8

You watched your brother through the night," Ilna said, scuffling gravel with her toes. A tiny black crab scurried to a new hiding place in the gaps between wave-smoothed stones; a castaway from a distant seaweed forest, tossed here like Tenoctris. "How did he seem to you?"

She and Sharina had gone out saying they were combing the beach for flotsam the storm threw up—a chest of silver tableware from a merchantman, or perhaps a chunk of shimmering amber scoured from a fossil tree once buried somewhere far across the Inner Sea. In truth Ilna had come to talk to her friend about the things that had been happening; and perhaps the same was true of Sharina.

"I've never seen anyone sleep so soundly," Sharina said. Like Ilna, she kept her eyes on the beach. "It scared me, but he was breathing all right. He's got a little fever, but Nonnus says that's nothing to worry about; he'd expected much worse."

Ilna looked at her friend. "You trust the hermit, then?" she said.

Sharina met her eyes. "Yes," she said in a clipped tone. "I do."

Ilna nodded and went back to toeing across the gravel. An upturned shell as delicate as a snowflake gleamed against the dark stone. Ilna turned it over, wondering that the five delicate spines hadn't snapped off.

There was a ragged hole in the shell's upper surface; something had gnawed through to devour the animal inside. Ilna grimaced and flung the shell into the sea.

"It was pretty," Sharina said in mild protest.

"Until you look at the other side," Ilna said. She swallowed a sigh. "Then it's like the rest of life."

They walked on. "The woman Garric rescued is a wizard," Sharina said in the direction of her feet. "She spoke a spell over Garric. Right in the open."

"I saw that," Ilna said. She'd felt a creeping coldness in her heart when she looked from the kitchen and saw Tenoctris chanting as smoke rose from the brazier. She'd wanted to say something, but Garric's family was watching as if it were all as natural as daybreak, and the hermit went about his business undeterred. Some of the visitors spoke in shocked whispers, but none of them tried to interfere.

Nor had Ilna.

"I thought wizards did things in the dark," Sharina said in a miserable voice. "I thought they sacrificed babies and called terrible things out of the Underworld. She just burned a piece of kindling and spoke some words. I didn't know what I should do, so I didn't do anything. It seemed so harmless....But she really is a wizard."

"Yes," Ilna agreed. The same thoughts had gone through her mind. The core of her being had decided that she wouldn't interfere with anyone who was obviously trying to help Garric, even if they had been practicing blood magic at midnight. "I knew she was...something. As soon as I touched the robe she came in. The cloth was different from anything in this world."

Sharina nodded absently, accepting the comment as meaning there was something odd about the fabric rather than about where the fabric came from. She didn't question the statement any more than she'd have doubted something Cashel said about the behavior of sheep.

"Nonnus doesn't mind her," Sharina said after a moment. "I asked him later. He said that he doesn't decide what's right for other people, but anyway Tenoctris wouldn't go any places he wouldn't go himself. I think I understand what he means."

She didn't amplify the last comment, any more than Ilna would have tried to explain why the robe felt unusual.

"I'm afraid about the things that are happening," Ilna said softly. She hadn't been sure she was going to speak. The noon sun flooded the beach and the dancing waves, but she pressed her arms close to her sides because her body felt frozen. "I feel it squeezing me and I don't know what to do."

Sharina glanced at her in the sort of blank-faced silence with which one greets a friend's embarrassing revelation.

Something wriggled on the eastern horizon. Ilna straightened up. "That's a ship," she said. "It's too big for a fishing boat."

Sharina shaded her eyes from above and below with her hands held parallel, forming a slit that cut the glare from the water as well as direct sunlight. "We have to get back," she said in a tight voice. "Let's run."

The girls broke into a trot, tunics fluttering about their legs. They'd strolled half a mile north of the hamlet; it seemed much farther, now that they wanted to return.

"It must be a big merchantman that was caught in the storm," Ilna said as her toes kicked gravel behind her. "It wouldn't be putting in to Barca's Hamlet unless it had been damaged."

"It's not a merchant ship," Sharina said. She glanced over, coldly measuring her friend's stride and deciding whether to go on ahead.

Ilna lengthened her pace, knowing that Sharina could outrun anyone else in the hamlet over a distance this long. "It's too big for a fishing boat!" she gasped.

"It has hundreds of oars, not just a few sweeps like a merchantman," Sharina said. "A merchant couldn't afford to pay so many rowers and still make a profit on his goods. This is a warship like the ones in the epics!"