Six Heirs (30 page)

“But the only rich heirs are the descendants of Arkane of Junine,” Grigán said. “Who never came to the gatherings, Thomé excepted.”

“And the Arkane lineage is coming to an end,” Corenn added. “The queen Séhane will die without children; the barons are already arguing over the throne.”

“Remember when I said that Ji was nothing more than a curse?” Rey commented. “But this queen has to be our main suspect?”

“In theory, yes,” Corenn responded, “but I already had the chance to meet her, and she didn’t seem all that devious. She is an elderly woman who cultivates kindness and politeness, while the barons display only condescension. Moreover, she doesn’t know the secret.”

“Since I’m missing a piece, you could say a very significant one at that, you will have to excuse me for not understanding right away,” Rey complained again. “Do we at least know if she’s still alive?”

“She is not on my list, which leaves us some hope.”

“Maybe we could ask her for help?” Yan suggested. “She would do it, for your ancestors.”

“And what kind of help do you want from her? We won’t be any safer in the Baronies than here,” Grigán answered.

“Actually, I was thinking, since she’s a queen, she could more easily find traces of the other heirs.”

“That’s a good idea,” Corenn announced, upon consideration. “Maybe that is what we will do, if we do not learn anything on the island.”

“I have something else to propose,” Rey responded. “The Small Palace Market.”

“In Lorelia?” Grigán asked. “What do you want us to do there?”

“Meet the Züu. And buy information from them. That’s what I was planning to do before I met up with you.”

“Refresh my memory,” Corenn asked. “I know I have already heard about it, but the details escape me.”

“Once a dékade, in the old Royal Commerce Commissioner’s palace, they host a market that is a bit special. There, anyone can sell any type of merchandise, even illegal. Especially illegal, actually, as that is what is exchanged there most often. And the Züu are there...how should I put it? Permanently.”

“You want us to bargain with them?” Grigán protested.

“Why not? If they gave me the option to buy back my life, you better believe I wouldn’t hesitate.”

“Just walking up to the Züu doesn’t seem safe,” Corenn objected.

“The Small Palace is a truce zone. The Crown uses it as a method to keep an eye on all the traffic, and the place is overflowing with spies. The officers watch the entryways and guarantee safety. To my knowledge, everything’s always gone smoothly.”

“I’m warning you, Corenn, I refuse to haggle for my life with assassins.”

“The idea repulses me, too, but maybe we should try that avenue, if Ji doesn’t deliver a solution.”

The warrior didn’t add anything. He figured he would make himself heard when it mattered.

“Well, either way, the best we can do for now is wait for the Bear. That leaves us two days to think it over,” he concluded, standing up from the table.

His companions soon did the same, then they all attended to their nightly chores, except for Léti, who approached the warrior. “There are three days left, right?”

“Two. You’ve counted wrong.”

Léti froze.

“That’s impossible! That means that today was...”

She couldn’t finish her thought, which died in a sob.

Feeling awkward, Grigán waited hopelessly for someone to come help him, but no one had paid any attention to their conversation.

“It was the Day of the Promise, yes,” he finally said. “I thought you knew, everyone thought you knew...”

She turned around and observed each of her friends. Yan seemed to be sulking.

“I’m going to go for a walk,” she said to Corenn, tearfully, before running off.

Four inquisitive faces turned toward Grigán, who mumbled, “I didn’t do anything. I can’t fix all our problems.”

He refused to offer any other explanation. Yan wanted to go and comfort Léti, but he couldn’t bring himself to.

Surely, she would prefer it if Rey were the one to go.

For everyone, it was an extremely long wait for that fateful day. Curiosity gnawed at each of them, as did anxiety at the thought of exploring Ji and its mysteries. Needless to say, the prevailing tension in the group didn’t improve the atmosphere.

Rey and Grigán stuck to haughtily ignoring one another, except when the actor made a joke behind the warrior’s back, which happened often enough, and consistently triggered a more acerbic verbal spat.

Léti didn’t know how to act toward Yan, and he didn’t know what to think or how to react. From time to time, the young woman would make an attempt at reconciliation, but was it out of pity? She also spent a lot of time with Rey. In the end, Yan decided he wouldn’t make any decisive moves until things became clearer. Léti soon made the same decision, and so things between them remained unchanged.

Grigán spent most of his time patrolling the area surrounding their camp and keeping a close watch on the island. He didn’t come back to camp until nightfall, when it became impossible to discern a boat landing on the small island. His biggest fear was that they would fall right into a trap set by the Züu on Ji, and even if they didn’t talk about it, everyone else feared the same thing.

From the start they considered the question of how they would cross the sea to the island, but the problem was soon resolved. The fishermen of Berce, like plenty of other fishermen, simply left their boats on the beach. So all they needed to do was “borrow” one. Grigán had already picked out a craft, equipped with a sail, whose owner lived outside the village. The skiff, separated from the rest by a few hundred yards, might escape the Züu’s likely surveillance.

The rest of their preparations didn’t amount to much. The warrior asked them to make a few torches and suggested that they take advantage of their forced inactivity by gathering provisions of all varieties. As usual, Grigán took charge of hunting and brought back plenty of game.

But, at the end of the day, they were still left with a lot of free time, which they filled as best they could. Rey tried to give his companions lessons in different Ithare dice games, but none among them was a very good player, whereas the actor was very experienced and won almost every round.

