David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

A footed lamp in the form of a three-headed dragon stood in a niche across the room; one wick burned as a night light. Garric shot his sword back home in its sheath and padded over to the lamp. His hands were shaking. He tried to light the other wicks from the first, but he couldn't even get the scrap of tow he intended for a spill to catch from the existing flame.

Liane took the tow from his trembling fingers and lit the wicks. She glanced at a second lamp, but instead of lighting it also she crushed the spill out on the bottom of the niche. She faced Garric and put her hands on his shoulders without speaking further. He hugged her hard against him.

"I was a tree," he said. He closed his eyes tightly. "They made me grow exactly where they wanted me to grow."

He drew in a deep breath. "I don't know who they are, Liane," he said. "But I know what they intend."

"They won't succeed," Liane said, her voice calm but her heart hammering like a bird's. "You won't let them, Garric. None of us will let them do that."

"Read to me," Garric whispered into her hair. "I don't care what-just civilized words, my love. Because what they are isn't civilized. It isn't even human."

Obediently Liane lifted the lamp out of the niche with one hand. With the other she guided Garric back to the bed and sat him beside her on the edge. She set the lamp on the nightstand and opened the book she'd been reading earlier in the evening.

"'I know my own language only from letters,'" she read aloud, her voice a glow of amber in the darkness. "'If I could not write, I would be mute…'"

She paused with a look of horror. Garric started to laugh. His choked giggles built quickly to bellowing guffaws just this side of hysteria. She'd been reading Pendill'sLetters from Exile, and because of her nervousness she hadn't remembered the subject matter when she picked it up in haste at Garric's direction.

After a moment, Liane began to laugh also. She set the book back on the table and embraced him. "Oh, Garric, wewill win this, you know," she gasped between gusts of laughter.

"Aye," growled the king in Garric's mind. "And when it's time to split skulls, we'll do that too, lad; you and me!"

Ilna awakened in her bedroll on the stern an instant before the lookout's cry roused everybody aboard theBird of the Tide. The sky to the north rippled and flared crimson.

"Get the oars out," Chalcus ordered calmly from the door to the tiny deckhouse. "Nabarbi and Tellura to port, Shausga and Ninon starboard. Kulit-"

Kulit was on watch; he'd sounded the alarm.

"-stay there in the bow to conn us through the passage."

In a break from his usual blithe cheerfulness, Chalcus added in a snarl, "Sister take those bloody rocks, and may they not takeus before we're even out of this harbor!"

Ilna glanced at the stars; it was past midnight. The moon was waxing and not yet visible in Terness Harbor, though on the open sea it would probably be above the horizon.

The weapons were stored in the deckhouse, sheltered from the weather. Chalcus took out a bow, set one end on the deck, and leaned his weight on the other until the staff curved; then he slipped the bow cord into its notch. Bowstaves cracked if left with the cord taut, so an archer only strung his weapon when he was about to use it.

Night lay on the drystone huts built up the hillside; the town was dark as only a peasant village or the deep forest can be. No lights gleamed from the fishing boats. A muted clang came from theDefender, moored across the harbor. The narrow-hulled patrol vessel rocked even in the still water of the harbor; the hammer hanging beside the alarm gong in the stern occasionally brushed it as they both swung.

"What's it that's happening out there, captain?" Hutena asked as he took the first bow as Chalcus began to string the next. The four crewmen told off to row were fitting their long oars onto the thole pins. They worked with their usual skill, never wasting a motion, but there was a silent tension to the task tonight.

"Ah, that's what we're going out to learn, lads," Chalcus said. He passed the second bow to the bosun who gathered it with the first in his right hand. He held them by their tips. "Wizards' work, that we know from the sky."

He nodded as he strung the third bow, a particularly stiff one. Its core of black wood from Shengy was laminated between a layer of whalebone on the face and a backing of ox sinew. "Which wizards those would be, and what their intent is-those things we need to be closer to learn."

Chalcus grinned broadly at Ilna. "Not so, dear heart?" he asked.

"I can't tell anything from here," Ilna said. Smiling faintly because the situation really did amuse her, she added, "Of course I may not be able to tell anything when we're in the middle of whatever unpleasant business is going on, either."

"Indeed, we may not," Chalcus agreed equably. "And we may all have our heads taken for trophies in the airy halls of the birdmen. If any of you lads would stay ashore tonight, the dock's a short step now but a very long one if you wait."

"We're with you," Hutena grunted. He reached for the third bow.

"This bow is for me, I think, Master Bosun," Chalcus said mildly. He straightened, surveying the crew. "Does Hutena speak for you all, then?"

Nobody replied. Hutena said, "Cast off the bow line, Kulit. I've already gotten the stern."

Kulit loosed the line, then took a boat-pike from the mast rack and joined the bosun in shoving theBird of the Tideaway from the quay. The rowers took up the stroke, falling into a rhythm without external command.

The bosun set a bow between each pair of oarsmen while Chalcus brought out bundles of arrows. Ilna thought about the attack on the fishermen; if the Rua chose, they could drive theBird 's crew into the hold as easily as they'd cleared the decks of the open boats. But she was increasingly less convinced that the winged men had anything to do with the attacks on merchantmen in the Strait.

TheBird of the Tidemade for the harbor entrance. Kulit called low-voiced bearings from the bow, but the oarsmen needed little correction. Their faces had the set, unhappy expressions of men about to go out in a drenching rainstorm. They didn't look frightened; and perhaps they weren't.

That there were no lights in the village of Terness was only to be expected; Ilna would've been surprised if any fisherman had been wasting lamp oil at this time of night. The castle was equally dark, though, and that was another matter. She'd seen enough palaces and noblemen's mansions to know that there should be the gleam of a lantern in the guardroom, the glow of fires beneath the ovens where bread for the company was baking.

She smiled tightly again. In this particular place, she didn't suppose the lord would be reading far into the night; but it was likely enough that the wink of a rushlight through a shutter would indicate that a clerk had been late finishing his accounts.

The stars shone as bright points undimmed by a haze of wizardlight. Whatever had awakened her was over now. That part of it, at any rate.

Chalcus distributed short cutlasses to the crew, all but Hutena who had his own broad-bladed hatchet thrust through his belt. The short, curving cutlasses looked clumsy to Ilna, but they were as keen as Chalcus thought they should be-working edges rather than being sharpened chisel-thin and sure to break at the first hard stroke. They must have suited the men using them or else they'd have had something different. Blades were no business of hers, anyway.

Another gush of wizardlight stained the sky as theBird of the Tide negotiated the last of the narrows. The cliffs on either side of the vessel stood out starkly against the scarlet glare above them. Ilna felt the hairs on the backs of her arms rise; her nose wrinkled in irritation at her body's inability not to react.