He decided to leave her in ignorance of his true identity, which could serve only to heap more wonders on a mind that rejected all that was not ordinary.

“I left certain property with my friends, and I’ve come to retrieve it. Then I will be off your decks.” She would wake in the night with the memory of a strange dream, he thought, though his presence on her ship was as real as the sea.

When she departed, Stipes looked uncomfortably to his companions to speak up, but they glared him down and he was forced to offer his own defense. “Those items being of importance to Thebin interests, I handed them over to your own countrymen as seemed fit.” He mentioned nothing of his own troubles, but Llesho knew they must have been considerable.

“I’m sorry if I worried anyone—”

“Anyone!” Hmishi snorted indignantly. Having spent some time dead in the underworld, he felt more freedom to speak his mind, even to the Holy King of Thebin. “Whatever possessed you to go off on your own on such a cracked-brain scheme! Kaydu takes it as a personal failure that she could not protect you from your own foolishness. And as for the rest of us, we hardly know how we will greet the Lady SienMa, having lost the one hope we had to save the world from disaster!”

“I’m sorry—”

Bixei had been quiet until now. Bound to the quest only by the luck of his servitude, he had neither the tradition of family service to the mortal goddess of war nor the fealty a subject owes a king to hold him. That and his attachment to Stipes, who had joined their cadre in spite of his injuries because they didn’t want to be separated again. For him, Llesho’s disappearance had caused a private injury.

“How could you do that to Stipes? Did you ask for him to accompany you to the market because you knew he couldn’t say ‘no’ to you? You must have known he would be blamed for your actions, though there was little he could do to stop you.”

“You can’t think I meant to deceive you from the start!” Looking from face to face, he realized that they believed just that, though Hmishi admitted, “Kaydu never did. She thought it was one of your harebrained spur-of-the-moment ideas that look good until you get into them and then turn out to be quicksand in every direction.”

Which pretty much described it. He wasn’t sorry he’d done it, though. Not yet at least. “The plan will work,” he insisted. It had to work, or Prince Tayy would be dead. “But my rest period will be over soon. I don’t have time to argue the matter.”

They seemed unwilling to let the matter go. Lling, however, remembered Llesho’s dream visit to Tsu-tan’s camp during her own rescue. She understood the urgency of speed and rose to find her cabin and the objects she and Hmishi had hidden there. “What do you need?” she asked. “Everything?”

Llesho stopped her with a shake of his head. “I will need my knife and my spear, and that which you wear around your neck for me.” He didn’t want to mention the pearls—most particularly the one he was most worried about at the moment—where a seaman might be passing at any time.

“I’ll bring them right away.”

Hmishi followed her, a wise precaution to guard all their movements in a strange ship. At the hatch, however, Lling turned around and asked again, “Are you sure you don’t want the cups?”

“Why?”

“They give me strange dreams,” she answered uncomfortably. “In the night I hear a woman weeping, and sometimes the slither and hiss of a serpent—”

Llesho knew who that was. His dreams had been blessedly free of her presence since he’d sent the cups away in other hands. He didn’t want to put Lling at risk, but he didn’t dare carry the false Lady Chaiujin with him into the court of the mortal goddess of war. Not when he still had Tayy to rescue.

Lling read both of his concerns—over leaving the cup and about taking it with him—in his hesitation and waved off the request. “I can carry her a while longer. But she must be dealt with eventually.”

“I know. Just not today.”

With a nod that accepted his decision she disappeared after her partner.

Settling to wait, Llesho took a chair at the table. “Her ladyship SienMa has called me to attend her in my dream travels,” he told Bixei and Stipes, counting on them to fill in Hmishi and Lling. “She will want a report of all our doings.”

Bixei still hadn’t let go of his anger, but he leaned forward, his hands between his knees. Between those two he always did the talking. “Kaydu thinks we’ll catch up with the pirates by tomorrow afternoon. If we can outrun this storm, we’ll stand off until dark. If the storm proves stronger, we will all need rescuing, I think.”

“That’s what Marmer Sea Dragon says.” Falling silent, Llesho stared off into a broody distance.

“We won’t fail you,” Stipes promised. He seldom spoke up except at need, and Llesho wondered how badly he had hurt all his cadre, how they must have interpreted his rashness as their failure.

“You never have,” he assured the two, knowing they would pass the message along. “I trust you with my life, and with my honor, as I trust the air to be there when I breathe. But Marmer Sea Dragon is right. It’s a risky plan. The storm has a strange character to it. Master Markko had a hand in its birth, but it grows a wild and powerful soul of its own, I think.” The enormity of the task that remained ahead bowed him for a moment.

“If Kaydu manages to tame that wind, we are still far from completing our quest,” he cautioned them. “Wars will be fought over our bones if we fail.”

“Then we won’t fail,” Bixei said, as simply as if offering tea. Stipes added, “What do you want us to do?”

They were so sure, so solid, that he found a smile creeping onto his lips in spite of how close to despair he had fallen over the betrayals of this voyage. If he gave it a moment’s thought, no one had surprised him in all the mess he found himself. Master Den was the trickster god, after all, and Pig was Pig. Though he put the safety of the Great Goddess and the heavenly gardens he tended before all other things, in matters to do with humans he would be what his nature made him.

If Llesho’s own lady wife forgave her servant, as it seemed the Goddess had done, he could do no less. He’d take a lesson from the experience, however. Pig was his guide in the spirit world and a devotee of the Goddess, but the Jinn had never been a friend. It was a mistake to think of him that way. If he’d relearned wariness around the magical creature, so much the better. As for Pig’s actions in the past, while horrific, they didn’t change the present. Only Llesho could do that.

“Do you really think Master Den has betrayed us?” Bixei asked him.

Since he’d seen the trickster god crossing the deck of theGuiding Star, Llesho had thought so. But the conversation with Marmer Sea Dragon had made him stop and think.

“I’m not ready to trust him completely, but he probably means us no permanent injury.” His teacher hadn’t kidnapped Tayy or carried him off to the galleys. He hadn’t sold Llesho back into slavery in a plan that was looking less well thought out by the stormy minute. As the patron of pirates and also the teacher of young kings, however, he had put himself in a position to watch out for both Tayy and Llesho. Not to see that they came to no harm, perhaps, but to see that they came out of the experience with a lesson well learned.

That part wasn’t working any better than Llesho’s plan at the moment, but he hoped, by the time he’d pitched Tayy into the sea and breathed into his lungs to rescue him, that they’d both have learned something. With a sigh, he wondered why none of his teachers believed in writing his lessons on a slate.

When he came out of his reverie, he discovered that Hmishi and Lling had returned and his companions had continued their conversation without him.

“Where do you suppose he’s been this time?” Hmishi asked.

Lling answered with a little shrug. “He gets that look when he’s deciding what not to tell us. Which happens right before he gets into trouble for keeping things from us.”

“You’re right,” Stipes agreed. “That’s the look.”

“It’s nothing worth telling.” At least, not until he figured out what it meant.

It seemed they had learned that cynical twist of the mouth from each other, because he saw it in every direction he looked.

“Whenever you’re ready.” Hmishi pulled the thong with the small bag of pearls from around his neck and handed it over.

He didn’t really need the true pearls, but didn’t trust Pig around somebody else’s neck. The thought of Hmishi turned into a creature like Master Markko made him ill. Llesho didn’t know what Master Markko would do to his friend to seize the pearls for himself, either. Hmishi had already died for him once and he didn’t want it to happen again.

Next, Hmishi drew out the silver chain around his neck and stared at it with sick dismay. The pearl in its wire setting was gone. “I had it, I swear,” he cried. “I haven’t taken it off since Stipes put it in my care, and I check the slide every shift to make sure it is secure.”

“No one can hold Pig when he goes wandering. He’s around here somewhere,” Llesho assured them, and slipped the empty chain around his neck, next to the thong that held the bag of pearls from the Goddess’ necklace, the String of Midnights. “You haven’t found any more of these by any chance?”

Hmishi shook his head. “I prefer to leave the adventures to you.”

Llesho took the knife and the spear that Lling handed him with a wink. It would be their little secret, that Hmishi was having an adventure, at least until he figured it out for himself. But Llesho could well understand the impulse. One day, if he completed his quest to save his country and free the gates of heaven, he hoped only for a quiet life at the side of his lady wife, the Great Goddess. He was lucky he didn’t see Pig, or he might be tempted into just such a wish.

“Her ladyship, the goddess SienMa, is waiting for me.” Llesho rose to depart, and then added, “Habiba will want to know how Kaydu is faring.”

Hmishi made a face like he’d eaten something sour.

“She is my captain and I trust her,” Bixei gave a helpless shrug and grabbed the edge of the table as the ship heeled over in the heavy seas. “I don’t want to think what will happen if Master Markko proves stronger in controlling this storm.”

Llesho didn’t think Master Markko would prove strong enough to control the building typhoon, but he wasn’t sure Kaydu could do it either. He remembered Marmer Sea Dragon’s offhand comment about her familiar. He’d had his own suspicions about Little Brother—and hoped the monkey’s hidden depths were of practical use to his mistress as well.

No time to question it now, though. He shook his head, feeling the buds of antlers rising above his forehead. When he reached the upper deck, he let his hold on his human form start to slip. And then, as he crossed the open expanse amidships, he began to run. A step, another, sharp hooves clacked across the wooden deck and he was up, up, rising above the tossing sea. In his totem form, the roebuck that Bolghai had taught him to find, he made in his mind the image of the mortal goddess of war and flew to her.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Sixteen

“YOU’RE WET.”

That was Habiba’s voice. Pig usually had the good sense to bring him to her ladyship’s witch first. It gave them a chance to sound out the situation before they went blindly into whatever crisis currently simmered around the court. Llesho remembered when he’d accidentally traveled into the dreams of the mortal goddess of war on his own. In her dreams the Lady SienMa wore the form of a great white cobra, which scared the life out of him if he admitted to such unheroic feelings. From their first meeting, when Master Jaks and Master Den had tested his aptitude for weapons, he had learned to fear her as much as he had later learned to honor her. He never wished to have her undivided attention.

Habiba was, if not safe, at least not so visually disturbing. He had the power to take the shape of great and mystical creatures, but he seldom bothered except as needed during battle. Llesho had seen him fight as a great mythical bird and in the shape of a dragon, easier since witches and magicians all had a dragon somewhere on their family tree. Except for Master Markko, of course. He still didn’t know what to make of Pig about that. Even given that the Jinn could not know where his foolish actions would take them, it had still been an evil thing to do.

Pig had disappeared again. The silver chain Llesho had reclaimed from Hmishi still lay empty at his throat, next to the Great Goddess’ pearls. He’d felt naked without the pearls; their presence comforted him in spite of the trouble he would have explaining them if his pirate captors caught sight of them. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Pig’s absence, though. Didn’t know what to say to him after the dragon-king’s revelation, but he wasn’t sure he could get back to the galley without him either.

“Ahem.” Habiba was looking down his nose at him across a familiar lab table laden with bubbling equipment that oozed smelly vapors. He was awaiting an explanation for the seawater dripping on his marble floor, but somewhere nearby, her ladyship demanded Llesho’s presence.

“Stipes sold me to the pirates. I’ve been rowing in a slave galley for the past day or so.”

Habiba gave one slow nod to show that he’d heard but made no comment about Llesho’s return to slavery or Stipes’ part in it. “And my daughter?” he asked.

That was why he hadn’t already been hurried off to see the mortal goddess of war. Llesho had expected as much, and was ready for the question. “On her way to rescue us, as planned.” He didn’t mention whose plan, though her father would figure it out easily enough. “Master Markko is raising a storm that threatens to overwhelm us all, however.”

Llesho considered passing on Marmer Sea Dragon’s opinion, that she wouldn’t be able to hold back the storm for long, but decided against it. Kaydu seemed to know what she was doing when he left her and he didn’t want to keep the mortal goddess of war waiting. He shook his head like a lion, sending a spray of seawater flying into the room. Droplets spattered Habiba’s robes with a dark, fine spray.

“Was that really necessary?” The witch combed a hand through his beard, all that he would show of his exasperation.

“Pardon.” Llesho bowed low to show the humility of his apology. “Her ladyship wished to see me?” He hadn’t mentioned Prince Tayyichiut’s fate, or why Stipes had sold him to the pirates, preferring to make his case only once for the mortal goddess herself. That suited Habiba as well, except for the sea water Llesho had brought with him in his dream travel.

“You cannot go to her ladyship in that condition. Take those clothes off and get into something dry.”

Llesho wondered first why a magician who could turn into a dragon at will and reappear with his clothing intact couldn’t dry out a few drops of sea spray. Then he wondered where he was supposed to remove his clothes, and where the dry ones were to come from. Before he had a chance to ask any of his questions, however, Habiba gave an annoyed wave of his hand. Suddenly, Llesho found that he was naked, but still dripping on the floor. Habiba made another gesture and a cloth of soft cotton fell over Llesho’s head and across his shoulders.

“I don’t know why you didn’t just dry the clothes I had,” he grumbled. He had burrowed into the towel and hoped his mumbling would go unnoticed.

