35

IT DID NOT take much persuasion for Daffyd to let himself be shown to a bed. He was clearly exhausted far beyond his endurance.

I felt too nauseous to sleep and decided to go out on deck. Perhaps some fresh air would make me feel better.

The wind had risen, and it fluttered my clothing and snapped the sailcloth. The sea was higher, too, and slapped against the wooden hull in a broken rhythm. I shivered and pulled my cloak about me, trying to imagine what it would be like to do as Powyrs suggested and give myself to the sea.

“Wet, doubtless,” a voice clove into my thoughts.

I started violently, for draped languidly on a mast strut right in front of me, licking one paw, was Maruman!

“How in Lud’s name did you manage to get aboard?” I demanded. “And where have you been?”

For once, my questions did not rouse his ire. He stretched with slow and infuriating feline grace and jumped lightly to the deck to rub against my leg.

“There you are!” Powyrs bellowed, and swooped over to scoop him up.

I froze, but instead of scratching the seaman, the bedraggled feline lay quiescently in his arms, an alarming mixture of complacence and thwarted mischief in his single gleaming eye.

“I wondered where he had been hiding,” Powyrs said, pretending severity. He looked at me and winked hugely. “The fools I have working for me think he is a bad omen, but he is too smart for them to catch and throw over the edge as they would like. He torments them, the naughty thing. Darting out and scaring them. Twice he has made seamen fall overboard.” He beamed at Maruman with paternal pride, and I could barely stop myself laughing aloud.

I stood up and reached out to pat him. Powyrs’s muscles tightened as mine had done moments before, but he relaxed as the cat allowed himself to be petted.

“Well, you are honored. Usually he will suffer no one to touch him but me,” he said, sounding astonished.

“He is magnificent,” I said, repressing a grin at how utterly Maruman had beguiled the burly seaman.

“Of course,” Maruman sent haughtily.

“He can be savage,” Powyrs warned. “You’d best leave him be, except when I’m holding him. He’s used to me. Reminds me of the sea, he does. My father said to me when he advised me against being a seaman; ‘The sea is a wild beast that eats the lives of those who would try to tame it.’ ”

“You didn’t listen, then?” I smiled.

He shrugged. “I never liked tame things, even as a boy.” He glanced over and noticed one of his seamen mending a sail. Snorting in derision, he set Maruman down gently before stomping over to instruct the seaman on his deficiencies.

“Well, I see how you managed to get yourself aboard,” I sent, grinning at him.

Maruman made no response. He leapt up onto a box beside me, and I felt a surge of pure happiness as he climbed onto my arm and clawed his way up to my shoulders to drape himself about my neck. I breathed deeply, taking in the slightly fishy smell of his coarse fur, as if it were the scent of fresh flowers. Oddly, I no longer felt sick.

I yawned and decided I would go to bed. For the first time in many days, I felt content.

“I am glad to see/carry/smell you,” I sent, repressing my usual instinct to cuddle him close and tell him I loved him.

“I am glad also,” Maruman sent with rare sweetness.

The tiny cabin I had chosen contained only a bed and was no more than a closet. Its virtues were that it was situated on the main deck, which meant there was no need to grope my way down ladders in the darkness, and I would have some privacy. In a short time, I was leaning down to let Maruman jump onto the narrow bed, which was fixed to the wall under a small round window looking out to sea. The moon slid out of its envelope of cloud, and the old cat sniffed suspiciously at the pillow where its silvery light fell. Then he turned to me, his eye filled with moonlight.

I froze in the act of taking off my sandals.

“The oldOne sent ashling to Maruman/yelloweyes. Say come. Maruman coming. Say: tell Innle. Maruman tells,” he sent.

“Tell me what?” My heart pounded.

“Maruman flew the dreamtrails with the oldOnes. Saw Innle on blackdeathroad. Going to the endmost means end of barud. Obernewtyn finished and all gone for Innle.”

I stared at him. Atthis had sometimes called my quest a black road. Maruman seemed to be saying that if I completed my quest, Obernewtyn would not be there anymore. But what did that mean? That it would be abandoned? Destroyed? And why would Atthis want him to tell me this now?

