The Fox (18 page)

Everyone in his new office stared at her. Delfin Islanders looked like birds, ungainly birds, but when they spoke, anyone who had anything to do with the sea listened.

Harbormaster Sholf, who took over after the slaughter of his old uncle when the pirates burned down the Nob, could count the times a Delf had offered information: three times in his fifty years. And this was one of those three rare times.

His staff was appalled. Only Mardric, the tall young man lounging near the doorway, seemed amused.

“So what do we do, stop rebuilding?” asked Sholf’s chief scribe, a hard-working young woman who had lost half her family in the pirate attack.

Sholf wanted to say, “Good question,” except he couldn’t. He had to seem calm and decisive—a leader—because he knew he did not look like one. His uncle had said,
When you’re almost always the shortest man in the room, not to mention the stoutest, people tend to look to you for meals, not for decisions
.

“Even if we all fight, we can’t win,” protested the new guild master, hitching up his worn sash under his massive belly.

At least he’s fatter than me,
Sholf thought, distracted by the movement.
If much taller
.

They all had lost people during the killing spree before the pirates looted the city—a day-long orgy of drinking, singing, fighting, and rutting by the light of the fire—then departed on the morning tide, leaving the devastation to be found by those who had survived by hiding in the ancient caves below the southern cliffs.

I will be expected to stand there with a sword in hand if the pirates come again,
he thought now.
And die like my uncle.

There was one alternative, but the others would hate it so much that he had to let them find it on their own or they would argue against it all night.

And so he waited while they suggested everyone hide and brick up the ancient tunnel entrance. No, that’s a stupid idea, let’s all take to the sea. And what if the Venn are there, behind the pirates, like everyone says they are? We’ll fight. We can’t fight. Hide. No. Then we may as well give up the city altogether. Some kind of plan? Oh, yes, a plan against
how
many pirates?

It was Mardric, the lounger—leader of the Resistance to the Marlovan conquerors—who spoke up at last, saying unexpectedly, “Tell the Marlovans.”

Everyone fell silent.

Mardric chuckled as he fingered back a lock of wavy black hair that had fallen across his brow. “Come now,” he chided, waving a hand to and fro. “Would you not like to see pirates take arms against the Marlovans? I know I would.”

That caused another hubbub, everyone trying to speak down the others. Yes, watch them get slaughtered. They think they are so superior. How would they measure against pirates? Taken by surprise. Can they be taken by surprise? But it was his chief scribe who gave Mardric a contemptuous toss of the head before saying, “If they fight, it’s for us.”

Gradually the voices died away, some looking at her, and she raised her chin and stated more firmly, “They’d be fighting for
us
.”

“But that’s supposedly in the treaty they forced on us,” the guild master pointed out, hitching up his sash again.

“Yes,” the scribe said. “Exactly. They did take on the cost of the rebuilding. Just as they promised. So if they take on the pirates . . .” She groped, as if the right words hovered in the air in front of her.

“If they defend our city against the pirates,” Sholf said, “then we have accepted their treaty.”

“So you’ve decided?” Mardric asked, inspecting the clean, short nails on one shapely hand.

A few beginning protests, one snort, but most indicated agreement, however reluctant.

Mardric stared across the room, eyes narrowed, then said, “So you expect us to accept their yoke, like obedient oxen?”

Sholf said, “If they keep the treaty, then I think it right that we do, too. Well?” And he turned to the others. “Do I ride down to warn their prince?”

Mardric laughed. “That fool? Save yourself a trip. Send one of their patrol flunkies.” He waved toward the window, which was shuttered against listeners despite the still summer air. The resultant stuffiness did not help anyone’s temper.

Beyond that window a small contingent of Marlovans patrolled the harbor and the city, under strict orders from their prince not to interfere unless there was violence.

Their prince.

“A fool from whom you never did find out any information, ” Sholf retorted, and the others laughed.