In addition to the powers that dragon blood imparted to a witch, however, Habiba was graced with excellent hearing. “Clothing falls within the domain of man,” he replied tartly. “The sea, which you brought with you into my workshop, is the domain of Marmer Sea Dragon. Even in a dream, only he or his offspring can command it, to the finest of its drops.”

“We’ve met.” Llesho emerged from the towel to discover Carina had joined them and, with Habiba, was staring at his back. The healer’s presence meant his brothers must be nearby. The princes were not on his mind when he hurriedly draped the towel to cover his front, however. Under Carina’s professional scrutiny, embarrassment had turned his skin a deep burgundy from his toes to the top of his head. Once he’d had hope of attracting her attention, but this wasn’t what he’d had in mind.

“Let me treat your back before you put on new clothes.”

“Pirates use the lash.” He’d almost forgotten, but his shrug set the angry welts complaining again along his ribs. The discomfort made it easier to bear her troubled gaze.

“Have they broken the skin?” He wouldn’t refuse a bandage if he stood in danger of infection, or of spoiling dry clothes with bloodstains.

Carina wrinkled her nose with distaste, but shook her head. “No blood, but you should have bandages to protect the welts from the rub of your clothes until they heal.”

“Moll would know something was up if she caught sight of them,” he decided, “so I’d better not.”

Habiba had been silent while the healer tried to persuade him to have his wounds treated, but now he stepped into the discussion with his own persuasions.

“A fresh cut would open your shirt, revealing treatment you wouldn’t have received on board the pirate vessel,” Habiba agreed. “But a little salve won’t hurt. Something to prevent infection, at least.”

“I have just the thing.” Carina had set up her small shop in the adjoining room and she returned quickly with a dark crock and unsealed the wax that protected it from air and moisture.

In fact it did hurt, first burning like fire, then freezing like ice. But in a matter of moments, Llesho decided that he could hardly feel the welts on his back at all. His hands remained curled around his towel so she couldn’t see the damage there and he didn’t offer them up for treatment. They, at least, must look the way they had when he left. When the salve had seeped into the skin, Habiba offered him dry court clothes in the Thebin style. He couldn’t quite bring himself to release his towel with Carina still in the room, however, even if giving up his towel didn’t mean showing her the bloody blisters on his palms.

“I’ll be nearby if you need me.” With a graceful bow and not a single comment about his foolish modesty in the presence of his healer, she left the room.

“You can let that go now.” Habiba maintained a studiously blank expression as he handed over a shirt and drawers. Llesho was glad for the slide of fine linen on his skin again. He thought he’d escaped comment from the magician, but Habiba was waiting for him with a raised eyebrow when his head emerged through the neck opening of his clean shirt. Llesho drew a breath, though he wasn’t certain what he would say.

The magician put up a hand to stop him. “A difficult situation handled with discretion, but now we must hurry. Her ladyship and the emperor await. Mergen-Khan of the Qubal clan has arrived within the hour; he demands words with you, and possibly your head. His nephew, Prince Tayyichiut, disappeared soon after you departed his camp.

“He has sworn blood feud against your party, which grieves him as much as the loss of his kin, he says, for the debt his family owes your own. Since you are an exiled king, however, he has come to declare war against the emperor of Shan, who guaranteed your actions in the grasslands, if the boy is not returned to him.”

“Nobody forced Tayy to travel with us. I tried to send him home from the beginning.”

“I believe the first part of that, but suggest you work on sounding more convincing when you try to persuade his uncle of the latter part of that statement,” Habiba commented before adding, “Mergen-Khan would likewise declare war against his neighbor, Tinglut-Khan, for the murder of his brother by the Tinglut princess, Chimbai’s wife.”

Llesho had paused to listen to this summary of events and Habiba hurried him with a wave of his hand. “Finish dressing. Her ladyship awaits.”

A king obeyed the mortal goddess of war as quickly as a common soldier. He put on the fine woolen overshirt and slid the breeches up over the linen smallclothes. A servant came forward with a sleeveless Thebin coat embroidered in gold-and-crimson thread crossed with blue silk. Llesho slipped his arms into the slashed openings. The luxurious cloth drew his touch but he curled his fingers away from the shimmering decoration, afraid that bloody streaks from his damaged hands would spoil the work.

As Llesho dressed, Habiba continued the briefing: “For his own part, Tinglut-Khan would have words with you about the disappearance of his daughter, the beloved Lady Chaiujin. He has declared war on the Qubal, but her ladyship has asked for a truce until the facts can be judged, perhaps again with your testimony to the injured party. And I see, by the guilty conscience that marks your face, that he may have cause for his complaint against you.”

“I had nothing to do with the Lady Chaiujin’s disappearance,” Llesho began. His guilt had much to do with his dream in which the lady had come to him in her bamboo snake form and as a woman, whispering enticements in his ear, but he had no wish to share that intelligence.

“Do you by any chance have my boots here as well?” he asked, turning Habiba’s attention from where he didn’t want it.

The witch knew what he was up to, but conceded with a little smile. “By no chance at all, we do. And a belt for your knife and sword as well.”

The servant brought out a pair of soft leather boots encrusted at heel and toe with gold filigree. Llesho pulled them on and buckled the belt at his waist. The scabbard for his sword hung empty at his side, but the knife slid easily home in its own smaller sheath. He settled the short spear at his back. Then Habiba opened a flat box that had rested hidden on his lab table.

“The others will be wearing their own crowns of state,” he said, and held up the silver fillet of a prince of Thebin. “We have yet to win back the king’s corona for you, but this will do for now.” When Llesho had settled the silver band at his brow, Habiba led him into a long corridor he thought perhaps he had seen before.

“Are we in the governor’s palace at Durnhag?”

“Itwas the governor’s palace. Now it is the emperor’s headquarters at the front. We may be on the march soon, but that, too, is a matter for her ladyship to discuss.” Habiba made it clear that he would say no more, and so they proceeded in silence to the audience hall where the gathered dignitaries awaited them.

 

 

 

In the past, Llesho’s visits to the palace at Durnhag had occurred in secret and under cover of night. Pig had disappeared during those visits, too, he remembered. He’d seen the roof and the courtyard, various balconies, Habiba’s workroom on several occasions, and the private chambers of the mortal goddess and her chosen consort, the emperor of Shan.

The last time he’d seen Shou, the man had been sharing her ladyship’s chambers, but he had seemed to take no joy in his place by her side. Rather, it had seemed as though he had hidden away in this shell of a palace to brood over the smoldering coals of his wounds. And her ladyship, he would almost say, fluttered around the glowing heat of his agony as though she needed his pain more than she needed the pleasure he might bring her. Not for the first time he wondered at her marriage to the governor of Farshore, who had been a man of peace until his murder at Markko’s urging.

Such thoughts made him extremely nervous, more so than he was at the summons itself. Never before had the mortal goddess of war called him to a formal and public audience. It might bode well, but it didn’t get his hopes up.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Seventeen

GUARDSMEN BRISTLED dangerously in front of the massive, elaborate gilt doors to the audience chamber. Their chief moved to stop the newcomers.

“No weapons beyond this point, Master Witch.” The guardsman bent his knee and bowed his head as he spoke, no doubt fearing some terrible magical retribution for doing his duty.

Habiba touched him lightly on the shoulder. He flinched, but settled under the gentle touch. “The knife is a ritual object of the Thebin court. As for the spear, her ladyship gifted him with it. She will want to see for herself how these two have fared together.”

The chief of the guards spared a glance filled with dread for the weapon and Llesho wondered for a moment if the man could hear it whispering in his ear.Let us go on, he willed the guard.For it will not be left behind.

The guard lost the focus of his gaze for a moment. When he came back to himself, he seemed to have come to the same conclusion. Stepping aside, he signaled his men who swung the huge doors wide for them. Habiba swept Llesho into the audience chamber and followed in his train to the echoes of the crier announcing their names.

As he’d noticed about those parts of the palace he’d seen before in his visits, Llesho observed that the audience chamber was crowded with the wealth that the governor of Guynm Province had extorted from his neighbors and had stolen from his own people. He remembered Shou’s horror at the torture chambers in the governor’s cellars. The corrupt official was dead now, and no loss to anyone. His legacy remained in this overheated room aglitter with gold and silver and sumptuous with carved rosewood thrones upholstered in satin and draperies of heavy beaten silk. The floor was set with glass tiles colored like jewels, each no bigger than the nail on Llesho’s thumb. Overhead, chimes in the shapes of birds and butterflies made endless music of the breeze that sifted through the slotted windows cut in the walls high above them.

There were five thrones set in a semicircle, Llesho noted. Mergen-Khan, in the cone-shaped hat heavy with silver threads that served the Qubal people as a crown, sat on the throne that would have been the farthest right if they’d been set in a straight row. Mergen seemed to have aged since they’d last met. He’d lost a brother to betrayal and he believed that once again trust had cost him dearly in his nephew. His hooded eyes followed Llesho’s approach with predatory intensity over a set mouth made grim by the lines that etched themselves on either side of his nose.

He sat with his back straight and his legs tucked up as if he rested on the dais of the ger-tent on the grasslands, in a caftan of red-and-yellow brocade under a dark blue sleeveless coat with the sky and the sea woven through it. Chimbai-Khan had worn those very clothes at Llesho’s first audience in the ger-tent palace that, like the clothes and the crown and the lost boy, belonged to Mergen now. Llesho met his eyes as openly as he could, but still he flinched at what he saw there. How many people would die if he didn’t get Tayy off that boat? Too many, and he figured their number would start with him. It wouldn’t happen, though. He couldn’t do anything about Chimbai-khan, but they’d get Tayy back. He’d already promised that.

A man Llesho didn’t know sat in the throne that would have been the farthest left if the line had not curved in upon itself. The stranger was old in a human way, with iron-gray hair and a seamed face pale with some great anguish. He had a cone-shaped hat like the one Mergen wore, but with gold threads instead of silver, and a costume of caftan and coat as elaborately woven as that of the Qubal Khan. Even in less identifiable clothes, however, the strong, sharp features would have given him away as a Harnishman. Tinglut-Khan, grieving the loss of his daughter, Llesho guessed. He had seen enough of grief and battle to know they had the makings of a war sitting in those opposing chairs.

The throne next to Mergen-Khan was empty. Shou sat next to the stranger, watching as Llesho walked across the jewel-tiled floor with Habiba at his back. The life had returned to the emperor’s eyes, which focused unflinchingly on Llesho’s approach. Little else showed of his face, however. Like the others, he had dressed for a state occasion, including the huge gold helmet that covered most of his features. Llesho had only seen the helmet once before. Shou had passed through the streets wearing it and the golden clothes of state in the celebration that followed the defeat of the Harnish raiders in the Imperial City of Shan. Then, Llesho had thought that the emperor looked like a god. Time had passed and he’d grown at least a little bit wiser. He wondered, now, how Shou managed to balance the heavy burden on his slender neck.

Her ladyship, SienMa, the mortal goddess of war, sat at the center of the gathering with Shou at her right hand. Her ladyship had dressed in the colors of Thousand Lakes Province, blues and greens drifting into one another like the lake grasses floating under the water. At her waist she wore a girdle of embroidery stiffened with buckram and held by a series of buckles worked in precious metals. Her face was white as snow. White as death. Blood-red tinted her lips and the long curved tips of her nails. She wore no ornaments of hair or throat to draw the eye of the beholder from the glistening blue-black fall of her hair or the brightness of her eyes. To make her interest clear to all who saw them, she rested her blood-tipped fingers delicately against the back of Shou’s hand, which lay on the arm of his tall throne. He didn’t look at her, but settled under her touch. Just so, she showed both her favor and her control.

On a step below the five thrones, four lesser chairs had been placed in a row and on each chair sat one of the princes of Thebin, each in the court clothes of the Palace of the Sun, and each with a silver coronet around his forehead. Adar’s arm and shoulder lay bandaged tight along his side, but he had lost some of the purple weariness that recent injury painted under his eyes. Balar watched him as one might who walked a narrow bridge over a deep gorge with rocky teeth reaching out for him from below.

Shokar made as if to rise, but thought better of it, given the kings and the goddess at his back. He settled back into his chair though he followed Llesho’s every move with an intense protectiveness that shook him to his soul.

“I didn’t realize,” Llesho thought to himself, shocked to see his brother’s love written so starkly into taut sinews. Seeing that love, he would have distanced himself from it to protect his brother, but knew for both of them that was impossible. Lluka didn’t look at him at all. It seemed, in fact, that Lluka saw nothing of the room where he sat, so inwardly did his gaze turn. Llesho knew what images he saw behind his eyes and shuddered, horrified at the thought of being trapped inside those annihilating images as he was himself so recently trapped behind an oar. They had to find a way to stop it before Lluka passed beyond their reach into his madness.

He hadn’t noticed the stool at the foot of the goddess until a silver trill drew his attention. Bright Morning the dwarf, who was the mortal god of mercy, announced Llesho with a flourish of silver notes he played on a sweet potato that fit in the palm of his hand. At his back rested a quiver of flutes, and he had wedged a small drum between his knees.

“Welcome back,” he said with such warmth in his eyes that Llesho had to blink back his tears. He had missed the dwarf’s quiet understanding, and the greeting brought all the feelings for his brothers gathered here, for Shou and even the Lady SienMa, dangerously close to spilling from his eyes. If he had come to account for his failure with Prince Tayy, the gathering of princes, kings, and deities reminded him of his successes as well.

