Treason's Shore (77 page)

He got up to report the news to Queen Wisthia, remembered that she had company, and waited until the next time they met alone.

“Evred sent Inda,” Tau later reported. “With orders to ‘restore order’ in the strait. I hope that means we will be seeing Inda before spring is over.” Tau shook his head. “You’d think someone would have got one of those transfer tokens to him so he could spend the winter and summer drilling instead of traveling.”

Wisthia tipped her head. “Taumad. Do you really think any monarch will trust the famed Elgar the Fox with his force for longer than it will take to win a battle? No, don’t protest about how long it takes to drill. I know that, though I wouldn’t have before being forced to live among Marlovans as long as I did. I can assure you, Kliessin wants your Inda to walk in, lead Bren’s navy to a spectacular victory, and then go home again. Preferably in a day.”

“Well that won’t happen,” Tau retorted.

“No, and I’m afraid to find out what will.” Wisthia began to pass, then halted and looked back. “What did Evred say? ‘Restore order.’ ” Her expression was difficult to interpret. Then she smiled. “I do hope whatever happens, that young man comes here at some point. I confess to an almost overwhelming desire to meet him.”

The world was made of silence and lay outside of time.

Language had failed Rajnir, and so he abandoned it, straining toward the ceiling of gray ice in hopes of another window. He cherished the last window, examining it minutely again and again as he reveled in sensory memory: how his lungs expanded of his own volition, without the constraint of the vile whisper. How heat pressed upon him so that sweat trickled down his brow into his ear, ran down his inner thigh. How the white silk squeaked when he moved his arms. The press of his loosely-laced armor under his arms when he arched his back.

He remembered
hearing
words. Not the vile whisper. He heard Uncle Fulla. He understood the words! “
My king.” That is I! I am Rajnir!
He held onto the meaning of those words, saying them over—sensing a window—turned and turned until he found it, and there it was! He used his eyes—his eyelids lifted, and he reveled in the cold air on his eyeball, the itch along his lashes, because it was so very good to
feel!
He cherished the tearing of bright light. There was the table, with a chart on it. There were inward slanting ship windows, with a green sea moving outside. There
he
was, the vile whisperer, but giving orders to his dags, and so Rajnir relished the cold flow of air against his face, and the sweat inside his clothes. The expansion of an indrawn breath, the shape of his own lips and jaw and tongue. He moved them! His throat worked, and he spoke words!
“I want the fleet to win sea room.”
And when the vile whisperer spun around, eyes and mouth three circles, Rajnir thought,
I am king!
and said,
“Order the signals, my Dag.”
He said them! He thought the words, and his own lips and tongue and breath shaped them! What pleasure, what glory, to choose to speak and then to do it!

Then came the fight to hold onto movement, and meaning, but he could not shut out the vile whispers. Inexorably the ice built and built, shrouding him with numbing cold until the window closed. Gone was volition, and feeling, and hearing. Gone everything but floating in the ice-bound silence, except when the whisper forced him to stand, forced him to sit, forced him to speak a stream of words whose meaning was gone as soon as the sound left his lips.

So he cherished the memory of that window, of feeling and being, again and again and again . . .

Then he felt another window. And a new voice, whispering
Rajnir
.

At first he let the whisper pass. Rajnir had no being, no voice, no volition. Only memory.

Rajnir, come to the window
.

That was not the vile whisperer. The vile whispers took away the windows.

It took immense effort to remember how to turn. How to look. How to listen. The new voice persisted:
Rajnir. Come see. Come find me. Open your eyes
.

. . . to find a world within a world. He floated higher, aware of the sensation of floating, of movement. Sunbeams shot through the gray, and when he turned, there was the deep blue immensity of the sky.

Rajnir. Open your eyes
.

In his dream he had self again, and opened his eyes, but he knew it was a dream, for he was in Ymar again, the tower high above the port of Jaro. Higher than the clouds, a cold wind blowing and blowing, and above the sky so brilliant and pure a blue it hurt to look, it hurt his skin to feel the wind, it hurt his body to walk . . .

. . . and he tumbled out of the dream and into a room he had never seen. He fell to his hands and knees, his body thick and heavy, his breath sobbing in his throat. His limbs trembled with the effort it took just to hold himself on hands and knees in a crawl. His eyelids burned, but he forced them open.

A small old woman with untidy gray-white hair knelt by him. He remembered her, not who she was, only that he knew her. Memory! It had become more precious than gold.

“Rajnir.” Hers was the other voice! No longer a smooth whisper inside the gray world but real, the cracked voice of an old woman, hissing through real teeth and over a real tongue. And so familiar, and so kind, calling and calling to bring him out of the ice. “Come, wake up. We must speak.”

He made a great effort and lifted his head again. Drew in a breath of his own volition! “Uuuuuhhhhn.” It was his voice! His word!

“Rajnir, I am Brit Valda. I’ve created a hole in Erkric’s spells. We are in a bubble outside of time. It will not last, the cost is so very great just for this much,” she said quickly. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

He shifted, sitting down abruptly. The stone floor was cold and rough under his haunch. He ran his fingers over the stones, loving the coarseness of the grit. “Where am I?” His voice, his chosen words!

