Kushiel’s Dart

Chapter Sixty-Seven

And so we did.

It was somewhat later than dawn, truth be told, when we set out in the oar-boat for Rousse’s flagship. Once he’d made up his mind, the Admiral was nothing but efficiency, but there were a great many orders to be delegated before we left.

These I tried to follow as best I could, but Quintilius Rousse was in no mind to be tailed by Delaunay’s anguissette, so all I caught was a confused impression. He would leave his lieutenant in charge, with orders to implement a shore brigade, guarding their borders. A quarter of the ships would sail upcoast to Azzalle and find berth at Trevalion, held loyal by Ghislain de Somerville, and send word to Ysandre. If royal couriers could not make it through Morhban, they could send word through Trevalion.

As for the rest, they would do their best to hold off de Morhban’s inquiry, and sound out his loyalty. For de Morbhan had a fleet of his own-I’d not known that-and if he turned traitor, he could use it to sail north and harry the whole of the Azzallese coast, forcing them to turn their attention away from the flatlands and guarding the Rhenus.

It was a fair bewilderment of possibilities and strategies. I had never appreciated, until his death, the narrow and dangerous path Delaunay trod among his allies and enemies. Then again, I thought, nor had he, not entirely. Melisande had played a deeper game, and blinded him to d’Aiglemort’s betrayal. It was only my ill-luck to have stumbled upon it.

And now I was playing an even deeper game that she had not yet guessed. Thinking on it, I shuddered. Kushiel’s Dart, cast against the blood of his line. Whatever befell us on the waters, at least it took me further away from her. I did not trust myself, after seeing her at the Hippochamp. I had withheld the signale, it was true, the last time…but I would not trust it a third time. I had come closer than I liked to think, with de Morhban. It was shock and the numbness of grief that had buffered me that terrible night with Melisande, the night of Delaunay and Alcuin’s death. And even then, it had been so close.

Another time…I trailed my fingers in the water, as the oarsmen set to and the shore grew distant behind us. Another time, it would be different. And Elua help me, I longed for it. I could not help it, even as I despised her.

The edge between love and hate is honed finer than the keenest flechette. She told me something like that, once, but I dared not think on such things, with her name so close to my tongue. She told me too that it was not my acquiescence that interested her, but my rebellion. That was the thing that set her apart from the others, who failed to see where it lay.

That was the thing that terrified me.

Well, then; if I could not free myself from her sway, I could do that much. I ran one finger under the velvet lead tied about my throat, considering the horizon. Melisande Shahrizai wanted to see how far I would run with her line upon me, how far my rebellion would take me. I do not think she reckoned on it taking me to the green and distant shores of Alba. Elua willing, it might even lead to the unraveling of her subtle and deep-laid plans.

So I prayed, facing the forbidding seas. And if I were to die on these deadly waters, I prayed my last thought wouldn’t be of her.

Though somehow I feared it would.

While I occupied myself with these morbid thoughts, Rousse’s strong oarsmen gained his flagship, scrambling aboard. And then I had no time to dwell on such things, as they lowered rope ladders for us and we had to clamber on board, hands and feet slipping on the salt-slickened rope. I count myself agile, but it was no easy feat, learning to balance on the swaying wooden decks of the great ship.

A pillar of compassion, Quintilius Rousse laughed at our dismay, striding about with a rolling ease he didn’t display on dry land. He shouted orders as he strode, obeyed with alacrity, and we came to see quickly, all of us, why he was the Royal Admiral. He gave us unto the charge of his second-in-command, wiry, sharp-eyed Jean Marchand, who showed us to a cabin with four hammocks slung from the ceiling.

By the time we had stowed such gear as we brought, Quintilius was giving orders to hoist sail.

