The Guild of the Cowry Catchers, Book 1: Embers, Deluxe Illustrated Edition (22 page)

Silveo glanced at him with distaste. “Gerard
knows I don’t value apologies. What you did on Sern was vicious and
effective. It was exactly what I would have done.” He gave a small,
bitter smile. “But I’ll kill you if you ever do anything like it
again.”

Alsair couldn’t seem to decide whether he’d
been complimented, insulted, or threatened. Finally he said, “I
still don’t trust you—”

“You hear that, Gerard?” called Silveo. “The
griffin is smarter than you!”

“—but,” continued Alsair, “I appreciate what
you did on Holovarus, so thank you for that.”

Silveo shook his head. “Your first idea was
better.”

Gerard had decided to take them to
Holovarus-4, an uninhabited little gem of an island that could be
crossed in a quarter watch on foot. It had a tiny cove where he’d
loved to fish, as well as some small game that Alsair had used to
hunt. They landed on the beach opposite the cove and hiked up into
the dunes along a little ridge of cliff that gave a decent view of
Holovarus-2, 5, 8, and 9. Silveo asked questions about everything
he saw, but he still made no attempt to lead them. Gerard had
spotted a nautilus shell on the beach and given it to Thessalyn.
She was exploring its surfaces like a child admiring a beautiful
new trinket. Alsair flew off to look for rabbits and mice in the
dunes.

“So this is where you should be,” commented
Silveo, after Gerard had pointed out the distant spike of
Holvarus-9 and explained its political relationship to the other
holdings.

“Pardon?”

“I mean, this is where you fit and what you
were trained to do, as opposed to wandering around Wefrivain taking
orders from a foxling who dresses like ‘a flamboyantly.’”

Gerard shrugged. He glanced at Thessalyn a
little way down the slope, who was alternatively examining her
nautilus and unpacking their lunch. “She’s worth it.” He sighed.
“No matter how I try to speak to you, I seem to say things that in
retrospect appear ungracious and unkind.”

Silveo laughed. He seemed truly amused.
“‘Ungracious.’ Gerard, you are so very far from the right job.”

He started down the hill. “Did you hear what
happened at the castle last night, Thess?”

She raised her head from the nautilus shell
and gave a hesitant smile. “I heard you made Lord Holovar extremely
uncomfortable.”

“Oh, yes,” purred Silveo. “He’d never had to
be polite to something like me before.”

Thessalyn frowned. “You’re not a something,
Silveo.”

“Oh, I am a something,” he said cheerfully.
“I’ve gotten along very well as a something.”

“You haven’t,” said Thessalyn. “You’ve
survived.”

“That’s getting along well, at least where I
come from. What was Holovarus-2 like when you lived there? I hope
you didn’t have any siblings as charming as Jaleel.”

So Thessalyn talked about
her girlhood while they ate roasted fish brought from the
Fang
and nibbled on
pastries left over from last night’s feast. Gerard felt a mixture
of strangeness at Silveo’s presence and profound peace. He was with
Thessalyn and Alsair on islands that he knew and loved with his own
boat on the sandy beach. When the meal was finished, he stretched
out in the sun in a nest of sea grass with Thessalyn absently
running her fingers through his hair. He never knew quite when he
drifted off to sleep.

Chapter 29. A Sad
Story

Non-grishnard panauns such as foxlings and
ocelons are in some ways the most powerless group of creatures in
Wefrivain. The Resistance does not trust them because they are
panauns, and they do not have the monetary and physical clout to
force their way into the Resistance by being needed as some
sympathetic grishnards do. For better or for worse, non-grishnard
panauns like foxlings and ocelons are usually stuck trying to make
the best of what grishnards will give them.

—Gwain,
The Non-grishnards of Wefrivain

Gerard woke by degrees. Thessalyn and Silveo
were talking, and their voices drifted in and out of his
dreams.

“My mother,” said Silveo, “loved sweat leaf a
good deal more than she loved me. But at least I was pretty, so I
wasn’t totally useless.”

Gerard felt Thessalyn shift. “Oh,
Silveo—”

“Oh, no. No, ‘Oh, Silveo’s. You asked for the
story. Now I’m telling it. Be quiet and listen or I’ll stop.”

