Chapter XIV

Therkon came around just at the verge of dusk, about an hour, Rathi estimated, out of Gildair. It was colder than ever, and the wind had worked round nor-nor-easterly, buffeting Anfluga’s flank like fists. Sitting at Therkon’s head, I saw his lashes flicker, almost imperceptible in the dingy light. But then his face shifted. A moment later, he opened his eyes.

Straight upon the gripping beast atop Anfluga’s stern post, the leach of the straining sail, and Rathi, upright and tense at the steering oar.

Therkon gave a gasp that strangled at birth, squeezed his eyes shut and tried to curl up with both arms over his head. I had just time to catch at a shoulder and almost exclaim, “Therkon?”

His eyes shot wide. The curling motion froze.

“We’re at sea but they’re friends, it’s all right—”

He turned suddenly onto his back. A hand groped inside the cloak and he murmured, sounding half-dazed, half-dreaming, “Chaeris . . .”

I shut my hand over his. His eyes flew wide again. He almost yelped, “Chaeris?” Then he jack-knifed up and grabbed for me. “Chaeris!”

He smelt like the bottom of a dungeon, his beard scratched, his arms hurt, his hands were rougher than the stones they used for sanding planks. I seized him like a Heartland python, hard enough to start both our ribs. And then we both wept as if we were still on Evva beach.

Eventually I had to let him loose: I wiped my streaming eyes down the seal furs, my nose on the back of a wrist, and fastened the other hand back in the cloak collar. He was still clutching me, murmuring prayers, gratitudes, vows of devotion to every known god. But when I moved, the burthen changed.

“Oh, Dhe,” he whispered into my unwashed, half-undone hair, “It was my fault. All my own benighted fault.”

Before I could burst out in excuses and denials Two said, “No.”

“What?”

“Not the choice,” Two said precisely. “Not at the cliff. Not with those facts.”

Therkon made a fraught, dissenting noise. “But after—!”

“After, yes.”

It stopped him on something like a grunt. I almost felt the fall of imperial frost. He had been half out of himself as I had seen him on Evva beach, and as on Evva beach, more than ready to blame himself for everything. He had not expected blame.

“Two didn’t mean—” I stopped before Two could cut me off. Because at the point, I could not lie to him. Two had forecast, I had feared, Thralli’s report affirmed it: what happened from Ve Pool onward had been, must have been, partly his own fault.

He was too honest to deny it. He had already dropped his head against my shoulder with a single wordless groan.

“It doesn’t matter.” I overrode Two and grabbed him, cloak and all. “It’s over and there’s no use blaming anyone. Oh, my—oh, Therkon,” my dear, my heart’s ease, my darling, Two recited the endearments while I prayed he had not been conscious to hear them on Skall beach. “It doesn’t matter. We’ve got you back.”

I tightened my arms. He drew me in against him. For an uncounted span of time we had nothing but a seal-fur cloak and some odorous clothes and dusk falling in the ice-wind on an open heaving boat. And I would not have changed them for anything on the Mother’s whole wide earth.

* * * *

Tacking to make Gildair’s harbour restored us to life. We both squeezed against the side as the ropemen heaved and swung and stamped to and fro, while the rowers stood by and Rathi, half-invisible in the twilight, called commands. Gildair was only a cluster of twinkles in the grey mass of western sea and sky, sliding above the gunwale, here and gone. I had my head shamelessly on Therkon’s shoulder. He was making his best effort, from inside the cloak, to grip me round the waist. And presently, in the eddy from others’ attention, the confessional of the half-dark, he began to talk.

“Ve Pool . . . Lord, I was such an idiot.” Two wanted to agree but I silenced her with ferocity. She had already stated the fact. Facts were not needed here.

“With the gate-guard. It was late afternoon, I could see no way to find someone, and still get back to you. Not by dark. I was half-crazy then. I would have drawn on them, except one clubbed me. From behind.” He massaged a shoulder, under the cloak. “But in the hall. That popinjay. That prancing, posturing, Archipelago fishmonger. And you somewhere on the hill, no-one to reach you, no-one to—I lost—I wholly lost my head.”

All too clearly I could picture it, the imperial Heir in a paroxysm of wrath and panic and outrage, gainsaid, flouted, trifled with, by what he would consider less than a backwoods autocrat.

Against my cheek he let out a sudden, silent air-shock of a laugh. “I hardly believed it when they threw me in the ‘dungeon.’ But when they took the lamp. And I remembered it was already evening. And I could not get out . . .”

I hugged him desperately and let that cry, Oh, my dear.

“I think,” he added ruefully, trying to rub his temple, “I actually beat my head against the door. But in the morning. Oh, Dhe.”

“If you’d only known, if only I could have told you,” I whispered back. “They came looking for me that morning. Skeag and Dath.” I told him about the night under the cliff, the whole saga of the ribs, the farm, the downhill trip, missing him by so few hours in Ve Pool itself. “I almost went crazy, when I couldn’t go on. And we almost knew what had happened to you.”