“I trust we find you well, King Llesho of the Thebin people, beloved of the Great Goddess who suffers in heaven as we struggle here in the mortal realm.” With that reminder of the urgency of his quest, the mortal goddess of war reclaimed the hand that had rested on Shou’s wrist and extended both slender palms for Llesho to lay his forehead on.

“As well as can be expected, my Lady SienMa.” He placed his own hands beneath hers and bowed his forehead low over them as she had invited him to do.

Having completed that formality, she addressed him more familiarly. “My gift has served you faithfully, boy-king?” She tilted a brow at him as she pointed one blood-tipped finger at the spear peeking over Llesho’s shoulder.

“It has not, of late, tried to kill me,” he reported with a grim smile more answer than the words. “I decide the direction of its flight, and the spear limits itself to the occasional muttered complaint. So far, our agreement holds.”

“Then perhaps there is still hope.” For the first time since they had parted company in her yellow silk tent at the outset of his quest, her ladyship showed him her true emotions. She smiled with tears in her eyes, and he saw hope struggle with such despair that he would have fallen to the floor of glittering glass tiles except that his knees locked, keeping him upright. In Shou’s steady gaze Llesho saw that he shared her foreboding and would fight to the last to hold back the terrible fiery dark that awaited should Llesho fail in his quest.

With a flutter of her fingers to signal that they should move on, her ladyship motioned him to the empty throne at her side. Llesho would have preferred a seat next to his brothers, or better yet, to sit by the dwarf at the foot of the goddess. He had lost that choice long ago, however, and took his place among the kings. As was his practice, Habiba went to take up his watch at the side of the mortal goddess, ever in her service. She gave him no overt notice, but a little of the tension seemed to go out of her.

“Your hands are bleeding and rough with blisters, Llesho.” She nodded at his lap, where he had locked all his fingers in one tight fist to hide the damage. “What have you been up to?”

“Rowing a galley, your ladyship.” Llesho took the question as an introduction to the matter of Prince Tayy. He ignored Adar’s gasp of dismay and humbly bowed his head to offer his apologies to Mergen-Khan as he knew she meant him to do.

“Your nephew, Prince Tayyichiut, joined our party as we parted ways with the Qubal people, Lord Khan.” The circumstances, which included the delivery of bad news in front of a room full of kings and the goddess of war herself, made him more formal in his speech than he found comfortable. Comfort, of course, had nothing to do with his present situation.

“We tried to persuade him to stay behind, but he felt it a point of honor to join my cadre’s quest. There was a misunderstanding between us. I took something he had said as a rebuff. With my own feelings wounded, I fear that I offended him deeply. When I realized what I had done, I tried to find him, to make it right with him, but he had already left our company to return home. In the morning we found signs that pirates had taken him in the night.”

At the mention of pirates, Shokar tensed as if he would draw a sword he did not carry in an assembly of kings and in the presence of the goddess. Mergen closed his eyes, as if he could will away the terrible news. After a moment, however, the khan gestured to Llesho to go on. A glance at her ladyship gave him permission to proceed. Llesho took a deep breath and began his tale.

When he reached the part where Marmer Sea Dragon lost his son to an ill-thought wish, her ladyship stopped him with a mournful sigh. Llesho agreed with the sorrowful sentiment.

“I would see this injustice repaired, if it is possible, my lady.” He asked with a bowed head, as a supplicant.

“Give this token to Marmer Sea Dragon, with my promise—” From her girdle, the goddess SienMa took a buckle and put it into Llesho’s hand. “—We will do what we can. It may not be enough, but that is a risk we all share.”

“Yes, my lady.” The weight of it against his open blisters hurt, but only a little. The copper circle had been worked in the shape of a dragon coiled in a loop. He hoped the blood that already marked it from his rough hands did not portend an evil outcome for the young dragon. When he had tucked it into his pocket, her ladyship motioned him to go on.

There was little more to tell. He finished with the news that Master Den now traveled among the pirates as their patron and king.

“You bring us news of brave and worthy deeds,” she said of Llesho’s tale. Musing, she added, “One never knows the intentions of ChiChu, the trickster god, but it seems to me he wanted you on that ship.”

Lluka, who had seemed unaware of the conversation taking place around him, chose that moment to speak out. “Proof again,” he said, “that only fools put their trust in the trickster god.”

Catching his breath in a stifled gasp, Llesho waited for the retribution the mortal goddess of war would rain down on his brother for speaking so in her presence. The tense silence told him the whole room did the same. The Lady SienMa, however, bowed her head to acknowledge that the mad could sometimes speak the truth others would not see.

“In my experience as his pupil,” Shou offered with an ironic drawl, both accepting and dismissing Lluka’s complaint at the same time, “Master Trickster often chooses the hard lesson learned once over the gentle one which must be repeated many times. For example, this business of offering oneself to slavers. As I recall, the last time we used such a ruse in the Imperial City of Shan the point was to free the castle without losing the foot soldier. That lesson might need relearning.”

Shokar coughed to smother a bark of laughter. Llesho never had the time to learn the game of chess, but he understood Shou’s meaning as well as his brother had. Shou had dangled him as bait to find Adar’s owner and buy the prince’s freedom. It turned out that Shokar had already freed his brother, but Llesho had managed to stay off the block that time.

“He might let the pupil in on what the lesson is supposed to be,” Llesho grumbled. “I learned I didn’t like being a slave when I was seven and I don’t know what pirates have to teach me about it that I couldn’t have picked up with a word in the ear instead.”

Mergen-Khan might once have questioned such magics interfering in the lives of men, but he had seen more than he wished in the ger-tent of his brother. His own shaman trusted this trickster, ChiChu, and the Lady Carina, who had learned at Bolghai’s knee as her mother had before her, had traveled with both the Thebin kingling and his tricksy teacher. “The honorable emperor probably has the right of it,” he agreed. “What we are taught is perhaps not as important as what we learn.”

Llesho gave that a moment’s consideration. He had convinced himself he’d learned nothing, but if he accounted for all the time since discovering that Tayy was missing, he’d figured out a lot. He’d thought he already knew most of it, but it turned out that he needed it driven into his head like Shou said.

“I knew Tayy was my friend, but mistook his confidences for rejection of my friendship. So I learned to listen more closely to the actions of a friend than to hasty words, and to question my own understanding when words and actions contradict each other. If I’d questioned him right then, Tayy would have been safe.”

“Quests are never safe,” Shou reminded them all. “You have ridden with danger as your companion since before I knew your name, young king. Prince Tayyichiut would be no less a warrior. He will test his skill against the blades and arrows of our mutual enemies just as your cadre has.”

Stipes had lost an eye. Lling had suffered grievous wounds and Master Markko had controlled her mind in captivity. Hmishi had died and returned as a gift of Mercy, but Harlol had joined his ancestors, murdered by stone monsters who left a black pearl in place of his heart. Llesho carried that evidence of the cost of his quest among the pearls of the Goddess he had collected in a little bag he wore at his throat.

Even Shou had broken, for a time, under the magician’s torments. And Lluka . . . Lluka was a warning of what would happen to them all if they failed. Llesho dropped his head, humbled by the suffering endured in his cause. Her ladyship raised him up again, however, with a finger crooked under his chin.

“It appears to me that you have learned more than this,” she said.

He nodded slowly, conscious of her fingers rising with the motion. With a slow smile, he lifted his hands to show his bloody palms to the gathered rulers and the mortal goddess of war. “I have learned the price of my honor,” he said. “I will bring Prince Tayyichiut home safely, or die in the attempt.”

“It seems you would aspire to be the mortal god of mercy,” Bright Morning teased him gently.

Llesho knew he intended it as a compliment, and returned the smile with a shake of the head. “Not mercy, but justice.” He meant only to say that his actions were no more than Tayy’s due, but the words resonated through him like a forgotten memory.

Bright Morning seemed to recognize more than he ought about how Llesho felt all of a sudden, because he gave a knowing wink that puzzled Llesho as much as the feeling had.

Mergen-Khan studied him like one of Habiba’s specimens, as if the khan was working out some puzzle meant for Llesho himself. Then he let all his breath out in one great release of tension that had held the room in suspense since long before Llesho had arrived.

“Justice. Perhaps,” Mergen-Khan agreed. “A hard-won lesson nonetheless. For myself, I find the pupil has become the teacher. I have learned that true friendship has no limits, even to the sacrifice of life and freedom. And I have learned that the honor of our Thebin ally likewise knows no bounds.”

Mergen rose from his chair and faced Llesho, bowing deeply to show his respect. “You humble me, Holy Excellence. I am in your debt.”

“There can be no debts between loyal friends acting in good conscience,” Llesho corrected him. “I will bring Tayy home safe because he is that friend.”

“That may be a lesson you have to learn as well as teach,” Mergen-Khan suggested. “Free my stubborn nephew to follow his heart because it is your duty to do so. After that, it is up to Prince Tayyichiut where his honor takes him.”

“I guess safe is out of the question, then,” Llesho conceded. For the first time since he had arrived in Durnhag, he saw smiles light the eyes of the gathered company of kings, though his brothers looked worried with it. What they didn’t know about the Harnish prince they could guess by the company he kept.

This would, in normal times, have called for a commentary on Bright Morning’s flutes, but the dwarf kept his hands still and his lips closed. His questioning gaze he turned upon Tinglut-Khan, who watched them all as if he would call up a ward against demons.

“You have said much of monsters and gods and the loyalty one owes a friend, young King Llesho.” The old khan of the Tinglut clan nodded his head to emphasize each point of his argument. “And yet, you say nothing of my daughter. Does your honor stop at the well-being of a friend and useful ally in your coming war with the South? What of a woman who leaves her home to forge alliances with her kindness and her love? What of such a woman, lost in the vast sea of grass, and the brink of war to which her loss brings an honored friend and a potential ally?”

“I would speak of your daughter and cherish her honor as my own, Tinglut-Khan, but I never met her.” It pained Llesho to speak his fears to the father of the missing Har nishwoman, but he could not, in conscience, withhold what he knew. “The woman who sat next to Chimbai-Khan as his wife was no Tinglut but a demon of the underworld with some plot of her own.”

Tinglut-Khan’s face grew red with fury. “And how do you know this, young man?”

“Because she told me so, while I slept on the grasslands on my way to Edris.”

“And you spoke to this demon during your dream travels, as you say you are doing now with us?” Tinglut-Khan asked with disbelief clear in his voice.

Llesho shook his head. “No,” he answered. “In a dream, I knew that the emerald bamboo snake had uncurled from a spiral rune at the bottom of a cup with which the lady had once poisoned me. When I awoke I found that in her serpent form, the lady had wrapped herself against my belly. She hissed my name and in the shape of the false Lady Chaiujin she offered to make me a king among her own kind if I would join her in the underworld. We argued.”

He didn’t tell them what she’d said. “You are a demon, too.” Didn’t want anyone to know until he’d figured out what she meant, or if she’d been lying to draw him under her spell. “She would have killed me where I lay, except that I refused her. Then she slithered away into the grass. I couldn’t find her again after that.”

“This is serious,” the lady SienMa interrupted him. “Did you bring the cup with you?”

“No, my lady. Lling carries it for me until I have freed Prince Tayyichiut.” And now he wondered why he had refused when Lling had wanted to rid herself of the miserable thing. What danger had he left among his cadre because he did not wish to bring it into this company?

Her ladyship accepted this with a thoughtful nod. “Bring it next time. In the meantime, I will ask my witch to discover what he can about this bamboo snake demon.”

Llesho accepted the gentle rebuke. Knowing that Habiba was on the case gave him some measure of reassurance. As he expected, however, Tinglut-Khan dismissed the tale. The Harnishman expressed his disgust with a hawking sound deep in his throat. He looked around for somewhere to spit, and gave up with an irritated growl.

“This is all nonsense. Gods and demons do not consort with homeless kinglings in the light of day. I do not believe half of what you have said. If I did, I would order my armies into this city and burn it to the ground to cleanse the earth of these unholy monsters.”

Bright Morning watched as if he attended some play or entertainment, but the Lady SienMa found his discourtesy unpleasing. Tinglut did not have to believe, Llesho thought, to bring the wrath of the mortal goddess of war down on his head.

“If you are speaking of Master Markko or the demon who has taken the Lady Chaiujin’s place to murderous advantage, all here in this room would support you, and join in your grief.” Her ladyship spoke with compassion. He was, after all, a father suffering a great loss.

Then she added a sensible warning, “When in the house of strangers, however, one cautions a proper respect for the company one finds there.”

It seemed for a moment poised upon a knife blade that Tinglut would object to her ladyship’s rebuke. The khan saw something moving in her eyes, however, that stilled his tongue. War, Llesho thought. Even Lluka kept still.

Tinglut bowed his head. “Like Mergen-Khan, the Tinglut join the young king in learning something new today.”

Her ladyship accepted his apology with a gentle incline of her head.

“I have to go back. Marmer Sea Dragon says that the storm Master Markko has raised will soon grow out of his control and Kaydu can’t do much more than slow it down. The dragon-king has agreed to help us, but he hasn’t yet said how, or if his aid will be enough to turn the tide.”

