The Fox (37 page)

“Will the ships be ready?” Jeje asked, when Thog had at last taken a sip, and her face looked less drawn.

That short nod, a jab of chin toward collarbones.

Jeje stared up at the clouds wreathing the snow-blue heights as the last of the light vanished. “So what’ll you do with your share if we win?”

Thog glanced Jeje’s way. “If we live. You will stay with Inda, yes?”

Jeje had posed an idle question, or at least she thought she had. Thog’s quiet question shifted the mood, exposing the real question Jeje had not asked—had not let herself think.

But she was not a coward, and so she faced it now. “If we live. I’ll crew with Inda long’s he commands.” She considered that, and liked the sound of it. And as Thog did not agree—or disagree—she said, “I like his purpose. It’s a good purpose, fighting pirates. I thought after we sank the first one there off Freedom Islands, there are people who will see old age now, with this one gone.”

Thog whispered, “I count them. Each time I kill a pirate, I count the lives I save.”

The outsides of Jeje’s arms prickled. “How—how do you determine the number?”

“By how many died in my village, killed by each pirate.”

Thog’s black eyes were huge, with no hint of humor.

Jeje let her breath trickle out and groped for ease again. “And when we got to Pirate Island, I liked the way people looked at us. Everyone fears pirates, but no one is doing anything. Except we are. And they know it. I can see it in the way they looked at my ruby.” She flicked her ear. “And got out of my way.”

Thog stared into her drink.

“And you?” Jeje asked. “I take it you will not stay.” She hesitated again, but could not force the words to try to talk her into it, skilled as she was.

Thog set her empty cup down and spread her fingers flat. Then said in a low, fervent voice, as if making a vow, “If we live, then I shall go home and find some land, make a garden, and each night when I lie down I will know that I will never again fear the dawn bringing red sails on the horizon.”

Jeje sighed, glowering into her own cup. The truth was, she liked Thog, respected her ability, but she would never again truly trust her. Not after that terrible, deliberate fire on Boruin’s consort.

Thog knew and accepted it.

Two days of slow progress were broken once when a ship farther down the line, heeling too far in a sudden gust of the wind howled down the canyons, struck a jagged rock that tore a hole in the hull. It was soon plugged, with carpenters from five ships working as desperately as the ruse crews worked to finish their ghost crews aboard the fire ships.

Inda spent the rest of the day aboard the
Vixen,
going from vessel to vessel to inspect and to review plans. Each ship was ready, eyes on him, tension evident in hands, faces, lips. Heartbeats pulsing in necks, temples.

He returned at sundown to the
Death
and said to Fox, “We’re ready.”

The last act was to soak those brigs with oil, something that Thog oversaw. Again it was done under a canopy the last night before the attack; under all the other canopies, people not on watch sat on deck despite the cold, doing the things that people do when sleep is impossible: talking, playing cards, singing, even dancing.

When they anchored, a signal fire glowed, golden and sinister on the heights. Inda watched the light steadily through his glass until the light blinked once. Twice. His heartbeat quickened. They had nineteen ships all told, including the three false ones and four scout craft. If the blinking varied three times at the end of the count, they were blown. If four, perhaps their ruse was safe—

Eleven . . . twelve . . . fifteen . . . blink-blink, blink-blink. Four blinks in a different rhythm: four for the small craft. Some of the tension gripping his neck eased.

“. . . and listen to ’em, yowling away like that.”

The voice was distinct in the frigid air. Inda walked aft. Ah. The singing of the Sartoran and Sarendan independents on
Cocodu
—this time accompanied by Tau on a stringed instrument someone had brought. Tau played a counterpoint to the complicated rise and fall of those voices, glissades of three-note chords every first and third beat. The sound drifted faintly over the black water churning by.

He nodded to Gillor, who had the command deck watch, saw her nod back and then pull her scarf up closer to her knit hat as she paced back and forth, keeping on the move so she wouldn’t go numb.