We made my-blame-was-greater noises for a while. But to have him in my grasp, to know him intact in wits if not wholly undamaged in body, was sweet enough to counter horrors twice as bad. I did deliberately skip over his sale. I did say triumphantly, “Two tricked Stokka. I got Hvestang back.”

“You tricked Stokka? You got Hvestang?”

So then I had to tell that story, at full length, and add Vithre, and Fiskri. And the thieves in Fiskri’s house.

“You were set upon? You had to kill two?” His voice spoke more than naked shock. A Dhasdeini man, to whom women were almost irretrievably the slighter, weaker vessels, the beloved to be cherished, defended. From violence, whether others’ or their own.

I just kept from retorting, It was what I trained for, it worked, I’m alive, Azo would have been so pleased. Honesty compelled me to amend: at least, she might have said, Not bad. But I could recall, all too shudderingly, how the bodies had surfaced in the lantern-light, the vile sensation of a knife cleaving flesh.

The other memory fell like a boulder. The scissoring draw of a light-gun, slicing not one but eight or nine men apart.

“Chaeris? Chaeris, what is it? My—what is it, my dear?”

“Skall,” I said, and buried my face in the seal furs. “Two. We had to do it. It was them or us. And you.”

The sea threshed, the wind squealed over us, almost as high a keen as Skall’s gyring birds. His arm had tightened round me, but it was a good minute before he spoke.

“Chaeris? What did you . . .”

I tried to sidle round it. I went back to Ve Pool, and Aerful, and forward to Eithay. The Lady, the emptied cage. Anfluga, a fresh hope of pursuit. “I’m sorry, I had to sell two finghends, for the passage, for the fish.” He made a wordless, impatient noise. What did gems matter? What else were they for? “We were five days Eithay to Yinstey, I could hardly bear even that.”

Knowing Angrir still had a full seven days’ space for whatever he did to you.

“The slaver,” he said into a gout of spume, almost under his breath. “I was—still new, then. I could not believe someone—anyone could—do what they did.” My heart bumped against my mouth-roof. Don’t tell me, I wanted to cry, even to exorcise yourself. But I felt the quick, curt shake of his head. “Chains, and that—clout—they put on me. They took my boots.” The first note of true indignation. Of memory being sloughed. “I could have borne the clothes, even Hvestang. But my boots!”

Made in Dhasdein. Almost the last remnant of the crown prince. The one absolute necessity, had he actually managed to escape.

He laughed again, another smothered concussion of breath. “Do you know, my—Chaeris? I was glad to have been sold, before the end. I was even glad for my, my stomach’s work. I made that squirming heap of lard pay for it, the chains, that hold.” He shuddered once, more eloquent than any words. “Even the whip. I reminded him, every time he was driven to distraction, that if he beat me, it would bring down his price.”

I bit my tongue on, And it was only the price’s counter-balance that saved your life.

“But to be sold . . . again.”

To a woman. Stripped again, no doubt, this time before a woman’s eyes. He did not have to put the loathing, the humiliation, into words.

“I thought. I did think—the only thing I could think was, If she keeps me, I could get away here. Find a boat, get back. I had to get back. I tried not to think, what might have happened to you, how far away you were. Oh, Dhe.”

I hugged him rib-squeezingly and said fiercely into his ear, “I was behind you. I didn’t ever stop following you. Whatever I had to do, I was going to get you back.”

Whatever I had to do. The shudder took me, uncontrollably: I had done whatever I had to do, and it was beyond any horror I ever conceived.

He leant his cheek to mine, and for all the husk of mistreatment, his voice came with a rouse of the crown prince’s authority. “Chaeris, tell me. What did you have to do?”

I stared out into the grey and white spume that was merging into darkened sky. Gildair was a brighter constellation, but human shelter, its comfort and sanctuary, still seemed very far away. Once he heard this confession, might he ever count me human again?

“Skall,” I said. And shut my eyes, and said it out in a piece, before I lost courage irredeemably.

“Rathi put me ashore, he said they’d wait, I wore Nouip’s cloak, I took Hvestang on my shoulder, I remembered Grithsperry. So I went up to find—Angrir.”

His shoulder twitched. He had had cause to learn that name.

“They were,” I took breath. “At the ceat.”

His breath came in hard, and his every muscle turned to stone.

“I tried to bargain. I would have bought you, I would have traded him every gem I, we, had left. But he played with me. And in the end. In the end—”

His silence, his muscles’ clench gave me the answer: I remember what he did, in the end. Yes. I do remember that.

“So I threw Verrith’s knife.”

I heard his grunt, loud as a foot-trip. He had seen us, at exercise on the River. He knew an Iskardan knife-thrower’s scope.

“The others came after me.” I had to get it over with. “I had one knife left, and Hvestang, it wasn’t enough. But Two, Two remembered how they woke the statue, at Cataract. She pulled the other knife and—the—the—she woke.”

Therkon had his own memories. Dhasdein’s history. I heard the breath hiss, as if I had hurt him, in his throat.

“Gods above, Chaeris.”

“I couldn’t—we had no other way. I d-didn’t . . .”

