Treason's Shore (110 page)

Fareas had drooped her gaze to the papers on the desk, her hands gripped inside her sleeves; Hadand said, “I’d just send Cama’s note.”

It was then that Tdor understood the sense of Hadand’s earlier words. She was not there to try to convince Evred to change his mind. He knew his mind. He believed his decision to be the right one, and he’d sworn it before all his Jarls.

In those moments he looked past her to address Hadand about the audience he’d just finished, she realized that what she’d taken to be anger was a tension so severe it looked like anger. But when he was angry, he whispered. His voice right now was flat with pain.

He needs us to help him explain himself to Inda and Tau
. The import of that felt like a burden of stone, and the desperate importance of that communication was yet another great block of stone, and the consequences of failure a block so massive that its weight seemed to crush mind and spirit.
Is this what being king is like every day?

Evred turned Tdor’s way, and she braced herself to meet that pain-flat gaze. “I need . . . more time to understand,” she said, because he was waiting, though she hated the inadequacy.

“There isn’t time.” He flat-handed the words away. “Here
or
there.” An indrawn breath—they heard it. “Have you descried something that I misapprehended? There has to be a reason they keep writing all these words about this empty treaty.”

Hadand turned toward the door. Evred’s pain hurt her, as it always did, though she fought against it. But she was tired, everyone’s duty seemed clear, and Inda’s willful blindness irked her as much as the silent conspiracy to preserve it. Despite all the trouble that had caused. “If nothing else, remind my idiot brother to keep his word of honor,” she said and walked out.

Tdor said something—later she never remembered what—and found herself with Fareas-Iofre outside of her own suite. She did not remember walking there.

“I believe I will go visit my Fera-Vayir relations,” Fareas said. “It is time.”

It was then that Tdor really understood not just the price of kingship, but the price Inda would have to pay if he did not obey. And his mother, dauntless all these years, could not bear to be there to see him pay it.

Inda signaled the
Vixen
the next day. When Tau climbed aboard to the sound of creaking ropes and masts as the ship rats skylarked overhead, Inda waved at him from the cabin.

As soon as Tau shut the door Inda said with an odd expression, more pained than rueful, “What did you say to Evred? He told me to explain to you what honor means, beginning with how we always keep our vows. Phew!”

“Well, I tried,” Tau said, hating the futility of his words—of weeks of effort.

He rowed himself back to
Vixen
.

Fox watched him leave. Wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Next morning he was alone on deck with Barend just before the dawn watch change. They’d both checked sky, sea, and sails, before Barend was ready to take command, and Fox to rouse the morning watch for drill before he retired. “Your cousin,” he said, “seems determined to force Inda to succeed where the Venn failed.”

Barend squinted his way. “In what?”

“Conquering the world.”

Barend was silent a long time, then turned his squint skyward. “We brought Inda to it. Whatever happens, I’ll back him.”

Chapter Thirty-one

K
HANERENTH still rode with the alliance.

Aboard the Khanerenth flagship, the conversation was superficially about customs, kingdoms, accords—finding the meaning of words in other languages—but the real subject was who was going to find out what Indevan Algara-Vayir, their unbeatable commander, was going to do next. Until then, Inda had always been open (if not blunt) about what was on his mind. The two times they’d seen him since everyone sailed away from Geranda he’d not only been evasive, but uncomfortable to a disturbing degree. So everyone turned to Lord Taumad Dei for explanation, but all they got were vague assurances and expert deflection through questions about their own thoughts on matters—they’d leave, having lengthily aired their views, and not realize until they reached their ships that, yet again, they had no idea what Inda was going to do next.

Mehayan and Hamazhav wrote to their king, asking permission to leave the alliance. Both were told variations of,
Stay with Elgar at least as far as the Chwahir coast and make sure they sail on into the strait. We don’t want you arriving home just to discover the rest of them entering our harbors next season, swords at the ready
.

“Altruism,” Dhalshev said to Mehayan, “is what we all claim at the treaty table. It’s expected. We cloak naked self-interest in a wish to serve others, mix it with a modicum of goodwill, and then hope to find a balance.”

Mehayan leaned over to freshen their wine cups, first with the good blue wine from Gyrn, and then with the mulling rod. It hissed, filling the cabin with the heady aromas of hot spice. “That is so, that is so.” He laid the rod back on the grill above the Fire Stick in the cabin’s ceramic furnace.

“Lord Taumad, despite his silver tongue and golden looks, is one of us,” Hamazhav murmured, lifting his glass in salute.

Dhalshev said, “Inda is one of the only two people I’ve ever met who I think of as altruists. Though maybe I don’t understand what that really means.”

Hamazhav raised his brows. Mehayan uttered a barking laugh. “I’ll know if you and I mean the same thing if you tell me your second one.”

