"Telun and Milu need to rest." Kisia came to the door of the chamber Rasim had taken for his own. He had been there for hours, too cold and tired to watch as the Stonemasters sank the snake back into the stone. He had gotten up once for the necessary, and had stopped on the way to look into the garrison's shattered courtyard. The snake's sinuous body made a wide, twisting path across the ground, its differently colored stone easy to see from above. The sight made Rasim's chest hurt, and he'd returned to his room to shiver and wonder why he felt such sadness over the beast's near death. It, after all, had attacked them.
When he didn't answer, Kisia came into the chamber and hunkered down beside him, right in front of the fire. "They were given mindkiller, too, but either not as much or their magic makes it not work as well on them. They tried to free themselves. Milu thinks they probably woke the stone snake with their witchery. It went after everyone else, but not them."
A raw breath exploded from Rasim's chest. "Then I was right not to kill it. We disturbed it. A lot of people died because of that."
"Slavers and soldiers who were happy to keep slaves," Kisia said with a curled lip.
Rasim looked at her, feeling as dull as the snake's eyes had been. "Maybe nobody ever offered them a better way. Maybe they were just bad, but maybe they could have learned better. I don't like killing people, Kisia. It's not right."
She pursed her mouth, but didn't argue. "Any-way, Milu and Telun are exhausted. Almost as tired as you are. You look like Isidri now, Rasim. You look that sick. We're going to stay here tonight," she said like she was challenging him to disagree. "We'll find clothes to travel in and we'll leave tomorrow or the next day, after we've all had enough to eat and have slept and warmed up. Then we'll go, but going overland isn't an option."
Rasim inhaled and Kisia said, "I found maps," sharply, as if defying a protest Rasim hadn't yet made. "This peninsula sweeps down from the mainland into the sea for hundreds of miles, Ras. There are passes and passageways marked through them, but they're only usable in the summer, and even then it's a months-long journey. So I've been searching the grounds. There's a ship that hardly deserves the name, one of their silly one-masted ones, but some of the miners know how to sail it, and with two Seamasters aboard we should make the capital in three or four days."
"All right."
Kisia's eyebrows rose and she glanced around like Rasim might have been talking to someone else. "That's it? All right?"
"It's a good plan. Why wouldn't it be all right?"
"Because you're the one who plans things."
"Only because I usually think of things faster than most people, Kees, and I'm too tired to think right now. Ice is hard." He felt foolish as soon as he'd said it, but it was true. No wonder Isidri had been so wrecked after thawing the harbor. He was ninety years younger than she was, and he could barely stay sitting upright after icing the snake.
Kisia's smile appeared, softer than usual. "It is. If you don't mind, I'll sleep in here too. It's warm, and..." She drew a deep breath. "And I don't trust the Northerners. I'd rather be with you. Telun and Milu are next door."
Rasim nodded. Kisia did too, and got up. "All right. I'll bring you food in a little while. Sondra and Lars raided the larder. There's meat, not just fish, and they're baking bread. It smells wonderful. I'll tell you if anything needs your attention." She went to the door, pausing there to look back. "Rasim?"
He looked up tiredly. Kisia smiled. "You saved me again. Thank you."
Laughter jolted out of him. "You just about killed that snake single-handedly, Kees. I don't think you need much saving."
"Still, I didn't shape the stone that caught me." Kisia waved and left Rasim looking after her in bemusement. He didn't think he'd shaped the giant stone hand, either, but the only thing worse than arguing with Kisia was arguing with her and later discovering she was right. He would ask Milu privately. Tomorrow, after they'd all slept.
Or, as it turned out, two mornings later, when they had indeed all slept, and eaten, and after Kisia had prepared the one-masted ship to sail. Rasim had barely left his room for the two days, glad to do nothing but eat and rest. By the second morning he felt well enough to come down to shore, where Kisia climbed the ship's rigging and shouted orders at Northerners who understood well enough to do as they were told.
Milu stood on the beach too, his brown face as pale as it could be, and wry. "I cannot tell you how much I do not want to get on that boat."
"Ship," Rasim corrected cheerfully. "Would you rather stay here?"
"Almost. But it's days past when the slave ships were supposed to arrive, and if we have to sail, I'd rather do it before they get here. Maybe a storm took them," Milu said with an unusual viciousness.
"Or maybe they saw the mess we left at the mines and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. Thank you," Rasim said abruptly, feeling awkward. "For burying the snake instead of killing it."
Milu glanced at him, surprised. "Not at all. You were right. We disturbed it, and...I didn't want it to die," he confessed. "There's a mind in there. I could almost feel it, thinking slowly, the way stone...does." He made a face. "Not that stone really thinks, but..."
"No, I know what you mean. Water is like that too. Alive, in its own way. Anyway, thank you. And thank you for saving Kisia."
