Weight of Stone (34 page)

Jerzy shuddered, as though shaking off even that brief touch. He knew Ao meant well, was trying to apologize, but the contact felt like an imposition, instead.

Behind him, Kaï drew in a breath as though to speak, and Jerzy’s entire body tensed, cursing silently as his hold on the winds was broken. The prince seemed to rethink his words, and released them unspoken with a heavy exhale.

Jerzy remained uneasy. His companions seemed to expect something from him that he didn’t know how to give. Every mention of magic—every indirect reference to what had happened back in The Berengia, his master’s death—made them feel as though they should offer a comfort he did not want, or need. He knew that he should be mourning. They clearly expected him to. But Jerzy did not know how, could not show the proper emotions that would reassure them, make them feel better.

Detta had understood; Detta knew Vinearts.

A Vineart did not show weakness. Jerzy needed to be calm and display only certainty when they questioned him. It was difficult: the press of their existence was always against his skin, the sound of their voices, the incomprehension … like now, it made him tense and irritable in the face of their concern.

It wasn’t them. He knew that. The
Vine’s Heart
was larger than their previous craft, so when he needed to be away from the others or risk losing his temper or doing something hurtful, he could find a quiet place where they did not disturb him, but space alone was not enough. There was no soil within reach for him to touch, to dig himself into, to hear the roots and leaves whisper his name.

Spellwines did not make a Vineart. Quiet-magic did not even make a Vineart. Vines made a Vineart. When Sin Washer had Commanded them to mind their vines to the exclusion of all else, he had set them on a path that did not allow for deviation.

If Jerzy did not get off this ship and onto growing soil again soon, he thought he might go mad.

“We are still on track?” Kaï asked, moving on to a topic they both could handle.

“Yes.” Jerzy was certain of that, if nothing else. It drove him, the whip hanging over his shoulder, ready to flick out at the slightest sign of slacking. He woke in the morning, rising from his bunk already searching for the taint, and the last thing he did before falling asleep at the end of his shift was to taste the air one last time, to ensure nothing had
changed. The feel of that magic, dark and potent and
wrong,
would not hide from him again.

It was not about avenging Master Malech, or making the Washers back off from their accusations, or even preventing the chaos the Guardian had predicted. Or, it was about all of those things, but a single thought kept Jerzy company when he woke, and when he went to bed, and when he breathed during the day and dreamed at night.

Master Malech was dead. The Guardian would protect the vineyards; Detta would ensure the House ran smoothly until he returned … but the Master of the House was dead, and the Washers who had come to take Jerzy into custody were either dead or missing.

If he did not find the source of the taint, their hidden foe, and expose him, Jerzy would have no home to return to. Ever. The Brotherhood of Washers would have their justice: the yards would be burned and salted, and the House of Malech would be no more.

His soil, his soul, would be destroyed.

“Vineart. If you let it eat you, there will be nothing left, after a while.”

Kaï’s voice was hard, as though he were speaking of something that made him angry, and Jerzy flinched, instinctively.

“You don’t know …” he started to say, and then trailed off. Unlike Ao and Mahault, Kaï did know. His sister was dead, too, if not by the same hand, then directed by the same mind, and he, too, was outcast from the lands he had been chosen to protect and nurture. They were more alike than not; Jerzy was not so lost to self-pity and guilt that he could forget that.

Part of him wished that he could, that they would just leave him alone, and he felt guilty over that as well.

“I can’t stop,” he said instead, not looking back to see if Kaï was still there. “I keep wondering if, if I’d been there, if Master Malech would still be alive. If they would have taken me, and left, and …” He shrugged. “You can only harvest the fruit that’s grown, not the fruit you wonder would have grown.” The fact that the saying was true made it no easier to live by.

There was silence behind him, and when he did finally look over his shoulder, Kaïnam was gone.

Jerzy stayed by the railing, the shadow of the sail falling over him and protecting him from the sun’s rays, letting the endless undulations of the waves soothe him even as he watched for another sign of a sleek, monstrous head or, worse, a hint of the neck, suggesting that it was about to rise up and strike.

