Lightning strobed, followed by a monstrous triple crash of thunder as Sharina loosed the mainfall. The boat's sodden leather sail dropped despite the wind's snatching grip. Sharina's right arm ached and she'd been feverish for the past three days of storm, ever since she'd put her hand on the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish that came over the side on the spume of a wave. Despite her dizziness, neither she nor the hermit could imagine trusting Asera or Meder with anything to do with the vessel.
The surf roared around them, displaying fangs of foam in the blue-white glare of lightning. The storm tried to swing the skin boat broadside, but Nonnus dug in his steering oar. Though the vessel shimmied, it drove high up on the northern shore of Sandrakkan safely on its double keel. Without the hermit's skill they'd have overset and very possibly drowned beneath grinding tons of whalebone and hide.
The wave receded. The boat toppled slowly onto its starboard side. Because the Floating Folk never came ashore they didn't build their vessels with wear strakes along the sides as bumpers, but the sandy beach was no direct threat to the boat's hull.
Sharina let the tipping motion spill her out onto the ground. She hunched on all fours, digging her fingers into the sand. She'd have prayed never to leave dry land again except that even after the ordeal of the past weeks she didn't want to spend the rest of her life on Sandrakkan
And because being around Nonnus had made her unwilling to call on the gods lightly.
The hermit had jumped from the catcher boat while the incoming wave still foamed. He grabbed the bow ropehemp cordage he'd brought from the trireme, not the stiff leather strap the Folk had used before the islanders appropriated the vesseland trotted to one of the line of pilings at the head of the beach. A score of plank-built fishing dories were already drawn up on shore, overturned to keep the slashing rain from filling them.
Lightning pulsed for twenty seconds behind the cloudbanks, illuminating both sky and land. Sharina got to her feet. She wanted to help Nonnus, but just now standing upright was as much as she could handle.
"Why, this is Gonalia!" Meder said enthusiastically. "Gonalia Bay! I recognize the castle there on the headland."
He paused as thunder rolled, shaking the dark land beneath. In a much different tone he said, "There's a light in the castle. Who would be there? It's not a place to visit at night."
"What do you mean?" Asera demanded. She was fully the procurator again, commanding in voice and demeanor. She shook out her robe. She might better have wrung it. The fabric was so wet that it dripped during the present lull in the rain.
Nonnus was coming back. Meder watched the hermit and lowered his voice as he said, "A wizard built the castle a thousand years ago. He left no account of his activities but others did, and the stories weren't the sort to draw others here. The whole region was unpopulated for centuries after he died."
"Wizards!" Asera said, the word a curse and a hissing reminder of the lightning of moments before.
The hermit joined them. He laid three fingertips against Sharina's forehead. His touch was cold; she'd known she was running a fever but hadn't realized it was this serious.
"You need to get inside," he said. "Can you walk?"
"We'll all get inside," the procurator said crisply. Even a renewed spatter of rain did nothing to quench her newly recovered sense of authority. "If this is Gonalia"
"Yes," Nonnus said.
Asera frowned at the interruption. "Then there'll be a coach south to Erdin. We'll buy passage on a ship there."
Her eyes swept the group, then settled on Nonnus. Distant lightning turned her pupils into balls of blue glass.
"And hold your tongues!" she ordered. "I'll travel as a shipwrecked Ornifal noble with you as my servants. I have enough money for immediate needs and I'll be able to arrange credit in Erdin. If word gets out that I'm an emissary for the king, though, it's our lives. Do you understand?"
Sharina wanted to slap her. The thought of the way everybody in Barca's Hamlet had felt honored by the procurator's presence now turned her stomach.
Nonnus smiled faintly. "Yes, mistress," he said. "I understand life and death."
He gestured with the butt of his javelin toward the wooden houses on the corniche above the beach; lights showed through the chinks of shutters but no one was out at night in this weather. "Go on to the inn. I'll follow you shortly."
The procurator frowned, sniffed, and took the small bag of her belongings from the vessel. Sharina thought she'd been about to tell the hermit to carry her luggage, but she wasn't quite such a fool.
Meder already had his satchel. He carried the ivory athame thrust beneath his sash as if a weapon. Sharina looked at him, then said to Nonnus, "I'll stay with you."
"No, child, you won't," he said, touching her cheek with his fingers. "You're too sick. But I'll thank the Lady for you also in my prayers."
