fic - Strandline - part 6
Dec. 7th, 2014 02:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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last_herald_mageSorry it's been so long. I got stuck on this part and started working on part 7, which is therefore also more or less finished - am hoping to post it later today. Because I can't just leave you with this one. That would be cruel.
Beside him, Valdir still heard Stefen's foot tap in a soft, declining rhythm, fading into the sound of the city. Tantras had vanished down the streets, his mind growing distant as a far moon behind the thick clouds hanging over river. Stefen paused, and as another crowd of sailors shoved past them, he slid around the corner of the tavern porch into the street, leaving Valdir to almost get his nose bloodied by the swinging door.
There had been times in his life that he found himself immensely frustrated that, while he was entirely capable of discovering what someone was thinking, he couldn't do it. Wouldn't. But he wanted to reach right past Stefen's calculating scowl and know its elusive meaning.
"Out of sight," Stefen murmured. He hooked his thumbs in his belt, and leaned cautiously one way and then another, looking either way down the street. "I wait all my life to see a Herald, and then..."
Heralds don't come here. Why would they? A small city, with civic machinery well in place - a portmaster and borderguards and patrolling watchmen, and functionaries sending reports and meagre tax remittances - would often be omitted from circuit to allow Heralds to focus on more distant climes. There haven't been enough of us since the war began, and we don't come close enough to see the machinery turn -
Stefen softly sang the opening bars of a song as he looked around the crowded streets. Not the Demonsbane song. It was the Shadow Stalker song, and it sent a strange pain through him - fell, dissonant memories, distortions of a life that wasn't Valdir's. He chewed on the inside of his cheek as Stef looked about, thinking. Soon enough, he fell silent. "Follow me quick," Stef told him, and he was gone in a flash, down the street and into a tiny alley.
Valdir followed. He was realising how consistently the routes Stefen picked were not those he would have walked alone himself; thin paths, shaded and and thick with grime and litter. Unpatrolled streets. Valdir was prepared to hold his nose in deference to his guide's aversion to the light of the law than part ways from his only source.
I don't like leaning on only one source. It reminded him none too comfortably of being in Highjorune, stumbling in darkness and reliant on one shuttered, flickering candle of insight. If there's anyone else who would tell me as much of Cul Aber as Stefen, I haven't the time to find them. Harri's been dead for a day and a half.
Afternoon was already drawing in, and from the alleyways Cul Aber seemed thick with layers of shadows, cast beyond its own walls - hooks stretched across the land and the river. It's all, everything I've seen of the Cul Aber, from Stef's word. I can't separate him from the city. He had a sense of the two paths coinciding - Harri's death, Stefen's life, crossing like lines of magic.
He tried to keep his bearings as Stefen picked his way down the backstreets - Stefen kept a hand to the wall, feeling out his way along the weather-worn stones as if they spoke to him. Southeast, paralleling the curve in the river that the whole city crooked around. Stefen's other hand rested near his belt - over a purse, perhaps, though they seemed alone save for stoop-smokers and children picking through whatever rubbish hadn't been swept clean by the vicious winds.
"Stefen," a voice called.
Stefen stumbled to a halt - the first time Valdir had seen him be less than graceful. "Who goes there?"
A shadow arose from a pile of alley-scraps - stained cloth, a cracked wooden staff, the man beneath it even thinner and paler than Stefen. Valdir gasped as he saw blood seeping through ragged clothes. The man lifted his hood, revealing a fresh gash on his scalp, a bruise obliterating the crude Scale tattoo on his withered face. "It's Dotrid, sir, begging your service." Stefen stepped back from him, a grimace on his face. "I can pay you for passage through Rockharbour land -"
"Passage? I don't play ferryman since truce," Stefen explained patiently, addressing the injured man as if he were mad. There was a tension written in his back that his voice did not admit to. He had risen on the balls of his feet, as if ready to run away from the decrepit old man.
"They broke truce," Dotrid explained, leaning on his stick and waving at his wounds. "Ain't no truce no more. You look at this -"
"Who you piss off this time?" Stef asked longsufferingly. Valdir cautiously opened his empathic senses, and found uncertainty colouring Stefen's aura dark.
"No one! They say Yorann put word out that Dotrid snitched on a Rockharbour man, and got every fence in the Grand Bazaar put under arrest! But I never! Who would do such a vile thing!"
