Full Circle (9 page)

“Have a drink,” he said. “There’s a long night ahead of us.”

T
HE SHANTYMAN
was singing as they brought up the anchor.

Lady Death will ring her knell

Heave away

Haul away

And call us all to the coldest hell

Raise the anchor, maties!

Martine stood at the stern and watched the huge anchor, wood bounded by iron, slide slowly up out of the dark green water,
dripping weed.

The Last Domain cargo having been finally off-loaded and paid for, and Trine well exercised by Zel while that was done, they
were catching an evening tide out of the small harbour, back onto the open sea. Without Apple. The men who had attacked her
had been taken by the Moot staff, and would be tried and punished. The two merchants who had come with her were riding back
north.

“Didn’t have no Travellers there to start with,” one had said. “May not be no ghosts there, either.”

Martine was full of foreboding, but her Sight couldn’t tell her about what. No matter what happened, the next few weeks were
unlikely to go well. People would die; the dead would walk; not even the gods knew what the outcome would be. Perhaps her
jitters were no more than that; or perhaps, since Safred didn’t seem to share them, they were more personal. Perhaps this
new-found joy with Arvid was doomed to end when they reached Turvite.

Perversely, that thought cheered her. If all she had to worry about was a love affair gone wrong, she was in good shape.

On the thought, Arvid appeared from below decks and joined her. “Safred’s sick again. Cael’s tending her.”

“Never take a seer over water,” Martine said lightly.

“
You
don’t get sick.”

She ignored the implication. “Cael’s not well himself.”

“No.” Arvid’s face darkened with worry and he pushed a hand through his light brown hair. “He’s worse.”

“If Safred can’t heal him, and the ship’s healer can’t…”

“Cast the stones again for him,” Arvid said.

It was worth a try. She sat cross legged on the bare warm deck and pulled out of her belt the square of blue linen she used
to cast on, and spread it on the deck. She spat in her hand and held it out to Arvid. He spat in his and clasped hands. The
familiar ritual calmed her, reminded her of who she was. Not Arvid’s bed mate, but a stonecaster, Sighted and strong.

“Ask your question,” she said.

“Why can’t Cael be cured?” Arvid asked.

Her right hand went into the pouch and the stones leapt to her fingers, the ones she needed seeming almost to stick, as they
always did. She brought them out and cast them across the linen, her head bent to watch their fall, her ears ready.

“Death,” she said, a catch in her voice, because she liked Cael. “Destiny. Sacrifice.” She reached out to turn the other two
over. Although she recognised each of her stones no matter which way they lay, they spoke to her only when they were face
up, and other stonecasters she knew had told her that it was the same for them. “Time, and Memory, both hidden.”

“Dragon’s fart!” Arvid said angrily. It was so unexpected she just gaped at him, and he was puzzled for a moment. “It’s a
northern saying,” he said. “I just meant — well, it’s clear, isn’t it, even to me?”

Martine bent her head over the stones and listened. They spoke quietly but surely. Lady Death was coming for Cael, and coming
soon, but there was a reason for it, not just blind malignant chance. She said so to Arvid.

“And that’s comforting, is it?” he said, staring at the stones. “I’d hoped to give Safred better news.”

Martine felt that pang that all stonecasters knew. They were only the heralds, the messengers, but somehow they felt responsible
for the bad news they delivered — and certainly, customers tended to act as though they were. It irritated Martine when the
questioners stared at her with anger and suspicion, but when they didn’t she felt even more culpable. Like with Ranny of Highmark.
She was still unsure if she’d made the right choice there. It had seemed right, to deny Ranny the knowledge the stones had
given her of the time and date of her death. But had she the right to censor the stones? She didn’t know.

She felt so young, all her old certainties dissipated. Who was she to withhold information from anyone? She sighed and packed
the stones away in her pouch, folded her casting cloth. When they reached Turvite she’d find Ranny and tell her what she wanted
to know.

Then Arvid touched her hand and smiled tentatively at her. He was unsure, too, even after a week of sharing a bed, and that
gave her more confidence. She smiled back, touching his cheek lightly, and he lit up from within, glowing with desire and
what she had to suspect was love. Oh, gods. How could she love a warlord?