I didn’t want to do it, to remember is almost more than I can bear, if you think I am not human, how do you think I feel? I could not get out any of it. I clutched like a man drowning at the folds of sealskin cloak.

I heard his next breath suck in. Then he moved with the jerkiness of shock, and his other arm tried to come round me, to pull me right into his body’s refuge. His face bowed, but not with revulsion, into my hair. “Oh, Chaeris,” I heard him whisper, almost in the way I had whispered, Oh, Therkon. “Oh, my . . . Oh, Chaeris.”

Wind and sea-sound washed over us. Anfluga tacked again: Rathi must have been sailing purely by the wind’s feel on his cheek, for it was almost completely dark. Gildair’s lights had grown, strengthened, larger than planets now. We were round on the next tack before Therkon spoke.

Straightening only a little, not releasing me, but I could feel him staring out over the rail, onto the lightless sea.

“He.”

I did not have to ask which “he.” The one he would not scorn as a slaver, nor dismiss as a popinjay. The one who had taken more from him than pride.

“I kicked him,” he said softly, “the third day. At sea. He told me then. What they would do to me. When they had me ashore. When they were on—Skall.” He said it as if the very word burnt his throat. “He would not just whip me. Like a dog. Or chain me. Like a dog. We’ve a kennel for you, he said, on my island. Fit for an Outland cur. You’ll taste the pleasures of that a day or two. And then.”

I did not say, Go on. I could envisage, far too clearly, what that portal might unseal.

“When they pulled me out of the—kennel,” Therkon said very softly, “I knew I would die.”

He shifted his arm over me a little, as if to confirm I was still there.

“No more safeguards. No chances. Even if I chose—and I would have—to plead. He—Nothing would save me. I knew I would never find you. Rescue you. Know what happened to you. To you. Or to Dhasdein.”

I had no words at all.

“So I spat at them.” He was barely whispering. “And I prayed. To the River-lord. To Dhe. If it’s all in ruin, I besought them, my charge lost, both my charges, my life’s work, my mother’s life work, the whole Riverworld lost. If it’s all ruin, only let me die. As fast as I can.”

I could only tighten my handful of cloak until my very fingerbones cracked. And I had thought myself sorely overtried.

“I meant to jump. To bang my head on the gallows. They told me about the gallows. To strangle myself, to—but when they pulled me out, I was too cold, they were too quick.”

Now I could feel him trembling, a fine vibration that seemed to start in his very bones. His breath came in abrupt, fitful pants against my cheek.

“Then,” he said, “you came.”

He left me the dark to understand the fullness of that. Not merely his own survival, not merely the greatest of individual debts. Not merely rescue from torture and a prolonged, hideous death. But also the chance to redeem his honor. Recover the charge for whom he had pledged his life. And with it, a renewed hope for his greater charge.

For Dhasdein. For the Riverworld.

In silence Two rehearsed the rest. The price for us was great, almost as great as for those nine who lost their lives. But did this not go some way to redeem the debt?

Tears trembled on my lashes, blurring Gildair to a row of golden stars, more fitful and far blurrier than the torches that had burned for us along the imperial wall in Riversend. Tears of horror and sorrow and loss. Tears of a wormwood gratitude, such as Azo brought me on the tower of the Seaward fort. Yes, what you did was bitter, an eternal stain upon you, she too had said. But you did what you must.

Anfluga turned again, far more slowly this time, almost majestically. The lights were close upon us, I could make out the blocky silhouette of walls, perhaps a wharf. The shape of windows. The smell of smoke and tar and fish-guts, the sound of shipping, creaky planks, slap of ropes. Humankind waited for us. Warmth, perhaps some welcome. Even I need not despair of entering there.

In that slow rise of hope, the detail recurred with something near a slap. “The ring! What did you do with the ring? The imperial seal! You still had it, didn’t you, at Ve Pool? Mother save us, if Stokka or Thralli found that—!”

“I ate it,” said Dhasdein’s crown prince.

* * * *

By daylight, Gildair was blue. A steely, dark grey-blue in both tile and stone, thick-walled, stolid houses snugged in startlingly regular streets above the harbour in its short arms of bay. From my upstairs window, its solidity spoke an aplomb, a tempered endurance, equal to every storm the south could unleash.

It was also a town sophisticated as Jurrick, the conduit between Sandouin and the bigger islands of the further, the true South Isles, a town with merchants and craft shops, and inns, from overnight dormitories to hostelries doubtless fit for lords. But even a dockside tavern might have refused our custom, a handful of bedraggled seamen, me in my hard-used clothes, and Therkon fumbling like an animated scarecrow in Nouip’s cloak and Rathi’s spare boots: had not Gildair, like Ve Pool, been feeling hardship’s pinch.

“An’ now, lass. What think ye to do now?”

Rathi had out-paced sun and breakfast both. It was scudding bleakly outside. Last night, I had been unable to think past getting Therkon clean, dry, fed, his hurts salved, and into a bed, preferably all at once. I had hardly noticed a landlord happy to fill even a few bunks and a couple of dingy rooms, and a healer willing to stir abroad in wind and darkness at a stranger’s call.

