The Fox (67 page)

At nightfall, when they were alone on the sea, Dasta signaled and Tcholan rowed the short distance to
Cocodu
.

They were exhausted from the storm and its aftermath. There was plenty to do on both ships, but at least they were seaworthy and could survive any but the worst storm.

Tcholan glanced back at
Death
riding quietly on the mild swell, lamps strung along the deck as the night watch continued repairing the rigging.

He hooked on and clambered up the sides of the
Cocodu
. Dasta was waiting, the lamplight painting his skin gold as he led the way into the cabin. He wore Fox’s black trousers, but no shirt, and he’d scrounged a vest from somewhere with added pockets, which carried his spyglass and a few other oddments.

Inda’s big Eastern Seas chart lay open on the table, a lamp holding down each corner.

They sat down together at the table and for a moment looked at each other. “You ever expect to be a captain?” Tcholan said presently.

“No,” Dasta admitted, then laughed. “I’ve been sitting here wondering if I ought to get drunk, or play around with maps and pretend to be Inda.”

Tcholan laughed. “Yes. Yes.”

Dasta sighed. “Jeje told me, when she made her run to Freedom, she kept asking herself what Inda would do. So I tried to think the same.” He smacked the chart. “See, if we use the sun-trackers we can go straight east to Inglenook.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect we’ll find
Sea-King
there, and maybe even some of Walic’s old gang.”

Tcholan grimaced. “Why would you want them? I thought you told Inda none of them were worth going after.”

“We couldn’t take the ship with all those spies o’ Walic’s aboard. Not after that fight, and the storm.” Dasta ran his fingers lightly over the islands. “But what if, once they found out Walic was gone, they got the spies overboard?”

Tcholan leaned forward. “Keep talking.”

Dasta did—with much back and forth, doubts, shrugs, curses, and then, “Let’s ask Gillor when she’s off watch.”

“Let’s. Three guesses at what Inda would do are better than two.” Tcholan squinted at the chart. “I hate this kind of thing. I want a clear order. Get your fight band up the side of that ship and take it. That I can do. D’you think Inda ever felt this way? Like being captain is puttin’ someone else’s clothes on?”

“Like these?” Dasta stuck his legs out, grinning, then grimaced. “Tight across the hips. Wish Fox had the sense to wear drawstrings.” Dasta frowned at Tcholan, who was bigger all through his body. “These won’t fit you at all.”

Tcholan laughed. “I know, already tried. Sails gave me some black cloth from the flags chest. Good linen cloth. Always carries extra, he said, on account of Fox, if his shirts get ripped up. He’s particular, he said—won’t wear summer-sailcloth, like the rest of us. Got to be linen.”

They both contemplated Fox.

Tcholan went on, since Dasta hadn’t laughed. “Wearing Fox’s clothes—even if they aren’t strictly his—makes being a captain a put on, for me, outside as well as in here.” He hit the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Maybe easier to think of it as puttin’ a ruse on.”

“I’ve an idea for that, too,” Dasta said, tracing round and round the Inglenook Islands on the chart. “Inda said before we sailed, the outfit is part of war in the mind. Like the earrings. You know what would make us look real, real good? I mean make us look like that Ramis, except for that business about the holes in the sky?”

Tcholan made a warding sign. “
Big
business.”

Dasta chuckled. “So here’s what. We time our attacks at Fire Island—first you, then me. We attack one then the other on opposite sides of the island. Get us a cutter like
Vixen
, to go between us. Then the pirates think Fox is everywhere. War up here, see?” He tapped his head.

Tcholan considered. “Good. Gillor has some tricksy ideas, too,” he offered. “She was on privateers before Walic got her. They’re good at ruses.” He rose. “Got to get back. Too much to do.” He paused at the door, then faced Dasta again. “I was born on land. Parents painters—pa did wall murals, ma did porcelain. I spent my days grinding colors. Sitting outside trying to sketch trees. Always looked like bread dough on a stick. Pa smacked me. Said try harder. I hated trees. Told Ma one night if I never saw another tree again, I’d be happy. She took me to the city. Ended up at sea.” He hesitated. “And here I am.”

Dasta laughed. “My family was beekeepers. Figured on the sea, there were no bees.”