They all knew the story, for the Marlovan prince (had he really believed he was unknown when he called himself Sponge?) had either from ignorance or arrogance made no pretense of hiding his infatuation with one of Mardric’s spies. Dallo, the spy, had been assigned to work his way among the Marlovan forces by whatever means, and unexpectedly attracted their leader himself with no more than a glance. But the very day after the spy declared he had only to snap his fingers and the prince would come to heel and give them whatever aid and information they demanded, the prince had as suddenly departed.

Sholf said, “If you have not noticed—I have—they don’t make decisions without his sanction. From everything I hear, young as he is, and foolish as he might have been when he was among us, they abide by his decisions.” He paused, and observed shrugs, nods, tipped heads of agreement or at least acceptance. The news coming up the peninsula from all their various contacts seemed to agree.

“Further, unlike his uncle and those his uncle appointed over us—” Their reactions varied, though the impetus was a universal disgust and anger at the cruelties of the Jarl Kepri-Davan and his son and heir. “Unlike
them,
this young prince appears to regard the treaty as binding. So far he has honored their promises in his judgments.”

“How can you blind yourself so willfully?” Mardric retorted. “Does it comfort you? Was it so easy to forget Nalma in the vinelands and her friends, much less everything done after?”

A murmur of protest, of uneasiness, rose.

Sholf said, “I have never forgotten Nalma. Or her friends. Or any of the other young women the Marlovan prince has murdered—except I still wonder, after all this time, why have no other names or towns have been named in this murderous rampage? Or why the king of Idayago himself never talked about it when he signed the treaty?”

“You deny that my own brother saw Nalma and the others in that house before they were Disappeared?” Mardric retorted.

“I do not,” Sholf answered. “I have heard, vividly, what that house looked like, all that blood. All the more peculiar that no word of other murders has reached me.”

“They don’t come out of fear, of course,” the old woman said, but Sholf heard the question in her voice.

So he said, “We are not going to answer those questions now. What we do have to answer is: what do we do to prepare for imminent attack? Choose, council. Do we stand to the last man or woman, or do we invoke the treaty and let the Marlovans stand in our place?”

Again he paused, again he saw subtle signs of concession.

“If the winds change soon, there will be no time for the back-and-forth of messengers. Are we agreed that if the Marlovan conquerors abide by the treaty and come in force to our defense, we will abide by it, too? However unwillingly?”

They all signified agreement. Mardric last, lounging there with his superior smile; Sholf waited in patient silence until Mardric said, “Aye.”

“Then I will leave today and ride down the coast to Ala Larkadhe.”

For Evred Montrei-Vayir, second son of the Marlovan king, his first command could be summed up as a frustrating series of travels back and forth along the Andahi Pass to hearings for petty crimes. Again and again he listened to accusations from both sides for crimes petty and not so petty, such as the wholesale burning of cotton fields just so the evil Marlovans would not get the profits.

He knew some of these burnings were the last protests against the harshness of the Kepri-Davans, who had been initially placed by the Harskialdna as the guards of the north end of the Andahi Pass. But that did not explain the bitterness in the eastern portion of Idayago in particular, the sullen, deliberate resistance. Something else was amiss, though as yet he had not discovered what. He knew this: his judgment, however fair, could not satisfy emotional reaction—either his or the Idayagans’—he had to wall away his feelings and strive to find a balance between the treaty stipulations and Marlovan law.

There was another mystery, perhaps connected, perhaps not. He was certain that, despite apparent evidence, the Idayagans had not ambushed and murdered his former commander, Tanrid-Laef Algara-Vayir, brother to his old academy mate Inda.

Hawkeye Yvana-Vayir, arriving as Tanrid’s replacement, had brought reports of attacks all the way down to the southern border of Iasca Leror. It was land warfare that they all understood, had been trained to understand. But the enemies now were in ships: pirates sent by the Venn.

As the summer sun slanted more northward each day Harbormaster Sholf traveled down from Olara’s mountainous peninsula to Ala Larkadhe.