A brisk, middle-aged, dark Archipelagan, he had seemed careful, if clinically detached. I had ached to hover, to tally the damage revealed and its repairs begun. But recalling that moment of rage and revelation on Skall’s hillside, once he set to work, I had heroically shut the door on them both.

“Y’r brither’ll hardly leave that bed today.”

Rathi was right in that.

“The healer’s coming back.”

The healer finished, there had still been a bath to organize, cooks fit to cater for a near invalid, Anfluga’s crew to wrestle into conceding that, no, they would not sail on in the dark, yes, I was going to pay for passage from Skall, and yes, that price would include their bed and board.

They had just dispersed, leaving me to stay abruptly watery knees against the hall stairpost, when the healer reappeared.

“The skipper tells me, ye’re in charge?” It had hovered between doubt and courtesy, a “lass,” or perhaps, “ma’am.” His face showed lines, even for middle-age, under the hanging lamp. “Y’r man’s clean, an’ I’ve seen to the rest. Ye’ll need salves, for a week or so. I’ll send some round?” I nodded and nodded, trying hard to summon suddenly elusive words. “He’s abed now. If they’ve thin soup, give him some, an’ a little bread. Not too much, at first! An’ he says,” suddenly he was eyeing me narrowly, “ye were hurt y’rself, a piece back. Ribs, was it? Cracked?”

“Ribs, yes. But they’re all right now.” His face was swinging slowly toward and away from me. “The soup’s heating. May I, can I go up?”

“He’s askin’ for ye.” He frowned. “But he was very firm. Made me promise I’d look at ye, as well.”

I had shut myself out, but he had not forgotten me. He had looked for me. Thought for me, with that infuriating, ire-melting Dhasdeini concern, even in his own distress.

I had bitten my lip hard, and shut my hand harder on the stairpost. And managed, “I had two good healers, on Phaerea. But thank you. I can go up?”

Now I bit my lip again, still staring outside, as Rathi’s boots shifted on the bare wooden floor. Too early, I wanted to exclaim, it’s too early for this, before the healer, before breakfast, before Therkon and I even have a chance to talk. Do you think I, alone, can decree what we’ll do now?

For some things, yes. I still had the gem pouch, and Therkon would not cavil at my sole decision there.

“I can pay the passages, both of them, but I may need a money-changer.” The healer’s reckoning waited, too. “Could Segil or someone escort—?”

“The whole crew’ll convoy ye, if ye choose, lass. But—”

“In a moment. That’s the door.”

Therkon had been sitting up, against what looked like half the inn’s pillows, when I tapped, bare minutes earlier. The nightshirt was probably from his own pack, its clean if now rumpled white a stark contrast to the dark veils of hair, combed but still loose over his shoulders, and the regular thicket of beard. It did match the hollow-eyed pallor of his face all too well.

I had known better than to try watching the night with him, just as I had known to bespeak my own room. I had officiated while he swallowed, almost reverently, his first mouthfuls of bread. Helped him spoon up soup. But when his eyelids began to sink, I had coaxed the sleeping-potion down him, and then, with what felt like tearing sinews, whispered a goodnight, and tiptoed out. If ghosts and nightmares plagued his rest, he would not want that further humiliation shared.

And if fatigue and relief had sunk me as swiftly, the memories had not stayed buried. Neither Therkon nor I had asked, Did you sleep well?

Now the door swung open. Helpfully, Rathi admitted the kitchen-maid. Unlike the White Grebe, the Lobster Pot readily served food upstairs. I did settle the tray myself over Therkon’s lap, and inspect the barley broth, exactly as the healer had ordered. Toasted bread came with it. When my own stomach rumbled, Therkon said sharply, “Sit down, Chaeris.”

The healer had said the same thing the night before. After a sharp stare, and a hand suddenly clamped under my elbow, while he sent a shout ringing down the rear passage. “Husvorth! Up here!”

Husvorth was the innkeeper, who brought bustle and exclamation and a hot, exquisitely poached cod fillet in his wake. Against both his and the healer’s protests—“Y’r forespent, lass! Take a moment for y’rself!”—I had gulped it in time to follow Therkon’s tray up the stairs.

Therkon’s own expression now warned against further dispute. I sat on the bedside stool and purloined half the bread. A moment before he had been muttering about razors and rubbing at his jaw. Now I pointed magisterially at the spoon, and with a tiny smile that retorted, For the moment, you have the tiller, he began to eat.

Rathi watched in silence. But however villainous his looks, Therkon was rapidly reclaiming the crown prince: he took three mouthfuls, set the spoon down, looked straight in Rathi’s face, and said, “Sir, I have much to thank you for.”

Rathi grunted and shifted his feet again. In a moment he said gruffly, “T’ passage was paid.”

“But not the rest.”

“Aye, well. None’d leave the lass to that.”

Therkon’s mouth crimped. I could see him thinking, You saved us, and I could do nothing. I, who imperiled us both. Whatever gratitude he assuredly felt had Dhasdeini self-esteem to balance it. Not to mention imperial pride.