Asera trudged toward the wooden staircase to the corniche. Meder looked at Sharina, then closed his mouth without speaking and went off with the procurator.
Sharina squeezed Nonnus' hand and followed them, carrying her own bundle. The rain started again. Its drops chilled her soul without seeming to cool her hot flesh.
Meder muttered to the procurator at the top of the stairs; they paused for Sharina. Lightning shimmered on wet wood and the nobles' rain-streaked faces.
"The Pewleman served us well, I'll grant that," Asera said to Sharina as she took the last step. "But he'd best recollect his position now that we've returned to civilization. If you're his friend, you'll see that he heeds my warning."
"He did nothing for you, mistress," Sharina said. The inn was on the other side of the street. She continued walking as she spoke because she wasn't sure she'd be able to move again if she stopped after climbing the stairs. "And since we're giving warningsif anything happens to Nonnus, you'll learn how good a friend of his I am."
She didn't suppose she'd have said that if it weren't for the fever. That was all right. It was the truth and they needed to know it.
The road was cobblestone, slick and cold and hard against Sharina's unfamiliar feet. Her calluses didn't cushion the shock. The nobles showed no signs of discomfort; Meder wore boots but the procurator's thin-soled slippers shouldn't have been much help.
Life in the palace would be that way in all things. Sharina might be Count Niard's daughter and of royal bloodshe hadn't really let herself think about thatbut she didn't know anything about the life she'd be expected to live in Valles. Every aspect of it would pound her, bruise her, just as these civilized cobblestones were doing to her feet. . . .
Asera struggled for a moment with the inn's front door; she raised the latch easily enough, but the weight of braced timber was a surprise. She probably had servants to open doors for her.
Meder bowed Sharina into the common room ahead of him. He'd have taken her bundle of personal effects if she'd let him. Both nobles had changed as a result of their return to civilization. While Asera had become brusquely commanding, the wizard had changed from a sullen youth into a polished gentleman attending a lady.
On balance Sharina thought she preferred the sullen youth. In that frame of mind Meder had kept as far away from her as possible.
The air of the common room was dank. The innkeeper rose from one side of the chimney alcove; on the opposite seat the sole guest present merely turned his head and gave the newcomers a morose glance. The fire was tiny, dwarfed by the massive limestone hearth.
"You're the host?" Asera said. "Well, start acting like one, then! I'll want food and a hot bath besides. Do you have a wine heater?"
The innkeeper looked astounded. The front door blew open: Meder hadn't latched it properly behind him. Sharina checked to be sure that Nonnus hadn't followed them after all, then slammed it shut herself.
"Well I . . ." the innkeeper said. Three guests coming out of the storm were as surprising as a lightning bolt. "I can mull some, I suppose."
He looked up the staircase. "Enzi! Come down here! Pao! Pao! Where are you, boy?"
The innkeeper thrust a poker into the fire, looked at Asera's face, and hurriedly set three more billets of split wood on.
Sharina dropped onto one of the bench seats built out from the walls of the common room. Her surroundings shimmered in a pastel haze. Her right arm no longer ached but she thought she heard it buzzing. She opened and closed the fingers; they moved normally.
A woman who coiled her hair in twin braids on top of her head looked over the upstairs railing, took in the guests' aristocratic features, and bustled down without snarling the prepared response to her husband's summons. A gangling boy ran into the room from a back corridor.
Asera seated herself on the hearth bench the innkeeper had vacated. She leaned forward and warmed her hands over the growing fire.
Meder glanced at the man on the other seat as if considering ordering him to get up. Sharina suspected the only question was whether the fellow simply refused to move or whether he knocked the wizard down with the sturdy stick he held between his knees. Meder apparently came to the same conclusion; he sat beside Sharina instead.
The innkeeper walked the boy to the door, talking earnestly to him in a voice too low to be overheard. The boy's eyes widened. The innkeeper sent him out the door and slammed it shut again behind him.
"Get wine, woman," he said to his wife. "Our guests want mulled wine to warm them!"
She scurried to the bar and set a copper pail under a small cask on the wall rack. With an oily expression the innkeeper tented his fingers and turned to Asera. "Mistress?" he said. "May I ask how long you'll be staying?"
"No longer than the first coach leaves for Erdin," Asera said. "When will that be?"
"Ah," the innkeeper said. Instead of answering he took the pail of wine from his wife and carried it over to the hearth. "How did mistress come to arrive here, if I may ask?"
