The Fox (101 page)

“No.” Fox’s voice was so soft Inda almost didn’t hear it. “I have no curiosity whatsoever.”

Fox’s forehead had tightened with anger, but his long mouth was white-lipped with pain, and for once the challenging derision was all gone. “I don’t care if Aldren Montrei-Vayir is bad, good, or indifferent as king,” Fox said. “The only surety is that nothing has changed for my family, because there is no justice for the Montredavan-Ans. ” He glared at Inda, listening so patiently, and thought,
If I had half the wit of my ancestors I would have seen a way to grasp events by the throat and force them to my will. As my forefathers did. As you have done, without ever realizing what it is you do.
He shook his head to dispel thoughts he would never utter. “Maybe someday. But not now.”

Inda flicked his fingers up toward the captain’s deck. “Then it’s simple. Take command of my fleet.”

Fox crossed his arms, sardonic again. “But then it becomes my fleet.”

Inda opened his hands. “Nothing finite is infinite, as my mother used to say. I will give you one of these gold things. When I’ve delivered my message, I send a message where to meet me, and either you will be there or you won’t.”

The corners of Fox’s mouth deepened. His eyes were wide, steady, bright as spring leaves in the lamplight. “Wait here,” he said, and left, shutting the cabin door firmly behind him.

Inda stared at the cabin door.
It’s a shame
, he thought. Fox—sardonic, deadly, cynical—would not go home to a drunken sot of a father squatting in his tower.
A mistake to think he doesn’t care. He does. He knows he does. And can’t abide it.

There was no time to consider it further; Fox was back. “Hold out your hand.”

Inda did, and Fox dropped the two rings onto his palm.

“Won’t you need these?” Inda asked.

“I can see my fleet,” Fox retorted.

A measure of safety
. “Thanks,” Inda said.

Signi had made it about five steps before she crumpled in a silent faint.

Gillor caught her, carried her to her alcove, laid her in the hammock, and then sat there beside her, as the ship slid away steadily to safety in the thick magical fog.

Presently Signi’s eyes opened, moved from side to side, and Gillor said, “I take it they couldn’t fight your fog?”

“Not the sea dags,” Signi whispered, her smile pensive. “The spell will strengthen as they try to break it, which they will eventually discover. Few know how to break such a spell. The Dag Erkric, who could break it, will be with the prince on the north coast. It ought to mire them a day and a night, at the least.”

Gillor sprang up, batted through the canvas door that they had hung for her when she ceased being a prisoner—it let in more air than the old wooden one. Gillor returned with water, which Signi downed gratefully. Color came back into her face, and she sat up. “Ah, so much better. Thank you.”

“So they will know that was you.”

“Oh, yes.”

“What does it mean for us?”

Signi told Gillor what she had told Inda. Gillor listened, nodded, then said, “Lie quiet. I’ll bring you something from the galley.” She paused at the door, smiling over her shoulder. “I take it magic-making is something like fighting a night-long battle?”

“That much magic is. It is not so much the making of the vapor but the spell that binds attempts to dispel it into making more.”

Signi lay watching the lamplight on the wood above her, permitting her mind to range back, back, over a lifetime of decisions. She would not think about the future, except to discover, step by step, what Ydrasal’s path demanded.

The door batted aside, and the delicious smell of fresh fish and rice balls wafted in. Signi sat up. Gillor sat on the tiny storage chest as Signi wolfed down the food. When Signi looked up, feeling very much recovered, she saw the woman studying her, head tilted to the side.

“What do you look for?” she asked.

“For the future,” Gillor said. Her Sartoran was accented in a way Signi could not trace. She smiled. “It seems that our commander has decided to beach himself. He’s putting on his prince hat again, and going home to tell them what you told us about the invasion. If they don’t kill him first.”

“Ah,” Signi said.

Water slapped the sides of the ship, the wood creaked. The smell of mulled wine wafted through the gently swaying canvas door. From the hold came the sounds of a reed pipe and soft singing, the quick triplets of Sartoran folk music, weaving in and out of minor keys into major.

Signi turned her attention back to Gillor, to meet those steady dark eyes. She felt the hairs along the backs of her arms lift.