“Although it could come at us from underneath, as well,” he said to a large gray-and-white speckled bird that landed on the railing a span away. The bird folded its great wings and looked at him, cocking its head to one side and clacking its curved beak twice, as though in response.

“Fine help you are,” he told the bird. “I don’t have any bread for you. Go away.” The birds were endless pests, lurking for food and leaving their filthy shit all over the deck. They weren’t even good eating, according to Kaïnam, merely annoying.

The bird clacked at him again, then launched itself from the railing, in flight a much more graceful and attractive creature.

Serpents were not the only threat, nor the ever-present risk of a storm driving them off course. Twice they had seen ships with the red flag of the Brotherhood in the distance. Without a word from Jerzy, Kaï had ordered the
Heart
to change course, avoiding contact. They could not risk being found.

In the months since setting sail from The Berengia, there had been other ships, deeper out to sea: larger vessels bearing the trader-clan flags delivering their cargo from seller to buyer and back again, or Caulic vessels coming or going from their years’ long ventures, exploring for new lands to claim. The
Heart
exchanged salutes in passing, but the hint of weapons arrayed along those ships were, according to Kaï, new, and made the princeling frown.

Heart
was better suited for deep sea than the
Green Wave,
but Jerzy’s sense of the taint was keeping them closer in to the coastline. Kaïnam charted a course that he said would minimize the danger from either
coastal waters or unfriendly pursuit, but it was an uneasy compromise, and added to Jerzy’s general feeling of discomfort.

The sound of metal on wood broke into his bleak thoughts, distracting him. Curious, Jerzy walked along the railing, no longer having to hold on to lines, to the middeck, where space had been cleared of barrels and ropes, to make a square large enough for a person to move freely.

Mahl, her long hair tied up at the back of her head and a dark green kerchief around her forehead to keep the sweat from blinding her, was doing sword movements. She was wearing a pair of trou and a sleeveless jerkin similar to Jerzy’s, but there were soft leather boots on her feet and a leather bracer wrapped around her right forearm.

Even as he watched, she went through a series of poses, moving far more slowly than one would in an actual fight, bringing her blade up into readiness, then down again as though blocking something, and then up again and down in a swift and brutal-looking strike.

They were not, he reflected, entirely helpless.

Mahault paused, then retreated a step, and started the series of movements again.

Master Malech had hired Mil’ar Cai to teach him similar moves, only with a coarser, curved cudgel, learning how to judge what an opponent might be planning. Defensive fighting—to get out of trouble, not to find it, Cai had said over and over again.

The cudgel he had now, replacing the original that had been lost, did not have the same heft or balance, and Jerzy had not been keeping up with his practice. Cai would be annoyed with him, and yet practice had, before, seemed foolish. Vinearts did not carry weapons; there was no need, for who would attack one?

The idea of someone doing physical harm to a Vineart … unthinkable, even a year ago. Thinkable, now.

“Hai, Jer.” Mahl saw him standing there as she turned into the final blow, and lowered her sword, using her free arm to take the headband off and wipe her forehead. Her face was flushed and her eyes bright, and
she moved with an easy grace that made her normal smooth walk seem almost clumsy in comparison.

“You should practice with Kaïnam,” he said. “Otherwise, he will forget all he knows, despite his pretty sword, and start to think he’s only a sailor.”

That made her laugh, as he’d intended. “No chance of that,” she assured him. “He is out here every morning, working on his own moves when you’re sound asleep.” Jerzy had the last watch of the night, the quietest hours, and fell into bed after that in a dead sleep—or as deep as he could with Ao in the other hammock, snoring loudly.

“We sparred once,” Mahl went on, “but two blades here … we were both too worried about damaging a line or canvas we would desperately need, later.”

She looked him up and down, consideringly. “You could use a workout yourself,” she said. “Ao climbs the ropes ten times a day, but you’re starting to look a little soft.”

“Soft?” He had never been soft a moment of his entire life. “Is that what you think?”