"You may get the skin flayed off your back if you don't keep to your own affairs!" Asera said. "Are you worried about your pay? Don't be!"
She took a coin from her purse and rapped it on the mantel; the gold rang musically. "Besides seats in the coach for me and my household, I'll need to replace some of the wardrobe lost when I was shipwrecked. Now, when is the next coach?"
"The boy should be back with that information shortly," the innkeeper said. "Let me fix your wine."
He took the poker from the fire, knocked ash from the glowing metal, and thrust it into the pail. The smell of hot wine and spices filled the common room, reminding Sharina of winter evenings at home.
She thought about the past. For the first time she really understood that she'd never be able to go home, at least not back to the home she'd known in the past. She was a pawn in the hands of strangers who'd never leave her alone, who'd hound her if she tried to return.
Sharina closed her eyes. She felt tears on her cheeks but she didn't care. Voices swirled about her; the innkeeper talked about the weather and making up beds. Someone offered Sharina wine; she took the pottery mug and held it between her palms. She didn't want to drink, but the warm clay felt good in her hands.
Horses clattered up to the front door. Their shod hooves had a nasty, unfamiliar ring on the cobblestones. Horsemen, not a coach; there was no sound of iron tires accompanying the hooves.
The door banged back. Sharina opened her eyes. Six armored soldiers crashed into the room with swords drawn. Over their mail shirts they wore white linen tabards with a black horsehead on the right breast. Their shouting presence filled the room.
Meder jumped to his feet. A soldier pushed him back onto the bench; another soldier put his sword to the wizard's throat and snarled, "Don't move or we'll see if that's sawdust you're stuffed with!"
Asera cried out in wordless anger. Sharina couldn't see her through the press of armored men.
Sharina raised the mug to her lips and sipped her wine. A soldier looked at her; he frowned but said nothing.
The innkeeper's wife had put too much nutmeg and not enough cinnamon in the wine, but it was a good vintage. Sharina didn't drink wine often, but her father had seen to it that she and Garric had an understanding of the subject.
Sights and sounds were as clear to her as the air of a frozen morning. The fever had burned all the dross out of her mind, leaving her wits sharper than ever before.
An officer entered; he wore a muscled cuirass and a bronze helmet with a trailing horsehair plume instead of the mail shirt and iron pot of the common soldiers. He didn't have a tabard but he wore a separate linen sleeve tied to hooks on his breastplate; there was a black horsehead at the shoulder.
Two soldiers straightened, keeping their grip on Asera between them. Another soldier had his sword half-raised to threaten the fellow in the other chimney seat, but the traveler's lifted cudgel made that a standoff for the moment.
"Callin!" Asera said to the officer. "What are you doing wearing Sandrakkan colors? Did the queen decide you were too slimy for even her to stomach?"
Callin laughed merrily. He swept off his helmet and bowed to the procurator.
"Mistress Asera," he said, "I can't tell you how pleased I am that the king chose you for his agent and that I was here to greet you. I haven't forgotten your interference in the matter of the chief steward's wife, you see."
Callin was a tall man with handsome features and shoulder-length hair as blond as Sharina's own. His eyes were blue; they glittered the way a snake's do. He swept them around the room before returning to the man in the chimney alcove.
"Not him, master," the innkeeper said hurriedly. "Master Eskal inspects the earl's properties in this district and to the west. I know him well."
Callin nodded and gestured away the soldier fronting Eskal. He turned his attention to Sharina and Meder. The queen's agent was supple and shone with a lacquered perfection despite having ridden here through the rain.
Sharina sipped her mulled wine. She thought of the hatchet in her belt, thought of Nonnus still outside; and waited.
"Does the earl know that you're meddling in his domains?" Asera said to Callin's back. "What do you suppose he'll do to this inn and everyone in Gonalia when he learns they've been aiding you?"
Callin chuckled. He fingered the horsehead on his sleeve. "Oh, the earl and my mistress are very good friends, Asera," he said. "I'm acting for both of them in this matter, and these men"
He patted the cheek guard of the soldier beside him; the man looked as though he'd swallowed something unpleasant.
"are the earl's own troops, right enough. Aren't you, boys?"
The soldiers grunted. Sharina had seen poisonous snakes she liked better than she did Callin; but as did those snakes, the queen's agent had a glittering beauty.
