The Copper Promise (44 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said O’rin. ‘I reckon I’ll just throw you off this statue and carry on with what I’m doing. It’s been years since I’ve had the freedom of the sky. I don’t have time to listen to the witterings of mortals.’

‘I think you do, actually.’ Gallo stepped up to the huge bird creature, squaring his shoulders. His shoulders were never as broad as Sebastian’s but he was always good at squaring them heroically. ‘Because if you don’t come with me now, I shall call Y’Ruen.’ O’rin flinched slightly at the sound of her name. ‘I will call her to come here now and see you. How would that be?’

O’rin hissed softly.

‘Why should that worry me?’ But Gallo thought he was worried, for all that.

‘A dragon against … whatever you are? I’d be worried.’

‘You can’t do it. You’re lying.’

Gallo shrugged.

‘I can still feel her, in my head. It would only take a small effort for me to reach out to her, touch her mind as she touched mine. And even if you pushed me from this ledge,’ he added quickly as O’rin shifted his weight, ‘I wouldn’t die when I hit the ground. There would be enough of me left to send for her. And I’m sure Y’Ruen would be very interested to know her brother is alive and … uneaten.’

There was a long silence then, broken only by the screaming of the birds and the high-pitched whine of the storm-light. Blue and black shadows crawled across the stone like expectant ghosts, while O’rin’s wings twitched and shivered on his back. Gallo felt a moment of true fear.

But when the god spoke again, it was with weary resignation.

‘Frith’s not a bad lad. Well, he’s a shit, but I think that’s why I liked him.’ O’rin tipped his head, and in that instant the storm-light vanished, revealing an overcast sky. Gallo blinked rapidly in the change of light. ‘And I suspect you’ll be needing my help more than you realise.’

Wydrin watched uneasily as a god walked across the sands of Whittenfarne towards them. Even with the huge wings folded neatly behind O’rin’s back, Gallo looked like a sickly child next to him, and she noticed a handful of black birds circled above their heads. She also noticed they were walking too bloody slowly. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

‘I haven’t got all day, you know!’

She saw the creature called O’rin tip his head to one side – what was that? Anger? Amusement? It was impossible to tell and Wydrin was a long way from caring; inside the cabin of
The
Sea King
her brother was teetering on the edge of death. Not for the first time she glanced back to the ship, half expecting to see a signal from Bill, telling her that she was too late. Time, it was all about time. Jarath had so little left.

‘That might not be wise,’ said Frith in her ear. ‘Jolnir isn’t human, remember, and he was able—’

‘If he wants to kill me he can bloody well try,’ she snapped. ‘I need you back up in working order.’

‘Wydrin—’

‘Hello again, young Lord Frith,’ said the creature calling itself O’rin. Wydrin shifted her weight from foot to foot. ‘I probably owe you some sort of apology.’ He didn’t sound apologetic at all to Wydrin.

‘I imagine you do,’ said Frith. His voice dripped with caution.

O’rin shrugged, shifting the black wings.

‘I won’t give you one, of course – gods don’t apologise, I’m sure you’re aware – but at least you know you’re owed one.’

‘I’m still not entirely sure that’s what you are,’ said Frith. ‘Remember I asked you about that? Whether the old gods really were what they said?’

‘Of course.’ The strange bird head dipped, yellow eyes flashing, and Wydrin decided that look was amusement after all. ‘I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed our little conversations. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about humans, all the tiny questions and thoughts and imaginings. Gods’ minds are like mountains, huge, immovable and solid, while humans have minds like mountain streams, splitting off every which way. When the world was young—’

‘Can we save the lectures for later?’ Wydrin stepped between O’rin and Frith, walking on the balls of her feet. She could smell the stink of Jarath’s cabin on her skin. ‘Give him back whatever it is you took. He needs the magic now. I need it now.’

O’rin turned those shrewd eyes on her. He didn’t speak immediately.

‘This is the woman you healed,’ he said.

The corners of Frith’s mouth turned down ever so slightly.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I can see the connection between the two of you. Part of you is in her.’

To Wydrin’s surprise Frith’s cheeks turned slightly pink. She shook her head at the pair of them.

‘Yes, and I need him to do that again. The healing thing.’ She waved a hand back at the ship. ‘My brother is close to death and that pink light business is the only chance he’s got.’

