Just before he beached, the rower expertly turned the dory and backed water for a few strokes. Then he rested on his oars.
“What do you catch, stranger?” Virgorek called. The response took long enough that he had almost given up hope, but the newcomer was merely studying him and the enveloping fog.
“Bigger than you expect.” came the expected reply at last.
Virgorek held up his pouch.
“Bring it!” the visitor commanded.
Reluctantly the ambassador’s emissary stepped forward into the icy clutches of Westerwater. He waded out through the puny waves. Before he reached the boat, his teeth were starting to chatter, and the freezing water was almost up to his groin.
“All blood is red,” he said, thinking that his own might be turning blue by now.
“And beautiful,” the rower said. He was wearing nothing but a pair of leather breeches, and his lips were white with cold. Even the damp could not darken his heavy pale hair. His eyes were an intense blue, glittering arrogance. His face was callous—and also clean shaven, which was strange indeed if he was a raider, a sailor on an orca ship. Even more strange, he bore no tattoos. He still looked mean enough to eat trees.
But the passwords had been correct. With relief that his vigil was over and he need never return to this godsforsaken headland, Virgorek fumbled at his pouch.
“Get in,” the stranger said, waving a thumb at the bows.
The ambassador’s emissary hesitated, and the raider’s fingers strayed to the hilt of the dagger in his belt. Virgorek scrambled aboard and huddled himself into a shivering knot. The boatman pulled a few strokes, sending the little craft leaping seaward. Then he hauled the oars inboard and scrambled back off his thwart. “You row. Warm you.”
Virgorek unwound and edged over to sit amidships; then he was toe to toe with the raider. Maybe Hub was not the worst place in the world to live. Maybe a diplomatic career not the worst fate a man could suffer.
“Give me the pouch,” the stranger said. “It is for the thane’s eyes only.”
The steady sapphire gaze was a nightmare of unspoken threat. “I will give it to him.”
He must be one of Kalkor’s men, and one of the most trusted. By definition, then, he was a killer with no scruples at all.
Virgorek passed over the pouch and took the oars. He had not rowed in years, but a jotunn learned boats before he learned fighting, and fighting before speech. He put his back into it, to show this uppity youngster, and in a few moments he began to feel his blood run warm again.
The raider’s change to inactivity must be chilling him, but he showed no signs of it. He leaned back, a statue of hard muscle and icy stare, and for several minutes said nothing. Then he bent and found a third oar, which he pushed out aft and tucked under his arm to steer. He seemed to have no compass, and the world ended less than a cable length away in all directions. He did not look worried. He did not look as if he ever worried.
Virgorek pulled and pulled and soon began to feel hot. He had been letting himself get soft-palms, and arms . . . He did not slack the pace he had set. ”How far?” he panted.
“Far enough.”
With his free hand, the stranger opened the pouch. He took out each roll in turn, staring hard at the seals and inscriptions as if he could read them. Almost certainly he would be faking . . . he wasn’t even moving his lips! Very few jotnar ever learned to read, because their eyes were not good at close work.
But then he returned the safe conduct to the bag and tossed the imperor’s letter overboard unopened. Virgorek considered a protest and then thought better.
Then the third scroll, the letter from the ambassador, followed the second. That was too much. “Hey!” Virgorek said, lifting his oars from the water. The vellum would float, and the ink might not wash out if it were recovered quickly.
“Hey what?” the stranger said, unwinking.
“That’s important!”
“No it isn’t. It would merely warn Kalkor that the Impire plans to set a trap for him. He knows that.”
Suddenly the raider smiled.
Virgorek dipped his oars again quickly. He didn’t like that smile. A few years among imps made a man feel tough, but now he wondered if he was any more important than those discarded scrolls. That sort of thinking untoughened a man awfully fast.
“Why is he doing this?”
“Doing what?” The blue eyes widened; the smile widened.
“Going to Hub! Putting himself in the Impire’s clutches! They’ll never let him escape!”