He looked at Meder and all the humor left his face. "Yes," Callin said, "I know you too, don't I, Meder bor-Mederman?"
He took the ivory athame from the wizard's sash, looked at it with distaste, and tossed it accurately into the center of the fire with only a glance to judge distance and angle. He smiled again.
"Master Meder," he said. "My directions from the queen are to take all of you alive if possible. You're believed to have valuable information. If you make a sound that I imagine could be charm or curse, however, I'll have your tongue torn out."
Callin smiled more broadly. "No, I misspoke," he said. "I'll tear your tongue out myself."
The soldier still held Meder against the wall. Callin chucked the wizard under the chin with two fingers.
"Wizards are quite all right in their proper place," he said pleasantly to the room at large. "There was doubtless wizardry behind the decision to send me to this godforsaken place to await the king's agent. But if some little toad of a wizard tries to get in my way, well, he won't like the place I think proper to put him in."
Callin stood in front of Sharina and put his hands on his waist. "And just who have we here, mistress?" he said.
The mug was empty. Sharina set it on the bench beside her. "I'm Sharina os-Reise from Barca's Hamlet on Haft," she said, looking up at the tall, smiling man. "Mistress Asera engaged me as her maid."
"Oh, I think you're rather more than that, my dear," Callin said. "More even than the prettiest little girl I've ever seen on Sandrakkan, I rather think."
He drew the hand axe from the loops of her shoulder belt and looked at it critically. There was rust on the blade because she hadn't wiped it down since coming out of the rain and spray, but the steel was honed to a working edge without nicks or dull spots.
"We were shipwrecked," Sharina said simply.
Callin's smile wavered into one of real appraisal. "Well, we'll see to it that you're not shipwrecked again," he said. He looked around and flipped the hand axe into the molding above the bar. The edge banged a finger's breadth deep in the wood. The innkeeper's wife bleated in fear, then stuffed the hem of her apron in her mouth with both hands.
"Let's go," Callin said to his men in a hard voice. "I'll take care of Mistress Sharina here. Two of you tie the others' hands to the tail of your horses."
He grinned at the procurator. "If I'm feeling kindly, Asera my dear, I'll walk you back to the castle. But I warn you, my mount has a very comfortable trot."
Callin started to offer his arm to Sharina. The outside door opened. Soldiers jerked around. Callin drew his sword so swiftly that the blade sang against the bronze lips of his scabbard. The layered steel shimmered in a pattern like the ripples of a running stream.
Nonnus walked into the common room. He carried his javelin point-forward over his left shoulder with his bindle hanging behind him.
A soldier tried to grab him by the throat. Nonnus kicked the man in the groin and shoved him gasping aside. Nobody else moved for a moment.
"And who are you, my man?" Callin asked. Sharina picked up the mug. It was heavy enough to be useful. . . .
"I'm Nonnus son of Bran, son of Pewle," the hermit said in a voice from deep in his throat. "And who are you, buddy, besides the man who's going to be looking at his guts on the floor if he doesn't point that sword someplace else?"
"No!" Callin said to one of his soldiers. Sharina hadn't seen the man tense to move, but Nonnus nodded to the officer with a wolfish grin.
"What are you doing here, Master Nonnus?" Callin asked. He didn't move his sword, but the situation no longer teetered quite on the edge of a bloody abyss.
"I'm looking for Waley the Merchant," Nonnus said. He looked around the common room with cold, angry eyes whose expression didn't change wherever they lighted. "Any of you lot know where he lives?"
Callin raised an eyebrow to the innkeeper. "Waley's been dead these ten years past," the innkeeper said in a nervous voice. "His stepson Arduk handles what sealskin business comes through here nowadays. He's the ostler, three doors down on this side of the street."
"Right," Nonnus said, nodding. "I'll leave you lot to your fun, then."
He looked at Callin. Callin relaxed minutely and gave Nonnus a curt nod.
The hermit slammed the door shut behind him. Callin sheathed his sword, and Sharina put down the mug.
"Let's go," Callin repeated, his face still showing the strain of the past few moments. Whatever else the young courtier had done, he'd met Pewlemen before.
"Mistress" He extended his arm to Sharina. "you'll ride on my saddle ahead of me. I regret I didn't think to bring an extra horse for you."
Sharina ignored the arm as she stood and walked to the door. Every sight and sound was crystalline, and she moved as though crystal knives surrounded her.