Beyond the pretext for curtains, the sky had darkened. Now a sudden squall tapped against the casement’s tiny panes. In Gildair they burned bright whale oil in the lamps, however sparingly, and even a dockside inn filled its windows with glass.

Rathi was staring intently in that grey light: so an Isle skipper might evaluate a fellow man, and one he felt no obligation to respect, but something suddenly recalled that fleeting expression of the night before. Yet why should Rathi conceivably covet a rescued slave, an Outland enigma? Any more than a girl, at best an Outland curiosity, at worst a witch, with a ‘companion’ whose menace he had seen for himself?

Soup forgotten, Therkon was staring back. What are you? that look riposted: the prince, the imperial leader assessing a tool, an ally, a resource. Who are you? demanded the man behind the masks. Who are you, to have helped, comforted, been trusted by my Chaeris?

Because it was possessiveness, if not open warning, in that stare. Even, I realized, something near to jealousy.

“Ye’re no’,” Rathi said slowly, “much alike.”

Therkon turned a wrist. The prince’s gesture: a point I decline to explain. “And what are your plans, now?”

For all the snub, he had known better than to add, After you are paid. Rathi’s look noted both points. What he said was, “An’ ye don’t sound alike.”

“We were raised apart.” Therkon looked down his nose as if he had never left Riversend.

“Aye?” Rathi raised his own brows. “But ye know about the lass’s ‘companion’?”

Therkon put the spoon right down. The stare chilled from prince to hatchet man.

“No affair o’ mine?” Rathi looked half amused. “Ye take a fine toplofty tone when ye’ve a mind to it. No wonder ye stirred yon hoodie crow on Skall. Si’thee, prince.” It was pure Isles irony, but Therkon winced. “T’was the lass followed ye, an’ found ye, an’ broke ye out o’ that. An’ t’was Anfluga brought ye off. I’m no’ sure I’d do it again. But the lass. Ye’ve taken fine care for her so far. Is there any space, in y’r plans now, for her?”

Therkon sat up with such a jerk the soup spilt, but the manifold injustices gagged him the split second that let me get in first.

“He does take care for me, he has taken care for me! I’m the troublecrew, I should take care for him!” I swung on Therkon, spurting words that had waited weeks to be said. “I was stupid on the cliff, Two said it was quicker, the chimney, I thought, it’ll just waste time to stop for the rope—What you did might have been wrong, but it began with my fault!”

He was almost as confounded as Rathi. He literally blinked. Then his eyes went black and hard as dagger-points and he said, “Are you sure?”

The question I had asked myself in the street at Ve Pool. Had I fallen by chance, or the consequence of my own choice? Or at the choice of someone—something—else?

I could feel the blood drain out of my face. Rain tapped and whispered at the window and black water was rising round me, touching, groping, reaching for my lungs, my breath, my throat . . .

“Chaeris!”

Therkon had lunged for my wrist. The yank threw me almost across the bed, the soup spilt definitively. “Chaeris!”

I managed to sit up. To nod, to gasp, to gulp wordlessly. I’m here.

He let go. His face looked hard as mine felt, stiffened onto the bone. I could feel Rathi staring. The air around us fairly vibrated. Doubt, suspicion, multiple tensions. More than a little fear.

Then Rathi said harshly, “Was that y’r ‘companion,’ too?”

Therkon shuddered once and took his eyes from mine. Looked vaguely at the soiled sheets, the empty bowl. Then lifted his stare to Rathi and answered bleakly, “No. That was what brought us here.”

Rathi’s mouth opened, and I felt my own jaw drop. Two had named, we had both thought we accepted Therkon as strategist, but his decisions could still catch us both unawares.

Therkon pushed bowl and tray away and began at the beginning. With the Dhasdeini wrecks, and the survivor in that Sea-fort bed.

When he stopped, Rathi had subsided on the forsaken stool, with both hands plunged wrist-deep in his beard, yanking it so hard his head swung to and fro.

“Somethin’ brought ye to the Isles. Wrecked y’r ship. Saved ye, maybe. Sent ye on south. Maybe. So ye cannot say, flatly, Aye, or Nay. Ye only think this bogle’s arranged things. Tiran’s eyes, d’ye mean it arranged me?”

Therkon answered flintily, “There is no use trying to divide what was planned from what went awry.”

Because if I had been manipulated on the cliff, with intent to part me from Therkon, why would I have been allowed to rejoin him? And if we were both meant to die, why would a rescue have been allowed on Skall?

“But ye can make no sense of this either way?” Rathi was almost ready to tear his hair. “Do ye at least know what’s doin’ it? Do ye have the faintest idea where ye’re goin’?”

Therkon looked up with eyes black as midnight water, and said, “Kaastria.” Just as Two said, “Sthassamaer.”

For an instant Rathi froze. Then he almost shouted, “What d’ye know—what have ye heard—how d’ye know about that?”

He had gone a clay-ish grey, and his hand had flown by instinct into the horns. Therkon stared at him, and then at me. But I was already staring at him.

