As I touched the door he spoke to me. “Come to me. Very early tomorrow morning. To my tower.”
“Sir?”
“Perhaps we may yet discover another Skilled one, unsuspected in our midst.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tasks
PERHAPS THE MOST devastating part of our war with the Red-Ships was the sense of helplessness that overpowered us. It was as if a terrible paralysis lay over the land and its rulers. The tactics of the Raiders were so incomprehensible that for the first year we stood still as if dazed. The second year of raiding, we tried to defend ourselves. But our skills were rusty; for too long they had been employed only against the chance Raiders, the opportunistic or the desperate. Against organized pirates who had studied our seacoasts, our watchtower positions, our tides and currents, we were like children. Only Prince Verity’s Skilling provided any protection for us. How many ships he turned aside, how many navigators he muddled or pilots he confused, we will never know. Because his people could not grasp what he did for them, it was as if the Farseers did nothing. Folks saw only the raids that were successful, never the ships that went onto the rocks or sailed too far south during a storm. The people lost heart. The Inland Duchies bridled at taxes to protect a coastline they didn’t share; the Coastal Duchies labored under taxes that seemed to make no difference. So if the enthusiasm for Verity’s warships was a fickle thing, rising and falling with the folk’s current assessment of him, we cannot really blame the people. It seemed the longest winter of my life.