Llesho asked permission with his eyes and received it when her ladyship held out her hands to be kissed. He rose and bowed to all the gathered dignitaries. Shokar seemed on the point of pleading with him, that if he stayed he might escape the fate of his comrades. Even he, with anguish in his eyes, held his tongue, however.

Rather, Mergen-Khan asked, “Will you do us the honor of leaving from our presence, or do you require privacy for your transformation?”

Mergen had studied with Bolghai the shaman and knew what Llesho must do to return to his ship. For the rest, they had traveled with wonders for many cycles of the seasons now. Tinglut-Khan, however, might need a demonstration to prove the story he had heard. Lives surely depended on the khan believing that the Qubal people had not murdered the daughter sent to be Chimbai’s second wife. With a last bow, Llesho stepped away from the company of thrones into the center of the jeweled room. Slowly he began to run in the tight circle that Bolghai had taught him, gaining speed as he focused on his goal.

Like an anchor the place where he’d begun his dream travel tugged at him and he tossed his head, irritated at the itch of antlers breaching the skin on his forehead. A gasp behind him followed by Tinglut’s guttural voice swearing, “It’s a demon!” almost threw him off his course. He righted himself and lifted, to a litany of Tinglut’s curses and prayers to the ancestors while Bright Morning played a cheerful jig to speed him on his way. As his hooves cut the sky, Llesho figured that the old khan would need assurances, but at least he had seen something of the magical parts of the tale for himself.

In the twilight world of dream travel, he felt the pull of a familiar, malevolent power. Master Markko, his inner vision ever roving, latched onto Llesho and pulled.

“No!” Llesho thrashed against the tug at his soul, felt himself surrounded by the turbulence of the distant storm.

“No.” A deep, calm voice from outside of the dream world agreed. Something scooped him up and tucked him into a pocket of calm, away from the storm and safe from the magician’s madness.

Then he was falling, his shabby slave’s clothes napping in the fresh wind and his arms and legs flailing as he returned to his human shape. The galley appeared beneath him and he fell toward his rowing bench.

“By the Goddess!” Just in time, Singer rolled off the bench where he’d been sleeping.

Llesho fell onto the padded surface with a bone-jarring thump. The spear remained strapped to his back and the knife at his belt, and beneath his shirt the pearls were a familiar weight. But . . . a moment later, her ladyship’s buckle fell out of the sky after him. No pockets. Somewhere in his trek across the dream world, he’d lost his court clothes and landed back where he began in the slave clothes he’d left in. Which had no pockets. He made a grab for the copper token, but Singer, who was shocked but not knocked senseless from his fall, reached it before him.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Eighteen

THE GALLEY bobbed with a gentle warning of the coming storm, which seemed farther away now than when Llesho had left. He figured Pig had kept his promise, returning him to the pirate galley before he left it. The absence of his court clothes seemed to confirm his suspicion. That was good news. The bad news was Singer standing over him with the Lady SienMa’s token in his hand.

“What are you?” The oarsman shook the copper buckle in Llesho’s face. Fear made him dangerous. When he’d gone to sleep, the newcomers had been chained to their bench like the rest of the galley slaves. Even Llesho had to admit that waking to find his bench mate falling out of the sky on top of him was a bit much to take lying down, so to speak.

Common sense warned Llesho to tread cautiously. While his bench mates had managed some rest after their shift at the oar, he’d spent the missing time dream traveling and doing the heavy work of statecraft. He’d had no sleep at all, he was exhausted beyond measure, and Singer had her ladyship’s token. He made a grab for the buckle, but Singer held it out of reach.

It was turning into a really bad day, and Llesho just wasn’t up to any more diplomacy. “I’m the king of Thebin and you’ve got my property there—who’re you?”

He knew his answer would rub a raw spot on his fellow slave. He didn’t have the energy to worry about anything more than getting back the gift her ladyship had sent for Marmer Sea Dragon. Singer didn’t seem inclined to cooperate.

“Well, I’m the king of Shan.” Sarcasm didn’t hurt as much as a punch in the nose, but Llesho still winced.

“Really?” Tayy stirred from his sleep in the well between the benches. “You said the emperor was back in Durnhag, Llesho.”

“He is,” Llesho heaved an irritated sigh. “Our good friend Singer is trying to say he doesn’t believe me. Which is just fine, because I hadn’t intended him to.”

“It’s true, then?” Singer fell to his bench and grabbed hold of his oar as the galley tipped into a small trough. Time and Master Markko’s storm would catch up with them soon.

“Not really.” The rest he’d managed had revived the Harnish prince. Discovering the biscuits in his pocket helped even more. He pulled one out and took a bite.

Relief flashed across Singer’s face as Tayy struggled up out of the well. Anger replaced it quickly, though, at having been made to look a fool with all the talk of kings and emperors.

Then Prince Tayyichiut finished his sentence. “He used to be a prince of Thebin, until the raiders overran the city of Kungol and killed his parents. He was on his way home to reclaim his father’s throne when he was captured by pirates.”

“Not captured,” Llesho corrected him. “I came to rescue you.”

“Nice of you, considering it’s your fault I was captured in the first place,” Tayy answered tartly. Now that it had become clear that he hadn’t been abandoned to his fate he’d cheered up considerably. It seemed he might even be inclined to live.

At that moment, as if to remind them of their situation, the beater changed the pattern of his drumming with a flurry of sound before settling into his rhythm again. Llesho twitched as if he’d been struck by the tip of a lash. He’d become so accustomed to the regular pattern of the drum that it had blended with the sound of the sea and the creak of the oars. He hadn’t really heard it at all until the change reminded him of his position here.

“The call to the next quarter,” Singer explained. He looked off to the horizon, where Master Markko’s magic stirred the haze over the land. “I don’t think we’ll have a full shift of rest. It looks like a storm may be coming.”

“There is.” Llesho followed his gaze, remembering Kaydu standing on the deck with her hand out, holding back the wind. If he expected Marmer Sea Dragon’s aid, he would need to get her ladyship’s token back.

Tayy was familiar with dream travel and in the way of a Harnishman who spent more time than was completely healthy tagging after shaman, recognized the signs of it in Llesho’s answer. “You’ve been travelling again,” he deduced. “Where have you been while the rest of us slept?”

“Durnhag.” He didn’t ask for a bite of Tayy’s biscuit, but Llesho wished he’d thought to grab a snack before he left the palace. Time moved strangely in the dream world. He knew it had been a lot longer since breakfast for him than for the rest of them. “The emperor is doing better, but I am in big trouble with your uncle. And Singer here has her ladyship’s buckle, which is not meant for him.”

“Durnhag? Wow!” The mortal goddess meant little to the Harnish prince. He believed in a different religion and had never met her, but he’d never traveled farther than the grasslands with the Qubal before either. “I wish I’d talked Bolghai into teaching me how to dream travel.”

“He’d have done it if you asked.”

Tayy twisted his mouth up in distaste. “Only if I agreed to train to become the next shaman, which wasn’t an option even if I’d wanted to.”

“I suppose not.” It would have made rescuing him a lot easier, but princes didn’t get such choices. Llesho knew that as well as anybody.

“Uncle?” Singer had listened in stunned silence while they repaired their friendship, but now he brought them back to the point where their story had set him back on his heels. He’d turned an unpleasant shade of green in the meantime, which might have been the effect of the increasingly choppy seas, but seemed more likely the result of the present conversation. Llesho wondered what shade he’d turn when he discovered who “her ladyship” really was.

“Is this some sort of outlander game?”

“No game,” Tayy assured him. He’d met few people in his lifetime who didn’t know who he was, and so he didn’t understand Singer’s disbelief. “Mergen-Khan is my uncle, since my father’s death, the leader of the Qubal people, the greatest clan to wander the grasslands.” His tone of voice said the oarsman really ought to know this last bit at least, but Tayy skittered on to his next thought without looking back:

“If you saw my uncle, were the princes there as well?”

“All four of them.” Llesho thought about what he had seen. “Adar is looking better, but Shokar would like to take me back to his farm and set me among his children, I think. And Lluka—” He stopped, unsure what to say about his brother. Tayy had no such hesitation.

“Watch yourself around that one,” he warned. “His mind travels a dark and dangerous path.”

Llesho didn’t need the warning. Didn’t know what to do about it, but he knew better than to get sucked into Lluka’s reality again.

“If he’s a king, what are you?” Singer interrupted the exchange of warnings with a barely whispered question. His throat seemed to close up around the thought, strangling the words. The rower shifted her ladyship’s token nervously from hand to hand. He probably didn’t want to hear the answer, but Tayy gave it to him anyway.

“Prince Tayyichiut, son of Chimbai-Khan, now dead but during his life the greatest warrior chief of the Qubal clan. Also nephew to the present khan, Mergen, my uncle, as I’ve already mentioned.” He gave a little seated bow to acknowledge the introduction.

“The plan didn’t call for making a public announcement for the pirates to hear,” Llesho complained. With a wary glance at the oarsman, he tucked his weapons out of sight under their bench.

Tayy seemed undisturbed. “We can’t very well keep our escape a secret from him when we are chained together on this bench,” he reasoned, but Llesho wasn’t reassured.

“We could have kept it quiet until we were ready to go. Then he wouldn’t have time to warn the pirates.”

The oarsman, however, had paid no attention to their argument and telling the pirates was the farthest thing from his mind. “I share an oar with a prince and a king?” He shook his head, still unsure whether they were playing a game at his expense. “I would cuff you both on your heads for making fun of your lead rower, except that this one just fell out of the sky on top of me.” He pointed his thumb at Llesho in a contained gesture that took their conversation no farther than their bench.

Llesho responded with a little tip of the shoulder in apology, for what he wasn’t sure except that it did seem to be his fault. Tayy seemed to be pacing his thoughts along a parallel track.

“Did you explain to my uncle it was my fault?” he asked, dropping the thread of what Singer should or shouldn’t know about their escape plan. “Some hero I turned out to be, running off instead of fighting for my place in the quest. And then I allowed myself to be captured by pirates! I should have fought them off—there were only five of them, after all. You were right to refuse my company.”

“I don’t think even Kaydu could take on five armed warriors alone, not and win.” Llesho thought she probably could, actually, but he wanted to salve Tayy’s wounded pride. It seemed the sort of thing a friend would do. “I told your uncle that I overreacted to a misunderstanding and got you in trouble. He seemed to think you were equally at fault, however, and has forgiven everything because of my efforts to repair the damage my foolishness has caused. He’d appreciate it if I got you back out alive, of course.”

“Good of him.” Tayy sniffed. “I still haven’t decided whether I’ve forgiven you.”

He finished his biscuits and looked around for more, but he’d missed his bean soup back the other side of his nap. Singer gestured with her ladyship’s token at the barrel in their well, and Tayy drew himself a cup and drank it down with a satisfied slurp.

“You mentioned a plan,” he reminded Llesho. “When do we escape? I really don’t like all this water.” he gestured over the side to indicate the vast salty body of it, and not the cup in his hand.

At the mention of a plan, Singer scanned the deck nervously, but the pirates had their eyes turned to the stern, gauging the cloud bank moving off the shore. “Don’t even think it,” he warned them. “Since this one arrived,” he palmed the copper buckle and gave Llesho the thumb again, “we have been watched constantly by the pirate king among our captors, and by the new slave who came on board with him after the raid on theGuiding Star .”

“The slave will get along much better if you return that buckle, since it was meant for him.” He didn’t mention the dragon-king’s identity. The reminder of their danger had Llesho craning his neck, however. “It’s Moll and Alph we have to worry about,” he warned them, but he saw no sign of the pair on deck. “Moll paid Stipes six copper coins for me, and she won’t be happy when we slip away.”

Tayy took a quick look around as well. Though Moll had come aboard with Llesho and he couldn’t know her, he had his own experience with the pirates to make him wary.

About Master Den, however, Llesho thought he could reassure them both. “Unless I have been mistaken these past three cycles of the seasons, your pirate king is in disguise as well, and I suspect he’ll have a lecture waiting for us when we are done here.”

“The trickster god is Llesho’s teacher,” Prince Tayy explained to his bench mate, “and even worse than Bolghai about learning by experience. Or I hope that’s the idea.”

“Unless it’s been a trick all along.” Llesho conceded the possibility. “Shou seems to think not, though. The emperor seems pretty sure this is another one of those awful tests the gods are always springing on us.” He didn’t mention Lluka’s opinion which Tayy would have taken contrarily as a good sign.

“Now I know you are yarning stories to pull an old rower’s tail,” Singer objected. “Next you’ll be telling me that you know the dragon who resides at the bottom of this sea.”

Llesho didn’t want to tell him any more than he already had, at least not until he got that buckle back. The stranger who had lately introduced himself as Marmer Sea Dragon had left his bench, however, as if there was nothing unusual about chained slaves wandering about the galley at will. No one was looking in his direction, not even Master Den. With each step the sea itself seemed to calm beneath his feet.

“My Lord Dragon,” Llesho greeted the man with a proper bow, which he returned.

“This isn’t happening,” Singer whispered, burying his head in his hands.

Llesho had no time to comfort him, and Tayy, while willing, came from a straight-talking people. “Of course it is!” the prince insisted. “I never thought I’d meet a dragon in real life, but Llesho always knows the most interesting people.”

