12

Ilna pulled the latch cord with her little finger, then shouldered the door open and entered the main room of her side of the millhouse. Cashel hadn't returned yet with the load of straw beds he was gathering from neighbors, so she dropped the pile of extra quilts on the stone floor.

"Say, it's the princess back and prettier than ever!" said one of the soldiers sitting around the kitchen table. Two of the men stood up when she entered, but none of them moved to help her.

She kicked the door closed herself and said, "What do you do if you don't have a village to stay in? Or don't you get out of the palace most years?"

Fifteen of the Blood Eagles were billeted in the common room of the inn. The remaining ten were in the millhouse, the hamlet's only other substantial building: five on Ilna's side and five on Fedra's.

The Blood Eagles had been bragging to her about their rank and importance in Valles, how in guarding the palace they rubbed shoulders with the top nobility; but they'd arrived at Barca's Hamlet with nothing but the clothes they stood in. The ship's crewmen carried their own blanket rolls, but these proud soldiers would have had to shiver under piles of leaves if the cove had been uninhabited.

"Aw, all that stuff was on the other ships," the youngest of the soldiers said. He was in his mid-twenties, a tall man with pale hair whose ancestry probably involved one of Ornifal's noble houses—though probably not by marriage. "I lost a set of court dress that was worth enough to buy this whole dog kennel."

He waved a dismissive hand to include all of Barca's Hamlet.

"We're not supposed to talk about that, Ningir," said the soldier sitting cross-

legged in a corner of the room, cleaning his inlaid dagger sheath with a piece of soft leather and a stylus. He was twice Ningir's age, scarred and balding above heavy brows.

"Belt up, Mesilim," a third soldier said. "Who died and made you king, hey?"

He looked at Ilna and went on in what he clearly hoped was an ingratiating tone, "We started with three ships. All of us were with the procurator, but our gear was on the other two. There's damned little room on a trireme, just deck and the smell of those monkeys right underneath breaking their backs rowing."

"Zabar—" Mesilim said, a frown beetling his already low brows.

"Hey, belt up!" Ningir said, and aimed a kick at the older man's booted foot. Their hobnails clashed. "You think you got something to say, you go out and say it to somebody who cares, right?"

Because of the way the soldiers were divided, the five billeted on this side of the mill were all equals of the lowest rank. Those with authority had chosen the inn or the sumptuous appointments of Katchin's quarters for their billets.

Ilna smiled as she knelt to check the stew simmering on the hearth for tomorrow's dinner. Those in the inn would be well served, but the men across the partition wall from her had probably already learned to regret Fedra's cooking. They'd be lucky if they didn't find lice and bedbugs as well!

Ilna stood. "You were separated in the storm, then?" she asked. She wasn't an idle gossip like most of the villagers—there was little enough else to do on the days of blustery drizzle that were typical of winter on this coast—but the ship's arrival was a unique event. There hadn't been this many strangers in Barca's Hamlet in living memory.

"Separated!" a fourth soldier said. He mimed drawing his sword across his throat. "Yeah, you could say that. Separated by about a mile of water, or however deep the Inner Sea is where the storm hit us!"

"Aw, Eshkol..." muttered Mesilim. He hunched his shoulders in frustrated anger and pretended not to hear anything further. Mesilim was an old soldier who could execute familiar orders with single-minded determination, but he was obviously too stupid to promote. His younger, smarter fellows ignored his opinion even when he was probably right.

"It was the damnedest thing," Ningir said. He shook his head. "I mean that: that storm came straight out of Hell."

A moment before, Ningir had been just chatting, bragging to a pretty girl in hopes that she'd turn out to be more willing than she'd thus far given reason to believe. With the memory of the storm, his mood had changed completely.

"It was like somebody pulled a curtain up from the sea," Zabar said in a tone of frowning recollection. "Solid black. I've never seen anything like it in my life."

"Neither had the sailors," Ningir said. "There'd been no wind and we were cruising on one bank of oars."

"All three ships close enough we could shout," the fifth soldier said. His hands were crossed on the table and he didn't look up from them. "A pretty day, just it was too hot in the sun is all."

"And it came right down on us, black as a woman's heart," Zabar continued. "I wasn't even looking in that direction. There were seawolves swimming along with us, just off the stern, and I was watching them. Only it got dark and I looked over my shoulder, that fast. And then the wind hit."

Ilna looked at the soldiers, feeling surprise that she kept off her expressionless face. Some of the men were doubtless braver than others, but they were none of them cowards or they couldn't have been members of this elite unit.

The storm had frightened them. All of them.

"A snowbank dumped on me once when I was just a kid," Mesilim said. His fingers continued to rub at the pattern on the sheath, black niello inlay on silver plating. "It was like that again. The wind pressed my chest just that hard."

