David Drake - Godess of the Ice Realm

It struck Sharina that Scoggin and Franca had attached themselves to her for the same reason the wizard had been able to gather his entourage. She and Alfdan were willing to lead in a world where most of the survivors had lost purpose.

Alfdan stood in the stern of the vessel. Though the deck was crowded, there was a clear space in front of him for as far as he could have swung his bone staff. He tapped the deck and said, "Aieth." There was a quick flicker of crimson.

Keeping a hand on the mast, Sharina stood to see over the heads of the men seated between her and the wizard. Scoggin cursed under his breath, but he braced her foot with his own.

A many-pointed symbol had appeared on-in-the shimmering deck before Alfdan. The figure and the words of power crawling around its perimeter were spaces in the plane of light, chill air through which Sharina saw the rocky beach without the intervening glow.

"Thotho squaleth ouer," Alfdan called. His staff was upright and motionless on the deck. The words of power spun around the symbol faster as he spoke them. "Melchou melcha ael."

He lifted his staff and pointed it out toward the distant sea. Though he continued to chant, a rushing sound like the winds of an approaching storm blurred the words. Sharina could no longer hear them clearly.

The deck came level. The prow rotated seaward in line with the staff as though the vessel were pivoting on its mast. The deck now had a tacky grip on the rabbitskin boots when Sharina shifted her feet.

"Pissadara!" Alfdan shouted. The unfelt wind roared around them, making Sharina's marrow tremble; the Queen Ship slid forward.

She'd expected to hear the crunch and scrape of shingle against their keel as she would've done if an ordinary vessel were being dragged into the water, but the only vibration was the high tremble of the wind. She and the others on the ship's deck were in an existence of their own, cut off from the world around them as if by thick diamond walls.

The ship accelerated, moving faster than any real vessel could have done. They reached the new shoreline, at least a mile beyond where the coast had been when Sharina was growing up in Barca's Hamlet. The water had a sluggish, gelid appearance, and the surf seemed to cling a long time to the beach before rolling back. The Queen Ship sped outward, leaving the swells as unmarked by its passage as the land had been.

Alfdan pointed his staff southward; the vessel obediently followed the wizard's direction. Sharina braced herself, expecting to be flung toward the outside of the curve as she would have been in a carriage, but she had no feel of them turning-beyond what her eyes told her about the way the world moved around her.

Alfdan's band was beginning to relax. Men talked among themselves in the manner of old associates in familiar surroundings. Several took food out of their packs or swigged from skins of liquid-wine, beer or water, Sharina couldn't tell. Franca watched them longingly.

Neal, the big auburn man, was seated on the other side of the mast from Sharina. She leaned sideways and called, "Neal? As we're a part of your band now, you need to feed us. We left our rations back at Barca's Hamlet when you waylaid us."

"Oh, good eating for Beard in Barca's Hamlet," said the axe, jolted out of his low-voiced litany by the key wordfeed. "Blood and brains, blood and brains and rich marrow for Beard!"

Neal looked disconcerted, then switched his gaze from Beard to Sharina herself. "Food?" he said. "Oh, food."

"We had a whole bear," said Franca. "Mistress Sharina killed it. We could have dried the meat and lived on it for months!"

"Here, mistress," said Neal, rummaging in his wallet. "It's smoked fish, that's mostly what we have. We build weirs and Alfdan calls fish into them. He has a lure. Lugin, give the mistress some of that wine."

"And for my companions," said Sharina sharply. "We're all together now."

She squatted to take the packet, a slab of dark, oily fish wrapped in an unfamiliar large leaf. After she broke off a chunk-it flaked when she twisted-she handed the rest to Scoggin. He started to bolt it, then caught the sudden hardening of Sharina's eye. He quickly divided the piece with Franca.

Neither of her companions was used to being part of society. They'd been surviving in a harsh world where being quick was the difference between life and death. They had to readjust to caring about other human beings.

"How long have you been with Master Alfdan?" she asked Neal through a mouthful of fish. It tasted wonderful, but the oily richness hitting her empty stomach made her gorge rise. She paused, hoping she wouldn't vomit.

"Me?" said Neal, chewing on a similar fillet. "Three years, near enough. He found me on Tisamur, when he was searching for the Stone Mirror."

He nodded toward Alfdan, standing statue straight. He held out the staff as he mouthed inaudible words of power. The script at the wizard's feet continued to turn in silent regularity like thin clouds scudding across a summer sky.

"He uses the mirror to find things," Neal explained. "Just a little pebble, you'd think, no different from any other that you'd turn up with your plow. But Alfdan sees things in it."

"Burness's been with Alfdan from the start," Neal said, nodding to a balding, older man talking volubly and with hand gestures to two others in the bow. "They were both rooming in a tenement on Erdin when She first came. Alfdan told fortunes and made charms, you know the sort of thing."

Sharina nodded. "I know," she agreed.

She looked over her shoulder at Alfdan. She wondered how long he could keep the staff out straight.

Alfdan would've been a conjurer, a hedge wizard; but not altogether a charlatan. There was somebody like him in every neighborhood of the larger cities; similar folk travelled through the borough, setting up their booths during the Sheep Fair and occasionally in other seasons as well.

"Alfdan took Burness with him," Neal said. "There were two other guys too, Burness says. One I never met, but Tadli was the man the faun killed just now on the shore. He'd lasted a long time, though."

Neal grimaced and chewed in silence for a time, his eyes on the horizon. Sharina thought she saw something moving there, on the surface of the gray sea or in the sky just above it. Neal's attention was on his memories.

When She came, when the weather chilled and the night sky began to ripple with wizardlight, Alfdan learned he could find objects of power. Perhaps the talent had always been in him but too weak to be noticed; perhaps Her power and the changes She wrought in the world squeezed Alfdan's mind into a pattern completely new to it.

"He's Alfdan the Great, now," Neal said in a wondering voice, still looking beyond his present company. "He does amazing things. I've seen him do things that I couldn't imagine being done. Wonderful things!"

"And Alfdan will freeze," said Beard, "andyou will freeze, and all the wonderful toys your great wizard is collecting, they'll freeze also. Because they're just toys-he gathers them to have them, not to use them. But my mistress-"

The axe laughed as musically as an infant watching a hanging bauble turn in the wind.

"-she'll use Beard. Beard will drink his fill many times more before the ice comes!"

Neal shivered. "Does it have to talk?" he muttered.

"Beard tells me things that I need to know," Sharina said, though she understood Neal's discomfort. "But perhaps, friend axe, you can keep your opinions more to yourself while we're in such close quarters?"

"Hmpff!" said Beard. "It won't change anything, whether I say things or I don't, you know."

Though the axe did subside with that remark. He began to sing in a low voice, "They struck with swords and hard they struck till blood ran down like rain…"