“Not for long. Without some help, we’ll all be too dead to know anybody.” Llesho turned to Marmer Sea Dragon, still in human form, with his appeal.

“Holy King of Thebin,” the human form of Marmer Sea Dragon said, “how fares your witch?”

“As well as she can,” Llesho admitted, then explained using the polite form of speech that reminded him to be nervous around such creatures. “Captain Kaydu holds back the wind for the moment, but soon, I think, it will overtake her ship. She stands to lose all hands.”

His cadre would drown, taking with them the only chance he had to rescue Tayy and himself from the pirates or the sea. “I have been in counsel with the emperor and the khans, and her ladyship, the mortal goddess of war, who has sent you a token.”

He didn’t want to tell the dragon-king that Singer had stolen the gift of the Lady SienMa. Fortunately, he didn’t have to. The oarsman dropped the copper buckle as if it were on fire.

Quick as a blink, the dragon-king reached out and snatched the ornament out of the air. He held it to the uncertain light, in which the copper coils of the dragon design stood out sharply. “This is from the mortal goddess of war?” he asked, though he seemed to know what it was and where it came from. His face alternately suffused with color and drained of it, so that he was by turns pale as a ghost and an inhuman shade of green.

“On the other side of my dream, you promised to help Kaydu, the captain of my cadre, who is the daughter of her ladyship’s chief adviser.” He almost offered his guess at the reasons for the gift. On balance, he wasn’t certain they had anything to do with Kaydu or her father at all. He did have her ladyship’s promise, however, which he gave in place of suppositions.

“The Lady SienMa bade me make this promise in her name, that she will do what she can.” For what, he wasn’t certain, though remembering the image worked into the buckle, he might have made some guesses of his own. “She further bade me to warn you that it may not be enough. But, she says, that is a risk we all share.”

Marmer Sea Dragon nodded, though it seemed that he listened to something far off and not her ladyship’s promises at all. Then he flung the copper buckle high out over the water, well beyond reach of the galley. Something deeper than thought stirred Llesho into action, and he would have leaped after it. Tayy caught him by the shoulder, however, and tugged him down into the well between the benches. His eyes never left the copper token, however. He saw it blur and grow like a copper-colored mist, uncurling from its frozen coil of metal and filling the sky as it tried its gossamer wings.

“Father!” the copper-colored mist cried in a voice out of another world, filled with anguish and pain. Then the mist slowly broke up, and with it the image of the young dragon. The buckle, for so it had become again, fell into the sea.

“By all the gods, heis a dragon!” Singer skittered to put as much distance between himself and the dragon-king as his chains would allow. His leg remained shackled to the footboard, however, giving him no way to escape their company. Even Tayy gave a nervous hitch of his shoulder, but he refused to show more fear than Llesho did.

“I’m sorry,” Singer began with a trembling voice, “I didn’t know—” But Prince Tayyichiut, who had survived in the court of the Qubal-Khan, Llesho reminded himself, silenced the oarsman with a warning shake of his head.

With his soul fixed on the distant patch of sky where lately her ladyship’s buckle had become the image of his son, Marmer Sea Dragon had paid their conversation no attention. “What would you have me do?”

The dragon-king turned a set face on the companions in the well. He seemed unaware of tears the slaty blue of the troubled sea falling from his eyes. Llesho would have given him more time to mourn, but he felt the pressure of the storm building in the distance. They didn’t have time to wait.

“As king of the world below the sea you must have the power to block even Master Markko’s raising in your realm,” he suggested.

“I don’t know.” His silent tears had dried, but the dragon-king stared out to sea with the same fixity. Llesho thought his mind must still be reliving the vision of his son released from the copper buckle. Then he heard it. The sound of the wind had changed, growing higher in pitch. Angrier. The galley rocked on restless green wavelets that painted her sides with white foam. The storm crossed the shore in a darkening mass, gathering water as it spiraled out to sea.

“Think of the waves as wild horses and the sea as the herd.” Marmer Sea Dragon explained what they heard with an example familiar to the grasslands. It was easy to picture with the white foam flying like manes streaming out across the gray-and-green backs of the choppy waves. Llesho knew the water, but he figured Prince Tayyichiut would better grasp the nature of the problem that way.

“Imagine that your Master Markko has called down lightning and thunder to stampede this watery herd. The tools he uses will certainly set all in motion, but will the herd go where he wishes?”

“Notmy Master Markko. His quarrel is with Llesho.” With the waves bucking under them like a horse trying to unseat his rider, Tayy did grasp the example, however. So did Singer, who sat stonily looking out to sea as the young prince shook his head.

“Not likely to go where you want,” he agreed. “Not easy to get them stopped again once they’re spooked, either.”

“Now you see the problem,” Marmer Sea Dragon nodded his head and Llesho noticed that his hair was the murky red of seaweed and his eyes the heavy gray of the stormy sea. “The witch has slowed the wind a little and rides ahead of the storm with a firm hand on the reins.”

Llesho heard it as “rains,” which seemed as accurate. In the distance, ominous dark clouds scraped their green-and-purple bellies on the rooftops of Edris, blotting out the horizon.

Marmer Sea Dragon followed his gaze. “Until it runs its course, there is little even I can do to halt it.”

Prince Tayyichiut had spent all of his life on a horse. Llesho had spent most of the past three cycles of the seasons that way, and he’d ridden out many a storm on Pearl Island before that. So it surprised neither of them that the solution came to them both at the same time. Grinning like a madman, Llesho deferred to Prince Tayy with a bow.

“You can’t stop a stampeding herd,” Tayy agreed, “but a good herdsman who knows his way around a horse can turn it.”

“Yes, he can,” Marmer Sea Dragon agreed. “It’s a dangerous maneuver, though, and requires that your witch ride at the very edge of the storm. Even then, it won’t necessarily work.

“If, between us, your witch and I do manage to turn the storm, it will still run very close to her ship and to this galley, which is the course she set.”

“And Master Markko?” Llesho feared the magician would fight them for control, bringing them all to disaster.

The dragon-king shook his head. “He’s too unpredictable. I can’t say what he will do.”

“He won’t stay and fight for control. If all else fails, he’ll escape in the shape of a bird and leave his ship to die.” Llesho had seen him do it before, and he had no doubt he would do the same again if his plan failed.

“No doubt,” the dragon-king agreed. “Many birds fly before the storm and not all of them have feathered souls.”

That sounded like Markko. “What bargain would you make, Lord Dragon, to help Kaydu turn the storm, to save the lives that follow us and the lives on this ship?”

Marmer Sea Dragon looked at him out of eyes of stone, letting his form flicker and melt into scales and horn. “Her ladyship has already made the bargain for my services.”

For his son, though Llesho wasn’t sure if the goddess of war offered the peace of death or knew some way to release the young dragon from his prison of distorted flesh. But he would not have his debt paid by another.

“That is her ladyship’s promise,” he pointed out, “and does not pay the debt I incur on myself.”

Marmer Sea Dragon acknowledged the honor of the request with a tilt of his head in a bow. “Where is Pig?” he asked.

“Pig is here?” Tayy asked, risking a glance over the low side of the galley as if he expected to find the Jinn swimming in the sea. “Will I get to meet him?”

Llesho tugged on the chain at his neck, pulling it free of his collar to show the pearl wrapped round with silver wire.

Marmer Sea Dragon recognized it for the Jinn’s disguise, or his punishment. “Keep him there,” he bargained.

“I’ll try,” Llesho agreed, though he couldn’t promise to succeed. “I don’t command him; Pig comes to me at need, or at the beck of the gods. Until he has undone the terrible harm he has inflicted on you, however, he will have no moment of peace. That I can promise on the honor of my lady wife.”

“That will do.” Marmer Sea Dragon sealed their pact with a deep bow and leaped into the sea. Freed of the constraints of their small boat, he soon reclaimed his dragon size.

“There he is!” Tayy cried out, pointing down into the water. Llesho saw the flash of gleaming green scales alongside the pirate galley, but Singer refused to look.

“Wife?” he asked. And Tayy answered, “You really don’t want to know.”

They were interrupted by an urgent flourish on the drum then, and Llesho escaped the necessity of explaining his promises to the dragon-king. Since he didn’t quite trust Singer with the truth yet, Llesho almost welcomed the emergency.

“Storm warning!” came the call. “All oarsmen, ship oars!”

Most of the benches had kept an eye on the darkness growing in the distance and each immediately snapped to his post.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Nineteen

“WE’RE GOING to race it for landfall,” Singer said. “Our pilot has decided on a course that will take us away from the eye of the storm.” Pointing out what they were to do, he instructed them to bear down with all their weight on the handholds of their oar while he released the stanchion. Free of its chain, the great oar pivoted on the thole. They were off their count; Singer grabbed hold, pressing down on the oar so the blade raised up out of the water.

The beater had set a rapid pace with his drum. Singer held them steady until the bench across the gangway from their own was in position. At the next beat he threw his back against the oar. Since Llesho and Tayy were both new and might lose their pace in a panic, he called the count for them: “Step, step, pull! Step, step, pull!” Llesho would have found the pace torture for his already abused back and arms, but his knowledge of the storm that followed them gave him renewed strength.

“Starboard, hold!” came a call from the stern and all the oarsmen on their side of the galley held their oars out of the water while all the benches on the port side dipped and raised, dipped and raised. “All pull!” came the next command, and Llesho watched Singer, followed his lead to step, step, pull.

The order had turned the galley and they fought their way out of the current that would have dragged them back to shore north of Edris, through the deepest part of the blow. The sea was higher at the boundaries of the current and the work of rowing across it grew harder still. Then they were through and the beater sounded a rest for all hands, chance for a last breath before striking out on their new heading.

During the lull in the galley’s struggle, Singer took a moment to let his young rowers know what was going on. “There are islands all around here. Our pilot will find a sheltered cove where we can lay up until the blow passes.”

Though it was midday, they were beginning to lose the light behind those ominous clouds. The storm was gaining on them, and Llesho didn’t see any islands. He didn’t think they were going to make it. There wasn’t time or breath for more discussion, though; the drummer had picked up the pace again. To lose the beat would mean death—at the hands of the pirates if not the storm—so Llesho straight-armed the oar out over the bench in front, taking the giant steps from footboard to footboard, and fell back again onto the padded bench until he thought the bones of his backside would be pounded to rubble.

Even here, well beyond the gray line of rain as they were, he knew they were losing the race. A fresh wave higher than the rest hit them broadside and the galley heeled over, dropping their port side almost flat to the water. Llesho heard the thunderous crack of an oar snapping under the strain. Men shouted in terror as the oarsmen who had lost their hold flew through the air, caught up sharply by the chains around their ankles. One man, thrown against the thole braces, fell unconscious to the bottom of the boat. His bench mate was flung with such force that he spilled overboard, leaving a severed foot dangling from his chains.

Llesho held on tight. The pirate galley rode high in the water at the best of times and the next wave might turn her over. If that happened, they would be trapped underneath and drown. His first instinct had been to pick the locks on Tayy’s shackles and free his companion. The chains had saved one man on the port side, however; he was already stirring from where he’d been knocked insensible by the wave. It hadn’t been enough to save his companion, however.

There wasn’t time to do anything about it anyway. Already the horizon had disappeared again behind a cresting wall of seawater that swept inexorably down on them ahead of the storm. They had managed to turn their nose around and the galley rose on the great wave’s back this time. Llesho clung to his oar as the sea fell away below them, leaving the bow suspended in the air for a terrible moment. Then they pitched forward, grabbing at their oars while the galley dropped with a dizzying plunge into the trough. The thick spray tossed up by the crashing sea washed over the side, soaking the rowers and leaving behind a wash of seawater to slosh at their feet in the well between the benches.

Llesho shivered in spite of the sweat he was working up at the oars. The low sides of the galley had seemed like a blessing from the god of Mercy himself for the success of his escape plan. Suddenly, however, they had become the greatest danger. Without their shackles to anchor them to the galley, they might be washed away in the next wave.

He’d experienced that contradiction of chains before, so it didn’t surprise him that they might owe their death or their survival to their bondage. Unfortunately, he hadn’t thought to put the chains back on his own leg when he’d fallen out of the sky onto Singer’s bench. The next wave might well sweep him away. He could probably dream travel himself out of danger, but Tayy didn’t have that option. The prince would die in the water he hated and feared.

Escape was out of the question if it meant leaving a friend without even a familiar face for comfort at his death. Sometimes, being a king was harder than others, he had long ago come to understand, and this was one of those times. So he stepped, stepped, pulled. Beneath his feet the well filled up with water while next to him, Tayy, with his reserves of energy already gone, moved only because his hands had clenched in knots around his oar hold and he couldn’t let go.

Overhead, flocks of birds raced ahead of them in long, ragged vees, all following the same road in the sky. Their pilot made corrections to their course, following the winged scouts who must, Llesho thought, find land when sailors searched in vain for any sign to lead them. They pulled, pulled on their oars, afraid that the birds would leave them behind when, suddenly, a great winged beast crossed the sky, heading back into the storm and painting a long dark shadow across the deck as it passed.

“The ancestors fly to battle,” Tayy remarked with a superstitious glance upward.