I took my sandals off and climbed into the bed, shifting Maruman to make room for myself. Maybe I was misunderstanding him. After all, beastspeaking obeyed no rules. Communications were entirely idiosyncratic, dependent on how much Talent a beast possessed, their mood at the time of communication, their relationship to the human with whom they communed, and, sometimes, even on what was to be told. Beasts interchangeably used their own odd dialect, human words, and imagepictures enhanced by empathised emotions. And Maruman was harder than most because of the distortions of his mind.

Maybe Maruman had not meant that Obernewtyn would fall but that it would be lost to me. The Agyllians had warned me that my quest would lead me away from my friends. But I had always assumed that, when that quest was over, my life would be my own. It disheartened me to think this might not be so.

I remembered Ariel saying in my dream, “Do what you wish, and you do my bidding.” Was that my mind’s way of warning me that free will was an illusion and that my life would never be mine to command?

“It would be a little late now to decide that we would not live our lives by the whimsical wisdoms of futuretellers, don’t you think?” Rushton had asked the previous day.

And it was too late. My sworn quest was the central and defining truth of my life now. Just as Daffyd’s long search for Gilaine shaped him, so my quest shaped me. If there was a black road, then I was on it already and had been all the days of my life. And I would walk it to the end—no matter where it led me. Even if it meant I could not go back to Obernewtyn.

Then it came to me. Perhaps Atthis had sent Maruman to test my resolve.

“Rest/sleep,” Maruman sent insistently. “All things seem dark under the whiteface.” He curled against my chest, and we slept.

I dreamed I was on land, walking through country as Ludforsaken and desolate as the drear vista of the Blacklands I had once seen from the top of the high mountains. The road beneath me was black, and I saw that its darkness had climbed into my limbs, staining them a sickly purplish yellow—the livid shades of advanced rotting sickness that told me the road was poisoning me.

I wondered then if Maruman had meant that I would not be able to return to Obernewtyn because I would be dead.

I woke to unexpected stillness.

It felt as if the ship were not moving at all, and I wondered if at last my senses had realigned to shipboard life. There was a weight against my arm, and I opened my eyes to find Maruman sprawled alongside me, his head resting on my elbow. I eased myself out from under him and turned on my side to watch him sleep. Poor, dear muddled Maruman filling me up with his garbled thoughts and gloomy predictions. In the daylight, such cryptic nonsense did not seem so terrible.

I leaned forward and kissed him very softly, knowing he would be furious if he caught me.

Kella poked her head in the door.

“Oh good, you’re awake, Elspeth. Come and see this.”

I put a hasty finger to my lips and pointed to Maruman. The healer’s eyes widened at the sight of the cat asleep in the rumpled bedclothes, and she backed out of the room. I climbed from the bed, ran my fingers through my hair, and laced on my sandals.

Kella was waiting for me outside. “How in Lud’s name did he get here?” she demanded.

“He must have had a true dream. He got aboard even before we did and settled himself to wait. He’s got old Powyrs twisted round his paw.”

Kella’s eyes shone. “I’m so glad he’s all right. Oh, Elspeth, maybe it’s true what Powyrs says about them being good luck.”

“ ‘Them’?” I asked, baffled. “Cats?”

She shook her head and beckoned, and I followed her to the edge of The Cutter. “Look out there,” she said, pointing.

I looked and was startled to see that the ocean was utterly still, stretching away like a mirror on all sides of us. Now I understood why my nausea had abated. Not a breath of air stirred the sagging canvas sails or rippled the glassy sea. We were so completely becalmed that a reflection of the ship and my face stared back with perfect clarity from the water. There was no sign of the coast, but Powyrs had explained to us the previous night that he would have to set a course directly away from land to begin with, in order to avoid the shoal beds clustered thickly in the sea between the Land and the Sadorian plains.

And then I saw three sleek, satiny, silver-gray fish, as big as grown men, propelling themselves high into the air, somersaulting, and plunging back into the water.

I gaped, astounded at their strength and agility.

“They have been known to save the lives of humans who fall from the deck,” Kella murmured.

“Good luck is right,” I said. “Good luck for the drowning seaman.”