Stefen bit his lip, and glanced back at Valdir, as if to check he was still close. He appeared oddly relieved. "You're daft. What you want me to do of it?"
"Take me to talk to Yorann, and I'll tell him -"
"You'll tell him you're daft," muttered Stefen. He stared at the ground, calculating. "Listen. I got places to be. If I sees you here this time tomorrow, and you got three silver for me, I'll do it, coin first."
Dotrid's stick rattled against the wall. "Three silver first? I say, that's steep for a favour for a longstanding friend to you -" but Stefen was already striding off, tripping so fast down the alleyway it was hard for Valdir to keep up with him. They reached another main street, and Stefen ducked across it and into the backstreets beyond. Only there did he slow for a moment to allow Valdir to catch up to him.
"That was Dotrid the Snitch, also known as Dotrid the Liar," he explained. "He's got himself a reputation - watchmen are the only ones listen to him, guess cause he says all kinds of things they like hearing."
"You don't like him," Valdir observed. Stef's words had carried more than the ordinary disdain that he would have expected toward an alleged informant - he really didn't like the man. There had been a thick, angry disgust in his words.
"If he shows up with my money and wants to call on Yorann for another beating, no skin off my nose..." He shrugged. "But he ain't no friend of mine. He was one of Berte's hangers-on."
Valdir felt that he'd reached into a thicket of thorns, so far in that the words would snag sharp on his skin whether he should retreat or go deeper. But the Empath in him could only reach out and grasp at them. "Your keeper's crowd?"
Stefen's face curled. "Yeah. She and I had a tenement gaff for a while - types like Dotrid were always over there, wheedling for something or giving her something for something. After she died, I go out one day to sing for pennies and I come home and find him and two more smoking in my bed like they owned the place, 'cause that's what they always did when they had some and nowhere to go with it and who cared if she was fucking dead, they still felt had more right to be at Berte's place than I did." He looked away suddenly, staring down the street toward the river. "So damn right I don't like him, but he had me worried for a second."
"About what?" Valdir breathed.
"The truce," Stefen frowned. "Dare say Dotrid had it coming, but I don't like when I see someone's face beat in on my watch. I seen too many troubles today," and he looked at Valdir significantly. "New faces round, old ones getting caved in. Things out of place and the law crawling on them and riling the Rockharbour - ain't asking, but I can't rule out any reasons as to why," he said delicately, and tilted his head.
"What do you mean?" Valdir asked carefully.
Stefen's voice dropped low. "I ain't asking or aught. But case you forgot, not two hours ago we met a Scale man thought you was in rough straits with the law, and now I hear they're walking on the Rockharbour and Yorann's out for blood, and a Herald shown up like out of a song and riding down the Causeway?"
A shiver ran up Valdir's back. "No - I'm not -"
"Ain't asking what's is or not," Stefen reiterated, quite firmly. "Never matters what's true or not. I only wonder what they're all thinking of you."
Me too. Often, he thought grimly, and closed his eyes. Valdir is just a harmless minstrel. He's only here because I don't want to make trouble. He tried to find his mistake, running back in his mind through the streets they'd walked, listening for hoofbeats. So Tantras kicked a hornet's nest at the Grand Bazaar...? He felt himself blunder through the delicate ecology of chalk-marks and territorial violence. Tantras had guides of his own - but they less sensitive than Valdir's, and tragically aware of Tantras's position above them.
He opened his eyes again, and found Stefen glancing at him while pretending not to. Stef shrugged, and continued up the alleyway, rising up to the river-wall, feet sliding on loose and slippery cobbles. Tread careful, Valdir warned himself as the water grew loud in his ears. The swollen river spread before them, so vast and stormy that the land beyond - far and foreign Ceejay - seemed an unreachable dream.
Valdir had seen little of the harbour when they'd passed by last night - only a few lights on the water. The riverfront was dotted with thick wooden jetties in a patchwork of disrepair. Barges and longships were moored here and there, perhaps a dozen in total, but in daylight hours his eyes were drawn immediately to the ship moored at the end of the longest of the jetties. He'd seen larger ships on Lake Evendim, but few even there; it could have been home to a dozen people and still carried cargo and cannon without trouble. The ship was stained dark and hung with lanterns. A half-dozen ruffians endured the cold to sit on the roof or the prow, an ale-jug passing from hand to hand. We walked near here last night - I heard their voices -
Stefen extended his right arm so fast that Valdir walked into it. He turned, spread his palm on Valdir's chest, then raised both hands to his face - not gentle, not kind, but interrogative, testing the heat of his skin, the strength of his pulse, lifting his brows as if searching his eyes for sanity, or at least sobriety. "I'm done telling you not to do this. But you go talk to the Morn without gold in your pocket, odds are, Silona's going to test you. Morn takes blood credit - doesn't lend favours to no one who can't prove they got the salt to pay them back," and Stefen looked at him measuringly. "You can handle yourself in a fight, right?" Valdir nodded. "You might have to. I got to say, I hope you're up to it, because," and he looked away, staring across the river. "I may be getting a taste for your madness."