"The sailors, they were shouting," said a soldier. "You could only tell because their mouths opened. You couldn't hear anything. The raindrops hit so hard they felt like gravel flying."

"The mast bent even though the sail was down," Ningir continued. "The rowers kept us headed into the wind and that's all that saved us. They may be monkeys, but if we'd gotten sideways to that storm we'd have been plowed under in less time than—"

He snapped his fingers.

"—that."

"The wizard Meder says he saved us," Eshkol said. His hand continued to rub a cloth over his swordblade, but he was no longer really polishing.

"Wizard, Meder?" Zabar said. "I don't guess he's really anything more than the procurator's fancy boy!"

Eshkol shook his head. "Don't you believe it," he said. "Meder may be a kid, but his family owns thirty square miles of Northern Gainstup Parish. Whatever he is, he's not selling himself for some old lady's bedwarmer."

"How does he claim to have saved the ship?" Ilna said. "What was it he did?"

Her mind concentrated unexpectedly when the discussion turned to wizardry. It was like feeling a knife twist in her hand toward a lodestone. Perhaps she was reacting because of how she'd felt when she touched the castaway's robe. The silk had awakened something in her.

"They'd been under an awning, him and the procurator," the soldier explained. "It went with the first gust. Meder bent down so the mast was between him and the worst of the wind and scratched something on the deck with a copper knife. I guess he was chanting, too."

"I looked on the boards the next day," Ningir said. "There were marks but they weren't real words."

"They're not for people to read, they're for gods!" the fifth soldier snapped. "Or demons, more likely. If he really is a wizard."

Ilna thought about Meder. Him a wizard? Yet no one could have looked less like a wizard than Tenoctris in a patched woolen shift. Her incantation had clearly helped save Garric's leg and perhaps his very life.

"All I know," Eshkol said stubbornly, "is that the ship on the right broke up like it was eggshells, and then the one on our left went the same way. Nothing left of them but foam, and I saw an arm try to grab air. But we made it through, and the whole time Meder sat there chanting."

"Did it seem to anybody else that things looked sort of red during the storm?" Ningir said. "I mean, not real red but sort of rosy?"

"That's right," the fifth soldier said to his hands. "Like we was stuck in a block of pink quartz. I shut my eyes but I still couldn't keep the light out."

"There wasn't anything like that," Zabar said. He looked at his companions in growing consternation as he realized they had seen something happen to the light. "I was on deck the whole time. Lightning was all, and that wasn't red."

"The wizard did it," Mesilim said from the floor. Everyone stared at him. Blinking, the old soldier went on, "There was light. After the first ship sank, and more when the second one went down. He's a wizard. It was magic just like at the Stone Wall, only this time on our side."

Ilna stood in the cold silence, looking from one soldier to the next. At last Zabar shivered and said to her, "Say, beautiful, what's it take to get a drink around here?"

"Right," said Eshkol, thrusting his sword back in its sheath with a clack. "Any chance of wine?"

"There's wine at the inn if you want to pay for it," Ilna said. She too was glad for the break in the mood, though a part of her that she didn't recognize squirmed regretfully to leave the subject of wizardry. "I don't know the prices. And there's more beer at seven coppers a bucket, that's half one of your Ornifal silver pieces. What do you want me to bring?"

The swordsman stood up. "I'd better look over the cellar myself," he said. "Doesn't sound like the pretty lady here would know Blue Hills White from stump water."

"Fetch a couple bottles of something red and strong, Eshkol," Ningir said. "None of your fancy stuff that doesn't have any more kick than water."

"I want beer," Mesilim said. He methodically hooked, then locked, the ornate dagger sheath back onto his equipment belt as he rose. "I'll get the beer."

Ilna opened the door. "What is it that the king sent you all to Haft for?" she asked. "There's never been a royal official in this borough since I've been born."

"Oh, that was the storm," Zabar said, taking the door from her in hopeful gallantry. "We were headed for the Passage to Carcosa on the outer coast, but we got blown southeast and were lucky to make any land."

The group, three soldiers and Ilna, stepped into the night. Lights gleamed through the inn's windows, only twenty feet away. The stars were hard in the clear sky.

"But why Haft at all?" Ilna said. "I know Valence is king of all the Isles"—in name, though little more—"but Ornifal's a long way away even without storms."

"Well, ah..." Zabar said, suddenly reserved.

"Oh, that's because of the count's heir," Mesilim said. He'd either forgotten their orders or decided that it no longer mattered because his fellows were talking anyway. "The old count, that is. King Valence learned that there was a child born just before they were killed, the count and countess. Countess Tera was of the old line of Haft, and that means the kid's of the old royal line that goes back to King Carus!"