I shook my head. My hair was now long enough to go to curls in the rain and droplets flew from it. ‘I don’t think they are as famed as you believe them to be. Kerf, had you heard of Clerres before the Servants hired you?’
He turned slowly toward me, blue eyes widening in slow consternation like a puzzled cow.
‘Hush,’ Vindeliar warned me. ‘Don’t ask him questions!’
Vindeliar furrowed his brow and, as he did, Kerf’s face settled into his habitual scowl. Alertness faded from his eyes. I stood up suddenly and stretched, choosing to do so just as two young deckhands dashed by. Both avoided me, but one turned to look back at me in surprise. I looked directly at him, smiling. He stumbled, caught himself, turned back, and I think he would have spoken to me if someone hadn’t roared a rebuke at him. The command was accompanied by the sound of a rope length snapping against the ship’s railing. Both boys fled to their work. I sat down slowly. Vindeliar was breathing through his nose harshly as if he had just run a race. The world settled around me, as if I had been paddling on the surface of a sea and now sank in stillness below the waves. I avoided his gaze as I tried to quote what he had said. ‘Clerres is the heart of the world, and the heartbeat of the world must always be steady.’
I peered at him through a sudden blast of rain. I could not tell if the water running down his face was rain or tears. His chin quivered briefly. ‘We who serve the Servants aid them to keep that heart beating steadily. If we obey. If we keep to the Path.’
‘But what about you?’ I asked him. ‘What harm if you went to a festival and ate roasted nuts and drank spiced cider? There’s no evil in that.’
His little round eyes were full of misery. ‘But no good, either. I must do only what keeps the world to the Path. Harm can come of simple things. The cake I eat, another person lacks. Like tiny pebbles that shift till the hillside gives way, carrying a road into oblivion.’
Had I heard such a thing, a long time ago? His words rang strangely, even as I hated the sense of them. If he believed that Dwalia knew his destiny and he followed her direction, I had no hope of enlisting his help to escape.
As if he heard my thought, he said, ‘That is why I cannot help you defy her. If you try to escape, I must stop you and bring you back.’ He shook his head. ‘She was very angry when you ran away in the city. I said I could not make you be obedient. I did it once, that first time. The power was fresh and strong in me that day; she had readied me for the hard work I did. But since then, I cannot make you obey me. She said I was lying. She slapped me many times.’ His tongue moved inside his cheek as if finding sore places. I felt a rush of guilty sympathy for him.
‘Oh, brother,’ I said and took his hand.
It was like thrusting my hand into a cold rush of water, I felt the current that strongly. Like touching my father when his thoughts were unguarded, before I had learned how to protect myself. I felt that his current snatched the thoughts from my mind. I sensed his hold on Kerf, like a strangling rope around his mind. Kerf was no weakling. It was taut with tension, a leash on a lunging dog. I snatched my hand back and tried to disguise what I’d felt by patting his sleeved arm sympathetically. ‘I am sorry she punished you for that.’
He stared at me. ‘You thought of your father.’
My heart was beating very fast. Walls, walls, walls. ‘I miss my father constantly,’ I said.
He reached for me and I stood up. ‘I’m so cold. I’m going inside. Kerf, are you not cold?’
Kerf’s eyes flickered and Vindeliar was distracted as he brought his lunging dog to heel again. By the time he had mastered Kerf and had him standing to follow me, I was out of his reach on my way back to the cabin. A deckhand coiling a rope paused in his activity and stared at me. So, Vindeliar had been concealing me and controlling Kerf. But doing both at the same time strained his abilities. A useful bit of information.
However, I’d handed him a weapon I wished he did not have. Did he guess that if he touched me, skin to skin, he might be able to push inside my mind? I did not look back at him or let my thoughts dwell on that. I must do better at guarding my thoughts. I now doubted that I’d be able to lure either Vindeliar or Kerf into helping me. An old sailor strode past me, wet shirt plastered to his back, bare feet slapping the deck. He did not even glance at me.
I reached the hatch and climbed down the ladder that led into the bowels of the ship where our miserable compartment awaited me. I threaded my way past dangling hammocks and sea chests. As I went, I studied those I passed. A few Chalcedean merchants had clustered to mutter about weather and pirates. I paused near them. None looked at me, but from their talk, I learned that our ship was bragged to be the swiftest out of Chalced. She had never been boarded by pirates, though she had been pursued by them more than once. She had also avoided encounters with the so-called Tariff Fleet and slipped unnoticed past the Pirate Isles without paying toll to Queen Etta and her cutthroats.
‘Are the pirate ships that might chase this ship part of the Tariff Fleet?’ I asked aloud, but no one turned toward me.
Yet a moment later, a younger fellow at the edge of the huddle said, ‘It seems ironic to me that a queen who rules a domain called the Pirate Isles is now troubled herself by pirates.’
A grey-moustached merchant laughed aloud. ‘Ironic and very satisfying to those of us who once had to run the Pirate Isles corridor hoping to escape the attention of King Kennit. He’d take ship, crew and cargo and turn it to his own purposes. Anyone who could not bring a ransom ended up a resident of the Pirate Isles.’
‘Kennit? Or Igrot?’ asked the youngster.
‘Kennit,’ the older man affirmed. ‘Igrot was before my time, and a much more brutal beast. He’d take the cargo, slaughter and rape the crew, and then scuttle the vessel. He had a liveship, and nothing outruns one of those. He choked trade for years. Then one day, he simply vanished.’ He widened his eyes at the younger man and mockingly asserted, ‘Some say that on a stormy night, you can glimpse his ghost ship in the distance with her sails blazing and the figurehead shrieking in agony.’
There was a moment of silence as the young man stared at him, and then all burst into laughter.
‘Do you think we’ll elude Queen Etta’s Tariff Fleet?’ the younger man asked, trying to regain a bit of dignity.
The older merchant tucked his hands into his ornate sash. He pursed his lips and waxed philosophical. ‘We will or we won’t. The deal I struck was that if the ship can get us past the Tariff Fleet, I’ll pay the captain half what I would have paid them. It’s a good bargain, and it’s one I’ve made with him before. On three voyages out of five we slipped past them. Good odds, I think. That little offer of mine makes him willing to crack on a bit more sail, I do believe.’
‘Good odds indeed,’ the young man replied.