Cael came up on deck not long after, while Arvid was aft talking to the captain. He was sweating and pale, a bad combination,
and he sat next to her at the bow heavily, turning his face into the wind with relief. Zel followed him like a shadow and
sat at his feet, her face serious.

“I’m dying,” he said conversationally.

He wasn’t asking for reassurance, so there was nothing to say except the truth. Zel sat perfectly still, waiting for Martine’s
response.

“Yes,” she said. “I think you are.”

A shiver ran through Zel and her face twisted, fighting tears, but Cael nodded and simply sat for a time.

“Why, do you think?” he asked. “Why won’t it heal?”

She had puzzled over that many times, with few answers. “It may be because your wound was given… somewhere else, some
other time. May be it can only be healed then, too.”

He frowned, thinking back to the stream in the Great Forest which had seemingly taken him to somewhere else, to be attacked
and wounded. “So I have to go back to the stream? But we each went to a different place.”

“No,” Martine said, sure of this at least. “A different time.”

“So there’s no guarantee that I’d go to the time I needed. And I’d have to take Saffie back too, back to where those…
things are.”

“I think so.”

He shook his head with decision. “Not a chance.”

“No.”

It was a fine day and they sat for a while, enjoying the sunshine and the breeze. Zel pulled out some tiny balls and juggled
for a while, keeping in practice.

Cael’s eyes seemed to look at a different horizon, somewhere in the past. “I had a family, you know,” he said. “We were Valuers,
born and bred. Sage, my wife, she died of a fever when Safred was two. We had two girls, March and Nim. They married. There
were three little ones: a girl and two boys. Linnet, Birch and Eagle. Nim was so excited when she saw an eagle from the birthing
chamber — she thought it meant he would be something great in the world.”

“What happened?” Martine asked, as gently as she could.

“Safred’s father, the warlord, came looking for her. I took Saffie to safety, so he couldn’t take her and use her as a warlord’s
weapon. He killed them, one by one, until someone in the village told him where we had gone.”

Martine was plunged into deep empathy and old grief. Her village, too, had been killed off; everyone she loved, gone, except
the young Elva, because Martine had taken her on the road. She sent a prayer to the gods for Elva’s safety.

There were tears on Zel’s cheeks. She turned her head away and scrubbed at them with the back of her hand, then went on juggling.

“They should have told straight away,” he said with old anger. “When it came down to it, they didn’t believe in Valuing after
all — her life, my life, was no more important than theirs. But it’s hard to believe that where she’s concerned. And she’d
helped so many of them. Healed so many… They loved her.”

“And she escaped,” Zel said, still not looking at him.

“Aye. The delvers rescued her.” He paused, staring at his hands. “I’ll be glad to see Sage and March and Nim again. If they’ve
waited for me.”

The lump in Martine’s throat was so hard she couldn’t talk.

“You’re lucky that your dead love you,” Zel said, then pushed herself up, hard, and tucked the balls in her pocket as she
walked away, her eyes resolutely turned up, to find her aunties in the rigging.

“That one carries a lot of grief, still, even after Safred helped her,” Cael said sadly.

“Everyone carries grief,” Martine said, “if they live long enough.”

Memories of her own dead came back to her: Elva’s parents, Cob and Lark, her own parents, her aunties and uncles, cousins,
grammers and granfers. Everyone in the two villages was related, one way or another.

The Ice King’s men had come on them so unexpectedly, early, very early in the season… too early, you would have thought,
for them to have made it over the snow-choked mountains.

Once again she remembered her girlhood vision of the villages being attacked. Not by the Ice King, but by the warlord and
his men. That was crazy, though. Why would the warlord have attacked his own people? The thought came, inevitably: they weren’t
his
people. Dark-haired villagers were never his people. But why would he have done it? She searched her memory more closely,
trying to piece together the separate parts of the vision. It was so long ago, she’d only been fifteen… She had seen
a young officer leading, not the warlord himself. Not even the warlord’s heir, Masry. She hadn’t known this officer, but he
had definitely been in charge.