“Somebody’s ancestor,” Llesho agreed. Neither Mergen nor Shou had such powers of transformation. He didn’t know how the Lady SienMa might travel, whether she could turn herself into a bird or follow the dream-road through time. But she wouldn’t leave in the middle of negotiations, when an ill-considered word might see the grasslands at war with the Shan Empire.

Habiba had traveled both the dream-road and the road of magical creatures before, though, and he wouldn’t leave his daughter to fight the storm alone. Llesho took comfort in the knowledge that Kaydu would have powerful magical assistance from her father as well as Marmer Sea Dragon. Maybe even from Little Brother, if the suspicions he had formed proved true. A monkey god, if such he was, had more of a reputation for mischief than for rescuing hapless travelers, but for Kaydu he might make an exception. Their own fate was not so well provided.

Another of the giant oars snapped in the heavy seas, this time to starboard and far to the stern. Llesho saw the rowers flutter like birds with arrows in their breasts, though they seemed to come to rest with all their limbs intact.

“Stow oars! Stow oars!” The wind had risen so that they couldn’t hear the call from the stern. Pirates stationed at short distances from one another along the gangway passed the order down the ship, however, and gradually the oars came to rest. Llesho thought that they would tie the oar above the waterline using the stanchion as they had during their break, but Singer showed them how to tuck the oar up along the side and lash it out of the way.

This had to be done in order, so that their oar would rest above that of the bench in front of them and below that of the bench behind. Then Singer grabbed onto the stanchion chain and told them to do the same. Together they huddled on their bench, trembling with fear that they would be cast into the sea with a leg torn off at any moment, or capsized and drowned as they fought against the chains that dragged them down.

“We’re not going to die, are we?” Tayy’s voice shook, and Llesho flung an arm around his shoulder, as much for something to hang onto in the galley as to offer comfort.

“I don’t think so,” Llesho said, but inside he was wondering about Master Markko, with the greed of a failed magician and the captive spirit of a dragon-lord twisting his flesh out of true. They were still on the outer edge of the typhoon, but it felt like they were plunging into the very heart. He tried not to think about how much worse it must be where Kaydu was.

“Can you find out?”

“I don’t exactly have a silver bowl of still water handy.” He didn’t mean to snap, but they’d just plowed through another trough and he was feeling sick as well as terrified.

Tayy looked at him with misery and threw up at his feet, too paralyzed with fear of the violent seas to hang his head over the side. Which was probably smart and made their bench smell no worse than the one in front of them, where the rowers were taking turns emptying their guts. Llesho figured in about ten seconds he’d be in the same position, with his head between his legs. It had been a lot longer since he’d eaten, but he expected the last water he’d drunk to make a reappearance real soon.

Tayy was persistent in spite of his illness, however, and he made Llesho listen. “If Kaydu doesn’t turn the storm, it’s coming right down on top of us, isn’t it?”

“Probably.” He was swallowing seawater in big unwelcome gulps, praying to all the gods he knew that they wouldn’t head down one of those troughs and not come up again.

“Then don’t you think you ought to go and help her?”

“I came to rescue you.”

Master Den’s huge frame loomed over them suddenly. The trickster god looked ragged and waterlogged. His red-and-yellow-satin pants, rimed with salt, clung to his tree-trunk legs and salt water dripped from his lashes onto his thick lips.

“I think he should go to Kaydu,” Prince Tayyichiut informed the trickster god. “If she fails, we all die!”

“Of course, you’re right,” Master Den agreed.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do there!” Llesho shouted over the wind.

“If you don’t think of anything more useful, you can always bail water.”

With that, the trickster god picked him up under his arms as if he were a toddler and threw him into the sea.

“Llesho!” Prince Tayy’s watery voice came to him from above the sea, but Llesho was sinking, sinking. Under the surface the sea moved in restless undulations, but he remembered old lessons and rode the surge effortlessly. He held his breath as if he’d never left the pearl beds and looked around, orienting himself by the movement of the seaweed and the direction of the fish who passed him indifferently on their fishy way. Then, underwater, he set his destination in his mind and started to make the motions of running on the land. He barely held his own against the sea pushing him away from the land, but he could feel the change coming and he leaped, scrabbled, found the deck and skittered across it. A rope snaked across his vision and he grabbed it as he slid down the wet and tilted surface until he caught up hard against a hatch cover that dug into his ribs like a knife.

 

 

 

“Get under cover!” Bixei appeared at the hatch and grabbed at him, pulling Llesho through and latching it tight behind him. They stood in a patch of calm belowdecks while the wind howled like a mad thing over their heads.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to help.”

Bixei shook his head, but opened another hatch that led them deeper into the bowels of the ship. They dropped through into a hold knee-deep in water and lit by one dangerously swaying lantern. Sailors milled in the darkness, sorting themselves into a line.

“Take this.” Hmishi handed him a bucket full of water and when he turned around, Bixei was already gone.

“Where’s Kaydu?” Llesho shouted above the sound of the sea and the wind pummeling the ship. “I came to help turn the storm!”

Lling took his bucket. “Do you know how to do that?”

Without breaking the rhythm of the bailing line, Hmishi thrust another bucket into his hands. Llesho passed it off to Lling, who handed it to a sailor who handed it to Stipes. He didn’t, actually, know how to help Kaydu, so he took the next bucket Hmishi slapped into his hands and moved it along.

“I saw Habiba on deck, but he looked exhausted just from fighting the storm to get here,” Bixei mentioned as he sloshed by with half a dozen empty buckets slung by their handles over his arms.

Llesho grabbed a full one from Hmishi, moved it on, took the next one. “Marmer Sea Dragon has offered to help, but the storm is out of control. He says that Master Markko started it.”

“As usual,” Hmishi growled. “He spends all of his time scheming about how to create a disaster, but he never bothers to figure out what to do with it, or how to calm it back down when he doesn’t need it anymore.”

Which did about sum it up. Llesho moved another bucket up the line. As far as he could tell, they weren’t making any progress lowering the level of water in the hold. Good seamanship kept them running ahead of the wind, but heavy seas washed over them, spilling through the chinks in the decking to the holds below. Gradually, in spite of the bucket brigade, the ship settled lower in the water.

“Here.” He handed off his bucket and slipped out of line. Wiping the blood from his reopened blisters on his pants legs, he headed for the hatch. He wasn’t sure what he could do on deck, but it had to be more than this.

 

 

 

The wind nearly took him over the side when he stepped out on the deck. As he skittered down the slope of the listing ship, he reached for a handhold and missed. His legs went over the side and he scrabbled frantically for something to grab onto. Whipping by the deck rail, he managed to get an arm around it before he went flying out over the water. He hung on tight with his legs dangling in the air.

“Pig!” he called. “Pig!”

A set of piggy fingers wrapped around his collar while another set grabbed him by the seat of his pants and hauled him back on board the ship. “What do you want?” Pig asked. Neither the wind nor the thundering waves that washed over them troubled the Jinn’s easy stance on the canted deck.

“Where’s Kaydu?” That wasn’t what he’d meant to say when he called out to the Jinn, but he’d already accomplished his main purpose; Pig had prevented him from washing overboard. The Jinn had missed a good opportunity to blackmail a wish out of Llesho, but the idea didn’t seem to upset him much.

“The good captain is at the stern, lashed to a mast. Her incantations have held the storm at bay. She would not have held much longer, as her strength was failing, but help has arrived to save the day.”

Llesho didn’t know if that meant Habiba or Marmer Sea Dragon, or even Pig himself, but the question of “who” came second to the warning he had come above decks to issue. “We’re taking on water,” he shouted over the howling of the wind and the crashing of the water. “I don’t know how much longer the ship will stay afloat!”

“That is a problem,” Pig agreed. He was turning a sickly shade of green, which was a strange sight on a large black pig. “Nevertheless, this is just the very tip of the storm, which will wash us all before it as if we were mere specks in the maelstrom.”

That seemed a bit more elaborate an explanation than the moment required, but Llesho got the point. Why worry about the water in the hold when they would be washed off the decks or smashed to splinters up against some reef? They were all going to die.

Not if he could help it, though. Determinedly, Llesho made his way to the stern, clinging to Pig as to an anchor. Habiba had moved out onto the gallery. He stood exposed to the sea with his hands spread wide, calling down his spells and incantations to the wind and the water and the earth itself.

As Pig had described, Kaydu stood on the deck, frozen in a position of supplication, her hands also held wide. The ropes that held her fast to the mast had stretched with repeated soaking from the waves, so that she was battered against the spar one minute and flung off the mast at the next. She held her arms out steadily, but her eyes had lost the sense of an intelligent presence behind them. She chanted her spells mechanically, the way a clockwork blacksmith might hammer out the hours on an automaton.

At her feet, Little Brother clung to the mast, his wizened face solemn, his eyes bright and alert as he took in all the surrounding chaos. With the wind and the high seas, he should have been swept from his perch the moment he set himself down there, but the sea seemed never to touch him.

As if he felt the weight of Llesho’s thoughts on him, Little Brother pulled back his lips in a wide monkey grin. By a trick of vision it seemed that two creatures sat in the same place, one the monkey that had traveled with them from the reaches of Farshore Province to the very brink of disaster on the stormy sea. The other, an old man, seemed to sit huddled at the foot of the mast. His eyes were dark as Little Brother’s. A bristly gray beard covered his chin and his long, flowing gray hair fell from a topknot almost to his elbows. The avatar of the monkey god met Llesho’s gaze and grinned, becoming again the monkey that remained at the foot of the mast even while the graybeard had appeared like a ghost around him.

Llesho shook his head, afraid that the near spill into the sea had damaged his eyes, or his perception. The old man was gone, however, leaving only the mystery of how the monkey escaped the perils of the storm. It seemed unlikely that he would solve the puzzle while the ship threatened to sink at any moment, though, so he stepped out, hazarding himself to the wind, and called upon Marmer Sea Dragon.

“Lord Dragon!” he called, “I have come to help turn back the storm!”

No answer came, and Llesho felt the cold touch of despair freezing his heart. They would founder under the great mountains of water that rose up around them. He had done this, bringing his friends out on the terrible sea to die. With their deaths, the quest would end in failure. Thebin would remain under the despotic rule of the Harnish raiders and the very gates of heaven would fall. All because of an unthought word spoken in hurt and in haste to a friend. The enormity of the outcome of so small a mistake stole his breath and drove him to his knees.

“No!” he shouted, and recalling that a failure of manners had brought him to this place, he replaced the angry words he would have spoken with a plea. “Please! I know you are doing all you can to help. But they don’t deserve to die for what I’ve done.”

“No, they don’t,” Pig agreed.

Llesho had forgotten the Jinn’s presence, but now he weighed the cost of another, potentially dreadful mistake. Pig had great powers, but they were held in check by one condition. He couldn’t do anything unless someone made a wish.

No one had ever confused a Jinn with the mortal god of mercy. Wishes came with a price every bit as dreadful as the wish was grand. He figured that wishing away a storm of this size was a pretty grand wish, and didn’t figure he’d survive the price. On the other hand, it didn’t look like he was going to survive the storm either.

He turned, took a deep, wet breath to shore up his courage, and Pig said, “Don’t do it. My lady, the Great Goddess would have my head boiled for her dinner if I gave you a wish. She would bar me from her gardens forever, and they need me.”

“Is there any other way?” he asked. Llesho knew the difference between the instructions that a spirit guide might rightly give and the exercise of a Jinn’s powers to grant wishes. Once before, Pig had led him into the hills where he had freed the Holy Well of Ahkenbad and gained the pearl that was Pig in his disguise—or banished form. It hadn’t been the working of a wish, but it had served the purpose.

Pig, however, shook his head. “You are where you need to be,” he said, which was information at least if not more help than that. “I can’t do anything else without jeopardizing my own position in heaven.”

Llesho stared back across the sea to the shore from whence they had come. He was thinking not of Edris or the grasslands, but of Thebin and the gates of heaven hidden in the mountains high over the Golden City.

“I need to save my wish,” he realized. “I’m going to need it on the mountain.” To fight the demon Master Markko had raised, he meant. Pig understood, gave a lift of a shoulder in a shrug as if to say he didn’t know, but wouldn’t risk his own fate for stakes as small as the lives of Llesho’s friends.

Marmer Sea Dragon was there, however, sliding like moon-glow beneath the water. Llesho knew the way of dragons, that they might appear as small as a human being or large enough that four armed soldiers might walk abreast down their backs. So it didn’t quite surprise him that the sleek worm gliding across their stern was longer by far than their little ship.

There was a hatch on the aft deck as there had been amidships. It opened against the wind, so that it opened only with difficulty. Llesho slid through and the storm slammed it closed tight behind him. He managed to secure it with only a brief spill of water following him onto the quarterdeck and made his way to the captain’s cabin. There the shutters were closed tight, but a door let onto the gallery where Habiba had taken his stand against the storm. Llesho joined him on the narrow walk. He said nothing to distract the magician, but found the gate in the rail and passed to the outer side. Nothing protected him from the sea now but his faith in the dragon-king.

As if he’d been waiting for this very act of trust, Marmer Sea Dragon glided to a halt and raised his immense green head. Llesho craned his own head back on his neck, watching Marmer Sea Dragon rise and rise and rise out of the sea until the worm towered over the ship’s naked masts.

