12

The southeast wind was gusty, fierce and dead against them. Nonnus had lowered the sail, but even so each spiteful puff drove the high-sided dugout farther into the Outer Sea.

Sharina sewed grommets into the leaches of the sail; Nonnus carefully split the pole she'd used to fend off Tegma's shore into brails to stiffen the canvas. The improvements would make only a minuscule difference in the vessel's ability to sail into the wind, but it was something to do besides fret.

Asera was in the bow looking grim. Meder faced forward with his back against the mast and his chest of paraphernalia open before him. Occasionally he looked toward the stern; Sharina studiously avoided meeting his eyes.

Asera stood. "This wind never changes!" she burst out. "It's a magical sending, isn't it? Meder, can't you do something about it?"

"No, because that peasant won't let me!" Meder said in a petulant voice. He didn't raise his eyes from the object he held; it looked to Sharina like a small mirror of polished lodestone.

"There's no magic to meeting a southeast wind in the Outer Sea at this time of the year," Nonnus said calmly. "No need of magic to get back to where we want to be either. There'll be a norther in the next week or few weeks, likely enough. We've provisions enough to wait for it, and we'll be catching fish before long."

The hermit didn't have a carpenter's froe and maul to split the brails. He'd trimmed a pair of wedges from what had been the oarloom, opened the grain with a stroke of his Pewle knife, and was using the back of the blade to tap the wedges down the shaft. He stood while he fed the pole forward with one hand as the other struck with a jeweler's care. Nonnus might have been a part of the vessel's hull for all the difference its pitching in the wind-driven swell made.

"A norther?" the procurator repeated in disgust. "A storm, you mean. Gods! why was I such a fool as to volunteer for this mission? I should have just opened a vein and died in my own bed in Valles!"

"A storm," Nonnus agreed mildly, "which we'll use to ride back to the Inner Sea or make landfall on one of the northern isles. I'm not proud of the workmanship of this pig we're sailing in, but she's sturdy and she wouldn't break up in a worse storm than I've seen yet in these seas."

Sharina stopped sewing the grommet that would anchor a clew adjusting the foot of the sail. Jumping fish had caught her eye. What she'd thought was another great gray wave rising behind them instead flicked its tail as it went under the surface again.

"There's nothing wrong with a dugout," the hermit went on in a musing voice. He was no longer speaking to Asera; perhaps he wasn't speaking to anyone at all. "A properly built twin-hull dugout will sail near as well as a planked ship—and swim in a storm better, too. But I didn't take the time to do the job properly."

"How much time would that have taken, Nonnus?" Sharina asked, watching her friend's face.

He smiled. "Yes, there's that, child," he agreed. "A year I'd say. To build her and work her up properly, aligning the hulls just right."

"I didn't want to spend a year on Tegma, Nonnus," she said, deliberately raising her voice so that the nobles would hear her clearly. "Even if we'd been allowed to by whoever put us there."

Nonnus seated himself on the stern crossbar holding the outriggers to the main hull. His eyes were toward the horizon, but Sharina wasn't sure her friend was really looking at anything in the present world.

"Oh, we'll be all right, Mistress Asera," he said. "The sea's bigger than any man or any ship, that's the first rule you learn on Pewle Island. A boy in a woodskin who gets too far north at this time of year is likely to just keep on going, blown all the way to the Ice Capes. But we've got plenty of provisions and we'll just ride the storm back."

Sharina stuck her needle firmly through the canvas and stood. She'd made herself a leather belt and bandolier. From it hung the hand axe, the sewing case, her dagger—a fine steel one in a sheath of nielloed tin, owned by one of the Blood Eagles until every creature on Tegma died—and a satchel containing bread and a bottle of water. It was an awkward burden but she'd taken the hermit's advice to heart: so long as she was aboard the dugout, everything she'd need to live was attached to her body.

She moved a pace forward, trying not to wobble, and sat on the crossbar beside Nonnus. He smiled wanly at her and said, "When I was a boy, so young that I hadn't even made my first woodskin, I stole my brother's. I can't have been but seven years old then; seven sealing seasons and seven hungry seasons, as we call it on the island. It was weather like this."

A gust made the dugout wallow, thrusting the port outrigger deep in the waves as the starboard one lifted briefly above the surface, to which it streamed back water in jeweled droplets. Spray flew from the wave tops, whacking like hail against the dugout's hull and the passengers. Asera glowered sternward; Meder closed his case of implements and materials.

"It took me north for three days," Nonnus said. "I had no food, just a water bottle. A school of jellyfish was swept along in the same current; sea tigers, the big ones with orange-and-black air sacs. Their tentacles were thirty feet long and their touch burned like the whips of demons. They thumped against my hull day and night; I could feel them pressing the other side when I lay against the thin wood."

He laughed, a bleak sound that might have come from a gull's throat but should not have come from a man's. Sharina put her hand on his shoulder.

"And the weather changed," Nonnus said to all the world around him. "Blew me in one night back the distance three days had carried me north, and the beating my brother gave me was a pleasure to take because so nearly I hadn't been there to get it. But sometimes I think about another boy in another . . . world I suppose. Who kept drifting north until he froze into the pack ice, seven years old, and nothing on his conscience except that he stole a woodskin from his brother."

"He didn't save a girl from Tegma," Sharina said.

Nonnus laughed again but this time a human sound. "No, he didn't, child," he said. "And the wind will change because the wind always changes."

"I can change the wind," Meder said; looking over his shoulder with his case clutched against his chest.

Nonnus stood up. "And so you can, sir, I don't in the least doubt," he said in a pleasant voice. He resumed tapping the wedges down the length of the pole he was splitting. "But if you do it ever on this boat that my friend and I built, I'll put you off into the sea. The fish have lower standards; they won't mind your presence."

Meder blinked in shock. Sharina glared at the young wizard. She was seated beside the hermit though no longer quite touching him.

Sharina was with Nonnus; there could be no question of that. But in her heart of hearts, she felt the wind and thought of the Ice Capes; and thought of her long blond hair frozen into the ice.