Still smiling. . . “Who knows? I’ve never met anyone brave enough to question him.”
Oars creaked. Water hissed by the planks. The pace was telling on Virgorek now, and he regretted his initial enthusiasm.
The raider leaned slightly on his steering oar and the dory veered, and yet nothing showed in the ubiquitous white fog.
“Why don’t you ask him?” he said. “When we get to the ship?”
Virgorek wondered if he had ever known real fear in his life before. ”No! I don’t think I will.”
“Then you may even see land again,” Thane Kalkor said pleasantly, ”but only if you row much faster than this.”
4
Autumn rains always brought on Ekka’s rheumatics, and this year they were especially painful. Ominously bad. Reluctantly she had taken to her bed, and she lay there now, buttressed by warm bricks wrapped in flannel, sprawled back on a heap of pillows, and wishing she had not demanded to see her face in a mirror that morning. A gray complexion definitely did not go with her amber teeth.
And just as a final, unbearable irritation, here was her idiot son, fatter and more incompetent than ever, shifting from shoe to shining shoe at the foot of her bed and tugging his pendulous lip. An impeccably dressed nincompoop! The thought of Angilki ever trying to manage Kinvale without her was enough to make a God blaspheme.
“It’s from the imperor!” he wailed again.
“I can see that, dolt!” Even her old eyes knew that imposing seal, and she could make out enough of the crabbed scribe’s hand.
“He wants me to come to Hub!”
“So?”
“So what?”
“So, what are you waiting for? Or are you planning to refuse?”
Angilki’s already sallow face turned even paler. Perhaps he had hoped she would write a note to excuse him? He had never been more than two day’s ride from home in his life.
“But why? Why me?”
Because the imperor had recently granted his gracious leave for this lumpkin to style himself King of Krasnegar, that was why, and now the bureaucrats had found some law or reason—the two were rarely compatible—requiring the pawn to move to the center of the board. The purpose might be as trivial as a public homage or as terminal as attainder for high treason. The only certainty was that Angilki was now involved in. Imperial politics and must do as he was told.
She could not face the thought of trying to explain all that to him. The less he knew the happier he would be.
When she did not speak, he added, “And the foundations for the new west portico . . .”
“God of Worms!” she muttered. “Give me strength! Go and pack your bags and saddle a horse. And you’d better take a lunch.”
“One lunch? It’ll take me weeks and weeks!”
Ekka shut her eyes and waited impatiently for the sound of the door closing.
5
Far to the east of Zark, below the hazy white of a maritime sky, Unvanquished dipped her bowsprit in salute to an advancing green mountain. The wind was boisterous, just right for sailing.
The crew were cheerful, not realizing how far from land they really were, and Rap was moderately content—no sorcerer was likely to detect his cautious experiments this far out in the Spring Sea, or wish to investigate if he did. He was learning. He could even adjust the weather now, within limits, and without rippling the ambience very much. Since his injuries had completed their healing, he had almost caught up on his sleep. He still had nightmares, though, and probably always would.
If Jalon and Gathmor had been his only companions, he would have taken the warlock’s boat for this trip north, but he could never ask the princess to ride in that. It might be booby-trapped, anyway, so that the warlock could follow its progress, or even call it to him. Lith’rian was sneaky, perhaps the least trustworthy of all the Four. Olybino was said to be stupid and the other two were just plain crazy. The elf was a trickster, and treacherous.
A gust of spray blew over the bows and did not touch Rap. He took hold of the rail as Unvanquished tipped her bow skyward. His jotunn blood thrilled to the creak of rope and spar, to the green gleam of light through the glassy edge of the wave ahead, and the swoop of the albatross astern, wheeling its wings against the sky. Fish swirled, myriads of them down in the main, and sometimes he sensed great somber shapes that might be whales, deeper in the cold dark. Most happily would he sail on forever. Landfall was going to bring back his troubles, and danger-and responsibility.