He looked back to Rathi. Tiredly, he said, “The survivor said it. The Seer knew it. She said, Black water. My—Chaeris—sees—feels—black water. Rising. Around her.”

Rathi gulped, twice. I said, flat and loud, “Kaastria?”

They both jerked round, but my own eyes were already fixed. “Kaastria. When did you think of—why did you decide on that?”

Therkon scrabbled a little higher among the tangled, soiled sheets. He still looked half invalid and half vagabond, but the hatchet man, the crown prince, the strategist, were all in that steely stare.

“That was the name she had.” He spoke to me, as if we were alone. “The name we were given. The sagas’ message. The clue. Whatever muddles, whatever tangles have befallen since, we have always moved toward Kaastria. Whatever we did.”

“But t’is only one island, and half the Isles around ye! Why d’ye say that?”

“Because Kaastria is the only name we had.”

He stopped, and stared past me into the grey mosaic of rain.

“And Kaastria,” he added flatly, “is in ruin.”

Where had he heard it? At Ve Pool, on Eithay, from Thralli’s crew, even on the way to Skall? But in whatever extremity, the strategist had not mislaid the gift.

Rathi seemed to have been struck mute. Then he swallowed and croaked, “Ruins? Why ruins—?”

Therkon’s back sagged, and he began to slide down against the pillows. The quick, unforeseeable ebb of over-tried strength. But he flapped a hand at me and managed, “Chaeris? Two?”

And Two was already answering for us both.

“You are the strategist,” she said.

Rathi clutched his hair and almost bellowed, “Will the pair o’ ye just make sense?”

Two answered, but not to him, “Because the name was given,” she said. “Because on Kaastria, there will be no-one else.”

The casement rattled in a sudden little gust and a draft slid across the room. I felt the goosebumps rise on my neck.

No-one else to intervene, Two meant, for good or evil, as Azo and Verrith and Deoren had in the wreck, and Nouip and Frotha on Sickle, and Veenn’s folk, and Vithre, and even Stokka, at Ve Pool. Or Rathi, at Eithay and Skall. No-one else to mar plans. No-one else to rescue us.

“Because,” I said to Rathi, “Two or I can read information. But at the point, we are troublecrew. We just have to make things happen. My—brother—knows what the things should be.”

Rathi hurled both hands in the air.

“So he decides ye’re goin’ to Kaastria? Now? Wi’ him limp as a jug o’ whey, an’ ye no’ much better, an no’ a ship or hand between ye. An’ ye want to go to Kaastria? To ferret in a heap o’ flood-wrack and mud-fall an’, an’—what are ye goin’ to do?”

Between him and my own terrors, I was very close to tears. “I don’t know! I don’t know how we’ll go or what we’ll find or what’ll happen and I don’t care! I only know, we have to go!”

Therkon stirred, and tried to lift a hand, then his head. I put my own hand hard on his and stared at Rathi, who was staring, as speechless and over-harried, at me.

Then he pushed the stool aside and said flatly, “Nay.”

We both stared. Rathi shoved fingers yet again into, through and out of his beard.

“If ye can find nothin’ better, between ye, this part I’ll tell. Ye may take ship for Kaastria.” A sudden little shudder ran through him. “But ye’ll do it on Anfluga, the pair o’ ye. Ye’ll sail wi’ me.”

Therkon heaved himself half up, and put in huskily but dourly, “I will go with you.”

He let me shout, conserving his strength. When I finished he had slid almost flat again, and let his eyes close. But at the pause he opened them and added, on a note that had become familiar, “Chaeris, it wants you.”

One of us had to go: we had no choice, he had already come to terms with that. Plan how we liked, the margin was no longer wide enough to think of reversing the tide. We had chosen to come south, on Phaerea. If we refused here, simply baulked, even took a ship and tried to sail back toward Dhasdein, how far would we get? In the teeth of that steadily northering wind?

So he would go. If it wanted me, then I was the more valuable, to the Isles, to Dhasdein and Iskarda. I must be left behind, protected, never hazarded. So if he did meet the enemy on Kaastria, I might still survive. Might still help the Isles, or if that was unnecessary, might go back, to bring the news, to become the next kingpost of Dhasdein.

Without him.

I might have screamed protests. I might have drowned in tears. Neither of them touched Two.

“If it wants us,” she said, “will it take you instead?”

Therkon’s eyes flew open. Shock, disbelief. Disillusion. Something near despair.

“You can’t—”

On my own account I snorted at him. “Do I have a choice?”

Because Two was right. If I did not go, would it even bother with Therkon? Might it not simply bypass him for some new ploy focused on its real target, now conveniently, perhaps utterly, even fatally alone?

I worked down Two’s logic paths and wondered that I had not already seen it for myself. If staying had been an immoral choice on Sickle, it was outright impossible now.

Therkon put both hands over his eyes. Rathi stood abruptly back from the bedside and growled, “I’ll find the healer. Whatever chances next, ye’ll not be leavin’ the day.”