The dragon-king’s body created a little oasis of calm between them in the stormy sea, and Llesho bowed with appropriate respect to the great green king.

“My Lord Dragon,” he said, confident that the creature would hear even a whisper in his own domain. “I am no great herdsman, but I have ridden from Farshore Province across half the known world to this place, and I would ride in defense of my comrades and the great Marmer Sea that is your home.”

The dragon smiled, a terrifying sight in such a creature. Standing rows of teeth big as glaciers stood guard in a mouth from which smoke lazily drifted past a red carpet of forked tongue. Llesho held his ground, however, and bowed to show that he meant no disrespect by the request.

“We will see how good a seat you have,” Marmer Sea Dragon agreed. He didn’t reduce his size, but dropped into the sea so that his great snout sat level with the gallery. For a moment Llesho wondered if the dragon-king meant him to walk down his gullet and ride to battle against the storm in his belly the way Mara the healer had traveled in Golden River Dragon’s gut. But Marmer Sea Dragon dipped his nostrils into the sea, making a gangplank of his nose.

Llesho walked up between the dragon’s eyes, clambered over his great eye ridges, and reached the top of the monstrous dragon’s head, between sharp curved horns like a gate of bone. Looking around him, Llesho found a hump like a third eye protruding out of the dragon’s forehead. He remembered the dreaming-room between the horns of Stone River Dragon, where the dream readers of Ahkenbad had read the future in the sleep of pilgrims.

Green scales, each longer than Llesho was tall, overlapped in a protective glittering pattern that covered the head and back of the dragon. Llesho’s trust had been abused on this leg of his quest, first by Master Den and later by Pig, making him question his judgment in allies. But he did trust Marmer Sea Dragon, at this moment and in this situation. The great worms had their own sense of time and purpose, and they could hold grudges long enough to wear down mountains. But if a dragon-lord made a bargain, you could trust him to keep to it. Llesho pushed at a scale until it shifted enough to expose a hollow depression like the cave he remembered at Ahkenbad.

“Be my guest,” the dragon rumbled.

Tumbling inside, Llesho found again the strange veins of light that crossed everywhere in the bony knot that formed the cave. In Ahkenbad, the dream readers had placed a pallet against the rocky wall, but here a bed of seaweed spread a thick carpet between the horns of the dragon. At the center of the cavity, a spur of bone like a saddle rose out of the cavern floor.

Llesho undid his belt and wrapped it around the base of the bone spur. Then he settled his feet on both sides, using his belt as reins, to keep him in his place. He had no illusion he could control the dragon’s flight from here, but he hoped not to fall into the sea.

“Take a deep breath.” The words rumbled through the cavern of bone. With no more warning than that, Marmer Sea Dragon dived.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Twenty

WHEN LLESHO came up with his big rescue plan, he’d expected to use his skills underwater to save Tayy’s life. This wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Water was pouring into the tiny cavern of bone above the dragon-king’s forehead, though, so he held his breath and clutched his makeshift reins until his knuckles whitened. The dragon plunged deeper and deeper into the sea.

They were diving below the storm. When they reached a layer of calmer water, the dragon turned in a great curve and headed back toward Edris. Vivid images flashed through Llesho’s mind: the sea boiling in angry rivers up the narrow streets turned the city square into a deep salty lake. Swift-running currents swept away buyers and sellers along with all their wares: priceless silks clung to cheap tin pots caught on the horns of cattle trying to keep their heads above water. Human hands reached out of the flood, begging silently for rescue as the torrent carried them away to their deaths. Little boats that might have helped them lay shattered against upper-story windows, now even with the flood.

Far inland, roof tiles torn off by the wind fell many li from where they had started, amazing the terrified horses who fled across the grasslands to escape the storm. And everywhere Llesho’s gaze fell, the rain tumbled like an angry quicksilver wall.

“It’s too late to help them now,” a voice echoed in his head.

Llesho couldn’t answer without breathing, and he couldn’t do that while the cavern in which he traveled was full of water. But the questions formed and clashed inside his head, created equally of surprise and guilt. “How?” he thought, the dragon’s words clear in his head.

And, “Why?” In his dream travels he had visited Durnhag and returned before he left with the idea of turning the storm. Why hadn’t he traveled farther back, before Master Markko had shaped the storm with his mind and the sea? Llesho could have stopped all that death . . . though he didn’t quite know how.

“We don’t always get to choose.” The voice of the dragon echoed in his head, resonating to something that Dognut had told him just weeks ago, though it seemed like forever since they had bargained over Hmishi’s life. Fate ran a certain way, and changing it always had consequences down the line. Maybe Master Markko had played with fate when he raised the storm, or maybe fate had used him to do its will. Llesho was about to take the same risk in turning the storm. He didn’t think he was meant to die now, however, when the end of his quest seemed within reach. Edris would suffer through the terrible storm. Many would perish on land and at sea, but he had to believe fate intended him to stop the end of the world or he would give up and breathe water where he sat.

“Good choice,” the dragon-king approved his decision to keep his mouth shut and stay alive. They were rising now, and Marmer Sea Dragon warned him, “Hold on tight,” as water started to drain from the bony cavern.

“Now!” the dragon’s voice boomed through the cavern. Llesho clamped his hands over his ears and realized that he hadn’t just imagined that the sound came from outside his head. A driving wind rose from unseen passages blocked off during their dive. Suddenly water exploded through an iris at the front of the cavern, forced out in a geyser that must reach high into the air as they neared the surface.

“Help!” Llesho grabbed the bone spur he had used as a saddle, but he was lifted out of his seat, flung aloft by the powerful wind whistling through the cavern.

“Hold on!” Marmer Sea Dragon snapped at him.

Llesho tightened his hands around the spur while the wind swept him end over end, so that his legs stretched out in front of him, drawing him into the storm with the water spout.

“I can’t!” he screamed. He’d lost all sense of feeling in his hands. Already bloody and blistered from his time at the oar, they couldn’t hold him any longer. One finger slipped, another, another. He felt the air go out of him in a defeated sigh as strength failed him. His hands opened, the wind took him, and he flew, out of the cavern, into the air.

To be plucked out of the spume by a hook of horn growing out of the joint on the dragon’s wing that would have been an elbow in a human. They had come to the surface behind the storm which was moving slowly away from them now. To their rear, Llesho could see the shattered wreckage of the port. Ahead, the relentless lashing of the wind raised the sea into great towering mountains that met the banks of evil green and blue-black clouds on every side. Rain pounded at the troughs in slanted sheets, blending air and water in one turbulent essence. Only the angry white foam that capped the waves and ran away down their sides marked the dividing line between the sky and the sea.

“Try to stay put this time,” Marmer Sea Dragon advised, and dropped his passenger back into the bony cavern between his horns.

Llesho caught hold of his belt, which had remained fast to the bony outcrop where he had tied it. Then the dragon-king stretched out his great, scaly wings. They flew, so high that they soon looked down on the violent, many-armed disk of the typhoon. It was quieter up here. Amazingly, Great Sun still chased his brothers across a blue-and-yellow sky while below the clouds turned in a huge spiral dance of death.

Over the many li his quest had carried him, Llesho had seen a myriad of things that had frozen him right to his soul in horror. Magicians in the shapes of mythical creatures had made war above his head. Golden Dragon Bridge had come to life, throwing Master Markko’s troops into the river and swallowing whole his healer, the aspirant Mara. Master Markko himself had raised stone monsters from the very ground, murderous, unkillable creatures that ate the hearts of warriors and left bits of stone in their places. Nothing, however, had inspired him with as much awe and terror as that great, ferociously wheeling storm.

“By the Goddess,” Llesho whispered, overcome by the sight spread out as far as he could see. “How can we stop such a monster!”

“We can’t,” Marmer Sea Dragon agreed, “but we can, perhaps, turn it a bit.”

Llesho shook his head as if he could clear it of the terrible sight and deny his part in it at the same time. He would do whatever he must, of course, but for a moment, he gave in to the human need to deny the enormity of what he must do. The dragon-king couldn’t see the gesture, of course, but read the answer as he had read all of Llesho’s thoughts and moods in the chamber between his horns. He didn’t say anything about Llesho’s part in bringing such violent death to the Mariner Sea, however. Rather, he cautioned Llesho against taking on too much blame.

“However it happened, you were bound to cross the Marmer Sea in search of your brother-prince, and the magician was bound to follow you,” he said. “Blame yourself for the suffering of your friend Tayyichiut, whose back has felt the lash by your actions. But this storm, and the upset that it brings to the sea and the shore, belongs to him who follows you, and to the Jinn who set the madman in motion to reward an ill-considered wish.”

Llesho felt in his bones the truth of the dragon’s words, but they didn’t make him feel any better.I could have stopped this, he thought, and imagined Master Den’s response to such a claim. The trickster god would smack him on the back of the head and warn him against using guilt as false pride. Which was probably true and didn’t change anything.

“What can I do?”

“Pray,” the dragon-king answered.

It sounded, at first, like an insult, that Llesho could be no help but must stay out of the way. Dragons were a respectful species when it came to the spirit, however. They were, after all, creatures of the sky, where the celestial kingdom lay, as well as of the water. Marmer Sea Dragon wouldn’t taunt him with the Way of the Goddess. There was something . . .

Llesho closed his eyes and began to move through the motions of the prayer forms. “Red Sun.” He stretched to honor Great Sun, which shed a golden light on the tops of the billowing clouds. As he stretched his arms in the up-reaching circle, he shaped in his mind the memory of the gardens of heaven. The light there flushed the sky with a diffused glow that never changed. Moving into the “Twin ing Branches” form, he called to mind the wild profusion of plants and tangled weeds that had overrun the heavenly gardens. And in this moment of great need, it was the plain and graying beekeeper he conjured in his mind.

Suddenly, he was there in the heavenly gardens. Disoriented from the shift across space and dimensions, he sprawled on his knees in front of a tree with a bees’ nest in it. The Goddess had appeared to him beneath this very tree on his first dream visit to the heavenly gardens. She was waiting for him now in the same place, with the netting tucked out of the way over the crown of her wide-brimmed hat.

“Llesho?” She bent to touch his shoulder, lifting him up. “What has happened?”

“I don’t know how I got here,” he answered with a deep bow from the waist. “But the quest is in grave peril.”

Briefly he repeated the story of Tayy’s capture and their ill-fated struggle with the storm. When he had finished with Marmer Sea Dragon’s instructions to pray, she nodded as if none of his words surprised her.

“I know the lesson Master ChiChu wished to teach with this prank, and you have surpassed all our hopes. This time, however, our trickster friend risks too much.”

Master Den seemed the chief target of the Goddess’ anger. She brushed aside Llesho’s own confession with a gesture as of a broom sweeping away his objections. “You have learned your lesson from that mistake and taken action that cost you dearly to correct it. What point in bela boring it now?”

Mergen-Khan had said as much, and honored him for his sacrifice. It humbled him to know that he had not fallen in the eyes of his blessed wife, the Great Goddess. For himself, however, only success would free his heart of the burden it carried. That meant defeating the storm before anything else.

“Marmer Sea Dragon seems to believe I can do something to help him turn the storm. I think he sent me to you to find out what it is.”

“I’ve seen this storm from my window.” For a moment sorrow clouded her brow, and he wondered how much she knew of what he had seen, and what he had begun to guess. He didn’t ask that question—figured he’d have to survive to find out the answer—but waited until her terrible, bright eyes cleared.

“It’s simple, really.” The beekeeper briskly dusted off her hands, as if she could dismiss the worries that bloomed on her brow as easily. With an encouraging smile she touched his shoulder. He was back with Marmer Sea Dragon again, looking out on the terrible circle of devastation below them with her voice still in his ear: “Follow my Way, and the storm must do likewise.”

“Where have you been?” the dragon-king asked.

“Praying,” Llesho answered, and moved into the next form, “Flowing River.” He felt the currents of the sea in his bones, and the way the storm seemed to touch and lift, touch and lift as he skittered along its flowing path.

“Wind through Millet” followed. Arms even with his shoulders, legs bent, he felt the wind pass through his limbs as he swayed, sweeping his weight from the back leg through his body and onto the forward leg, then farther, carrying the back leg through the move so that it became the fore. He envisioned the wind as it passed through him and answered the call of it, drawing him down into the storm. The wind and the rain and the clouds became a part of him. The wildness, the violence of it, took root in his heart and with it the need for motion and speed and the flex of muscles, gripping and tearing and turning end on end everything in his path. As he swept along with the storm, he felt stronger than he ever had, more powerful and more free. He rebelled against the memory of Pearl Island and the reality of the past day at the oar, and more shockingly, he tore and shrieked against the demands of his quest that bound him more surely than any shackles.

He felt the stamp of Master Markko’s mind somewhere in the sprawling arms of the typhoon, feeding the great spinning disk with the press of his fear and desire. The magician became aware of his presence, clutching at him in desperation. He had lost control of the storm, but still he rode within it, carried along as in a herd of stampeding horses. He would have pulled Llesho in with him, but already he had exceeded his reach. His prey slipped out of his grasp.

Habiba’s touch brushed against Llesho’s senses, and Kaydu’s. The storm paid them no heed. Its vast disk turned faster and faster as it closed on the tiny ship. Llesho shared its longing for the splintering of masts and the crashing of spars into the sea—a longing that the magician fed with his insanity.

