CHAPTER

6

BOOK TWO

The same morning Treia had been awakened by the bells to attend morning prayers, Skylan also woke early. The sun reddened the eastern sky, but the sunlight would be short-lived this day. The storms of last night had moved out, but rain clouds again gathered on the horizon. He wondered what had become of Wulfe and was determined to find out. Meanwhile, the Torgun had work to do. Ignoring the burning pain of the wound on his arm, he walked the deck of the Venjekar, yanking off blankets and ordering the warriors to wake up.

“My arm hurts,” Erdmun grumbled, snatching back his blanket. “At least if I’m asleep I can forget the pain.”

“I don’t want you to forget it,” said Skylan grimly. “I don’t want you to forget the pain or who is responsible. This day may bring a chance for us to escape. And if not this day, tomorrow. If not tomorrow, the day after. Whenever that chance comes, we need to take advantage of it. So on your feet, sluggard. We are going to see to it that our ship is in readiness.”

Bjorn grabbed hold of his brother’s blanket and gave it a tug, rolling Erdmun out onto the deck. The others laughed and yawned and grimaced at the pain and stretched. Aylaen rose and went off alone to perform her ablutions.

“Repairing the ship is a good plan,” Sigurd said. “I was going to give the order myself.”

“Of course you were,” said Skylan.

Clouds rolled in, obscuring the sun. Morning dawned cool, gray, and drizzly. The villa that stood on the hilltop was blotted out by the mist rising from the river. Sigurd stood on the deck, gazing northward.

“I think about my two sons,” he said suddenly. “They are of an age to stand in the shield wall. I was training them for war. They are good boys, but they are not ready. And now who will teach them?”

He sighed deeply and shook his head.

Skylan was startled. The dour Sigurd was never one to share his feelings. Sigurd saw Skylan’s sympathetic look and the older man’s expression hardened. He was clearly sorry he had spoken.

“I am the one in charge,” he said harshly. “You will follow my orders, not give orders of your own.”

Skylan shrugged. Sigurd seemed disappointed that Skylan had given way so easily. Perhaps he was hungering for a fight. Perhaps, like Skylan, he felt the need to lash out.

“I am Chief. I drew first blood. Someday, you must accept that,” Sigurd said.

“Someday,” Skylan said, and then he grinned. “But not this day.” He looked at Sigurd and, to his astonishment, Sigurd grinned back.

The first task of the Torgun would be to reattach the dragonhead prow. The Legate’s carpenters had failed, but they did not know this ship. Skylan and Sigurd and Aki, who had worked for some time as a carpenter and shipbuilder, studied the prow and discussed ways to mount it.

The prow had been carved from a single piece of wood. The break was clean, as though the beast’s neck had snapped off at the shoulders. Aki conceived the idea of carving a peg into the bottom of the “neck,” drilling a hole into the “shoulders,” and then fitting the peg into the hole.

This would be a temporary repair. When they returned to their homeland, they would build a new ship to honor the Dragon Kahg. When Erdmun said something about the dragon being dead, Sigurd set him to scrubbing the decks.

The soldiers had hauled away the sea chest containing the weapons, but they had left behind the tools. The Torgun set to work. Aylaen brought food: bread (soggy from the rain), goat cheese, and the olives that were a part of every meal.

At about midday, with the work on the prow going slowly, Sigurd decreed they should stop. They needed to keep in training for the day when they would have to fight.

The Vindrasi warriors did not generally train as a unit, not like the Southlanders, as Skylan had learned from talking to Zahakis. Skylan had listened with considerable skepticism to the Tribune explaining how he drilled his soldiers, taught them to march and fight in formations that could wheel and shift upon the battlefield to match the flow of the action. He talked of siege towers filled with men rolling up to the walls of great cities, machines that could hurl globs of fire.

He had thought Zahakis was making most of this up until he had seen the city of Sinaria and the wall that surrounded it and the walls within the walls that guarded the palace and the Temple. He had watched Zahakis’s soldiers march in lockstep, performing complicated maneuvers, showing off their skills in the parade. At one point they had closed ranks to form a compact square. Those on the outside of the square locked their shields together, while those in the center raised their shields over their heads, forming what Zahakis called the “turtle.”

“Protects from spears and arrows,” Zahakis had explained, and Skylan had watched and marveled.

Skylan took his place alongside Bjorn and waited to hear what Sigurd had planned. Since the Torgun had no weapons and could not practice with sword and shield, Sigurd proposed wrestling matches between the men. Sigurd paired them off and had them practice throws and holds. At first, their participation was half-hearted.

But soon, as the matches started, the blood warmed and spirits rose. The warriors began to enjoy the competition, though it soon became apparent that the long period of forced inactivity aboard ship had taken its toll. Their muscles had grown flabby and weak, their skills diminished. Erdmun, who had never before been able to beat anyone in wrestling, took down Grimuir, much to Erdmun’s elation.

Sigurd bullied and harangued and shamed them. He and Skylan fought a few rounds. Some Skylan won and some Sigurd won. The fight ended in a draw. No one cheered for Skylan, but he had the feeling that was because no one wanted to offend Sigurd. The cheers came at the end, when both men stood up, sweating and breathing hard, and shook hands.

