The Dragon Round (7 page)

“Is that it?” Solet says.

Again the poth says, “Yes.”

“Fool me once,” Solet says. “Hold her.” Two sailors stretch her by her arms and Solet runs his hands up each arm, over her back, belly, breasts, and broad, heavy hips, then from her crotch to her ankles. He finds no contraband. He and the crew might have taken a greater thrill from the search had her furious dignity not stiffened their hearts. The sailors let her go.

He says to Jeryon, “Pick up anything in the hold?” Jeryon yanks out his two pants pockets. They flap as uselessly as a spaniel's ears.

Solet looks to Livion, who orders, “Put them in the dinghy.”

They're led down to the starboard rail. The dinghy's thwarts have been removed, as well as the collapsible mast, the rigging, and the rudder.

It seems so much larger
, Jeryon thinks.

“It seems so small,” the poth mutters.

Jeryon offers the poth his hand. She refuses it, jumps into the dinghy, and kneels by the transom as he climbs in after her. He remains standing, the cords in his arms and his neck tensed. A sailor unties the painter and tosses it into the dinghy. It drifts away from the
Comber
.

Everlyn gets up, rocking the boat as little as possible, and stands behind Jeryon.

Jeryon says, “Livion, remember this. I don't take chances. I plot a course, and I bring my boat in.”

“If you did take chances,” Livion says, “you wouldn't have that one to bring in.”

Tuse descends to the rowers' deck, Solet takes the oar, and Livion pipes. The oars extend from the galley like the legs of a crab. The ports have been reopened, but none of the rowers look at the dinghy. Livion pipes again. As the oars stroke for Hanosh, Beale comes to the rail. He can't help it. He waves.

Jeryon calls out, “I still would have saved you.”

CHAPTER TWO

The Poth

1

I shouldn't have saved him
, Jeryon thinks.
Now I'll have to destroy him too
.

Solet would happily kill for revenge. Ynessi love revenge so much they have songs celebrating it. They feature the most brutal and cunning slaughters, people and places, times and events. Children are taught the songs as much to learn about the city's history as to learn about its mores. And you can dance to them. Because revenge leads to more revenge, songs are often parts of a cycle, and these are the basis for daylong, sometimes weeklong, parties.

Tuse would kill for revenge if he were drunk and angry enough.

Not Livion. He would take a slight as his due until someone told him what to do.

I'll get my revenge the old-fashioned way
, Jeryon thinks. Nothing threatens trade like mutiny, and trade is all the Trust and the city care about. The Trust will be his hammer and the law his anvil. He looks forward to seeing the fear in his mates' eyes as they're condemned. He looks forward to watching them struggle or, better, sit stunned as
mullets while they're carted through town and rowed to the gibbets, then listening to them scream as thirst gets its claws into them. It'll take three days for them to die. Such is the essence of justice.

The poth settles against the transom, her knees pulled up, her smock tucked around them, her arms shrunken into her sleeves and wrapped around her calves. She feels unmoored in such an empty smock. And it will be a long, hot afternoon. She's already thirsty. Who decided poths must wear dark green?

When the
Comber
is far enough away that Jeryon can no longer make out the crew on deck, he says, “There are two things you need to know, poth.”

“Sit,” Everlyn says.

“What?”

“Sit,” she says. “I like your shade, but not you looming over me like some shipowner on his parlor throne.”

He sits, pressing his spine as far into the bow as possible
. If that's how it's going to be, let her squint
, he thinks. She does.

“One,” Jeryon says, “here's what stands between us and Hanosh. The nearest land is Eryn Point at the mouth of Joslin Bay, eighty nautical miles away. Hanosh is twenty beyond that. If we had oars, half a barrel of water, and the stamina of guilded rowers, we could make the trip in three days and see my mates tucked into their gibbets in four. Instead, we have the Tallan River.”

“What's that?” she says.

He looks as if she'd asked,
What's air?
“It's a current. The current. How can you live in Hanosh and—”

“I'm not Hanoshi,” Everlyn says. “I'm Aydeni.”

“I know,” he says. “It's the fault of you Aydeni that we're here in the first place.”

She nearly stands. The dinghy rocks severely. She doesn't care. “I'm here because I wouldn't have a hand in your death.”

“You're here,” Jeryon says, “because Ayden wouldn't sell us its store of shield. At any price.”

“I wouldn't have a hand in Hanoshi deaths either,” she says. “Your Trust didn't come to me. I went to them. I said I could help.”

“They trusted you?” he says.

Ayden, deep in the mountains west of Hanosh, has been the city's chief rival in the Six Cities Trading League since it was allowed to join. Their admission ended a ruinous war and ushered in four decades of mutual prosperity, but for the last several years they've been taking baby steps toward another conflict. There's not enough money to go around. Pirates who've plundered Hanoshi ships are rumored to have been Aydeni privateers. Bandits who've attacked Hanoshi caravans are suspected of being backed by Ayden. Not that Hanosh doesn't have its own agents in Ayden to steal their trade secrets. Not that they aren't rumored to have attacked Aydeni traders too. Denying Hanosh the golden shield it needed to fight the flox was the first adult step, even if Ayden claims they only took it because two years ago Hanosh gouged them on the price of grain after a drought doomed their crops.

“Of course they didn't trust me,” Everlyn says. “They thought I was a saboteur, maybe a venomist. But my patients, the shipowners' wives, they vouched for me.”

Owners aren't easily swayed, and their wives don't sway lightly: Where's the profit? Jeryon figures her advocates still consider it fashionable to have an Aydeni apothecary, just as some still wear boots and plain smocks instead of returning to sandals and embroidered chitons and mantles. To get her on the
Comber
would signal their power.

