed her hands against the boards, and curtly demanded the heading. Hearvin explained that the storm drove them southwest, toward Innishari and the lower reaches of the Alliance. Cliffhaven lay in the opposite direction, and until the weather improved, the pinnace could hold no better course. Tathagres accepted the reverse with steely practicality. She reviewed her assets, beginning with the boy from Imrill Kand who sat in the stem, an oddly wooden expression on his face.

Tathagres studied him carefully. A fisherman's son whose past actions had been impulsively, even violently, brash, would never sit passive while his boat was endangered by heavy seas.

"Emien," she said sharply.

The boy responded as though drugged. Tathagres frowned. "Hearvin." Reprimand edged her voice. "You've placed a stay-spell on the boy. Why?"

The sorcerer leaned with the motion of the pinnace, his hood pulled over his head and his features in shadow. "You'd have lost him to Anskiere, had I not. The falcon's return forestalled any chance to involve you."

"What!"
Tathagres stiffened. She struck the seat with her fist, and gold jangled through the rush of the gale. "Do you tell me Anskiere sent a summoning aboard
Crow,
and you saw fit not to inform me? Koridan's Fires!
I'd like to see you flayed.
Because of your misjudgment, that foolish little girl will probably survive." She stared crossly over waters wracked by spume. "We won't recover her now, that's certain."

Hearvin said nothing. What he thought could not be guessed as Tathagres spun back to face him, her wet hair twisted into snake locks.

"It
is
a stay-spell?" She paused only for Hearvin's affirmation. "Then release him. I want the boy aware his sister's death was caused by that cloud-shifter's stormfalcon. Convince him, if he asks, that Taen perished in the hold of the galleass."

Hearvin obediently traced a pass in the air before the boy. A symbol glimmered red, framed briefly by the black surge of a wave before the sorcerer snapped his fingers. The glyph faded. Emien blinked, started, and his blankly disoriented expression transformed into a desperate survey of the pinnace's passengers.

Tathagres awaited her opening. With narrowed, predator's eyes, she absorbed every nuance of the boy's expression as he realized his sister was absent. He did not speak. But his body convulsed with a savage flare of rage.

Plotting for the future, Tathagres sought a way to exploit that anger; and in the seawater sloshing under her knees, found inspiration. She yanked a bucket from the pinnace's locker and thrust it between the boy's hands. "Bail," she urged softly. "Your life, and mine, depends upon keeping this craft seaworthy."

Emien seized the handles with a grip that blanched his knuckles, his eyes already hardened. He would live, Tathagres saw, expressly to avenge his sister. She smiled in the darkness. The boy was tough as sword steel and charged like a thunder-head with passion. Under her guidance he would become a magnificent weapon. Settled by the thought, Tathagres leaned against a thwart and shut her eyes.

* * *

Of the survivors of the pinnace, Emien alone searched astern for a glimpse of the vessel left behind.
Crow
reeled in her death throes. Thrashed like flotsam, she listed in the spume, the corpses of her slaves streaming from the oar-ports. As Emien watched, rain alone wet his cheeks. Once, he would have wept for the sister he had lost. Now his grief was eclipsed by hatred so pure it burned his very soul. If he lived, Anskiere would die. Mechanically, Emien continued to bail.

* * *

The abandoned galleass settled slowly to her deep water grave. No living man remained to observe as, tickled by a trail of bubbles from the hold, a brandy cask rose like a cork to the surface. Perched precariously on the rim, a tern spread wings haloed by the blaze of an enchanter's craft. Though gusts hammered the surrounding waves into a churning millrace of foam, the cask bobbed gently, girdled by calm only one sorcerer could command. Dry inside, Taen slept. Anskiere's ward drew her scathelessly through the gale-ravaged wreckage of Kisburn's fleet and westward into the open sea.

V
Ivain's Heir

In the close heat of evening Jaric lay limp on his cot in the loft above Morbrith Keep's smithy. Although more than one healer plied him with remedies, he had not regained consciousness since he had fallen senseless in the apothecary's herb garden two days past. Sightless as an icon beneath his blankets, he did not respond to the flare of light beneath the dormer by his head; nor did he stir as the tramp of booted feet shook the ladder which led to the loft. Far beyond reach of physical senses, the scribe's apprentice remained unaware his illness had earned him the attention of the Master Healer, and oddly, the Earl of Morbrith himself.

A liveried servant raised a lantern over the cot, revealing a profile now sharp-edged and sunken. Flamelight accentuated the boy's bloodless lips, and the fingers splayed on the coverlet seemed as fragile as the fluted shells washed in by the tide.

"He seems dead," said the Earl. Emeralds flashed as he bent and lifted Jaric's wrist. The limb was icy, and slender as a maid's in the man's callused grip. The Earl swallowed, moved to pity for the boy. Raised by the Smith's Guild, Jaric had proved too slight for the forges; he had been forced to repay the cost of his fostering on a copyist's wages. The Earl chafed the boy's skin, startled to discover blisters. He turned the hand he held to the light. "Did you see this?"

The Master Healer clicked his tongue. "Severe sunburn," he said gruffly. "The boy lay unprotected for several hours before anyone noticed him. The other side of his face is marked also. Except for that, he shows no trace of injury. I found no bruises, and if he's sick, his symptoms match no affliction I have ever known. I tell you, Lord, I believe him stricken by sorcery."

The Earl smoothed Jaric's arm on the blanket. He settled on his heels, remembering Kerain, the smith's son, who had hung for murdering his betrothed. Under oath at his trial, Kerain had sworn he had done nothing except prevent the girl from slaughtering her newborn child. The young man claimed to have snatched the infant from under her knife, and she had promptly turned the blade against herself. The earl winced in recollection. Condemned to the scaffold, Kerain had voiced his death wish; he claimed the orphaned baby as his own. Morbrith Keep's archives recorded the boy child as Kerain's son Jaric, assigned as ward of the Smith's Guild. Sixteen years later, the Earl studied the delicate features of that same boy, now certain the burly, black-haired Kerain had not been the father. If Jaric was a sorcerer's get, his mother's attempt at murder became plausible; a wizard's heir inherited the enemies of his sire, and terrible misfortune often befell those who surrounded him.

The Earl blotted sweat from his temples. Had he guessed the truth at the trial, he would have spared Kerain, and put the child to the sword instead. But hindsight was useless. The present offered options considerably less favorable. Unhappily, the Earl made his decision.

"I want the boy moved to the sanctuary tower behind Koridan's Shrine."

The healer gasped, startled. "That's not wise." The tower lay outside the walls, on the other side of the summerfair. The crowded alleys beyond the gates were no place to be carrying a sick boy after dark. "Jaric's condition is most serious, my Lord."

The Earl straightened angrily. "You'll move that boy quickly and without any fuss. I'll send guardsmen to help. Am I clear?"

"Very." The healer bowed with evident distress. "But you risk the boy's life."

Pressured by concern he had no wish to explain, the Earl said nothing. What healer could understand that this boy might be better dead? For should Jaric prove to be other than Kerain's get, the consequences might threaten all of Morbrith.