“And?”

“And now you have saved us,” Gillor said. “And you are in as much danger from the Venn as we.”

Signi felt her palms go damp. “You tell me what I know. Why is this?”

“Because you don’t know, though you should, that while he was in the galley, Fibi and I and a couple of the others unfolded the old bed from under the stern windows.”

Signi’s nerves prickled with fire sparks.

“Right now he is alone there, in the cabin—and I don’t think he’s even noticed the bed. Yet.” Pause, sigh, then a last try. “He’s going home after we don’t know how many years. But what he asks after is you:
is she recovered? Does she need anything?
Dag Signi, go to him.”

Signi licked her lips. So the attraction was perceivable, at least to some. “It is not right.”

“Was not right. Though that is a matter of debate. When you’ve been a pirate, you learn that ‘right’ varies not only from person to person, but from moment to moment. Sudden death can do that.” Gillor laughed. “He is kind, and passionate, and if you are kind and passionate back, good!”

“He might not want me. He is much young.”

To that Gillor made a rude noise, and so Signi, her heart beating fast, rose, and washed her face in clear water, and then trod barefoot, lightly, to the cabin door. No one was about; she knocked, and heard his voice: “Enter.”

She laid her hand on the latch and walked in, to find him sitting alone at the table before his charts—and yes, behind him spread a luxurious bed, fit for a pirate king.

She turned her attention to the papers on the table, and then to the man who had made them. His gaze was not the gaze of the commander working out his plans, it was the gaze of a young man overwhelmed in the whirlpools of emotional turmoil.

She touched his warm hand and felt the shock of desire that kindled inside her. And him.

They did not have to speak at all.

The sun was setting when they woke, mellow golden light slanting from the west through the stern windows as they sailed under the long Olaran peninsula toward Lindeth Harbor. Inda studied her features: the curve of her brows, the crease in her eyelids, a strand of sandy hair lying stuck to her cheek from the aftermath of passion. Wonder seized him, and on impulse he kissed her.

The ardent steadiness in her gaze rekindled his own fire, burning all thought to cinders as his hands drifted over her warm skin. This time love was slow, languorous, deliberate, spiraling hard down into a white fire as intense as before.

At last they lay side by side again, the rosy slants of fading light painting over their flesh, each listening to the other’s breathing.

She said, “What would you do?”

“Do?” he asked, lazily twining a finger through her hair, which was unexpectedly fine.

“When war threat is done. When you have freedom.”

Inda lay back and permitted his mind to wheel the sublime currents high above all the troubles of the world, and he smiled, and said, “I would go home. I wish I could show you Tenthen Castle. It—”

He looked down, and flushed, and she thought in anguish how very young he was.

Her gaze was so steady and intense he wondered what was going on in her mind, and then a terrible thought occurred. “Is that damned ghost still here? Watching, um, us?” Embarrassment and disgust cramped his middle.

Signi raised her head a little more, brow puckered as she focused into the air above Inda. Then her face changed, and she sat up in the broad bed, paying no attention to the falling of the sheet away from her breasts; she raised her hands, cupped them and held them out as she spoke in Venn.

It was too quick for him to follow. “Were you
talking
to the ghost? What did you say?”

Her mouth curved in a sad smile. “I said:
Bide and be welcome. If you can feel joy, it is mine to give and yours to share
. He is young like you, far too young. How much love did he get to share before he was taken out of life?”

Inda’s annoyance vanished as he contemplated for the first time a generosity that transcended petty human emotion, and embraced not just the body and mind but the spirit.

His eyelids prickled as he looked into her face lit by the ruddy gold of the setting sun, the faint lines of laughter and sorrow carved around eyes and mouth, her steady green-brown eyes; he heard again the benevolence in her voice as she offered to share joy with a dead spirit who was denied the warmth of living flesh, and he felt a strange hollow behind his ribs. The world had changed. No.
He
had changed; quick as that, he thought, I am in love.

