David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

And if she'd wanted, she could've knotted another pattern that would make those who viewed it leap into the sea to quench the flames they felt blazing from their eyesockets… but there'd been no need, and Ilna was trying to learn a sense of proportion in the punishments she paid out to those who opposed the right as she saw it.

But it was very hard. They all deserved to die; and Ilna os-Kenset deserved to die also, as she well knew…

She hitched up the drape of her modestly-long tunic and jumped aboard theBird of the Tide. Some day she'd receive the justice she deserved; but until then she'd live and continue to make amends in the best way she could.

"Cast off!" Chalcus ordered, but the crew was already shoving them clear of the barge. Lusius stood glaring after them. "You're free to return to your investigations, Commander. And no doubt we'll meet again in good time, after you've returned to Terness, not so?"

Chalcus laughed as the oarsmen pulled hard for the harbor. Ilna did not. The sound of the seawolf slapping the water again and again as it leaped for morsels could be heard for miles against the quiet sea.

'There's some wine in the cup here," said a voice in Cashel's ear. "You'll feel better if you can drink it."

Cashel opened… well, no, his eyes were already open. They suddenly focused, though. He blinked twice, clearing them, and thought about getting up. He tried to raise his head first, then thought better of moving at all for at least a little while.

It was late evening. He could tell that because he faced west as he lay on the mound at the base of the marble tank, and so he saw the sun setting. If he hadn't been looking that direction, he'd have just had to guess about the time of day.

Evne waddled around Cashel's head to face him. "Of course if you prefer to lie here feeling sorry for yourself…," she said.

Cashel started to laugh. It was just what he needed to do, though the first wracking gulps of air almost killed him, His bruised chest bounced again and again on the ground, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

He finally got his laughter enough under control to sit up. It was a good thing he'd landed on the mound rather than digging a trench with his nose across the stony plain. He felt dizzy for a moment and closed his eyes, then realized that was a bad idea and opened them again. When he didn't have the horizon to look at, he got vertigo.

"You knew I'd get mad if you said I was feeling sorry for myself," Cashel said. "And then I'd see how you'd fooled me, so I'd laugh and that'd bring me around. You're really smart, Evne."

"Yes, I am," the toad said. "Now the wine."

Cashel looked down at her affectionately. "I don't like-" he said.

"I didn't ask if you liked it," the toad said. "I said you'd feel better for drinking it. Though of course-"

Cashel took the cup waiting beside where his right hand had been holding the quarterstaff. Duzi, he'd really bruised the knuckles; though he didn't suppose that was such a terrible thing, given what might've happened when he came down.

The cup was crystal and as clear as the air around it. He drank the pale green liquid in three gulps. There weren't any bubbles in it, but it prickled like there were.

"Oh!" he said wonderingly. "That's wine, Evne? It doesn't taste like any wine I've had before."

"No," said the toad. "I don't suppose it does."

Cashel looked around him, which saved him asking where the wine-and the cup-came from. There were any number of folk, both in bright clothing and in servants' garb, standing among the ruins below the tank and staring up at Cashel. Near each handful of people was a curvy, boatlike thing with a long stem and sternpiece-sort of milkweed pods grown to giant size.

"Where didthey come from?" he asked amazed. And as rough as the slopes had been even for him, how did this lot of soft-living folk from the manors manage to get here near as quick as he had and carry those boats with them besides?

"Some are from Manor Bossian, I believe," said the toad, "but mostly they fled from Manor Ansache when the Visitor destroyed it. And there may be a few-"

She moved her head in a series of short twitches rather than a smooth arc as she eyed the crowd below them.

"-from other places as well, running before they're forced to run."

The toad paused, rubbing the back of her own neck with her long right leg. She added, "They flew here in their airboats when they learned you'd killed the dragon. They're afraid, you see, and they're looking for somebody strong to protect them."

"I'm not…," Cashel said. He didn't know how to continue the sentence, so he let his voice trail off. "Should I do something, Evne? I mean, about them?"

The toad sniffed. "You're not required to do anything," she said. "And at the moment, master, I don't see that you'reable to do very much. Including stand up."

Cashel cleared his throat. "Yeah, that had better wait for a time," he agreed. Because he didn't want to think aboutall those people watching him and expecting him to do-something, whatever-he turned his head to the side and saw the dragon for the first time since he'd awakened after the fight.

"Duzi!" he said. The little herdsman's God of Barca's Hamlet didn't seem a grand enough deity to name as he looked on the thing he'd been fighting, so he added, "May the Shepherd help me, Evne. I couldn't have beatenthat!"

"Really?" said the toad. "Then my eyes must have gone bad while I was imprisoned in that block of coal. It's not surprising after seven thousand years, I suppose, but I very distinctly saw you hammering the creature to death."

The dragon was a long sagging bronze tube. Some of the scales had dropped off, leaving gaps through which Cashel saw what seemed to be a web of wires. The body stretched from the top of the mound to well out into the plain, plus however how much of its length was still in the tank. Black smudges on pedestals of rocky soil showed where tufts of silkgrass had burned when the creature rolled over them during its flaming death throes, and it'd seared a broad wedge of the slope's juicier vegetation as well.

"Evne," Cashel said, "I couldn't have stopped it any better than I could've stopped a herd of oxen if they'd stampeded at me. It's just too big, itweighs too much. I'm strong, sure, but nobody's that strong."

"That might have been so if it'd been a real snake," the toad said, "but it wasn't-it was wizard's work. So you fought it as one wizard to another, and you were the stronger. It certainly gives the lie to those who claim intelligence and erudition are prerequisites for wizardry, doesn't it?"

Cashel sighed. He didn't know what either erudition or prerequisites were, but intelligence was a word he understood. He could figure out what the toad meant easily enough.

He ran the quarterstaff through his hands, letting his fingertips check the hickory for damage that his eyes couldn't see. The iron buttcaps were now rainbow colored from the energy they'd channeled during the battle, but the staff itself was unmarked. It remained the same straight, smooth friend as it'd been since he turned it out of a branch.

The closest spectators to Cashel were well-dressed folk in a group at the bottom of the mound. One of them was Syl, the woman who'd sat at Bossian's table during dinner, though the men didn't include the Farran who'd been with her. Cashel didn't recognize the others, which wasn't surprising; but seeing Syl made him wonder uneasily about Kotia.

"I told the refugees that I'd summon them in the event you deigned to grant them an audience," Evne said in a cool tone. "Otherwise they should keep their distance or it'd be the worse for them."

Cashel grinned. "They took orders from a little toad?" he said.

Evne rotated her head to put him in the middle of her two bulging eyes. "They may have thought," she said, "that so great a wizard as yourself would have a familiar who could herself blast them to ashes. And they may have been right."