Aylaen held herself apart, watching with an envious expression. Vindrasi women often held wrestling matches among themselves, and Aylaen had always enjoyed the sport. A woman wrestling a man was considered unseemly. She was the one who saw the soldiers approaching, and she called out a warning.

Skylan looked up the hill to see Zahakis, accompanied by four archers and eighteen soldiers, all of them armed. By the grim expression on the Tribune’s face, something was wrong.

Zahakis gestured to his soldiers. “You men, search the ship and those tents.”

The archers stood in front of the Torgun with bows raised, ready to shoot. Skylan wondered what this was about. The soldiers entered the tents and almost immediately came back out. They took more time searching the ship, going down into the hold, opening up the sea chests.

“The boy!” Zahakis said, staring around at the warriors. “Where is he?”

Skylan was startled. “I was going to ask you the same thing. The last I saw, Raegar’s men were hauling Wulfe off to prison.”

“They never made it,” said Zahakis. “If you have the boy, Skylan, hand him over.”

“He’s not here,” said Skylan. “I have not seen him. What do you mean, ‘they never made it’? What happened to Wulfe?”

Zahakis turned to the rest of the Torgun. “If you men are lying or trying to hide him, it will go bad with you. With all of you.”

The men glanced at each other and said nothing.

Zahakis eyed them, then turned to Aylaen. “Have you seen him?”

Aylaen shook her red curls. “I saw Raegar take him away. I have not seen him since.”

Skylan was growing exasperated. “I tell you that Wulfe is not here. What has happened to him?”

Zahakis was watching his soldiers. The two who had gone into the hold came back up, shaking their heads.

“The two guards were found dead,” said Zahakis grimly. “Weltering in their own blood. Their throats had been slashed, their faces mauled so that it was hard to recognize them. One of the men had his arm torn off at the shoulder.”

“And the boy?” Skylan asked in fear, his heart constricting. He had not realized until now how much he had come to care for the waif he’d found on that ill-fated voyage to the Druid Isles. “What about him? Was he hurt?”

“The boy is missing. Raegar accuses Wulfe of murdering his guards.”

Skylan stared at the man. He looked back at the other Torgun, who were slack-jawed in amazement. Then the warriors gave a great roar of laughter.

“You know our secret. Wulfe is our most valiant warrior,” said Skylan. “When we go into battle, we send the boy out first to do the killing. We men just come along behind him to mop up.”

Zahakis was not amused. “I saw the bodies of those men, what was left. I have seen men hacked to pieces on the field of battle and not blenched. But I will remember this horror to the day I die. It was not some gang or roving band of thieves murdered those men. It was some fiend of hell. Or rather, some beast from hell. We found bloody paw prints all around the bodies.”

“Because his name is ‘Wulfe’ you have let your imagination run away with you,” said Skylan. He was starting to grow angry. “The boy may be lying dead somewhere and you waste time accusing him of murdering two grown men, ripping off their arms!”

“What do you know about this boy?” Zahakis asked.

“He is an orphan I took in,” said Skylan. “I know nothing about him except that he claims to be the son of a faery princess.”

“The boy lived among us for a long time,” said Aylaen. Her red curls straggled around her face in the damp. The flaring fire of her green eyes seemed the only light in the gray, bleak dawn. “He never harmed anyone.”

The warriors added their avowals to Aylaen’s. The Torgun considered Wulfe strange. He could cause the birds to come down from the trees, light on his hand. He claimed he could speak to animals and understand them. He spent a great deal of time with Owl Mother, an old woman many thought was a witch. Still, Wulfe was one of their own. The very fact that the detested traitor Raegar hated the boy was a mark in Wulfe’s favor.

Zahakis looked very grim. “I tell you this for your own good, Skylan. If the boy returns, hand him over to me.”

Skylan stood stubbornly silent, his arms crossed defiantly over his chest.

Zahakis eyed him, then said, “Meantime, the Legate wants to speak to you.”

“Hang the Legate!” said Skylan angrily. “I need to find Wulfe—”

One of the soldiers jabbed Skylan in the gut with the butt of his spear and Skylan doubled over, clutching his belly.

Zahakis looked at the others. “I am in no mood to play games. I see you men want exercise. I am happy to accommodate you. There is a field that needs to be cleared of stones.”

He rounded on his heel and walked off. The soldiers seized hold of Skylan and shoved him along, prodding him in the back with their spears if he slowed. The other soldiers rounded up the Torgun, including Aylaen, and ordered them to start marching.

Skylan glanced back to the see the Venjekar adrift on a sea of mist, and he was reminded suddenly and unpleasantly of the ghostly voyage he had made aboard the ship returning from the ill-fated trip to the Druid Isles. The Goddess Vindrash had been steering the vessel. She had taken the body of his dead wife, terrorizing him, forcing him to play, night after night, games of dragonbone. Only at the last, on the Dragon Isles, had the goddess revealed herself to him in her true dragon form.

Skylan’s skin tingled, the hair prickled on the back of his neck. The goddess stood at the ship’s stern. He stared, amazed. She raised her hand, palm outward, in what might have been a salute. Then, deliberately, she spread her fingers and made an emphatic gesture. The number five.

“Get moving, lout!” said the guard, giving Skylan a shove. He slipped in the wet grass and stumbled, almost losing his footing. He regained his balance and walked on. He glanced back. The goddess was gone.