Tcholan left, chuckling, shaking his head. “No bees. No bees,” he repeated in a low voice as he rowed back to his new command.

Chapter Twelve

THE sun lightened the east as Fleet Commander Hyarl Fulla Durasnir finished his weapons warm-ups. He glanced skyward, something all Venn did as a matter of necessity, even those fixed here in the south year after year. The horizon all around was clear. Unimaginable at this season in the Land of the Venn, when autumn brought surprise storms howling like a pack of wolves nearly every day. But then this was not even autumn at home, it was spring—another cruel, stormy season, warming reluctantly.

Harsh as Venn was, it was home, and Durasnir missed his home. He hated it here in the south, hated its smiling seasons, its small, smiling people who looked up at him with imperfectly hidden hatred, fear, scorn.
Those huge Venn, stinking of spice, how stupid they are!
They used to say so openly, not knowing he knew their language as well as they did, while they did not know his. Every time he returned to the Port of Jaro after a cruise his hatred seemed to intensify a little more. And it was always at its worst the day after he regained the shore.

He reached the baths before the lazy locals were even out of their beds, and finished before anyone else came through the door, wringing his long yellow hair, now shot with gray, in the summer air. Another thing you did not do at home, unless you wanted your hair to freeze and break off, all in the time it took to draw three breaths.

But there was no use in thinking of home. He was here, in Ymar, living on the rocky walls overlooking the Port of Jaro, the rising sun revealing row after row of whitewashed stone houses as the shadows sank down toward the waterline and then vanished altogether for another day. After a long, fruitless spring journey he’d rejoined his wife and young son yesterday, which was good. They would be awake and awaiting him now.

He rolled his hair quickly and clipped it up on the back of his head, then ran up the steps into his meeting chamber, sensing something amiss before he reached the door. Ah. No sounds of breakfast, the quiet chatter of family— instead the silence due to the presence of strangers. Or superiors.

There was only one superior to the Commander of the Oneli—the sea lords—and that was Prince Rajnir himself. But there was one equal to him.

And indeed it was a tall, slim silver-haired man who placed hands together, head tipped politely, as Durasnir entered the room.

“Dag Erkric,” Durasnir said, hands open. “You honor my house.”

“Your house honors me,” Dag Abyarn Erkric said, indicating the family sitting motionless on the eating platform, their food rapidly cooling. Durasnir’s glance took in his rigid wife and knew that she’d offered to share and had been refused. No one could eat, or even move, until the Dag took his business out of the eating chamber.

“You will pardon my intrusion when I explain that I am here at the prince’s command,” the Dag said. “There were enough survivors of that storm appearing along this coast to convince him that Elgar the Fox slipped entirely past our blockade. Therefore the prince desires an immediate sweep-search of all possible inlets as well as the coast, every male from fifteen to thirty, every masted craft, checked for the identification medal.”

Durasnir was silent as he considered the scale of this order. A local search would ordinarily fall within the duties of the Erama Krona, the Arm of the Crown, the prince’s personal guard, who had their own training, their own command structure, and were thus answerable only to the prince. Or it would fall to the Yaga Krona, the Eyes of the Crown, the mages with a similar duty; they reported to Dag Erkric, who was answerable only to the prince.

But because of the prince’s anomalous status, the Erama Krona and Yaga Krona were few in number—enough to guard the royal residence and very little else.

Therefore such a search would fall on the shoulders of the navy, in particular the marines, already in use as supplemental guards, much to Durasnir’s regret. But the king, as yet, had not sent occupation forces. And so everyone had to make do with what they had.

There was no avoiding a direct order, but one could ask a question. Durasnir said, “Was there any evidence Elgar the Fox would turn northward—all land held by us—and not to the south, which is not held by us?”
In other words, is there any evidence that Elgar would do anything so profoundly stupid as to land on our side of the strait?

Erkric’s lips pulled down in amusement. “The prince is convinced that this Elgar, having defeated the pirates, is marking out the prince himself as his next target. Therefore, it is I who come, and not a messenger, as evidence of his wish for dispatch. It is by the prince’s command.” He used the royal modality.