I watched the strange fish leap out of the water as if they were moon-fair acrobats. They must be incredibly strong to lift themselves out of the sea like that, I thought. I had never tried to communicate with fish before, but some instinct told me these might be capable of beastspeaking. The sea was utterly clear of tainting, and I could have tried, yet I found I did not want to. These lovely creatures were oblivious to the humans watching them, and I was content to have it so. Humans had caused so much sorrow for the beastworld; let these remain untouched.

“Ah, ship fish. They are nowt truly fish, you know,” Fian said, coming to stand beside me.

I jumped, for I had not heard him approach.

“Of course they are,” Kella said.

“They are warm-blooded, an’ they suckle their babes on milk after bearin’ them whole as humans do. An’ they need air.” He held up a thick book with a mottled green cover. “This book tells all about them. Ship fish are much like humans.”

“Are they descended from the merpeople?” Kella asked. She had become fascinated with accounts in Beforetime books of a race of humans with gills and fishtails who had dwelt under the sea.

Fian frowned. “I dinna know. This books says nowt of them, other than that ship fish were sometimes mistaken for them. It does say that Beforetimers had boats that would go under water.”

“Where the merpeople lived?”

Fian frowned at the healer. “I told ye, it doesn’t say. Perhaps this was written after they became extinct. Apparently, there were ruined cities under th’ sea.…” He looked down at the tome in his hand. “Powyrs has even more books in a trunk in his room, an’ he has told me I may look through them.”

“So many books,” the healer murmured.

“And all about th’ sea,” Fian said. “Enough for a lifetime’s study, and I have only a few days.” He cast a final long look at the ship fish and turned to hurry back into the salon.

Kella shook her head. “Teknoguilders,” she said with faint disparagement. “How can he think of books when there is this to see?”

But a little later she grew tired of the ship-fish antics and went in.

I decided to climb up to the small upper deck, for it would give me a better view. It was piled with boxes, and I sat on top of one, dangling my legs and looking out at the sea. I had never known such stillness. It seemed to accentuate the vastness of the world and, in contrast, my own insignificance, but it was not an unpleasant feeling. In the face of this endless sea, I was no more than one of the ship fish, jumping in my bit of the ocean, making my little waves. There was a queer peace to be found in the thought, and I tried to draw the immense calmness into my heart to erase fear and anger and sadness.

My concentration was shattered by a muffled explosion of laughter.

“It tickles,” I heard a female voice giggle. I recognized Freya’s melodic voice and smiled, wondering whom she was with.

A moment later, I saw Rushton stroll to the rail, and my amusement evaporated.

Even as I watched, Freya stepped up beside him and shook her head, the springing golden curls catching and diffusing the morning sunlight into a pale halo.

Rushton appeared to be doing most of the speaking. Then he grasped Freya’s hands in his and stared into her face intently as if waiting for some response. Freya’s head was sunk as if in thought.

At last she nodded.

Rushton’s face suffused with joy. He flung his arms around her and hugged her tightly.

A terrible, savage pain clawed into my chest.

“You don’t know how much this means to me,” I heard Rushton saying as they moved toward the steep little stairs leading down to the main deck, obscured now by the sail. “I don’t want to tell anyone just yet. Let it remain our secret for now.…”

Their voices faded, and the pain in my chest intensified, spreading through my body like some exotic plague germ. The image of Rushton holding Freya in his arms seemed to have seared itself onto the inside of my eyelids so that I could see it even when my eyes were squeezed shut. I pulled my knees up to my chest and held them tightly, making myself into a ball.

“Rushton,” I whispered.

And who is she? I thought bitterly. Where did she come from, to steal him while my back was turned?

I clenched my teeth, resisting sour envy. While my back was turned? No, Freya had taken nothing that belonged to me. What could it possibly matter that he had turned to her? There was no room for anything in my life but my quest to destroy the weaponmachines.

Perhaps that was what Maruman had been trying to say the previous night—that there would be nothing for me at Obernewtyn when my quest was over. Maybe this was the price I must pay—not just Obernewtyn, but Rushton’s love.

I took a deep, shaky breath and made myself look into the gray calmness of the sea all around me. The ship fish had departed.

I had not wanted Rushton’s affections or encouraged them. So why did it hurt so much to learn that they were lost to me?

It does not matter, I thought fiercely. My feet are already on the black road. It is too late to choose another, and this one I must walk alone.