“Jeje sa Jeje. My first real talk with her, she told me how to defend the island. She could have taken my map to Inda. I saw her evaluate it in a single glance. I couldn’t have stopped them—I was hard pressed between you, the Fire Island rats of the time, and the remnants of the Brotherhood.”

The others chuckled appreciatively.

“I have yet to converse with him alone,” Hamazhav murmured. “He is quite elusive for so uncouth a figure. Yet everything I hear paints a picture of an old hero, a paragon.”

“A paragon with no manners.” Mehayan barked another laugh. “Eats like a dog at his dish, ignores the table’s prominent person, and converses on Old Sartoran verse forms with the least important person at table without comprehending the insult handed to the rest.”

Everyone laughed, Dhalshev included, though ruefully. He had been caught napping; sometime, somewhere, he’d been selected. Now they were waiting for him to realize it.

“Here’s my question about altruistic claims of peace and goodwill.” Mehayan stirred his forefinger around the top of his wine, then licked the spices off. “How do you enforce goodwill?”

“I don’t know, but as soon as this damn snowstorm lifts, I mean to row myself over and find out,” Dhalshev said, capitulating. At least they hadn’t brought up his social familiarity with pirates.

Between two storms, a grand captain’s barge rowed over to the
Death
from the Khanerenth flag and up climbed Dhalshev, Harbormaster of Freedom Islands.

The ice-numbing wind made Dhalshev feel his age. He was going to retire soon, now that he’d survived what he’d expected to be a spectacularly bloody end. But he had two missions: the one he’d been sent on and his own.
Altruism,
he thought, laughing to himself as he climbed aboard the black-sided pirate ship.

He’d half expected to be turned away, or at most to gain the ear of one or the other of their Elgars. He did not expect to find himself shut into that splendid, kingly cabin with all three of the Marlovans, though he could see in Barend’s averted face, his purposeless sketching on a tutor’s slate, how reluctant he was to be there.

So they had expected him, then. Dhalshev abandoned the careful chain of conversational gambits, and said, “Where are you going next? I’ve two purposes. My first is a thought to Freedom Islands’ future. Even a bricklayer wants to hand off his domain, small as it is, to someone who will build the way he did.”

Inda turned over his good hand, and Fox said, “Though she’d kill me if she heard me say it, you could not do better than Jeje sa Jeje.”

“I had been thinking of her.” Dhalshev sat back, pleased to find agreement so far. “If she weren’t so fierce in her antipathy to any type of authority, I would have asked her the year Woof vanished.”

“Keep at her. She’ll settle to it.” Fox was amused at the patent relief in Dhalshev’s face. No use in reminding him that if Fox had wanted to run the Freedom Islands federation, he would have been doing so by now. They both knew it. “Freeport is her home. She’d fight to keep it safe, and if you put it that way to her—harbormaster is one way of fighting to keep it safe—she might even listen. Eventually.”

Dhalshev signed his agreement, then said in the same affable tone, “The talk of peace and harmony and guaranteed trade is all good, but the question you’ve been avoiding is,
whose
peace?”

“Mine,” Inda said, thinking,
Here it is at last
. And then, quoting Evred, “The same way I came to Bren’s rescue last year. When no one else would.”

Dhalshev said, “You came because you were asked.” He got to his feet. “We’ve had a good relationship, and you are owed a debt of gratitude. The thing about gratitude is, when one tries to convert it into either money or blood it vanishes.”

Inda leaned forward, his expression earnest, his shoulders tense. “What if I don’t want money, or blood, just guaranteed peace?”

Dhalshev looked around the cabin, then back at Inda. “Did Idayago and Olara and Telaer Cassadas down in the south of Halia a couple centuries ago ever ask the Marlovans to come in and guarantee peace, once the dead were Disappeared? For that matter, did the Iascans?”

He opened the cabin door and left.

Inda rubbed his hand over his face. “I don’t know what to say to that.”

Barend was drawing a battle between two ships, rapping the chalk against the slate as he made fire arrows arcing back and forth. He did not look up.

Fox gave him an exasperated glance. “You’re going to have to figure out what to say, because we’re going to spot Chwahirsland on the horizon soon. Thog’s going to want to know if you’re going to pass them by . . . or not.”

“I wouldn’t attack the Chwahir even if I was ready to attack anybody,” Inda said crossly, circling the cabin, fist pounding lightly on the chair back, table, bulkheads. “They’d have to come last. Bren first, and the rest would follow. Bren won’t want to fight—you held them off with five ships I remember Jeje telling me.”

“They had almost no navy then, just the ten capital ships the Venn had left them from the old days,” Fox reminded him. “And most of them weren’t in the harbor. But even so, we can take ’em. If that’s what you really want.”

“I don’t want to
take
anybody! Except maybe the pirates Evred said are nosing around our coast. That’s where we should be, is protecting our own . . .” Inda stopped. Those words were treason.

He saw in Fox’s derisive gaze, and Barend’s sober face, that they were thinking the same thing.