I freely confess, boats are a great mystery to me. Before yesterday, I’d never even glimpsed the sea, let alone set sail upon it. I cannot begin to fathom the myriad tasks the sailors performed, swarming up and down the masts, lashing and unlashing ropes in bewildering profusion, cranking a chain that raised the anchor, massive and dripping. All I know is that Quintilius Rousse gave commands, and they obeyed. Some thirty men went belowdecks to set to at the oars, and the great flagship turned its prow slowly, swinging away from land and toward the open sea. And then the sails rose, steady and majestic, deep blue with the Courcel swan: three in a row, the greatest at the center, with smaller sails fore and aft. The wind filled them and they bellied out, snapping, setting the silver swan anight.

It happens faster than one imagines. One minute, the ship is turning slowly, inching through its own backwater, oars beating the sea into a seemingly futile roil. And then, suddenly, the waves are slipping past, lapping at the sides with ever-increasing speed.

A cheer arose from the sailors, and Quintilius Rousse breached a keg of wine for toasts all around; it is tradition, I learned later, at the start of each voyage.

In this, we shared. Hyacinthe tossed his down, gazing about him exuberantly. I sipped mine, finding it warming against the chilly wind. Joscelin stared into his mug and looked rather green.

"I don’t think I’m a sailor," he murmured.

Quintilius Rousse, strolling past, clapped him on the shoulder. "Drink it, lad," he said heartily. "If it comes back up, so be it. Just bend over the side, and give your toll to the Lord of the Deeps."

It proved to be prophetic advice. I winced with sympathy as Joscelin clutched the railing and leaned over, retching. Hyacinthe grinned.

"Cassilines aren’t fit for the Long Road," he said. "Not when it extends over sea!"

"He can start a fire with damp tinder in the middle of a blizzard," I said, feeling an obscure need to defend him. "I didn’t see any Tsingani in the heart of the Skaldic wilderness, Prince of Travellers."

"We’re not that stupid." Hyacinthe laughed, and wandered off to watch the sailors at work, already taking on a rolling sea-man’s gait. I watched him sourly, left to tend to the heaving Cassiline. There is something innately pitiful about a man in vambraces spewing up his breakfast.

It was Rousse’s plan to sail due west, running ahead of the wind that blows through the Straits. If we got a good-enough lead, he reckoned, we might outrun Elder Brother’s reach, gaining the open sea and rounding the southern tip of Alba.

It was a good plan, and from what I understood, we took a good run at it. A full half a day we sailed, until we were well and truly betwixt shores, neither visible, not Terre d’Ange that we had left, nor Alba that we sought. The weather held clear, and the wind blew true. As we headed west, nothing lay before us but open sea that made my blood run cold with its endless horizon, and made the sailors sing. Truly, they are a different breed, seafarers. I fixed my inner compass by the points around me, even in direst straits, knowing where I was. It is different for them. The unknown, the empty vastness of the sea, beckons with a lure I can but imagine.

Outermost west, the Tsingani had called the far shores of Kusheth. I understood then that it was only the place where the outermost west began, for the sea stretched endlessly, onward and onward, toward where the sun dies each night. Outermost west is beyond our ken. It is there, somewhere, the priests say, that Mother Earth and the One God created a realm where the sun never dies, but only rests; the true Terre d’Ange, where Elua walks smiling, naked feet treading upon the soil, and green things grow in his wake.

So it may be; I can only believe, and trust that it was true. Our journey was but a day’s, and even that met its end.

It came, as such things ever do, when we believed that we had passed the point of crisis, and our way lay clear before us. No one knows, for a surety, how far the reach of the Master of the Straits extends. Without a doubt, it was farther than Quintilius Rousse reckoned, for it came when he began at last to relax, swaying comfortably at the wheel of his mighty ship, ordering his sailors to take the soundings and gauging whether or not it was time to turn his prow toward the north.

It began as a wind ruffling the waves.

Such a thing, one might think, is normal at sea, where the wind is one’s mistress, and dictates one’s course. This is true. But this wind…I cannot explain. It ran contrary to the westerly breeze that blew us true, lower than that wind, blowing the waves backward, creating a cauldron of distress.

"Ah, no," Quintilius Rousse breathed, taking a firmer grip upon the wheel and casting his gaze skyward. "Ah, no, Elder Brother, have mercy!"