He looked around and saw a spar leaning against a barrel. Picking it up, he tested the heft experimentally, then nodded in satisfaction. As thick around as his wrist, the spar felt like seasoned hardwood, not the sort of thing to snap at the first or even second blow.

“With that?” she asked, her face expressing doubt and a hint of amusement.

“With this,” he agreed, and stepped forward into the square.

The cudgel would not have helped him against the cat’s-paw, or whatever came after Master Malech. But not all the blows had been magical.

M
AHAULT PROVED HER
point—Jerzy managed to hold off her attacks, but he was breathless, his arms quivering with exhaustion by the time they called it a draw. The exercise seemed to do some good, however, as Jerzy found his mood improved the rest of the day. After that, Jerzy
made a point of joining Mahl for sparring practice some afternoons before his first turn at the wheel, and when they gathered for the midday meal under a spare sail slung overhead to keep the sun from baking them into a stupor, he tried to take part in the conversation, rather than merely listening. His thoughts still too often drifted into dark corners, but something usually brought him back into the daylight again.

Other than that, though, he still spent a great deal of time by himself, either leaning against the bowrail of the
Heart,
watching the waves flow under her hull as he looked for serpents, or counting the spinners as they leaped out of the waves, easily keeping pace with the ship.

Serpents and spinners seemed to avoid each other, he noted almost idly, and when the sleek gray hides of the smaller beasts disappeared from their wake, that was when Jerzy kept a sharper eye on the waters beyond.

The others, seemingly reassured by his renewed sociability, left him be. He wasn’t brooding, or hiding: being alone felt natural to him, comfortable, and let him stay open to the next feel of the taint, drifting on the breeze. That was his responsibility, more than any time at the wheel, or in fighting practice.

Although he never lost it entirely, not even while sleeping, the taint seemed fainter now, as they slipped beyond the boundaries of the Lands Vin, and into the long shadow of the Beyond, the greater bulk of Irfan, largely uncharted and unknown. Yet against all likelihood, Jerzy remained convinced that they were heading to the source.

When he was off watch, and had taken as much of the bright sun and harsh air as his skin could bear, often as not Jerzy found himself drawn down into the hold, where the supplies they had brought from The Berengia were stored. Here he felt, if not at home, then
connected
. Here he could almost grieve.

It was there, one afternoon, that Ao cornered him.

“You should come upside.”

“I’m comfortable here.” Jerzy looked at Ao when he spoke, but his attention was taken up by the sound and feel of the cask he was sitting on. He needed to be alone—couldn’t Ao see that?

Of course not. “It can’t be healthy, Jer, you just sitting here with these casks and flasks, like they were talking to you.”

Ao would never understand that they were. The soft, barely audible whispers were nothing compared to the murmuring of the vines themselves, but he could hear them, the liquid shifting as the waves moved the ship back and forth, the delicate nuances of each spellwine making itself heard, some of them fading, some increasing in strength as they aged.

Jerzy reluctantly disentangled himself from the whispers and turned to look at Ao. “Isn’t this your off shift? Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“This is more restful.” In sleep, he dreamed. Here, he could relax. As much as he could relax, trapped on a wooden tub on strange waters, surrounded by people who didn’t understand him and expected him to have the answer for everything.

The thought brought a return of discomfort and irritability, and Jerzy breathed in deeply, willing the ambient magic within the hold to give him peace.

Ao, of course, didn’t notice. “Jer, it’s not good, you sitting alone. Not that you ever talked all that much, but you’re too quiet, too … distant.”

“I should talk nonstop, like you?”

The trader took the bitter riposte without flinching. “You couldn’t even if you tried. I’m worried, Jer. About you.” He softened his voice, unconsciously or not aping Mahault’s manner. “It’s been almost two months since. It’s not good to—”

“Leave him alone.” Kaïnam, his steps heavy on the ladder that led into the cargo hold.

“But—”

“Ao, leave him be.” Kaïnam rarely used his princeling voice these days,
but he did now, making Jerzy turn to look, as well. Ao bristled, drawing up to his full height—still barely to Kaï’s shoulder—and stomped away, taking the stairs with far more energy than was required.