O’rin nodded graciously.

‘Ah, your reasons for urgency become clear.’ He looked at Frith again, and there was a hint of slyness there now. ‘You will do that, will you? Heal this woman’s brother?’

‘It’s Wydrin, actually,’ she added.

Frith looked pained for a moment, then he met her eyes and grimaced.

‘I will.’

‘Interesting,’ said O’rin, and he reached out a withered grey hand, tapped Frith once on the shoulder, and there was a blinding flash of green light. When Wydrin’s eyes had recovered she looked up to see Frith staring at his hands in wonder.

‘It’s back,’ he said softly. ‘The Edenier is back with me.’

‘I’m over the moon for you.’ Wydrin grabbed him by the arm. ‘Now, princeling, you and I have a date.’

It was unbearably hot inside the cabin despite the miasma of fog outside, almost as if Jarath’s burns were somehow leaking heat into the small room. He lay on the narrow bunk with a thin blanket covering his legs. They had pressed wet rags to him where they could, and the ship’s surgeon had, under Wydrin’s withering eye, applied as many ointments as possible, although he had made it clear that any number of balms were unlikely to help. The blisters were red and seeping, and it hurt Wydrin to look at them.

Jarath was unconscious. She supposed that was for the best, although she kept one eye on his chest as it rose and fell rapidly.

‘Are you done?’

Frith stood by the bed, carefully wrapping ink-covered bandages around his hands. He had explained, in a voice tight with some emotion she couldn’t place, that this was how the magic was channelled, so it was more likely to work. So she let him get on with it.

Up to a point.

‘I am just about ready, I believe.’

And yet still he paused. They were alone in the cabin. O’rin and Gallo were out on the deck, no doubt putting the wind up the crew. Wydrin nibbled at the edge of a fingernail, already bitten until it was rough and unpleasant against her tongue.

‘You waiting for something?’

‘I … no.’ His grey eyes looked black in the dim light of the cabin. ‘I have the words,’ he held up his hands briefly, ‘so I’ll see what I can do. If I can’t—’

‘Never mind that,’ she said, brushing over the outcome that was too terrible to mention. ‘Just try. Please.’

He nodded once, and knelt by Jarath’s bed. Holding out his hands over her brother’s ruined chest, his face was rigid with concentration. After a few seconds a soft pink light spread from his fingers in a sudden cloud, like bright paint spilled in water. It looked a lot stronger than the light that had healed her arm, and Wydrin allowed herself to feel hopeful. It grew in brilliance until the entire room was lit with the rosy glow and the light swept over Jarath in a tide.

‘Is that supposed to happen?’

But Frith still had his head down. The ends of his fingers were trembling, and now his shoulders were shaking too. Despite her concern for her brother Wydrin took a few steps towards Frith, wondering if she should steady him somehow.

‘Stay back!’ he spat. ‘I
must
concentrate. I must …’

The light doubled in strength, so that Wydrin had to avert her eyes, and then just as suddenly it was gone. Frith slumped to the floor as though all his muscles had turned to water, while Wydrin blinked rapidly, trying to clear her eyes of the after-image left by the magic.

‘What happened? Is it over?’

‘Wyd?’ It was Jarath. His skin was smooth and brown and beautiful again. He was looking up at her with an expression of deep confusion. She grinned and grabbed his face, kissing him firmly on the forehead. There was sweat on his brow from the fever and he was smeared here and there with soot, but otherwise he looked exactly as he always had. Even the long diagonal scar on his chest had been smoothed away by Frith’s magic.

Frith …

‘Princeling?’

The young lord was wedged between the bed and the cabin wall, his head bowed on his chest as though in a very deep sleep. Wydrin’s stomach turned over.

‘Frith?’

She scrambled up and went to his side of the bed. Jarath was saying something, but she wasn’t listening.

‘Frith, don’t you bloody dare.’

She dragged him into an upright position, his body limp and clammy, but when she pressed her fingers to his chest there was a faint heartbeat there, as soft and frantic as a trapped bird.

‘By all the gods …’ She let out a breath she wasn’t aware she’d been holding and gave him a little shake. His eyelids fluttered, and he mumbled something unintelligible.

‘Who’s that?’ asked Jarath. He was sitting up in bed now, frowning at his stinking bandages.

‘Frith? Frith, are you with me?’