* * * *

We did not leave Gildair for a whole six days more. When I look back, it seems a time that swung like a pendulum between the Mother’s heaven and the Adversary’s hell. Because by day there was Therkon, safe, mine to cosset and tend and lovingly tyrannize over, recovering fast but still unfit or unwilling to rebel. But by night there was memory and dream to fling me back into Skall’s freezing murk, to the sights, the sounds, the sensation of a light-gun shearing human flesh.

The third evening, after the healer had brought his salves and diminishing bandages, I found Therkon sitting, as he had most of the day, on the side of the bed. As I came in he said quietly, “Chaeris? Would you wish to sleep in here tonight?”

I could feel my jaw sag. Injunctions and recollections raced past me, divided rooms or separate cabins, that searing insight on the hill in Skall. Sharp panic as Two fired other memories atop them, the weight and warmth of him asleep on my shoulder, the muscled support of his back against my forehead, the velvet touch of belly skin under my hand . . .

“It’s not correct, no.” He spoke in some apparent embarrassment, eyes on the floor. “But,” sounding rueful now, “after Phaerea, and the hills, ah, we may be past correctness, do you think?”

I could not suppress Two and speak as well. He looked up, and it was open anxiety now.

“We could make a partition. Hang a sheet, perhaps. They could bring another bed.”

I found words, however foolish. “It—why?”

His lashes went down again. He had adamantly demanded to shave, the very first day, but his hair was still loose as I had hardly seen it before Gildair. Through its shadows even whale-oil light did not fully reveal his face.

“I would feel happier. If I knew. If I was at least in earshot—of you.”

The strategist. He was thinking ahead of me, even of Two, considering some incursion here, as in Fiskri’s house. And I was thinking, as fast as Two, that it was a more than cogent point. Never mind modesty, forget nightmares. What if the enemy decided to move, this time against him?

I said, “I’ll ask Husvorth what they can do.”

So when the next nightmare brought me gasping up in a pool of sweat it was not half-dark and solitude that met me, but the glow of a night-light. And Therkon, silent in bare feet and nightshirt, drawing aside the makeshift curtain to murmur, “Chaeris?”

He had known better than to walk in and touch me. Not troublecrew, fresh sprung from nightmare and still half-awake. Or perhaps, his own custom forbade breaking in on any female, however close she had become to him, in her bed.

In a moment I managed, “I’m all right.”

“Of course.” His head slanted, against the back-light. “But I, at least, could use a sleep-settler. Heillor showed me how to heat up milk.”

In the peat coals of the brazier that served as fireplace, in a little brass pot, from the jugful on the window-ledge. A jug that must have come each night after I so tactfully left him to put himself to bed.

By the time the milk reached a bearable drinking heat, it seemed natural to sit on his bedside as we sipped.

“Ugh,” I said, the only safe thing that came to mind. “I hate hot milk.”

He laughed, a breath in the night-lamp’s twilight. “Drink up. It’s good for you.”

“My fathers used to say that.” The pang of memory almost blocked my throat. Evenings in infancy, one or the other of them taxed with the job of “getting Chaeris to bed.” Whether by cajolery, bribe or threat.

“My nurse,” he said, after a pause that nearly over-charged the moment, “said it too.”

His father was an emperor. Who would never do something as menial as bed down a son himself.

And I knew he had bad dreams too, and it would only embarrass him to say, Did I wake you? He would surely know better than to ask what had woken me. The past was forbidden territory. As for the future . . .

Rathi talked about thatt daily, mapping routes to Kaastria. “No’ down t’west o’ Hamair, though that’s quickest, aye.” Hamair was the one big island ahead. “But the chance o’ weather’s worse. An’ ye’ll no’ want another turn o’ the sea-qualm for him.”

So instead we would slant down Hamair’s long, deeply indented eastern side, past capes and towns Rathi named with old familiarity. “Easy enough, wi’ this wind settin’ northerly. An’ Anfluga’ll run better, on that reach.” Faster, as well as easier on Therkon’s stomach, I understood.

“If this pestilent weather ever turns.” Rathi again, grumbling at the window with its vista of dull-blue tile and stone, dark grey sky, pelting squalls of rain. “Tiran damp it. Ye’d think, by this time, we’d be half into spring. Seems the whole year’s turned hindabout, an’ headed back to winter again.”

And the wind still sat persistently from northward, a wholly untoward phenomenon in the Isles, whose weather came up from the west and south. Rathi had grumbled about that, too, if less than about the rain. “At least, if the cursed wind’s still workin’ westerly, it’ll no’ be in our teeth.”

Now I looked abruptly along the bedside at Therkon, who was looking at me. When our eyes met he put out a hand and laid it over mine.

Don’t think about it. Don’t wonder how and why the wind sits so long and so unusually as it is. He had known where my mind went, as I could have guessed for him. To the future, the real future, the unknown that waited for us on Kaastria, at the voyage’s end.

And he had not paused to consider Two’s reaction, or mine, or his own scruples. Not this time.

I turned my hand under his and his fingers shut, gently but decisively. We sat uncounted moments, taking comfort in the simplest, most banal human contact, in the empty night.