She rubbed at her side, where an old scar still sometimes ached. She owed that scar to Alder, the village voice at Cliffhaven,
who had beaten her for telling about that vision, for raising a false alarm. Yet it had seemed so clear, so true to that young
self. The danger had seemed… so real.

Oh, what was the point? False visions happened sometimes, particularly to the young. And sometimes the Sight couched itself
in riddles, leading you astray, even though, looking back, the meaning was clear.

It didn’t matter now, anyway. No matter who had attacked Cliffhaven, it was a long time ago and over and done with.

She touched Cael on the back of his hand. He was too warm to the touch. “I’ll make you a tisane to bring down the fever,”
she said.

He nodded heavily. “Aye. But don’t let Saffie know. She worries too much as it is.”

Rumer and Rawnie dropped down out of the rigging and draped an arm each over Zel, laughing about something.

“Family,” Cael said, and sighed.

I
ALWAYS WANTED
to be beautiful, like my little sister Osyth. She had that Traveller kind of beauty, dark and elegant and lithe. Well, we
was lithe enough, my twin Rumer and me, but that was because we was tumblers and worked hard at it. She were — oh, I don’t
know. Her eyes was big and her nose were straight and there were just something about her that made men look.

Rumer and me, we was ordinary, as ordinary as Travellers can be in the Domains. Not ill-featured nor even so plain, but ordinary.
Osyth stood out like a dark moon. After she married that Gorham (and he worshipped the ground she walked on, that were clear),
me and Rumer took to the Road alone, and had a good time of it. Osyth said we’d be short of silver within a month, and she
were near enough right, for neither of us had the knack of keeping money. Sweet in, sweet out, we thought, and if we had to
shag for our shelter more often than we’d like, well, everything has a price. It was a bad summer, too, that year, the worst
I remember, and there was no silver to be had for tumbling, not even tumbling in someone’s bed.

So we decided to head north, where the weather is different and the year might not have been so bad. And since we was heading
north, we thought we’d go see our mam, in Foreverfroze. She were a fisher, our mam, like one of the Seal Mother’s people,
and she loved the clean colours of the ice and the sea and the sky, white and blue and green and grey. Fishing was her passion,
I reckon, and Da came a cold second to it.

She’s a funny one, my mam. I mean, look at the names she gave us: Osyth and Rumer and Rawnie. Whoever heard of Traveller girls
with names like those? But Mam never did think much of tradition, and Da thought that whatever Mam did was right. We talked
about her and him, in the nights after a tumbling performance, but we could never seem to understand her right. Guess we never
will.

I think we was a bit kin-hungry without Osyth, and maybe a bit mother-hungry too, cause Osyth used to boss us around just
like Mam and it felt a bit rootless, somehow, not to have anyone telling us what to do.

We got up to Foreverfroze at the end of summer, which wasn’t so smart, maybe, but it let us spend the winter with Mam and
Da, helping to salt down the fish the women had brought back and helping Da weave the sweet-grass baskets the men traded down
south. And Mam filled the long nights with stories about the fisherwomen and their freedom and prosperity. It sounded good
enough, all right.

The next spring Mam said, “Come out and try it for yourselves,” and she got us berths on her ship, the
Flying Spray
, as a hooking and gutting team. All the fishers are women on those ships, and they work in partnerships, one woman hooking
the fish and flipping it back to deck, the other gutting it and rebaiting the hook.

Well, we tried it and we didn’t like it, although Rumer and I could work like one body when we wanted to, and the rhythm of
hooking and gutting the fish was easy enough for us to learn. But it was boring, boring as walking a long road between high
walls, and before three days were out we was up on the rigging with the sailors, laughing as we raced each other to the topsails.

They marvelled at us, but it weren’t hard for professional tumblers to keep balance, even on a swaying rope fathoms above
the deck and the icy sea.

So that’s how we found our passion, Rumer and me, the passion of high places and wide horizons, of swell and spray and sea
and sail. Of always moving, even in port. Of always seeing new things, good things and bad. Of taking your home with you wherever
you go, so that you are always where you belong.