Chaos. The storm reached to gather chaos in the curve of its vast spiral arms. Llesho turned in its grip, no way out, wanting none, and found an eye of quiet. At its center, Marmer Sea Dragon rested with his head propped up on the coils of his body.

“Is this what your Lady, the Great Goddess, intended of your working?” he asked, curious, it seemed, but not judging.

Llesho stared at him out of the storm’s eye, as if he’d never seen the dragon-king before. “What do you want?” he asked. Even the storm knew its king.

“My son,” he said. “For the moment I’ll settle for a hope that the world won’t end tomorrow.”

That meant nothing to the storm, but Llesho reached for the worm’s presence in the world outside the storm. “My Lord Dragon?” he said.

“King Llesho?” The dragon-king asked back.

“Yes,” Llesho realized. And then he knew what he had to do.

Neither witch nor dragon, he had no power to command a storm, nor did any of the prayer forms he had learned address such a need. But he could create a new form, following the Way of the Goddess to a new place on her path. Slowly he began to move in the paces of “Wind through Millet” again. Where the form called for straight arms even with the shoulder, he curved his arms toward his body, gathering the power of the storm within them.

Releasing the new shape of “Wind through Millet,” he stepped out, as if performing “Flowing River” but then folded his knees so that he almost rested on his heels. Instead of shifting his weight from side to side, he turned in a tight circle. From this low crouch his foot lashed out. Ah. Here was the point at which the turning of wind and water had become a combat form.

Master Markko, who wished his way into his powers, had little knowledge of the Way of the Goddess, or how that way was an echo of the natural world. He had no understanding of the form or power of the typhoon he had set into motion but called on the stolen magic of the dragon-king’s son to raise the storm to still greater heights, as if he could overwhelm Llesho with the pure might of wind and water. Llesho, however, had come into his own power with careful training and the grace of the Goddess, his wife of many lifetimes. Khri, his bodyguard, had taught him as a tiny prince in the Palace of the Sun in the Golden City, and he had learned at the foot of his mother’s throne. Lleck had taught him as man and ghost and bear cub. And Master Den had added the formal style of the prayers to the inner knowledge he had gathered from everyone he had touched from the day he was born.

To set against the raw anger of the storm, Llesho created a new prayer out of his body and his soul and the teachings of a lifetime. In the shaping of the prayer he learned the nature of the spinning wind and the greater forces that propelled it forward across the sea. Now he had to find a way to change that course.

Marmer Sea Dragon read his mind and his touch, returned a satisfied “hrmmm, hmmm” whuffling through the passages of his long snout. High above the storm he turned toward a breeze that pressed with no great speed against them, showing Llesho what he knew. The gentle-seeming wind banded all the world of men, never restless but always moving. Storms might cross it, sunlight might stir it, but the breeze was always there. Gentle clouds of midsummer and the storm that circled in on itself were both propelled forward by this breeze.

Llesho understood. In the prayer form he created, “Gen tleness turns the storm,” Llesho touched here, there, and the breeze shifted. At its heart, the storm continued its rampage, gobbling up the ocean in its path and emptying it back again in angry torrents. But gradually, gently, and from a distance, the breeze turned the storm.

At first the new path seemed no change at all, a single footstep off its former route that Master Markko, caught in the violence circling outward from the calm center, didn’t notice. Then, the typhoon seemed to take another step, and another. The gentleness of the breeze, aspiring not to destroy the storm but to guide it, succeeded where the force applied by the contesting wills of magician and witch could not. The great wheeling disk veered away from Kaydu’s ship. Its new path would take it more li out of the way of the pirate galley.

He sensed the easing of Kaydu’s spells, and those of her father, as they felt the changing direction of the storm. Master Markko, too, felt the shift. Screaming with rage, he seized upon the storm and called upon the young dragon bound into his flesh to set the typhoon back on course. Caught within the prevailing pattern of the world currents, however, even a dragon-prince could make no change in the path of the storm. Instead, he fed the storm with his desperation. Its far-flung arms spiraled faster, gathering so much water in its embrace that a man of Edris could walk a li or more onto the sea-bed and never dampen his sandals.

From high above the storm, Llesho watched that writhing, skyborne sea obliterate all distinctions between earth and air and water. In that onslaught, the malevolent consciousness of the magician vanished, swallowed by the very storm he had conjured. Not dead—that would be too much to hope—but Master Markko was gone, and sorely weakened, at least for now, by his struggle. The storm would carry him far out to sea, where Llesho’s prayer form had sent it. With a weary sigh, he fell onto his back in the cushioning seaweed bed that lined the bony cavern between the horns of the dragon.

“You did that well,” Marmer Sea Dragon informed him. “Better than I expected, better even than I had hoped.”

“Don’t you people ever get tired of tests?” It seemed petty of him to be arguing the point while the storm raged harmlessly out to sea. They’d just missed death by a whisper, however, which made Llesho short-tempered.

“I tired of them long ago.” The dragon-king snapped his answer, revealing much of his own temper and pain. “But you can’t expect all the powers of heaven and mortal beings to put their faith in your hands until they are sure you have the courage and the strength to use them properly. And that doesn’t even mention the intelligence to know when to use them and when to keep still.”

Llesho was exhausted and not in the best mood for arguing the fate of all the worlds. It made him snappish as well. “If you had anyone else, you wouldn’t need me, so it seems a bit pointless to pretend there is any choice about it.” Master Markko hadn’t left any of them a lot of options.

“Some fates are worse even than the end of all creation.” Marmer Sea Dragon went very quiet all of a sudden and Llesho figured he’d said more than he was supposed to. Something to do with worse choices.

Then he knew, and oh, by the Goddess, he was too tired to consider it, but he’d figured it wrong all along. He had assumed that the demon laying siege to the gates of heaven would raise the terrible firestorms in Lluka’s dreams, the chaos that ended all the worlds of men and heaven and the underworld. But what if that weren’t so?

What if the gods and spirits had determined to bring an end to all of creation rather than allow the demon to enter the gardens of heaven? He had to figure that the powers of the universe knew as well as he, or Lluka, what awaited the execution of their plan. What could be so much worse than what they themselves intended? And what would they do to him if they realized he knew?

Llesho decided then and there he didn’t want to find out. He thought he was safe for the moment, but the discussion left him feeling like a dragon snack.

“We need to get back to the ship.”

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Twenty-one

MARMER SEA Dragon vented a puff of warm air and salty water through the cavern where Llesho lay in boneless weariness. “Tell ChiChu, if you please, that I’ll be around,” he requested politely. Then he added the assurance, “I don’t forget my promises, especially not to her.”

“Tell him?” Llesho groaned. “You’re not going back?” That meant another run for the dream world. Only he didn’t think he could make it. Exhaustion seemed to be leaking from Llesho’s marrow into the seaweed bed he lay upon, taking muscle and sinew with it, and leaving him no more strength than a fading corpse.

He ached when he considered even standing on his own. The thought of focusing his mind and his legs on the skills Bolghai had taught him left him stunned, as though he’d taken a blow to the head. Since they’d been exploring the matter of choices anyway, Llesho admitted that he seemed to have none here either. So he rolled to his side and pressed his hands beneath him to push himself up.

A gentle breeze drifted through the cavern as the dragon-king sighed through his broad dragon snout. “Lie down, boy.” The sonorous voice gently soothed like a lullaby. “Remember, you had lessons in dream travel at Ahkenbad before you ever set foot in the grasslands.”

In a cavern very like the one in which he now lay, Llesho had traveled in dreams to the gardens of heaven and back. He’d thought it a natural formation of rock carved into the shape of a dragon’s head when he’d first seen the abode of the dream readers. Then Master Markko attacked and the Stone River Dragon woke up.

“Most people sleep and then dream,” the dragon-king gently reminded him. “I think you can spare the time to do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Tayy . . .” Llesho started to object, but the dragon shushed him with a soothing hoo-humm through the cavern.

“There is little you can do without a rescue ship,” Marmer Sea Dragon pointed out. “Your Captain Kaydu must see to the storm damage her vessel has taken before she can come to your Harnish prince’s rescue.

“I don’t think Tayy has that much time.” Hope had give the prince renewed strength, but Llesho knew that wouldn’t last long with the galley receiving such a beating from the sea. He had to get back, if only to reassure the prince that help was coming.

The dragon-king dismissed his concern with a whuffling breath that nearly flung Llesho into the sea. “ChiChu has a use for him yet, I reckon. He may not be comfortable or happy, but he’ll stay alive as long as the old trickster wears the red-and-yellow pantaloons.”

The dragon’s voice eased its way into his thoughts. As a pirate captain, Master Den could see to Prince Tayy’s safety until help arrived. He had to believe Shou was right about Master Den’s intention—a lesson, an adventure, but not murder. It made sense, just like sleeping did. The seaweed bed held him like a soft nest and he was so tired. Llesho felt his eyelids grow heavier still. Suggestion drew him further into the leaden drowsiness that called him to sleep. He found it impossible to resist the low rumble vibrating through the bony cavern where he lay.

“Master Markko!” The thought set his heart to drumming as if he’d suddenly fallen from a great height. His eyes popped open. “I have to find him.”

“Gone for now, driven on the same winds as all the ships before that storm.” The dragon-king answered in the low thrumming tones that were doing awful things to Llesho’s concentration. “Leave that fight for when you have a hope of winning it.”

Which was good advice. Llesho didn’t stand a chance against an angry sparrow in his present state. The magician should be in no better state, though he’d never lacked for allies. What creatures had the magician gathered around him? What powers might they bring against Llesho’s own followers? He didn’t ask the questions out loud, but he’d forgotten that the speaking part didn’t matter with dragons.

“Few,” the dragon soothed, reading his mind as his kind did when a human being rested in the crystal cave between their horns. “Fewer still serve the magician by choice.”

Which was meant to reassure him, Llesho supposed, though it reminded him not only of Marmer Sea Dragon’s power but also of the bargain he’d made. His help in exchange for Pig’s continued bondage. How free were the allegiances of his own company, which included a cadre formed in slavery and allies who bargained for the lives of their families?

“It’s not the same.” But there was doubt in the mind that sought to reassure him.

“I know.” Llesho did know. He just wasn’t sure the difference mattered. In the long run, he and Master Markko both used blackmail to get what they wanted. The difference was the magician held out the threat of death as a punishment for opposing him and Llesho held out the hope of life for those who helped him.

Bitter laughter hummed quietly in the cavern. Llesho got the point. Given a choice, he’d picked life as well. It was a good thought to fall asleep on, so he did.

 

 

 

He expected uneasy dreams to carry him back to the galley immediately. Like Stone River Dragon at Ahkenbad, however, Marmer Sea Dragon had the power to give him dreamless sleep and then to calm his travels in the other realm. It seemed like only a passing reverie at the edge of consciousness that brought him to wake in the well of his rowing bench. As awareness came back to him, he realized that his exhaustion had passed, leaving behind the groggi ness that follows a deep sleep. He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there but figured as dreams went, this one, in which he felt comfortable and rested, was better than most.

The heat of Great Sun fell on his eyelids but he wasn’t ready yet to admit he was awake. Hoping to delay the inevitable questions, he kept his eyes closed and listened to the activity around him. Nearby, he heard Tayy speaking to someone in hushed but determined tones. “He’s to sleep until he wakes, and I’m to watch over him. Captain’s orders.”

“And what’s a six-penny slave to do with the trickster god and patron of all pirates, when this ship needs all hands ashore?”

That was Moll, and Llesho was curious about what Tayy would answer.

Master Den, however, intervened. “He’s a special project of mine who fell into your hands through a combination of bad timing and worse judgment,” the trickster god said. Llesho had a suspicion that his teacher knew he was awake and was using the opportunity to chastise his pupil under cover of the explanation. He was fair enough to add, “Still, it all worked out in the end. Or it will.”

“What end?” Moll had a querulous tongue that grew sharp when others might withdraw into caution. She turned it on the trickster god now. “TheShark is beached well off her heading and you’ve pulled two able-bodied young slaves off water duty. We’ve a far way to go before we can call this voyage ended—their hands would see us on our way that much sooner.”

“TheShark ’s tale has a good way to run yet,” Master Den answered agreeably. “But this is where our young princes part company with it. They have their own tale to spin, and it leads them away from here on their own path. Or it will do as soon as yon laggard greets the morning.”

“Princes? Hah! Every slave’s a prince stolen from his cradle or robbed of his birthright by a sinister uncle. If we start bowing to every scrap with a story, we’ll have no time left for rowing at all!”

“My uncle is not sinister!” Tayy objected. “And he’s robbed me of nothing. The clans elected him fairly because they chose his wisdom over my youth. To gain some wisdom for myself, I’m on a quest.”

“Bah! Quest indeed!”

Moll raised her voice in derision, but Tayy held to his position, admitting only in the spirit of full honesty, “Well, it’s Llesho’s quest, really, but I am determined to help him gain his throne back and repay the debt of honor the Qubal clan owes his line. And so I will guard his life or his sleep, as Master Den says.”

“Fine words for a fine fool,” Moll grumbled.

“But true,” Master Den assured her and laughed. “And a fine job you’re doing, too.”