There seemed to be an order for the troops to pass along everyone who wished to speak to the Marlovan prince, and so Sholf was handed off from patrol to patrol, scout to sentry, until he reached the enormous castle with the weird tower made of ancient snow-white material that was not quite stone. The wind from the mountains brought an almost subliminal hum. Wind harps. Testament to unimaginably different customs as lived by their ancestors.

Tired, thirsty, the harbormaster was conducted to the room the Marlovan prince had taken for his headquarters, the carved, gilded furnishings shoved to the walls and replaced by a massive table littered with papers.

The room was full of men, all facing the young prince whom Sholf recognized from his stay at the Nob last spring: tall, dark red hair pulled high on the back of his head and hanging down between his shoulder blades in the singular style all these warriors affected, watchful hazel eyes below an intelligent brow.

Sholf ignored the other men. His attention stayed on the prince, who stood before a great map covered with indecipherable marks. He wore a gray warrior’s coat no different from any of his men’s, tight through muscular shoulders and chest, tied at the waist with a knife thrust through the sash, wide-skirted for riding on the world-famous horses.

The young man, scarcely out of boyhood, looked tired and tense, but his manner was as courteous as it had been last spring.

Sholf said in his diffident Iascan, “We have received word from a Delfin Islander, relayed through our fishing fleet. A small fleet of Venn and many pirate allies were seen north of the strait. The Delfin Islanders say as soon as the wind changes the pirates are going to attack the Nob in force once again. They say that if the pirates take it, the Venn this time mean to hold it.”

The prince turned to the tall, long-faced man standing farthest from the center of the room—but from where he could observe it in its entirety. He was Captain Sindan, not just the king’s own Runner, but Captain of the Runners. Sholf had been told dismissively that Sindan had given up the military command he’d earned to remain a Runner— thus staying in the royal city at the king’s side.

Many thought that he’d thus given up influence, but the most far-sighted among Idayagan and Olaran councils had subsequently come to the conclusion that in fact, Sindan had far more influence and therefore more power than any single man, excepting only the king and his brother.

It was he who had written the Idayagan and Olaran treaty.

Sindan did not speak, but some minute change in his expression seemed to reassure Evred.

The prince said, “The treaty does require us to defend these lands.”

The middle-aged, grizzled warrior at the prince’s other side frowned down at the map. This man had to be the new Jarl, called Dewlap Arveas, sent in to replace the horrible Kepri-Davan.

Arveas said, not hiding his skepticism, “Why attack and hold the end of a peninsula? It’s surrounded on three sides by nothing but ocean, and the fourth is solid mountain. They can’t possibly mount an invasion with any speed or secrecy along that narrow coast road.” He waved his hand in a circle. “No military value.”

Sholf said, “I cannot address questions of military value, for we are not military people.” He could not keep dryness from his tone, though the Marlovans did not react. “If the pirates destroy us once again and the Venn settle in, they can make of our harbor a port convenient to their long-range plans for your southern coast.”

Arveas said, “Ah! Yes. Repair, refit, resupply. But from the sea.”

Another young man, with bright yellow hair and a sharp-cut chin like the prince’s, made an impatient movement. This had to be Hawkeye Yvana-Vayir, whose mother had been sister to the Marlovan king and who as a youth had fought in the battle that the Idayagans had lost, the price their kingdom. If the rumors were true, he had been one of the older prince’s gang who went on a rampage killing unarmed girls.

The young man glanced at his cousin, then back at Sholf. “You want us to come in force to defend you.”

Sholf said, “It was in your treaty, signed by your king.”

Again silence, but of a different quality. They all felt the weight of decision, measured by the tension in the young prince’s face.

Evred could see in Arveas’ skeptical raised brows, in Hawkeye’s twisted mouth, they did not believe the man.

“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Evred responded, signing to one of the guards at the door. “I promise an answer as soon as possible.”

Sholf’s mouth tightened. “I shall depart on the morrow, answer or no.”

Evred couldn’t resist asking, “And?”

Sholf turned his way, the lines in his face deep. “We’ll try again to defend what’s ours.”