17
On the third night, after they made it through Forglin’s Pass and set up camp, Dehvi finally spoke to Vi. “Let us train together, wetboy.”
“I’m not a wetboy,” Vi said quickly.
“You were Hu Gibbet’s apprentice.”
Vi’s mouth dried up. “Yes.” The very name brought back ugly memories.
Dehvi drew a pair of sais. “The Night Angel did kill him.”
“I know. I couldn’t be happier.” Vi wished she’d had the guts to do it herself.
The smile faded into puzzlement. “You seek no vengeance?”
“I’ve f*cked men for smaller favors. I wanted to kill Hu since I was thirteen.”
Dehvi scowled. “Too much talk.” He bent over Vi’s bedroll where she had put her sword. He poked the point of one sai at the juncture of blade and hilt and flicked her sword to her. She caught it and tested the edge. It was blunted with a thin shield of magic, but a strong blow would still cut. Dehvi checked all six points of his sais. Vi had never fought against sais. A sai looked like a short sword with a narrow blade, except that the hilts swept in a broad U for catching blades. Each tine was sharpened.
Holding the sais in one hand, Dehvi removed his horsehide cloak and draped it over a rock. Vi followed suit reluctantly. Then Dehvi turned, bowed, said something incomprehensible in Ymmuri, spun the sais in his hands, and took an impossibly low ready stance.
Vi’s doubts about such a low stance were broken at the first clash. She lunged toward his face. He nearly leapt forward, catching her sword with one sai and then the other and twisting as he sprang like a snake. Vi’s sword spun from her grasp and she found a sai touching her throat while the other jabbed the small of her back. Dehvi’s face was impassive. He stepped back wordlessly and flicked her blade back to her.
She lasted fifteen seconds the second time, and didn’t lose her blade, though Dehvi twisted it far out of the way and touched her ribs with the other sai. After a few minutes, she was beginning to understand. Then Dehvi changed stances. He sidestepped her first cut, not even using the sais, and swept her feet out from under her.
She pulled herself out of the mud and found him grinning. Hu Gibbet had leered at her sometimes, and mocked her often, but Dehvi’s grin was innocent. It suggested that if she could see herself, she’d laugh too.
Suddenly, she was crying, hot tears spilling down her cheeks. Dehvi gave her the look she deserved: utter bewilderment. She laughed at the ridiculousness of it, rubbing her tears away. “Hu shit on everything, Dehvi. Every time he trained me, it was all mockery and bruises and humiliation. For f*ck’s sake, this is actually fun. And I’m learning so much more from you. You’re better than he ever was. No wonder you kick ass.”
“Asses I have kicked,” Dehvi said. “Though finding them less sensitive than other places.”
Vi laughed and blinked her eyes to keep that bizarre flood down.
“You did marry in Waeddryner way,” Dehvi said. He tugged his own ear to indicate her earring. “But are not Waeddryner. Who is husband?”
Well, that helped with the crying. She cleared her throat. “Kylar Stern. Sort of.”
Dehvi’s eyebrows raised.
“It’s, uh, complicated.”
He shrugged and drew a sword. He touched the edge to make sure it was shielded, and they began sparring again. Vi sank into it, releasing her worries about the life she was fleeing from and the life she was fleeing to. Even as she lost, time and again feeling the dull poke of Dehvi’s sword, for the first time she had the sense that fighting was something she was really good at. When she countered a move that had caught her before, Dehvi might barely nod, but it was as good as effusive praise.
Dehvi shifted fighting styles no less than six times, and Vi sensed that he knew quite a few more, but the last one felt familiar. Vi was sunk so deep into her own body that she barely noticed that she’d spoken until she saw Dehvi miss a step. Her riposte brushed his stomach. She’d said two words: “You’re Durzo.” Her eyes told her it was impossible. Her knowledge of illusory masks told her it was impossible. But she knew, and his reaction confirmed it. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“It was the accent, wasn’t it? Always takes me a while to get it back. You got some Ymmuri uncle or something?” Dehvi said, his voice abruptly Cenarian.
“You fight like Kylar. What are you doing here?”
“You bonded Kylar with the most powerful surviving set of compulsive wedding rings in the world. Was that your own idea?”
“The Godking put a compulsion on me. Sister Ariel said ringing was the way to break it.”
“I thought Kylar was in love with that Elene girl. Why’d he marry you?”
Vi swallowed. “I sort of ringed him when he was unconscious.”
Dehvi’s expression went blank, and Vi had a sudden intuition that Durzo’s blank look was as indicative of pending violence as Hu Gibbet’s rages. Dehvi said softly, “I’m here to decide if I should kill you to free Kylar from the bond. You’re not making much of a case for yourself.”
She tossed her sword into the mud and shrugged. F*ck it. Kill me.
Dehvi-Durzo looked at her strangely, weighing her. “Have you ever felt that you were part of a grand design, Vi? That some benevolence was shaping your fate?”
“No,” Vi said.
Dehvi laughed. “Me neither. Goodbye, Vi. Watch out for that husband of yours; he’ll change you.” Then he left.