Chapter Thirty-five

ONE bell past sunrise Nightingale Toraca met his local eyes and ears upstairs in a new inn high on the Nob’s ridge, so new it smelled sharply of fresh-planed wood. The young Runner shook raindrops off her hair, sat down and began weaving hemp and leddas together into rope as she spoke. “Harbormaster says that the Venn are all sailing north. The battle must have been out to sea. There were at least eighteen of ’em! Two blue-skiffs went out far as they dared, and our cliff lookouts, they all reported in with the same sighting: when the great fog cleared, the Venn were retreating to the north.”

“Then . . . there was a sea battle?” Nightingale asked.

She shrugged. “That’s what they say.”

“So they saw arrow flames, burning ships?”

“No, rain was too hard. But what else could there be, if all the Venn go north, except a retreat?”

Nightingale signified agreement, but reserved doubts. In his experience, civilians mistook skirmishes for major battles, and clashes with no result as definitive.

On the other hand these were sea folk, and he knew nothing about the sea and ships. He frowned, considering how to word his new report. The harbor city had been tense for two days of intermittent storms as reports came in, first of a sighting of a long line of Venn ships from the cliff-top lookouts, then from the daring fisher craft who plied the seas below the tip of the peninsula, their sides and sails painted blue to help hide them from the Venn. They had not only corroborated the sighting of Venn warships, they had brought the news of Elgar the Fox’s black pirate ship sailing straight into battle.

Then nothing, nothing, nothing, as the blue-painted craft ventured farther out. And at last came report of a mysterious smoke—no, a fog—spreading out across the ocean in a long white worm of a line, a fog that did not dissipate even in the rains.

And here was the latest news.

“So if there was a battle, Elgar the Fox must have won,” Nightingale said.

“Yes, and speaking of him, the black ship that Elgar the Fox commands has been sighted, right at dawn, heading east.”

“Inland. Toward Lindeth?” Nightingale asked, astonished.

“They will welcome him with joy—he drove off all those ships—the blue-skiffs swear it was more like thirty of ’em out there. Maybe even more!” the Runner replied, grinning in triumph. She looked around, then said, “I had better get to the shop before they notice how long I’ve been gone. Mistress Lagit doesn’t hate Marlovans, but she is nosy.”

“Then you must get back at once,” he agreed.

Nightingale watched her go. The one good thing about a city being rebuilt was that they needed workers, and not everyone knew everyone else. He’d been able, over the past year, to place young Runners-in-training to observe for the king in every harbor along the coast. They all had other jobs, so no one knew they were Marlovan Runners.

He sighed, thinking of the long journey ahead of him, riding to visit all his Runners once he found out the new orders. If there were any new orders. The Venn, driven north!

He remembered his last report, the grim news that the lines of Venn had been sighted, and everyone in the Nob was arming, preparing for yet another attack on the harbor. Now, for once, he could write the king some good news. A short message via the locket, and his fastest riders with a more detailed report. It had been far too long.

On the plains half a morning’s ride from the royal city, Evred-Harvaldar was galloping west, two outriders behind him, pennons streaming. He rode without a helm, his outward intention to watch the first war game of the season, his inward intention to escape his anger at the impending attack on the Nob, an attack he was helpless to do anything about.

He considered throwing away the lockets altogether. What was the good of faraway news you could do absolutely nothing about before it was too late? But he did not. Instead, he spent as much time as possible at his desk to speed the watches and then decided on this ride.

His father had written in his private papers,
The boys must never know, but to watch them is to earn a rare laugh. So like pups they are! But my father was right about one thing, if few others: do not go often, or the effect of your presence is lessened
.

Evred had left his chain mail behind, and his gauntlets and the helm that marked him as the king, as well as all but two of the royal entourage, so in practice he would be invisible, though he remembered well that royal invisibility was merely a matter of degree of royal notice.

The air smelled wet, like new grass, a clean smell that lifted his heart, and cleared from it, for a time, the tensions of council and Horsebutt Tya-Vayir’s new, arrogant demands. The fifteen-year-old boys nicknamed ponies riding the camp perimeter straightened up when they spied the banner, and already Evred was repressing laughter. How strange, to find himself in this older body now, when memory threw him so readily back to his scrub days and how they had watched anxiously for the king. At the memory of his father a pang of grief smote him, but these were easier to bear now.