The Wolf Lord growled, deep in the back of his throat. It was like a chuckle but harsher. “You need those, though. Don’t you? They are part of the mask with which you shield yourself. Can you bear to strip even one away?”
Closing her eyes, Rose Red removed one of her ragged gloves. She took the damaged one from the hand she had burned when she slapped the Dragon. “Take it,” she said. “But I cain’t give you the lantern.”
The Wolf Lord sighed then. “No, I did not think that you would. I am beyond the aid of its light, for I am dead.” With a flash of white teeth, he darted forward and snapped the glove out of Rose Red’s hand. It vanished.
“Very well,” he said. “You continue this suicide. But don’t tell anyone that I, the first god of the South Land, never warned you.”
He was gone. As was the Place of the Teeth. The mountain, the whole range, disappeared.
Rose Red stood at the bottom step of the wide stair in the western wing of the Eldest’s House. A chandelier creaked from the ceiling above her, and Rose Red shivered where she stood.
She hid her bare hand in the folds of her garment.
3
THE NEAR WORLD
SHALL I BRING HIM IN, CAPTAIN?”
“Yes.”
“He’s a sullen one. Not trustworthy. Shall I bind him?”
“That will not be necessary.”
Captain Sunan of the Kulap Kanya sat at a narrow desk in his cabin, keeping the ship’s log. Today’s entry noted, among other things, Stowaway finally too much of a nuisance. Time to bring him in.
Sunan always knew what went on on his ship, from the lookout in the crow’s nest to the lowliest ship rat. His crew would swear on their mothers’ graves that he possessed an intuitive sixth sense, if not a full-fledged mind-reading capability. They feared him, they respected him, and they were fiercely loyal to him.
Thus, when he boarded his ship after dining at the Duke of Shippening’s, beckoned his first mate to his side, and said, “There is a stowaway in the hold. Pretend you do not know and leave him alone until I say otherwise. We sail at dawn,” no one had questioned him. No one wondered how he knew about this stowaway whom no one else had spied; of course Captain Sunan would know. No one wondered why he did not have the wretch tossed over the side into the murky harbor along with the rest of the ship’s trash; Captain Sunan always had his reasons.
And if he decided now, six days into the voyage, to drag the creature up to his cabin and (presumably) split him from stem to stern, Captain Sunan knew best.
Two weathered sailors dragged the stowaway suspended between them into Sunan’s cabin and dropped him at the captain’s feet. The brown foreigner barked a string of angry curses in Westerner. One of the sailors kicked him in the ribs. “Stand in the presence of your betters.” The foreigner cursed again. Though the words were strange, the tone was unmistakably rude. The sailor kicked him again.
“Enough,” said Captain Sunan. He rose. Sunan was a tall man and very thin, though, despite the thinness, he gave the impression of great strength. He dressed impeccably, even amid the rigors of a long sea voyage. He looked down at the stowaway, and his piercing gaze was worse than the sailor’s kicks. The stowaway shut his mouth.
“Leave us,” Sunan said. The sailors did not hesitate to obey, though they may have thought in the privacy of their minds that it was unwise to leave their captain alone with the foreigner. But if Sunan read minds as easily as they suspected, these were thoughts they dared not long entertain. They stood outside his cabin door, which clicked shut behind them.
Lionheart gathered himself up from before the captain’s feet. The jester’s garb was stuffed inside his server’s shirt, though the colorful fabrics spilled out the front. He looked a fool, something the merchant captain could not fail to notice.
“Rise, boy,” Sunan said, using the western tongue Lionheart knew. Lionheart hastened to obey. He stood as straight and tall as he could, calling into play all his princely bearing. But somehow, in the merchant’s presence, he still felt as insignificant as the kennel hand he had been these last many months. Sunan took a seat at his desk again and regarded Lionheart as a king on his throne would regard a supplicant.
“Do you know,” said Sunan, his voice just as comfortable in Westerner as it was in his native dialect, “the enemy you have made?”
“I beg your pardon, captain,” Lionheart said, bowing quickly, “I meant no disrespect. I—”
“Not in myself,” the captain said. He was the sort of man who, when he started speaking, caused other people to stop. It wasn’t that he interrupted. Anything he had to say was certain to be more important than anyone else’s thought, so how could that be called interrupting? “In the Duke of Shippening.”
Lionheart gulped.