David Drake: Master of the Cauldron

But marvelous as Cashel'd found the places he'd gone and the folk he'd met there, none of them were as wonderful as the fact that Sharina loved him and had allowed him to love her. Her father Reise was the innkeeper, a wealthy man as the borough weighed such things and a learned one by any judgment. He'd come to Barca's Hamlet from Carcosa, where he'd been Countess Tera's chamberlain; and before that he'd served the king himself in Valles.

Reise had taught Garric and Sharina to read and to love the great writers of the Old Kingdom. They'd learned so well that Lady Liane had found the education she'd received at a school for the daughters of the wealthy made her no more than the equal of the innkeeper's children she met in Barca's Hamlet.

Reise's daughter was far too great a person to wed an orphan like Cashel who couldn't write his name and who'd never handled a silver coin in his life… and besides that, Sharina was a long-legged beauty with blond hair as fine as spiderweb. Every year at the borough's Sheep Fair there'd been drovers and wealthy merchants who offered Sharina riches past a peasant girl's imagining if she'd come away with them.

A thundercloud of memory shadowed Cashel's face. Sharina had told them 'no'. The ones who didn't like the answer were told it again, by Sharina's muscular brother Garric and her even more muscular friend Cashel. If they had bodyguards-and they generally did-so much the worse for them. A swordsman in an open courtyard hasn't a chance against a strong man with seven feet of iron-shod hickory and the skill to use it.

Cashel's left hand rested lightly on Sharina's waist, not a claim but rather a badge of honor. He'd worshipped Sharina for as long as he could remember, but he'd never imagined that he'd be permitted to love her. Whatever else happened in Cashel's life, it'd already been more wonderful than he'd dreamed.

He looked at the island. Volita didn't have much to see that Cashel cared about. Ruins were interesting to some folk, just as books were. Tenoctris could touch a carved stone and talk about where it came from, while Garric and Sharina nodded in understanding. But for Cashel, rocks were mostly important when they were where they'd grown, because then they gave him a notion about how good the grazing was likely to be.

Garric was sailing his fleet slowly up the western arc of the kingdom, halting at each of the major islands. He was making what his advisors called a Royal Progress. Cashel didn't need anybody to explain the sense of it: a shepherd who kept his eyes open saw the same thing happen every Spring. Birds, squirrels-frogs, even-stared at each other and puffed themselves up, singing or screeching or croaking. All of them were trying to make their rivals back down.

With dogs you might get a fight, but that was dogs. It could be a fight between men too, but not if they were as smart as Garric.

Cashel was one of the people Garric talked to before he did things. Cashel hadn't understood why at first, him a shepherd who couldn't read or write sitting with nobles who were used to running things. He'd seen quickly that his knowing the things a peasant knows could be useful. With nobles, what they knew got mixed up with what they called honor. Honor to a noble generally meant acting like you didn't have any common sense.

About fighting, for instance. A fight meant the winner was hurt too, like as not, and maybe the losers from earlier fights would pile in and turn it into an all-against-one thing that no 'one' could survive. It was a lot better in the long run to talk and posture and hop up and down-and not to have to fight, because you'd convinced your rival that he couldn't win but that you were going to let him not lose either.

So Garric arrived at each island with a fleet and army that the ruler knew he couldn't defeat; but instead of attacking, Garric told him how glad he was to have a loyal supporter of the kingdom like him in this place; and by the way, here was the new schedule of payments that his island would be sending to Valles to support the fleet and army.

That's what a Royal Progress was. That's why Garric and his huge fleet were here on an island just off the coast of Sandrakkan, whose previous ruler had claimed to be King of the Isles twenty-odd years ago; and who'd failed, but not by so much that his nephew mightn't have similar notions of his own.

Tenoctris had finished the spell she'd been working. Sharina bent down to talk with her, but Cashel remained where he was as a wall between the women and the bustle on the ship's narrow deck. No sailor would bump Sharina or Tenoctris deliberately, but they might not notice them. Most everybody noticed Cashel. If they didn't, well, they bounced off.

Cashel continued to scan Volita the way he would a new pasture. He'd seen a lot of places in the past five seasons. Many of them were cities, and the only parts of a city Cashel'd found he liked were the pictures city-folk, wealthy ones anyhow, had painted on their walls. But there'd been countryside too, none of it really nicer than the borough in springtime but nice enough regardless.

A ewe with a black body and an all-white face stood between half-raised pillars on the horizon, staring at the ships and men on the shore. She chewed a grass blade with the same rotary motion as a woman mixing bread dough. The hooves of sheep had cut narrow paths which wound among the ruins wherever Cashel looked, following the least possible grade across the landscape. Sheep could find a slope where water'd give up and make a pool instead…

Cashel smiled broadly and rested his hand gently on Sharina's shoulder, his eyes still on the shore. Volita might not be Barca's Hamlet, but it'd do. Any place in any world would do for Cashel or-Kenset, so long as he was there with Sharina.

Sharina saw the crimson spark vanish from above the symbol Tenoctris had drawn on the pine planking. She put her hand out to steady the old woman, but Tenoctris didn't sway with fatigue the way she often did after an incantation.

"I'm all right, dear," she said, though she raised her left hand for Sharina to hold and didn't look up for a moment. "I was determining the amount of power here, that's all. I'd never visited Sandrakkan before. In my former life, I mean."

Now she did turn to smile. Tenoctris appeared to be about seventy. Indeed she'd lived some seventy years, but she'd been born more than a millennium ago. She'd been ripped from her time by the wizardry which had drowned King Carus and brought the Old Kingdom down.

The Kingdom of the Isles today was only a shadow of the magnificence which had shattered a thousand years ago, the crudely rejoined fragments of the little that had survived the Collapse. Except for the help and direction Tenoctris had given Garric and the others who were trying to prevent it, a second, final Collapse would have destroyed what remained.

And that Collapse could still occur. The forces which wizards tapped with their art waxed every thousand years, and they were swiftly rising to their peak again. Wizards who in the past could only wither a tree with great effort were now able to blast whole forests-and might easily do so by accident, because an increase in power didn't bring with it greater learning and wisdom.

"I thought I must be mistaken about the skeins of force I felt here," Tenoctris continued, gesturing toward the ruin-speckled western slope of Volita. "I was right, though. Something really terrible must have happened, but-"

She grinned.

"-it was after I left my own age. Or I'd have been aware of it, even if there hadn't been time for human messengers to bring word."

The wizard shifted her feet in preparation to rise. Sharina stiffened to help, either by lifting or just to provide a fulcrum on which the old woman could lever herself upright.