“Which brings us back to the Tallan River,” he says. “An actual agent probably would have been briefed on it.” He lays his arms over the gunwales. “The sea is shaped like the bow of a boat pointing north. That—” he points to the starboard oarlock, “is Chorem. And this—” he points to the larboard oarlock, “is Yness. Eryn Point is a couple hands forward, where the center thwart would go. Everything aft of the oarlocks is ocean: trackless, empty ocean. Now—”

As he scoots forward, Everlyn tucks her knees tighter.

Jeryon puts his left foot on the bottom beneath the starboard
oarlock. “The current is fifty miles wide,” he says, “a bit wider than my sandal in boat scale. It leaves the ocean here, runs up my left leg, around my back, and down my right leg into the sea here.” He plants his right foot under the larboard oarlock. “And we are here.” He puts his finger on the bottom between his knees, amidships, and too close to his crotch, in Everlyn's opinion. “Do you see our problem?”

The poth had hated her loremasters. When she was twelve her father discovered that she was running away from them to tramp through the woods with a forest warden. The warden convinced him that Everlyn, whatever her talent for sums, had a real devotion to herb­lore and healing. So her father gave Everlyn to her for schooling. She broke her slate in joy.

“How fast does the current run?” she asks.

“Correct,” Jeryon says. “Six knots. The
Comber
could cross it in four or five hours under full sail and oar, entering the river north of Eryn Point and letting it carry the galley down to the mouth of the bay. If we had oars to reach it, we would cross more slowly and be carried much farther south. Hopefully we'd make it to Yness before being swept to sea.”

“But we have no oars,” she says.

“Or water, which makes the issue moot. We'll be dead of thirst before we make it across.”

“So we have no chance?”

“Not according to my mates' calculations,” Jeryon says.

2

“Which brings us,” Jeryon continues, “to the second thing you need to know. I will get you to Hanosh so you can testify against my crew.”

“I could write it down,” she says, “and save you the trouble of saving me too.”

“We don't have anything to write with,” he says. Jeryon reads her like a manifest: “Smock. Boots. Presumably undergarments.” She scowls. “Those sticks in your hair, let me see them,” he says. She looks skeptical. He says, “I won't run off,” and holds out his hand.

She draws the pair of long steel pins from her bun. Her hair unfurls. Her neck sweats. “Why do you need them?” she says.

He tests their points, which are oddly sharp, and taps them together. Their surfaces are mottled like flowing water. “Gift from one of your company ladies?” he says. “These aren't cheap.”

“Not everything has a price,” she says.

“In Hanosh it does.” He crosses his right leg and with one of the pins worries the seam of his pant leg. He says, “I bet someone came to you for help and discovered afterward that she was also suffering from a touch of embarrassment. So she paid you with these. Her husband's going to be very upset when he finds out. What did you palm while Solet was searching you?”

Startled, the poth says, “You saw that?”

“Never lose sight of a person's hand,” he says. “That's Solet's weakness. He's easily distracted.”

The poth reaches into her pocket and removes a purple phial. “For cuts and burns.”

“Handy, if we live long enough to be cut.” He looks at the sun. “We will be burned. Especially you.” Her upland skin is more golden than his, what the Hanoshi described in better times as “tea with honey” and now call “milky.”

“There we go.” A stitch pops and he yanks out the thread with the pin. He opens the seam and removes a steel blade, one edge straight, the other serrated, and a thin envelope the length of her pinky.

“Aren't you full of surprises,” she says.

Jeryon has such a bland face, like dough too dry and hard to be pounded, that she's shocked to see a bit of mischief dart through his eyes.

“Trust your sails, but not the wind,” Jeryon says. “And I've been thinking the wind was about to turn.”

“Do you have an aphorism for everything?” she says. “Any port in a storm? Nodding the head won't row the boat?”

“Simple rules prevent complex problems,” he says.

She humphs. “What's in the envelope?”

He unfolds it carefully. In it sits a bone needle and some red thread.

“What's that for? Sutures?”

“Do I look like a surgeon?” he says. “It's for fixing my pants. I can't run around with my pants falling to pieces, can I?”

Everlyn stifles a laugh at his serious expression.

He threads the needle and goes to work. “While I do this,” he says, “crawl to the bow and untie the painter.” Everlyn looks confused. “The line. The rope.”
Landlubber
, he thinks.

She nods and slips past him. She doesn't ask why he needs the rope and lets the mystery of it burnish the next five minutes of life adrift.

The knot is hard as steel, hammered by a thousand waves. She wonders if this is a test of patience. Her fingers are powerful from yanking roots and nimble from untangling vines, but the knot gives only the tiniest bit with each tug. She develops a rhythm after a while, which lets her look into the water.

The sea is lifeless compared to the lake at Ayden, whose shallows are covered in nests. She splashed and shrieked in summer, especially when a mother fish nipped at her for stepping on a nest, and she slid in winter until her friend went through the ice and drowned, then it wasn't so much fun. The lake was huge to her as a child. It could fit in the dinghy compared to the sea.

Everlyn gets the painter free. Having fixed his pants—all sailors can sew—Jeryon rewraps and pockets the needle, then trades her pins for the painter and cuts off a piece as long as his blade. This he slices longitudinally a third of the way through. He fits the straight edge into the rope and saws experimentally at the starboard gunwale forward of the oarlock. The rope guards his finger satisfactorily. He keeps sawing.

“First, we're going to remove the gunwales section by section,” Jeryon says.

The poth says, “Won't that make the boat fall apart?”

“Were this a new dinghy, maybe,” he says. “Nowadays, every bit of wood is minimized to keep costs down. Boats don't last more than a couple years. Some galleys don't even carry them anymore. But this dinghy is pre-League and overdesigned. It'll last.” He taps the gunwale with his blade. “Two boards. We'll just take the top one.” He shakes his head. “I even got her cheap, for being ancient.”