Solonariwan Tofusin stood on deck as the Modaini merchant ship lumbered toward HokkaiHarbor. It had been twelve years since he’d been to the Sethi capital, the city he had once called home. The sight of the two great chain towers guarding the entrance to the harbor, shining white in the autumn sun, filled his heart to bursting.
As they passed between the towers, as always, his appreciation of the seemingly delicate towers became awe. Built during the height of the Sethi Empire, the chain towers stood on narrow peninsulas. The base of each tower abutted the ocean so the chain couldn’t be attacked without taking the tower. The chains themselves lay under water except during maintenance and war. Then, the great teams of royal aurochs would winch the chains apart until they were at or barely below the water line at high tide and five to eight feet above it at low tide. During a battle, the aurochs would turn the chains. A single blade shaped like a shark tooth was attached to each link. Because of the half twist in the chain at each axle, a ship pressing against the mighty chains would find half the teeth chewing through his hull in each direction. It made the entire chain a saw that had destroyed more than one fleet, and deterred many more.
Above the sparkling blue waters—gods, Solon thought, the bay was a color to shame sapphires—Hokkai rose on its three hills. Above the ubiquitous docks already filling with wintering ships, the great city rose in thousands of whitewashed walls with red tile roofs. After the ugly hodgepodge of Cenarian architecture, it was a relief.
But the most beautiful sight of all, magnificent WhitecliffCastle reigning over the highest hill, filled Solon not only with awe but something akin to terror. Kaede, my love, do you hate me still?
After Khali and her Soulsworn had massacred everyone at Screaming Winds, Solon had had nothing to do. His friend Feir had left days before they knew of the danger. When the garrison commander ignored Dorian’s warnings that Khali was coming, Dorian disappeared. Solon had been the only man to escape. He’d found himself suddenly without ties to anything. It had been Dorian’s prophecy that had kept him from going home more than a decade ago. Solon had served Regnus Gyre as prophecy dictated—and failed. Regnus was dead. Solon had served for a decade, only to be dismissed the day before Regnus was murdered. Kaede was the Sethi empress now. She wasn’t likely to be happy to see Solon, but if she killed him, so much the better.
He labored with the sailors. He could have paid for his passage, but no Sethi worth his salt would sit in a cabin while others were hoisting sails, not even on a wide-bellied Modaini merchant ship. The Sethi preferred small, light ships. It meant their merchants had to make twice as many trips, but they made them twice as fast. A Sethi ship also had to ride a storm rather than plow through it, but the Sethi accepted the ocean’s whims and loved her and feared her equally.
As the ship came to rest in the bay, the Modaini merchant captain emerged from his cabin, his eyes and eyebrows freshly kohled. Solon always thought it gave the dark-haired Modaini a sinister aspect, but the captain was an affable man. He tossed Solon his pay and welcomed him to sail with him any time before going to speak with the harbormaster, who had rowed out to collect the harborage tax and inspect the cargo.
The harbormaster clambered up the webbing onto deck with the ease of a man who did it a dozen times a day. Like most Sethi, he wore no tunic until winter, and the sun had darkened his skin to a deep olive. He had a prominent nose, brown eyes, the figure-eight earring of Clan Hobashi, two silver rings on his right cheekbone, and two silver chains strung between the earring and cheek rings—an assistant to the harbormaster, then.
The man had barely spoken two words when he saw Solon and broke off in mid-sentence. Solon, still bare-chested as he had been for the whole trip, wasn’t as tanned as most Sethi. But despite his light tan and the white hair growing in to replace the black, he was unmistakably Sethi—and he wore no clan rings. The harbormaster’s long knife came out in a heartbeat. There were only two groups in Seth that wore no rings.
“What’s your name, clanless?”
The Modaini captain looked aghast. He had never made a trip to Seth and didn’t know their customs, which was why Solon had chosen his ship.
“Solon,” Solon said, not giving his clan name, as an exile wouldn’t.
The harbormaster grabbed Solon’s chin and looked closely at his cheeks and ears, first on one side, and then, frustrated, on the other. His eyebrows tightened in confusion. Not only were there no scars where the clan rings had been torn out, but there were no scars from where the rings had been put in.
“Raesh kodir Sethi?” he demanded. Are you not Sethi?
“Sethi kodi,” Solon acknowledged, his Old Sethi diction perfect.
The harbormaster released Solon’s face as if burned. “What was your name?”
“Solonariwan Tofusin.”
One of the Modaini sailors cursed. The harbormaster’s tanned face turned green. He noticed that his long knife was still out and tucked it away as if it were scalding. “I think you’d better come with me . . . uh, your lordship.”
“What’s going on?” the captain asked.
Neither Solon nor the harbormaster answered. Solon clambered into the rowboat with the harbormaster. The sailor who’d cursed said, “The Tofusins reigned for five hundred years.”
Not exactly. It was four hundred seventy-seven.
“Reigned? They don’t anymore?” the captain asked, his voice strangled. Hopping into the rowboat, Solon couldn’t help but smile.
“No, cap’n. The last one died ten years ago. If this one really is a Tofusin, there’ll be all sorts of hell to pay.”
That, on the other hand, is dead on.