Thessalyn was immediately quiet.

“She disappeared when I was eight,” continued
Silveo. “The brothel where she’d been selling me promptly claimed
me, and for the next five years I was essentially their prisoner.
They had a griffin that watched the grounds—mean, mangy thing. We
were all terrified of it. The master told us it would kill us if we
tried to leave.”

“Did anyone try?” asked Thessalyn.

“No, we weren’t that stupid. There were about
a dozen of us kids—mostly ocelons. You would think that being in
the same wretched situation, we’d have a lot of sympathy for each
other, but they thought they were better than us foxlings. They
looked more like grishnards, and when they grew big enough, the
master might sell them to a ship, and they’d get out. Foxlings,
though, he’d keep indefinitely, because we just don’t get very big.
There weren’t many of us, and customers thought we were exotic.

“There was one other white foxling, a girl
named Nix. We used to pretend we had the same father. Maybe we did,
too—no way of knowing. She and I both had sharp tongues. We used to
make up nasty nicknames for the customers. We’d joke about them,
about each other, about everything. We made the others laugh, and
it kept us all sane.

“The master, though—he didn’t like it,
especially since we didn’t exempt him from the sport. One of the
ocelons snitched about some of the stuff we said, and he didn’t
feed either of us for three days. He didn’t want to kill us or beat
us too badly, though, because we were valuable.”

Silveo paused, and this
time Thessalyn did not attempt to say anything. “You sure you want
to hear this, Thess? It’s not very…
nice.”

“Yes,” she said solemnly. “Silveo, I’m not
unaware of what goes on in the world beyond the common rooms and
courts where I sing. I grew up in poverty, and there were shelts
who counseled my father that there was only one way to make use of
a pretty, blind daughter. Thank the Firebird he didn’t listen.”

“Yes,” said Silveo thoughtfully, “we could
thank him for that, I suppose. Anyway, what I’m trying
unsuccessfully to think of a nice way to say is that there are
plenty of things an adult grishnard cannot do to a little foxling
if he wants to do anything to him tomorrow. The customers had rules
they were supposed to follow, and for the most part, they did.
However, we’d get one periodically who thought that once the door
was closed, the rules didn’t apply to him. If the money was good
enough, the master didn’t want to turn those shelts away. However,
he also didn’t want to lose valuable merchandise—us.

“He discovered fairly early that I was good
at handling these customers. I could talk them down, make them
laugh, convince them not to hurt me.”

“So you got the dangerous ones,” said
Thessalyn.

“Yes.” Silveo’s voice carried an acid hint of
mock pride. “Silvy got to handle the crazies. I was good at it,
too, but I did depend on the master to use some measure of common
sense. A grishnard came in one day—fellow about Gerard’s size. His
idea of a good time was beating one of us senseless. We’d had
problems with him before, and he’d killed a kid from a place down
the street earlier that year, but he laid down a few speckled
cowries, and the master let him in. I’d gotten in trouble earlier
that evening for saying something snippy, and the master was angry
at me.

“He shoved me into a room with that brute,
and nothing I said or did made any difference. He nearly killed me.
For anyone else, the master would have stopped it, but not for me.
Afterward, when the bastard had fallen into a drunken sleep, Nix
crept in and smothered him with a pillow. I told her not to. I told
her the worst was over, but she was so angry. She’d listened to me
getting knocked around for a quarter watch, and the master doing
nothing. She wouldn’t listen.

“When our master found the body, he was
livid. I told him I’d done it, but I could barely crawl, so he
didn’t believe me. He staked her out in the yard and let that
griffin at her. He made me watch.” Silveo bit off the last
word.

“Silveo,” whispered Thessalyn.

“I said none of that!” he snapped. “You asked
me. I told you. The end. If there’s one thing I cannot abide, it’s
pity. And quit pretending to be asleep, Gerard. I know perfectly
well that you’re not.”

Gerard sat up, feeling a little guilty.
Silveo had his knees pulled up to his chin, his tail wrapped
tightly around his body. Thessalyn leaned over suddenly and hugged
him. Silveo gave a startled hiss like a scolded cat, and Gerard
leapt up in alarm. “Thess, he’ll—”

“Lady,” growled Silveo against her shoulder,
“it is extremely unwise to seize me unexpectedly.” Gerard saw,
though, that his hand had stopped halfway inside his pocket. “Let
go of me,” said Silveo.