"After that display with the hand, I figured I'd better catch her when she fell again or I'd have you to answer to." Milu sighed. "And I owe you enough for cleaning up after me on the Waifia. I'll try not to be so much trouble on this journey. I'd better go get something to throw up in, in fact." He left without realizing he'd stunned Rasim into silence.
He had implied that the stone hand hadn't been his doing at all, but Rasim's. Which was either impossible, or everything the guilds thought they knew about mastery really was wrong. No one studied more than one magic, or at least no one but the royal family. It was unlikely many—or any—Seamasters had spent as many long, mind-numbing hours trying to understand stone's structure at all, never mind after watching a master stone witch at work, as Rasim had. The masters would have said there was no point, that everyone knew a witch could only master one magic, but if no one had tried, then they didn't really know it, they just believed it.
"But why wouldn't anyone try?" Rasim asked Kisia's ship. It rocked, offering no answers, but Rasim came to one on his own, after a moment. The guilds had been created centuries ago by the royal family—the only people who could use more than one kind of witchery. If they wanted to remain in uncontested power, convincing others that only royal blood could master many magics was very, very clever. It might have been difficult in the first years, but over time any royal matchmaker could find men and women able to use more than one magic and marry them into the royals, until no one thought to test the tale's truth. It would make a lie of the legends, of the song about Sunchild and all the others, and of the royal family's descendence from the gods, but that was a story, not history.
A band of Northerners at his side, an army of Islanders at his call, and now a dangerous insight into Ilyaran magic. Even Rasim could envision himself as an enemy of Taishm's rule, with those things in hand, and he didn't even want to be king. If any others in the King's Guild came to these same conclusions, or found themselves supported by foreign nations, Ilyara could fall into civil war breathtakingly quickly.
Rasim closed his hands into fists, admitting the possibility that Kisia and Milu were right. He would never work stonewitchery again, if it was true that he could. The last thing he wanted was to upset the balance of power in Ilyara, never mind anywhere else. He would ask to leave the King's Guild when they returned to Ilyara, and go back to the Sea-masters where he belonged. And if Kisia ever asked him about it, he would just have to lie. Maybe he had worked stonewitchery once, to save her, but that was all he had ever worked a great seamastery for, too, before Siliaria's blessing. If Coluth came calling, Rasim would look away the same way Milu had when Siliaria had examined him.
"Hey!" Kisia leaped off the ship and snapped her fingers under Rasim's nose. "Hey, Sunburn! I've been calling you for five minutes. We're ready to cast off, and you're standing here like a statue."
Rasim startled, then caught Kisia's hand to stop her snapping. "Sorry. I was thinking. What do you need me to do..." He hesitated, genuinely not wanting to tease her. "...Captain?"
A grin crooked the corner of her mouth. "Come aboard, First Mate, and translate. We've gotten by so far, but once we're at sea I don't want to be relying on pointing and arguing over the word for something. We sail on the tide, and I, for one, can't wait to see Missio's face when we turn up alive."
~
After shipboard fires, storms, island adventures, slavery, and stone snakes, Rasim did not expect the sail to Ringenstand to go smoothly. Nor did it, from Milu's point of view: the bony Stonemaster youth spent the entire journey hanging over the rail or flat on his face on the deck, too wrung out to even weep. Telun, much more comfortable on shipboard this time, took over cleaning up after his partner while Rasim ran from one end of the ship to the other, always moving, translating, giving orders, and wondering how Hassin kept up enough energy to work this hard and to be favored by admiring women. But the exhausting work made the time pass quickly, and despite Milu's misery, the journey went smoothly.
Only when they neared the capital's harbor did he begin to think about making an entrance. It was very clear they were approaching the right harbor: unlike the more modest cove at Hongrunn, where Rasim had last entered the Northlands, the capital's harbor was guarded by massive, stunning statues that rose up fifty times a man's height, carved out of the mountains themselves.
"They did that without stonemastery?" Kisia asked in awe as the statues became clearer. A man and a woman stood on either side of the harbor's mouth, both holding the same kinds of heavy swords Lorens had been teaching the journeymen to fight with. They were both armored, though neither wore helms, and both held their inside hands outward a little, as if welcoming sailors while also warning them that the people within were not to be trifled with.
"I don't know." Rasim stood beside her on the captain's deck, his gaze drawn upward just as hers was. "Princess Inga said they used to have magic here. Maybe they used to have stonemasters. Kisia, how are we going to...I mean, we're..." He gestured at them, and then at the impossible statues.
"You mean we're dressed like riff-raff, sailing a beaten-up old ship one step shy of the salvage yard, with a crew of slaves and puking journeymen, so how are we going to make a good impression on the Northlands queen and her court?"
"Yeah." Rasim smiled faintly. "That's exactly what I mean."
"I don't think we're really going to have to worry about it." Kisia pointed ahead of them, between the feet of the massive statues.
The entire Northern fleet sailed out to greet them, the Waifia at its head.