‘Oh,
Frith
,’ said Jarath. ‘Why do I smell so bad?’

Wydrin took hold of Frith’s jaw, forcing him to look at her, and noticed something that made her stomach turn over again; there was a long winding scar on the left-hand side of his face, just where it had been before the Mages’ Lake had healed all his wounds. It was fainter than before, but unmistakably there. Carefully she pushed his hair back from his face, and was relieved to see he had both his ears still.

‘What are you doing?’ His voice was little more than a croak, but the grey eyes that met her own were steady.

‘You!’ She threw her arms around his neck and briefly buried her nose in his hair. He smelled of salt and winter. ‘You’re a bloody fool and I hate you,’ she told his neck.

Frith made a noise that might have been a laugh, and for the briefest moment he hugged her back.

‘Hold on,’ said Jarath. ‘There are some things no brother should watch his sister doing. And I really need a drink.’

Jarath was not pleased about the state of his ship, and he was even less happy to be reminded of the fate of
The
Briny Wolf
.

He ran a hand over his face, a gesture Frith was sure he’d seen Wydrin do many times. They did not look very much alike, even for siblings who only shared one parent, but they had a certain way of standing, a posture of confidence that was very similar.

‘There were no survivors?’ he asked again.

‘Not that we know of,’ said Wydrin. ‘There might have been those that made it to the water, but I doubt many lived through that. I’m sorry, Jarath. We had to get away or it would have been us next.’

‘My sister shows no mercy,’ said O’rin. ‘That was always her nature.’

They stood, a small group crowded around a god, in the stern of the ship. Evening was coming on and they were heading away from Whittenfarne at a goodly pace. The crew, obviously spooked by the sight of a giant man with a bird’s head on their deck, were concentrating on getting the wounded ship moving and keeping their distance. Outside of the mists of the islands the sky was largely clear, with only a few scattered clouds dipped in the fading orange of sunset.

Frith shifted his weight, trying to ignore how his leg ached. It wasn’t the white-hot agony it had been before the Citadel, not at all, but the ghost of that pain was more than enough. Jolnir had been right about the dangers of the healing magic, that much was obvious.

‘Your
sister
needs to be destroyed,’ said Wydrin. ‘I wasn’t certain before. I thought – I don’t know, that we could ignore it and the problem would go away.’ She pursed her lips. ‘But it turns out there’s no ignoring a dragon.’

‘I have always thought so,’ said O’rin. His deep voice was calm, as though they discussed the weather or the best way to cook a lizard. ‘I built a weapon to that end once, a long, long time ago.’

Gallo raised his eyebrows.

‘You planned to kill your own sister?’

‘I planned to kill all of them. Not in a blood-thirsty way, you must understand, but as a fail-safe. I saw them becoming more and more powerful, just as the mages did, and I knew better than anyone how dangerous that could be. The mages got there before I did, as it happened.’

‘And does this weapon still exist?’ asked Frith.

‘In a sense, yes,’ said O’rin. He turned his yellow eyes towards him, nodding his head rapidly just as he had inside the mask. ‘You’ve seen it, in fact.’

‘It’s here? In the Nowhere Isles?’ said Wydrin.

‘Lord Frith, fetch your father’s maps, and all will become clear.’

Frith scowled, unhappy about being ordered about, but he went to his bags and removed the scrolls, now sealed in rough parchment tubes. He opened one, the map of Pinehold, and spread it on a nearby crate.

‘Now, Lord Frith, with your human head full of new knowledge, look at the maps and tell me what you see.’

‘I’ve looked at these a hundred times since we got them from the vault,’ he said. ‘They are just maps. Ancient, yes, but—’

And then he saw it. It was like looking up to the sky and seeing a castle formed of clouds, or one of those paintings where the artist has cleverly hidden a skull in an accident of shadows and cloth. There was Pinehold, depicted in steady black lines, and there were the green lines that indicated the existence of the tunnels hidden beneath the town. Except he recognised them now.

‘How is that possible?’

He grabbed the tube and shook out another map, one of Levenstan, a small city in Pathania. Again, there were the familiar lines of streets and lanes, neatly rowed squares indicating houses and hovels and even one big castle, and then laid over the top of that, stranger lines in red ink. The tunnels. But if you forgot that’s what they were, you could see that they were also words.