They thought for a moment to be entertained by a demonstration of Bowbaq’s powers; he could not say no to Léti’s urgings. But the results were far from spectacular. The horse that served as a guinea pig simply charged and whinnied, as if it had gone crazy. Worried about maintaining their low profile, Grigán asked that they stop the experiment, to the great disappointment of Léti, Yan, and Rey.

The young woman, now carried away by the idea of seeing a spectacle, then begged her aunt to provide them with a demonstration of her own mysterious talents. She quickly abandoned the idea after getting a scolding look from her aunt as her sole response. No one dared to ask questions.

Corenn took advantage of the free time by studying the lists of heirs, which she updated. Based on their collective memory, she drew and completed, as best she could, the genealogical trees of the seven Sages who survived the journey. She counted seventy-one individuals over three generations.

Of the seventy-one, she knew the fate of at least forty-nine: herself, Léti, Grigán, Bowbaq, and Rey were—by the grace
of Eurydis—still alive. Forty-four others, according to Rey’s list and her own, had been assassinated by the Züu.

That left the fate of only twenty-two heirs uncertain, a number that grew slightly after accounting for a few individuals overlooked by her initial census. It certainly didn’t leave them with much hope for growth.

Logic told her that their enemy was one of those twenty-two or so names, but her intuition told her otherwise. Corenn was more anxious than any of her companions to land on the forgotten island.

“How can you navigate? It’s a crescent moon and there isn’t even a star in the sky!”

Even though Bowbaq spoke in a whisper, they could hear the anxiety in his voice. Yan, on the other hand, felt perfectly at ease: the sea was calm, the night still, and soon enough his curiosity would be satisfied, finally putting an end to these three long days spent waiting.

“It’s magic,” Grigán answered for the young man, who was at the helm. “I think of a place, and the path simply appears in my mind.”

“What?”

“All right, it isn’t magic. I owe it to this object: a Rominian compass. I haven’t shown it to you already?”

The warrior explained the principle of the instrument briefly; Bowbaq wasn’t reassured in the slightest.

“Are you sure it works? We’ve been on the water for a while now, and we still can’t see the island!”

“That’s good. That means the Züu can’t see us either.”

“Don’t worry,” Rey added. “We aren’t going to get lost at sea. Look at those distant lights over there. You see them?”

“Zélanos and his children. Lorelia’s lighthouses, in other words. As long as we can see them, we know where the coast is.”

“That’s at least a day’s sail away,” Yan commented.

“A day!” wailed the Northerner, terrified. “A day! We’re so far!”

“Is it your first time on a boat or something?” jibed the actor. “One might think it’s the first time you’ve seen the sea your whole life.”

“That’s not far from the truth, in fact,” Bowbaq explained. “You’re going to think it’s silly, but I have a dreadful fear of water. Especially now. You can’t see a thing!”

“Is that why you’ve never been to Ji before? And here I thought you just wanted to stay with the kids,” Corenn gently teased.

“Yes, that was part of it,” he mumbled.

“Then how do you explain the hundreds of pounds of fish you catch every year? Don’t they come from the water?”

“That’s not the same, my friend. You can trust a creek, a stream, or even a river. You’re never more than a few yards from shore, a few oar strokes and you’re there. Here, there’s no land in sight.”

“Mind you, you might be able to touch the bottom,” joked Rey. “Thirty feet, forty feet, what’s that to a big guy like you?”

“Forty feet! Forty feet deep!” the giant exclaimed, before resolutely sitting down on the floor of the boat.

Léti sat down next to him. She couldn’t find the right words to reassure him, but she didn’t like seeing her kind friend in such a state.

They floated onward in silence for some time. Finally, Grigán pointed toward a point in the darkness.

“There,” he said simply.

As they had planned, Léti silently lowered the sail while Yan, Rey, and Grigán took position with their bows; the others lay on the floor of the boat. They slowly drifted across the remaining distance.

The island emerged out of the darkness, at first a mass just a bit darker than the water; as they got closer, its contours became progressively more defined. The silence was complete, disturbed only by a playful colony of marine frogs.

“It looks quiet,” murmured the actor.

“Maybe,” Grigán answered tersely.

Yan couldn’t help adding, “But he wouldn’t bet his life on in it.”

He had long waited to pull that joke out of his comedic reserve. The warrior responded with nothing more than an impassive look out of the corner of his eye, whereas Léti, squeezed between Corenn and Bowbaq, burst out laughing, joined by Bowbaq and Corenn.

The boat scraped the sandy bottom before coming to a complete halt. Grigán waited a moment before giving Yan the signal. The boy responded by crawling overboard and wading toward the beach, covered by his friends’ bows. Rey followed and took position opposite Yan on the beach.

Finally, it was Grigán’s turn; he slipped right past them, penetrating further into the rocky landscape. He came back soon after, reassured, at least for the moment.

“All clear,” he instructed. “You can come ashore. Light the torches.”

Not a moment later, Bowbaq hopped into the water and dragged the massive boat to the beach, pulling Léti and Corenn along with it. He didn’t even seem to notice the incredible feat he had accomplished.

“Ground! At last, solid ground!” he exclaimed, relieved. “Are you sure we can’t wait until dawn to make the return trip?”

“Positive. We would be too visible from the coast.”