“Let go of him,” agreed Gerard.

Thessalyn released him with
a sigh. “Well, you won’t let me
say
what I want to say.”

“Maddening, isn’t it? Let’s see if I can tell
you some things that will make you feel less like throwing your
arms around me. The priestess got me out of that place—turned up
when I was twelve and asked me to kill someone for her. I still
don’t know whether she picked me at random or whether she knew
something about me. She gave me a knife—first good weapon I ever
had. I killed a lot of shelts for her over the next few
years—mostly political assassinations. You wouldn’t believe how
much she likes to meddle. One day, she said, ‘You’re good at
surviving, Silveo. How would you like to survive my Sea Watch?’

“I thought she meant as a regular sailor, but
she put me in as a lieutenant. I have no idea what she said to
Admiral Mornay to make him do it—he certainly didn’t like me—but
two years later the Resistance shot him, and she made me
admiral.”

“Did you really try to gild
the
Fang
silver?”
asked Gerard.

Silveo snorted. “I was nineteen and giddy. I
knew I needed a legend, needed to keep everybody guessing. They’d
never serve under a foxling unless I stayed so far ahead of them
they never knew what I was going to do next.”

Silveo leaned back in the grass. “The
Priestess gave me Sern, too. I declared the island a nest of
Resistance traitors and went through it like a scythe. Even the
king was nervous by the time I was finished. My old master—” He
stopped. “You don’t even want to know what I did to him. Or to that
griffin. I hunted down every one of our regular patrons, killed the
ocelons, too.”

“Even the ones who weren’t cruel to you?”
asked Thessalyn.

“Even those,” said Silveo. “It certainly felt
therapeutic, but I also knew I couldn’t have shelts running around
talking about things that happened back then. It doesn’t do for an
admiral of the Sea Watch to have anyone able to say… Well, it just
doesn’t do. If there’s anyone left in Wefrivain who knew me back
then, they certainly aren’t talking about it.”

There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence.
Then Thessalyn said, “Did Nix sing?”

Silveo smiled. “Yes, she sang. Not like you.
She hadn’t had the training. She might have been terrible; I don’t
know. I was only a kid. She could make me sleep, though. Not much
else could make me sleep back then, except exhaustion.”

He hesitated. “They used to carry us around
sometimes by the scruff. It’s difficult for a little foxling to
fight when he’s being carried that way. There’s a powerful instinct
that tells your body to curl up and submit.”

“But you didn’t,” said Thessalyn.

Silveo gave a little huff.
“Oh, some days I did. You can’t
fight the system—not if you
want to win. You have to find a way to work from inside of it.
”

“Even if the system is wrong?” asked
Thessalyn.

Silveo rolled his eyes. “Everyone’s wrong.
Everyone cheats. Everyone will sell you for the right price. There
are no real choices. That’s the world according to Silveo Lamire. I
realize that the world according to Thessalyn Holovar is quite a
bit different. You’re a sweet fool.” He got up and dusted himself
off. “Story time’s over, little lambs. I need to get back to my
ship.”

Chapter 30.
Mance

Traffic on and off of Maijha Minor is closely
monitored. Supposedly it is a closed system, but everyone knows
that smuggling does occur. Shavier slaves sometimes escape to the
island, judging the risks of constant hunting worth the benefits of
relative freedom among their own kind. Even some grishnard
smugglers are willing to trade rare items from the island for the
weapons and steel that the inhabitants desperately need.

—Gwain,
The Non-grishnards of
Wefrivain

They left Holovarus three days later, bound
for Mance. Gerard didn’t think he’d ever seen a ship repaired so
quickly. Neither his father nor Jaleel put in another appearance,
for which he was grateful. The
Fang
still needed a number of
small things that Holovarus’s dockyard could not provide on short
notice. Silveo opted to pick them up on the way, rather than
waiting.

During those three days, Gerard spent a
considerable amount of time walking around town, confirming what
Silveo had said about Gwain. Their resistance pirate had certainly
asked a lot of questions, most of them about Gerard.
Why would
he have left a book in the library?