“You are in Llyenthur Harbor. You are in the old palace on the hill. Erkric has frozen you inside of spells, a terrible lock and interlock of spells, and when my own bubble bursts, the spells await you again, I am desolate to admit. We got you out once before, but then Erkric locked you in again, far more securely than before. I want you to know what is happening to you, so you can take the knowledge inside when the waiting spells close around you again. And know that I am fighting Erkric, and others are as well. We will free you. I vow to you, my king. By twig and root. We will free you.”

“Spells,” he whispered. “Is that the gray?”

“I don’t know what you see. There are two sets of spells. One binds your mind away from your body. Another set binds your body to actions controlled by magical signals, leaving you only the ability to eat, drink, and use the Waste Spell. Speak what you are constrained to speak, on signal.” She touched his arm. He twitched, then stretched his arm out again. Oh, to be touched—and to choose it, and know it!

She seemed to understand, and ran her hand lightly over his shoulder, then up to his head. She stroked his hair, tender as a mother.

Rajnir’s face crumpled. His chest ached with misery.

“Come. Come. You must regain your chair. Erkric must not know you moved.”

He gasped, and strained to sit upright. Valda lent him all her spindly strength as he forced himself to rise. He could not resist swinging his arms, just to feel them swinging, and though his knees trembled with his effort to hold himself, he stomped once, twice, thrice.

Then collapsed into the chair. She flicked his hair smooth, his robe straight. Her clothes smelled musty with the thin sweat of the old. Her breath on his cheek whiffed of the spice-milk she’d drunk at dawn. He breathed deeply, gathering to him the evidence of another life, of existence, of his ability to command his own body, strange and heavy and weak as it was.

A faint blue light flickered, and the woman gasped in dismay. “Already my bubble wears! Rajnir, hear me. Erkric right now is back in Twelve Towers, stripping the old protections from your chambers and laying his Norsunder magic. But we will destroy that, too. Augh, it’s fading.”

“No,” Rajnir begged. “No. Please, don’t—”

The woman whispered, making signs, then shook her head in frustration. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, tears gathering in her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

The window vanished, and Rajnir tumbled back into the featureless, painless gray, then gradually lost the sense of tumbling. He floated again, in the world of ice. For a time he raged and wept, except he had no voice, no tears.

But he did have memory. And so he cherished the memory, revisiting each sight and smell and touch. Each word.

Even the ones she had whispered.

 

The doors to the cabin slammed open to a whirl of frigid blizzard winds as Barend stumbled in, recognizable only by his crimson knit cap and his pointed chin. Fox sprang up and kicked the door shut.

Barend flapped his arms, shedding wet snow in clumps.

“Thank you for bringing that inside,” Fox said.

Barend was too cold, and too alarmed, to care. “There’s a fleet hull up. All across the horizon. We near to sailed into the midst of ’em.”

“Venn?” Fox asked sharply in total disbelief. Even the Venn couldn’t sail directly into the winds, especially these vicious, steady winds straight out of the east, unhindered by any continent for months of sailing.

“Hard to see, but Pilvig swears they’re Chwahir,” Barend said.

“She’d know.” Fox also knew what the Chwahir did to renegades they plucked off other ships. “She’s the mate on deck this watch, eh? I’ll come up. Relieve her.”

Barend turned away as Fox reached for his winter gear. By the time he reached the captain’s deck and looked around at the
Death
stripped to fighting sail, the foremost Chwahir could be made out through his glass by the ship rat shivering on lookout.

“Parley flag at the foremast!” he screeched.

Fox gestured to the mid at the signal flags. “Run up the ‘parley agreed’.”

No one moved; a faint whiff of the smolder pots whipped down from the mizzenmast from an errant gust of wind. The blizzard was breaking up.

The Chwahir spilled wind, and the flagship waited for the
Death
to slide up on its lee and shiver sail so that the captains could look across at the opposite ship.

The Chwahir had also stripped to fighting sail, bow teams waiting in the tops.

The Chwahir captain stood abaft those tending the wheel, his manner attentive to someone on the poop deck, in the position of supreme command. Fox turned his attention to the small, still figure dressed all in black, just like him. He recognized that childish form—

Snapped his glass to his eye. “Thog?”

Thog daughter of Pirog lifted a thin, small hand in gesture. She spoke, but the wind took away her words. But there was no mistaking that invitation.

As soon as wind, water, and surging wood would permit, Fox climbed aboard the Chwahir flagship, the first non-Chwahir to do so, as far as he was aware. A swift glance revealed a deck much like any other: wind-scoured, everything orderly, round-faced, black-eyed Chwahir at their posts, looking even more alike in their severely plain hooded tunic-coats.

The rounder hulls sat better in the water than Fox’s narrow-hulled racing ships. The forecastle was a true forecastle; that is, a raised structure off the main deck, as was the aft castle, the captain’s deck where the ship was conned, and a poop up behind.

Fox was conducted by silent Chwahir into a plain cabin, furnished much like any other cabin, with a bolted central table, charts spread.

Thog looked exactly the same as Fox remembered. She’d always seemed about twelve years old, though she was Fox’s age. As she came forward, the clear light of glowglobes showed tiny lines at the corners of her big, dark eyes and etched across her broad, tense forehead.