* * * *

In truth, neither Rathi nor I expected to be out of Gildair in less than a week. But for all his damages and privation, the third morning Therkon was up, walking, however unsteadily, about his room. Coming downstairs at intervals the fourth day, and ready, the fifth morning, for a sortie outside.

Heillor firmly vetoed that. But at noon Rathi came into the taproom with a pleased expression, announcing, “Picked up a cargo. Naught but letters an’ such, an’ it’ll take us clear in to Rangar. But we can take shore-rest there. An’ the better for it.”

He slanted a look at Therkon, mulishly established on a back-wall stool, meaning, too clearly, The better for you. Therkon returned crisply, “Can you sail tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?” Rathi stared. “We could, aye.”

“If the wind suits,” Therkon said flatly, “so can I.”

Rathi scrubbed his beard and looked anxiously at me. Therkon shot me one glance and got off the stool. “Tomorrow,” he said, in the crown prince’s voice, and whatever incompletely healed whipmarks and unfaded bruises he might be concealing, I knew better than to dispute.

Because I knew that he, like me, could not bear any more delay. Whatever was on Kaastria, whatever the outcome, he wanted it met. Done. Over with.

He did have to leave me most of the mundane arrangements, down to trading two more gems to pay the inn, the healer, Rathi and his crew for the two past passages, and, at my insistence, half the fair value of a further voyage to an unspecified port in Kaastria. I thought, with satisfaction, that I had learnt chaffering from Fiskri’s example, as well as caution in taking Segil and both stroke oars as escort to the money-changer. Until I overheard Husvorth and Rathi by the kitchen, Husvorth saying, on a note of wonder, “Paid the whole score, for y’r men as well. An’ never quibbled once!”

While Rathi responded, with something closer to respect than satisfaction, “Aye. Bountiful as the Mither, she is.”

Therkon did have the better of me over his new boots. It was manifestly ridiculous to summon a custom-making cobbler to the Lobster Pot. Nor could he do without. So his first genuine excursion was “up-town,” as Rathi described it, with someone’s weather-canvas instead of Nouip’s cloak—“we’ll not want a riot, d’ye see?”—Segil and Rathi both in attendance, and me right at his elbow, all but biting my tongue in between trying to see five ways at once.

When we came back, the tap-room light showed him rather white about the mouth, but he made his own way upstairs. And when the boots arrived, altered from the best pair the cobbler had, he greeted them upright, if seated. “Now,” he said, pulling his hair back into its usual tail, suddenly turning into an approximate copy of the man I remembered in Riversend, “we can go.”

I watched the dawn break next morning, grey and wretched as ever, feeling stretched and jaded after a mostly sleepless night. But departure already had its own momentum. The inn-score was paid. Our packs were filled. Breakfast had been ordered. Heillor arrived for a final examination and consignment of salves. And with them, to my amazement, a little vial of brown powder that, when he lifted the cork, emitted the pungent, unmistakable scent of imperial spice.

“He’s a fussy stomach, aye,” Heillor observed complacently. “Ye’ll likely need a store of this.”

A greater boon than decent boots. I shut my hand over it as on a butterfly, and managed, “I can’t thank you. How much—?” And he gave me an airy wave.

“Lass, ye’ve paid me o’er and above asking.” A quick half-grin and a glance at Therkon, embroiled with Rathi over something. “Y’r man did most o’ the work himself. You take that now.” For an instant his look changed, into something that recalled the tone in Rathi’s words to Husvorth. “An’ remember us.”

I would remember, I thought, with the last hot toast and delectably salted porridge warm in my belly, the rain beating futilely over my weather-canvas and knitted cap, and underneath, the heavy trousers and sweater Rathi had insisted I buy. “Those furs’ll ward him in Tiran’s own ice-house, but that bitty cloak an’—an’ y’r other things—” in Gildair too, women all wore skirts—“’ll never hold an honest southerly.” I would remember, yes, with as poignant a longing as I had preserved even the shape of Tolla’s cabin steps. Another sanctuary, so briefly found, so soon drawn away.

Rain sheened the cobblestones and pocked the puddles, wind beat our gear as we tramped dourly onto the wharf. Anfluga was moored rather than beached, with a spare sail for tarpaulin abaft the rowing thwarts. To keep, Rathi carefully did not explain, a place dry for my delicate brother, at least until we cast off. It gave me some amusement to watch how swiftly they had learnt to manage imperial pride.

We scrambled down and stowed ourselves, packs against the side, Hvestang atop. Only this time there were two of us to crouch beside them, as the rowers settled and the rope-men went into action, the warps dropped splashing, and Rathi nodded to Segil: Cast off.

In the unrelenting wind and rain, no-one had stirred out to watch. Segil put a boot to the wharf and pushed. Anfluga pitched a little, then the farther oars bit. She pivoted. The grey harbour waters revolved, as the River had beyond Marbleport, the somber blue tiles and stone walls receded. As silently as it had coalesced from wind and darkness, Gildair slid away into grey morning mist.