And if by some miracle he could ever find her, she would certainly by then be married into some noble family. The wardens might just possibly have installed her on the throne of her fathers, with a compromise consort acceptable to both thanes and imperor . . . not, thank the Gods, Little Chicken!
Never Rap.
The man in her tent had been a swordsman, almost certainly an aristocrat. Big, handsome fellow.
So Rap must continue his search if it took a lifetime. She would welcome him into her household, perhaps make him master-of-horse, as they had joked together when they were children. She need never suspect how he felt about her. He would serve her loyally as subject and worship as lover from afar.
And if all he was feeling was an overaged juvenile infatuation, then he would grow out of it in time.
Could a juvenile infatuation hurt this much?
Now he knew why the fairy child had not told him her word of power—her name, or possibly the name of her guardian elemental, if that is what the words were. She had told Little Chicken because he had truly known his life’s great desire, and because he had wanted it enough to die for it. Rap had not said that he loved Inos, only that he wanted to find her and be her loyal subject. Not the whole truth! Had he known the truth, and said it, then he would be an adept now, with two words. And the fairy would have died in his arms, not the goblin’s.
What if Kalkor got to Inos first?
Or changed his mind and slew Rap out of hand? He obviously took the prophecy seriously.
Or decided to torture his word out of him to become an adept? Better not to think about that.
No, somehow Rap must escape from the thane’s clutches.
He’d escaped from the goblins, hadn’t he? And from the imps, and from a warlock.
How obvious now was the advice that King Holindarn had given him, and even Andor—that occult powers must be kept secret at all costs. Too late! A jotunn raider would never willingly release a seer. Before landfall, Rap would find himself chained or deliberately crippled so he could neither run nor swim.
“Rap?”
The whisper startled him out of his brooding, and he jerked around to stare at a brilliantly flushed face. For a moment the redness suggested an extreme, comical embarrassment; then he saw that it was only a very bad case of tropic sunburn. Jalon had now found a shirt to give him some protection, but he must be suffering. Under his pain, he was pathetically bewildered and frightened. He still clutched the frivolously ornate harp in one hand and was holding up his oversized breeches with the other.
Once Jalon had confessed to having elvish blood in him. Seeing him now alongside so many pure jotnar, Rap thought he could detect a goldish tinge to his skin, and a slant to his eyes. And of course he lacked the height and muscle. It would be unkind to comment on that, though.
“Take a chair,” Rap said sadly. “Wine? Sweetmeats?”
“Don’t!” the minstrel said, crouching down. “Don’t mock, Rap! Gods, man, but you’ve grown!”
“I have?”
“It was only two days ago we met, you know. For me, that is.”
“You share memories, don’t you?” Rap thought of Thinal and Sagorn and Darad, and all that had happened in the year since that picnic . . . more than a year.
“Yes. But mine are the clearest to me. The others never see things properly!” That was the artist speaking, the painter. He took a harder look at Rap’s face and grimaced. “It wasn’t me set Darad on you, Rap!”
“Oh, no!”
“Really!” Jalon’s dreamy blue eyes filled with tears. “I warned you about him, remember! Then I got lost in the forest, and I was tempted to call him, because he knows that country, but I knew he’d head straight back to get you, so I called Andor instead. He recognized the danger, Rap, too. Andor’s not all that bad! He managed to find his way south . . . “
“Did he meet any goblins?” Rap asked, suddenly curious. The minstrel nodded. “A few, in ones and twos, and of course he could charm that many. They’re fairly harmless in the summer, anyway. “
“Not now, they’re not! Or so I’ve heard.”
“Well, they were! But I did try to keep Darad off you. And I haven’t been back since.”
“Not at all?” Rap thought he saw a shiftiness.
“Well . . . once. Just for a few minutes. I wrote a letter that Andor needed, a letter of introduction. And he’d trapped me, because he called me in a room where lots of people had seen him going in. They would’ve seen me if I tried to leave.”
Rap chuckled. The gang of five exploited one another without scruple. He wondered how many little tricks they had like that. Jalon glanced around nervously, then looked doubtfully at Gathmor, who was glaring at him. “Rap, I need some help!”
“Don’t we all?”
“No, immediate help! I have to compose an epic, a jotunn war song.”
“Good luck.”
A flicker of anger appeared in Jalon’s washed blue eyes, or perhaps it was only fear. “Kalkor told me to. You know the sort of thing he wants?”
“No. Do you?”
“Oh, yes. It’s to be about the battle of Durthing.”
Gathmor snarled, and Rap stretched out a hand to restrain him as he struggled to sit up.
“It’s not my idea!” the minstrel squealed, flinching. “But there’s a convention to these battle songs. Every man has to be mentioned, so I have to talk to every man aboard and get his name. Then I have to fit him into a verse, telling of his exploits. That’s not hard; I’ll just lift stuff from all the old classics. But I need to know the names of their opponents, see? They have to be in there, too.”
“And these brutes didn’t think to ask who they were killing? “ Rap asked bitterly.
Jalon nodded. “Please, Rap?”
“Why bother? Call Darad:”
“I daren’t! Kalkor says if I call any of the others he’ll put his eyes out!”
His distress and his red face made Jalon seem almost farcical. The sequential gang had a man for every situation, and Darad was the man for this one, never Jalon.
“Have you five ever been trapped like this before?”
The minstrel shook his head, looking ready to weep. He was much better at singing about warfare than he was at being involved in it.
“All right!” Rap said, ignoring Gathmor’s growls. “I’ll list the best fighters in Durthing for you. They’re dead, so it won’t hurt them. But you’ll owe me, Master Jalon!”
Jalon nodded vigorously. “I won’t forget, Rap. And the others will remember and be grateful, too.”
That seemed doubtful. Even more doubtful was the possibility that Rap would ever be able to collect on the debt.
Jalon was too fine an artist to displease any audience, and probably too great a coward to disappoint this one. By nightfall he had completed his jotunn battle song about the sack of Durthing. It was all pure fantasy, and a stupendous success. It listed every member of Blood Wave’s crew by name and credited him with some gruesome exploit or other. Even Rap could tell that most of these tales were verses pirated from well-known ballads or epics, but that did not seem to matter at all. The jotnar cheered and roared and applauded every line.
And when at last the blood-soaked narrative drew to its close with the youngest and most junior of the raiders, who turned out to be the oversized Vurjuk, the baby giant who so much reminded Rap of his boyhood friend Katharkran. For the finale, Jalon had saved a famous feat of arms attributed to the ancient jotunn hero Stoneheart. Legend told how Stoneheart had pursued three mighty foes up a great tree and there hacked them to pieces, so that when he departed the branches were all decorated with severed limbs and organs and the grass around was drenched with blood. In Jalon’s version there were six enemies, not three, and all were dismembered single-handedly in midair by young Vurjuk and his ax. The sailors screamed with joy, rolling around in their mirth, while the juvenile champion turned an excited fiery red and cheered with the rest of them, quite willing to pretend that every word of this had really happened.
The sky was dark, but the wind held, and Blood Wave sailed on. Long into the night Jalon had to keep repeating his masterpiece, over and over, until it seemed as if all the raiders had come to accept that things had actually happened exactly as he said. In the end they were congratulating one another, and especially complimenting the boy champion who had slaughtered six men single-handed, in a tree.