Inda dropped below, welcoming the warmer air. Most of the crew was gathered around the magical Fire Stick blaze in the center of the crew’s quarters, some honing weapons by lamplight, or sewing links under their coats. No one was asleep; the hammocks were rolled and stowed along the rail, the deck clear except for those sitting about.

From the look of his flushed face and glistening green eyes, Fox had been drinking; he held out mulled wine to Inda, who took it, drank, felt the bite of distilled rye underneath the wine. Warmth spread through him. He drank again, and again. The weight of home, so close, and yet forbidden, ceased to oppress him.

“. . . then you are a fool,” came Fox’s voice, soft, but with a cruel edge of amusement.

“
You
dance at weddings?” asked Knotfist, one of the older privateers hired at Freeport Harbor. “Dancing is for women!”

Fox turned his head. “Barend. Let’s show them.”

Barend was there, out of the firelight. He wouldn’t dance, not when he was in private exile. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t drum.

A sudden tapping in an old pattern, unheard for years, forced Inda’s mind back to the night Dogpiss died. Barend hadn’t a drum, of course; he thudded knife hilts against the decking.

Ching!
The shivery sound of steel being drawn from scabbards caused every head to turn, and there was Fox, holding his preferred fighting swords, two very fine sabers made in Sartor, with slightly curved tips after the fashion of the Marlovan riders.

The blades rose high, flame reflecting redly down the cool bluish watered steel; then Fox flung them down, one pointing north and south, the other crossing east and west, and before the echo of their ring died away he lifted his head and grinned, teeth showing. “Inda.”

War dances were usually performed in pairs. Inda set aside his wine, wondering if he even remembered the steps. Barend’s drumming increased in speed and volume, a galloping rhythm that brought everything back, including the sounds of boys’ voices and the scents of the fields, and horses, and the sharp aroma of rye bread baking.

Inda’s heels drummed the deck in counterpoint as he and Fox stamped and spun then swept their hands down to pick up the blades, whirling and clashing them together. And Inda was a boy again, a scrub among his friends in the sweet-grass summer of childhood.

The pirates found inspiration in their commanders’ deadly grace, the leashed power that was all the more threatening for its easy control.

They finished and Inda’s memory vanished at the roar of approval that went up. Several of the crew promptly pulled knives and started trying to reproduce the pattern.

“Again! Let’s have it again!” one roared.

“I give in,” Knotfist cried. “Teach me that! I’ll dance that one at me wedding, and no mistake!”

“No,” Fox said. “It’s a war dance. Tomorrow we go to war. After, I do a victory dance. Those’re fun, too.”

Inda looked around, feeling ill at ease. He retreated to the cabin.
It means nothing to them,
he thought.
I shouldn’t have done it.

He looked down at the owl ring on his hand, plucked so many years ago from his father’s wife’s dead body, worn for the decades since then as an expensive trophy without meaning. Inda groped mentally for meaning now, but other than the vague memories of his father that rose—with or without the ring—there was no inward conviction, no seeing the ring as symbol of honor, of family. It was just a hunk of metal, and he looked up and away, feeling the impulse to yank it off and toss it into the sea.

His gaze traveled up the rough gray sea cliff toward the bleak winter sky pressing low overhead. He knew he wanted justice, but he also knew it wouldn’t happen, not when the mystery behind his disgrace led directly back to the will of the Harskialdna, brother to the king. Justice was difficult enough to define, but honor, outside of the word
trust?
Maybe the concept of honor was mere pretense, as Fox insisted.

But Barend believed in honor, and what’s more, he wanted to go home again. For his sake Inda had to go through the forms. Supposing they lived through this pirate battle, he would have to send Barend to his father and Tanrid.

Inda sighed. His fear was that the Adaluin might insist on the old life-for-a-life ritual and tell Tanrid to slay Barend. No, Inda decided. His father would ride directly to the king—if he still lived.

If his father still lived.

So if Tanrid was now Adaluin . . . Inda tried to envision his brother as a grown man. His image of Tanrid was of a towering, hard-eyed figure of seventeen—which did not seem so old any more. And his last memory of Tanrid was his calloused fingers tousling his hair, like he always tousled the castle dogs’ ears. Tanrid had believed in justice, in his own way. And honor.