I looked up, then, at the sky, which had bid fair for our journey, as clear as the day before. No longer. Clouds roiled above us, gathering with purpose and darkness, a roiling mix, blotting out the sun.

"What is it?" I asked the Queen’s Admiral, dreading the answer.

Questions are dangerous, for they have answers. I had said as much to the Duc de Morhban. Quintilius Rousse looked at me with fear in his bright blue eyes, the old trawler-line scar dragging down one side of his mouth.

"It is him," he said.

And that is when the skies opened upon us.

For those who have never survived a storm at sea, I do not wish it upon anyone. Our ship, which had seemed such a safe haven on the vast breast of the waters, was pitched and tossed about like a child’s toy. The contrary winds, one moment ago a mild phenomenon, turned to forces of destruction, boiling the sea into crests and troughs higher than our tallest mast. Night or day, there was no telling, the skies turned a horrid bruised color, split only by lightning.

"Drop sails!" Quintilius Rousse shouted, his powerful voice battered and lost in the winds and the lashing rain that followed. "Drop sails!"

Somehow, his men heard; I saw them, as I clung helplessly to the foremast, their silhouettes against the lightning-struck sky, high overhead, obeying the Admiral’s orders. The sails dropped like stones, and I saw one man at least swept over, as the ship listed to starboard. Rain blew like veils across my sight; through it, incredibly, I saw Joscelin making his way to the foredeck, from grip to grip, a dim figure inching along with sheer determination. I prayed Hyacinthe had gained the safety of our cabin, though I doubted it; I remembered him last amid a group of sailors, too interested to go below. And it had come upon us too fast.

Gaining the mast, Joscelin took hold and crouched over me, sheltering me with his body from the buffeting winds. Drenched and sodden, I peered out from under him, my own rain-lashed hair obscuring my vision. "Do we turn back?" Joscelin asked the Admiral, shouting the question. "My lord Admiral! Do we turn back?"

"Here he comes!" Quintilius Rousse roared his answer, pointing with one shaking finger across the water. He came.

The Master of the Straits.

Those who have not made this passage say I lie; I swear, it is true. Huddled under Joscelin’s sheltering form, I saw him, a face upon the waters, moving toward us. Of waves was his flesh wrought, of thunderclouds, his hair; lightning, his eyes and, I swear, he spoke. His voice burst upon us like thunder, drumming at our ears, until we could but cower beneath it.

"WHO DARES CROSS?"

Like calls to like. Lashing himself to the wheel, the Queen’s Admiral dared to reply, roaring like fury into the winds, shaking his fist. "I do, you old bastard! And if you want your precious Black Boar to rule in Alba, you’ll let me go!"

There was laughter, then, and the face of the waters reared up three times the height of our mid-mast, dwarfing Rousse’s defiance. A vast, watery face, laughing like thunder, until I clapped my hands over my drowning ears.

"THAT IS NOT YOUR DREAM, SEAFARER! WHAT TOLL WILL YOU PAY?"

"Name your price!" Quintilus Rousse howled his answer, hands clinging like iron to the straining wheel. The ship plunged into a trough; he held its course, hurling defiance into the winds. "Just name it, you old bastard! I’ll pay what it takes!"

The ship climbed up the crest of a wave, toward the vast maw, dark and infinite, that had opened in the sky. Open, laughing like thunder, to swallow us forevermore.

This is the end, I thought, closing my eyes.

And felt the absence of Joscelin’s sheltering body.

"A song!" I knew the voice; it was Joscelin’s, strident and urgent with hope. His hand grabbed at my shoulder, hauling me erect, even as the ship teetered atop the pitch of a wave. "Such as you have never heard, my lord of the Straits, sung upon the waters!" he shouted at the wave-wrought face that loomed over us. "A song!"

"What song?" I asked Joscelin desperately, the ship pitching. The rain whipped his hair, dull and sodden, his hands anchoring me. We might have been the last two mortals left alive, for all that I could see. "Joscelin! What song?"