It is what Rajnir would do
. “There is nothing more to be said,” Durasnir replied. “But it will involve every ship and man, so large a search. The fishing fleets alone will not be able to sail for days and days while we sort them.”

“Ah, but the prince thought of that. Count Wafri will take charge of all land searches north of Jaro. It is the area the prince gave him to oversee, after all. The prince wishes Count Wafri to be given more responsibility in government. He feels it is a gesture of good will to the Ymarans. Your orders are to sail west in case they went to ground at the start of the storm and have beat up into the winds toward Bren.”

Durasnir made a gesture of agreement without speaking. Dags interfering in military business—again. And he sent haring off for yet more months, to come back to what changes next?

But he would not reveal his intention to check these orders. He had reason to visit Rajnir to report; that would suffice. “Very well.”

“Then I will depart at once, and leave you to your morning meal.” Erkric made the Dag’s bow again, this time to the degree of respected equal, rather than as Prince’s Voice. Then he made a sign and vanished, the displaced air swishing through the room.

Durasnir knelt across from his wife. Brun gave him a tight look that promised questions, and plenty of them, but not before Halvir. Instead, in her smooth, quiet voice, she oversaw Halvir’s eating until the boy made that abrupt change from interest in food to restlessness that characterizes the two-year-old. And Brun summoned his nurse.

As soon as the door was shut behind them she sat down next to him. “Well, Fulla? Shall we begin addressing him as ‘
the
Dag’?”

He let a laugh escape him. “He wants it now.”

“I know. But the king will have to direct me to give him that coveted article.” The lines in Brun’s face deepened with her hatred of Erkric, a hatred become implacable since the discovery of the treaty with the bloody-handed Marshig. No one believed that to be Rajnir’s idea—he would never have thought of such a thing. So it had to have been the Dag, and of course the prince would welcome any idea that would bring back his heirship to the throne of the Venn.

“If Rajnir becomes king,” he reminded her, “it will happen. ”

Brun’s face tightened. But she said nothing more about Erkric’s ambitions to be decreed The Dag of the Venn, the highest of all mages, above Houses. “What lies behind this search?” she asked.

“Oh, I believe the search is what it appears to be, though the Dag, and not the prince, is probably the instigator. Dag Erkric was badly disturbed by the rumors that this Elgar the Fox has dealings with Norsunder through Ramis.”

Brun set her spiced leaf aside. “I never thought I would be glad of such tidings—”

Durasnir laid his finger to her lips. “Ydrasal in deed,” he said in a whisper, “means Ydrasal in word and in thought.” He made the sign of the tree.

“Though our actions lead away from the path of Ydrasal,” she stated, and countered with the gesture of warding Rainorec—
Venn-doom
. “I’m silent. Never fear. But I live to see the summons come for us to go home.” Her eyes, seldom soft, were bright with a sheen of tears that she would never let fall. She was far too angry for that.

“I fear it is a quick repast I must make,” he said, sitting back on his mat.

Brun bowed her head, accepting the implied rebuke in the change of subject. Though their chambers were promised by the sea dag Jazsha Signi Sofar to be free of spy spells, Signi was just a sea dag, and not to be compared with the likes of Dag Erkric in power.

So Brun studied her husband, unsure how much of the truth she could burden him with and not dishonor herself. She could not say aloud how she was coming to hate Rajnir, who had grown up in Durasnir House playing with their first son, daughter, and the kin-children. Rajnir who had shown such promise, and who had been whispered about ever since he turned fifteen and was proclaimed heir to the throne, though others had previously been spoken of. No one knew the truth behind the heirship choice, but they did know that nine years ago, when he turned sixteen, he led the more impatient sons, including their own Vatta, into a disastrous ship battle that had gotten most of them killed—Vatta among them—at the callous and cruel hands of the Chwahir. Which led the king to rescind the heirship, causing a storm of conflict among the Houses at home.

Durasnir ate one muffin, drank one spice-milk, and then rose. “I must go report on my findings at the Ghost Isles,” he said. “And prepare for this new cruise, which I trust will at least be short.”

The harbor at Beila Lana on the east coast of Ymar was long and narrow and also shallow enough to limit the very large ships; thus it was a favorite of the fleets of small fishing craft that in larger harbors got shoved out into the worst anchorage and services.