And vengeance. What was it Tanrid said that one day at Daggers?
Never show mercy to pirates.

Inda looked down at his shaking hand. Odd. He was not aware of fear, just that endless stream of possibilities. Anticipation, and sorrow for the unrecoverable past.

One more drink, though he knew it would not numb the memories, and then he returned to pace the deck and watch out the rest of the night. They were as ready as they ever would be, and perhaps he could sleep through the day until the tide turned, carrying them out to battle.

Chapter Twenty-three

KNOTFIST was the first one to die.

Under the rapidly fading light, the
Death
rode the rolling green swells of the outflowing current, leading the line to the attack.

As they emerged into open ocean, arrows arced down from the last of the high cliffs—to clatter against the shields that the crews raised.

When the last of the rocky dragon-teeth was safely passed, there was the enemy. Two enormous half-circles of ships, all stripped to fighting sail, tacked very slowly against the wind and current, so tight nothing could slip between them and get away.

“We’re gonna die,” someone muttered as the icy wind whistled and moaned through those last jagged rock towers, serrying the hissing hail of arrows that were not even aimed, just shot. Some with fire, some not, but just as dangerous because they were difficult to see.

Arrows clattered on the shields overhead and at the sides. A few thunked into the hull. One skittered across the waiting barrel of newly made arrows, then clattered to the feet of Gillor, who, laughing, stood up and shot it back.

The rest puckered the surface of the gray sea and then vanished in the swirling white-water surges and eddies caused by the rocks they had now cleared.

Knotfist crawled out on the bowsprit with his glass to count the enemy. An arrow thunked squarely into his back from the heights behind them, and he fell without a cry, vanishing into the churning gray water.

Inda’s crew hunkered behind the rails—trembling, fingers gripping weapons with white-knuckled intensity, tongues licking numb, dry lips—but long drills held them in readiness.

“Orders, orders, orders,” someone whispered over and over, and those who heard
order, order, order
gripped that thought hard despite the looming threat of chaos and death.

At the bow, under a shield-covered net, Inda stood with his glass trained on the enemy, closer, closer, until he could see faces in the last of the light—

“Wait . . . wait . . .”
Range
. “Now!” Inda yelled.

The rail bow teams popped their heads up, the masthead teams leaned out, and arrows hissed over the black water, each aimed at a living target. Silhouettes tumbled from mastheads, booms, and yards as the
Death
drew near, nearer. Inda gauged the boarding crews lining up eagerly along the rails of the lead ships. “Disperse!”

Signals screamed skyward. Sails flashed. The ships behind the
Death
fanned out.

Inda’s head ached, but he kept the glass to his eye. Barend, Tau, and Tcholan sighted on that tight line of pirates, and checked that the sails had been tightly bowsed in place before they emerged from the rocks, the sail crews dropping aft to the boats on the lee side.

The three watched the
Death,
nearly hidden in the black-lined cloud of arrows concentrated on it, hearts thundering in their ears.

water?—
wafer?—

Shaking hands slipped waiting ropes over the helms, binding them hard in place, and Tcholan and Barend almost at the same moment dropped a bucket of smoldering, rum-soaked knotted rags below the open hatch where whiskey fumes rose. And then, their bows nudging between pirate bows, they crawled—shielded from view by festoons of old netting—to the stern rail. Last each kicked over the waiting fire buckets onto the oil-slick decks, and then, under the deadly sheets of arrows whizzing overhead, they dove overboard.

Foosh!
Barend’s and Tcholan’s ships torched skyward at exactly the same moment. From the pirate ships on either side rose a roar of shock and fear, followed by the blow and curse-punctuated commands; Tau’s ship sailed on— had the oil not been enough? It winnowed between two big brigantines under a thick shower of fire arrows, pinpricks of gold arcing through the dark from both sides— then it too exploded into a sky-scorching tower of flame, the shock sending clots of burning sail, rope, and blocks dropping onto the brigantines’ decks.