He answered, shouting; I saw it, though I could not hear. The wind ripped his answer away, rendered it soundless. But we had been together through all that humans might endure, through blizzard and storm, and all that the elements might hurl at us. We did not need to speak aloud. I saw his lips form the words.

Gunter’s steading.

And because there was nothing else to do, except die, I sang, then, a song of Gunter’s steading: a hearth-song, one of those the women had taught me, Hedwig and the others, a song of waiting, and longing, of a handsome thane dying young, in a welter of blood and sorrow, of reaping and sowing and harvest, of old age come early, and weaving by the fireside, while the snows of winter pile deep at the door.

I am not Thelesis de Mornay, at whose voice all present fall silent, listening. But I have a gift for language, that Delaunay taught to me. These songs I had committed to memory, scrawled by burnt twig next to the hearth-fire, never recorded by men. They were the homely songs of Skaldi women, to which no scholar ever paid heed. And I sang them, then, though the wind tore the words from my lips, for the Master of the Straits, whose face moved over the waters, impossibly vast and terrible.

And he listened, and the waters grew calm, the awesome features sinking back into the rippling waves.

No one, ever, had brought these songs to the sea before.

I kept singing, while the seas grew tranquil, and the waves lapped at the sides of the ship, and Joscelin’s hand was beneath my arm, keeping me upright while my voice grew ragged. Those sailors quailing beneath the onslaught stirred, creeping onto deck. I sang, hoarsely, of children born and fir trees giving forth new growth, until Quintilius Rousse roused himself with a shake.

"Do you accept our toll?" he cried.

The waves themselves shuddered, a face forming on their surface, benign and complacent, yet vast, so vast. Its mouth could have swallowed our ship whole.

"YESSSSS…" came the reply, whispered and dreadful. "YOU MAY PASS."

And it was gone.

The withdrawal of resistance came like a blow, the restoration of calm, water dissipating into mere waves, rippled by a western breeze. The skies cleared; it was not even dusk. I drew in a great breath, my throat rasping.

"Is it done?" I asked Quintilius Rousse hoarsely, trusting to Joscelin to keep me upright.

"It is done," he confirmed, his blue eyes darting left and right, scarce trusting to the evidence they saw. He looked at me then with something like fear. "Did Delaunay teach you that, then, to soothe Elder Brother’s craving?"

I laughed at that, my voice cracking with exhaustion and hysteria. "No," I whispered, leaning on Joscelin’s vambraced arm. "Those are the songs of Skaldi women, whose husbands and brothers may yet slaughter us all."

And with that, I collapsed.

When I awoke, I was lying in a dark cabin, enmeshed in a hammock as if in a hempen cradle, swaying. A single lamp lit the darkness, its flame trimmed low. A familiar figure drowsed beside it, sitting in a chair.

"Hyacinthe," I whispered.

He started, and lifted his head, white grin reassuring. "Did you think you’d lost me?"

"I wasn’t sure." I struggled to sit upright, then gave up, resigning myself to the hammock. "I saw at least one go over."

"Four." He said it quietly, no longer smiling. "It would have been more, if not for Jean Marchand. He made us lash ourselves to whatever we could."

"You saw it, then." My voice was hoarse still. It is something, to sing down the sea. Hyacinthe nodded, a faint movement in the shadows.

"I saw it."

"Where’s Joscelin?"

"Above." Hyacinthe yawned. "He wanted to see the stars, to gain his bearings. He’s not vomiting anymore, at least."

I began to laugh, then stopped. It hurt my throat. "We owe him all our lives."

"You sang." He looked at me curiously through the darkness.

"He made me. He remembered the songs. Gunter’s steading." I lay back, exhausted again. "I never thought I’d be grateful to the Skaldi."

"All knowledge is worth having," Hyacinthe said, quoting Delaunay, whom I had quoted to him. "Even this. Even the dromonde." Rising, he smoothed my hair back from my brow and kissed me. "Go to sleep," he said, and blew out the lamp.