Standing at the prow of the skimmer, Big Leo said, “Not that this. That this. That. Something ain’t right about that.” He pointed toward the strangers waiting for them with his chin.
“It’s my fault,” Ben-hadad said, still looking at the Blue Falcon. “My design. My work.” He brightened. “But… hey, I think I already know how to fix it. Orholam’s shining smile, boys, it’ll be beautiful.”
“Can you fix it now?” Cruxer asked, looking nervously toward the armed men waiting for them on shore.
“No, no, no, but on Blue Falcon III,” Ben-hadad said. “If we give the oars a convex shape and modify the hull a bit, we can have them fold seamlessly and interlock into the gunwales here. See? They’ll nest into each other. And if we make them of brightwater, they’d double as armor! Breaker, you think you can do that much solid yellow?”
“Ben,” Big Leo said, his voice rumbling deep in warning.
Ben-hadad clicked his lenses up. “Hmm?”
“Shut up. Someone tell me what’s wrong with this. With them. My gut’s going crazy.”
“Could be fear,” Ferkudi offered.
Big Leo leveled a gaze on him like a hammer falling on an errant thumb.
“Not fear,” Ferkudi amended. “Definitely not fear.”
No one else answered Big Leo. The skimmer drifted slowly downstream in the late-evening water. No sunlight meant no luxin, no luxin meant no motion. No oars meant no options. So they stared at the figures on the riverbank, and the figures stared back at them.
They could crack their lux torches for a source, but those were precious and they had precious few of them. No one wanted to waste their lux torches because they were scared of a few villagers.
“The current is pushing us right to them,” Tisis said. “And the wind isn’t helping.”
An improbably large bare-chested man and a child stood at the shore, but another dozen men and women sat around a cheery fire higher up the bank, cooking dinner and talking quietly.
“We’re too interesting for only two of them to be at the shore,” Kip said.
“If you do say so yourself,” Winsen said.
Kip let it go, though he was this close to punching Winsen in the nose. “We’re too dangerous looking,” Kip said. “That’s what’s wrong, Leo.”
“They’re trying not to spook us,” Tisis said, getting it.
“Who tries not to scare six armed men in uniform?” Kip asked.
“People who are scary themselves, that’s who,” Ferkudi said.
“Quiet, all of you,” Cruxer said. He was holding the waxed leather bag that carried the Mighty’s remaining mag torches. “Winsen, I count fourteen on the beach. Are there any others in the trees?”
“They’re Deep Foresters,” Tisis said. “If there’s more hiding in the trees, you’ll never see them.”
“None in the trees,” Winsen said, ignoring Tisis.
Cruxer handed out the precious mag torches. “No one crack one unless I give the order. Or unless I die, I suppose. That is one big, hairy, freckly guy.”
There was something feral about the man standing at the water’s edge. He wore a brown linen shirt, but it hung fully open, unlaced to show off a pelt of red chest hair and muscles, the tails of the shirt tucked into his belt, sleeves rolled up short to show bands of polished copper around his enormous biceps. Everywhere he was covered with thick, curly red hair over freckles: chest and arms and stomach. A beard like a burning bush hung halfway down his chest, contrasting with the bald dome of his head. And though Big Leo had a full head’s height on him, this warrior was chiseled from stone. Despite the fading light and the distance and hair, Kip could see veins on every muscle. And scars, as if from wild animals?
Tisis gasped, and at first Kip was needled that she was appreciating the incredible virility of that wild man, but when he turned to her, she said, “Look at her!”
The child wasn’t a child, but a pygmy.
Her appearance rattled something loose. A memory or—
I’m lying facedown, motionless, in the jungle underbrush in the lee of a downed tree. Loathsome things move under my belly and scuttle over my bare hands. Most of them harmless, I hope. A bird spider perches on a bough within arm’s reach above. Spiders terrify me beyond all measure, but I don’t move. Don’t dare to. Rustling through the underbrush and trees not twenty paces away is the war party.
The war-blue pygmies carry lances and flails, but the greater danger is the great tygre wolves they ride. Standing tall enough that they look eye to eye with a tall man, they’re almost too big for the pygmies to ride. They have long jaws more akin to an alligator’s than a dog’s, and their riders don’t control them so much as direct their viciousness. Tygre wolves aren’t trained mounts like a horse, they’re more like an arrowhead you strap into. Barely controlled, and that only by will magic; if a rider falls off, he can expect to be eaten first. Sight hunters, so their sense of smell isn’t as acute as a dog’s, but it is far better than a man’s.
The chi I drafted should have killed the scent of my body—give it that, the vile stuff—but there’s nothing to do about my breath. I don’t have it in me to draft chi again, not now. I can practically feel the tumors growing every time I do.
One of the tygre wolves comes toward me now, big wide paws silent on the greenery beneath. It growls.
My bowels turn to water, and I couldn’t move if I wanted to. The tygre wolf lunges—and snaps its fangs shut on the huge bird spider above me, drool from its slavering jaws splattering across my forehead.
Its rider curses and pulls at one of its ears, and it obeys her, chomping happily. Before they turn, I see the rider well, her gaze keen, teeth bared.
She is—
Not the same woman. Very alike. Maybe an ancestor. But that woman was not this one. Or perhaps Kip’s very unfamiliarity with the pygmies made them all look alike to him: sharp elfin features, imperial-purple hair, and the permanently upturned mouth and cheek depressions like smiles and dimples that had so often confounded men, who repeatedly mistook their expressions and motives, coming to call them smiling devils.
For a moment, Kip was suspended between the card’s knowledge and his own.
And then, in the blinking of an eye, he was out of that time-that-is-not-time.
And then the skimmer skritched onto the pebbles of the riverbank.
“Greetings,” Kip said. “We’ve come to fight.”
That came out wrong.
“Not to fight you, obviously,” he added. “I mean, we hope not? You wouldn’t happen to be fighting for the White King, are you? That would be awkward.”
“Good old Kip Silvertongue,” Winsen whispered.
“We know why you’ve come,” the pygmy woman said, her voice high pitched. “We’ve been sent to welcome you. Kip Guile? And you, Tisis Guile, born Malargos? And the Mighty, we presume?”
“That’s… right,” Kip said. She knew about Tisis and his marriage? How could she know that?
“I am Sibéal Siofra. This is Conn Ruadhán Arthur. We are of Shady Grove.”
“Shady Grove?” Tisis said. “You are far from home indeed.”
A cloud passed over Sibéal’s face. “There is no home now. Not for us. The White King has driven out everyone before him. First we in Shady Grove welcomed refugees, then to our shame and against our traditions we turned aside refugees, then we became refugees in turn. We have lost homes and tribe and spouses and children and land and faith. We have only a thirst for vengeance. Lead us, Luíseach, and we will go anywhere, so long as you lead us against that abomination.”
“Lee shock?” Kip asked, butchering the accent, though terminology probably shouldn’t have been foremost on his mind.
“Bringer of Light,” Tisis said.
“Oh, great. That again.” He turned to Sibéal and Conn Arthur. “Gather your people.”
“They’re not ours to command,” Conn Arthur said. “We here are all clanless, masterless, free.”
Kip had never heard anyone say ‘free’ with such a mix of loathing and despair. Though he’d already had long talks with Tisis about the Foresters, apparently he was going to need to have more of them.