Valdir felt the wind cut straight through his chest - freezing and unsettling him, pulling the layers of his self this way and that. He couldn't speak.
"I still telling you, it's not worth it," Stefen continued blithely. "Truth is the worst reason to do anything - you look for truth in a hash like this, all you going to find is evil, and it ain't like no songs from that war of yours. There's no glory on the river." Stefen looked at him with shadowed eyes - full of fear and sorrow and a strange recrimination - before turning back to the river and singing almost absently, "It was just a week till Sovvan, and the nights were turning chill..."
You're right about one thing - I'm certainly mad.
With that, Stefen leapt down the steps towards the dock where Silona's flagship was moored; almost immediately, four of the slouching sailors rose to their feet on the prow. The wind bit fierce, and Stefen strode the jetty ahead of Valdir with his cloak tight about him and his scarf struggling to escape, stray waves of spray scattering over the boards. They were soon close enough for him to read the ship's nameplate, though the first row of characters meant nothing to him - Ifteli script looked similar to Karsite, equally indecipherable; the Valdemaran letters beneath read Winter Sunrise.
With a hand to his eyes against the wind and the sun on the river, Valdir looked to the men who had made ready to receive them; apart from the semicircle Morn tattoos on their hands or faces, little marked them as alike to each other. The man closest to them seemed the oldest, perhaps because so much of him seemed torn and restitched, clumsily repaired after some fight or another, from his cloak to his boots to his glower at their approach. His face had the look of being kicked many a time, and the sword he brandished looked equally nicked and weathered.
Two were little more than boys; one looked Cejan, and Valdir wasn't sure about the other. They were otherwise made in the same image - jewels in their ears and knives worn openly in belt-sheaths. The Cejan lad had grown his hair out, and it was set in grimy blond coils. Behind them stood a man so tall and broad as to seem unmoveable; he was notably less battered than their leader, but then, who would dare?
"Stef. What's the trouble?" the first of them said, and Stefen nodded to him politely.
"Just paying a call on a lady, Thyll," and he flicked his cloak back over his shoulder to demonstrate that he carried no weapons. Valdir's eyes immediately dropped to his boots, but a casual glance didn't reveal a blade.
"And your friend?" Thyll's lips curled as he looked down at Valdir. "You sure Loa wants to meet him, because it won't be on my head if she don't."
"We wouldn't trouble her if it weren't of import." He spoke with a little of the same formality as he'd put on to play with the watchmen.
"You'll vouch for him?" asked Thyll suspiciously.
Valdir's heart froze when Stefen looked back at him, but his eyes were fleeting and unseeing, telling him only that he didn't care to see anything at all. Somewhere, he'd already made up his mind about what Valdir was. "Yes, on my soul I would," he answered solemnly.
"You don't have one," Thyll muttered, and he waved them aboard even as Stefen's blank eyes stared out across the river.
Stefen knew where he was going, lifting the hatch that led down into the ship's living quarters while Valdir was still catching his balance. The pirate children stifled laughter at him. He had noticed their odd bearing towards Stefen, and took heed of their empathic signals as he crossed the deck; Stefen's presence had provoked a strange blend of familiarity and fear. Not of Stefen, surely? He thought of Evendim legends that told of redheads being cursed. No, an Evendim crew would have tossed him overboard by now. There's some other history here.
Belowdecks, Stefen lead him toward the stern through a dark passage, Valdir stooping under the beams. He'd rarely stepped onto anything larger than a rowboat before - even the largest Evendim vessels were built by fishermen, with vast open holds and tight cabins to hole up from the rain. The Winter Sunrise was someone's home; opulent and varnished, and with space for comforts and treasures and a pack of guard dogs.
He smelt smoke, and its source soon came into view; another gilded young sailor, leaning on the ships' beams in an alcove, sucking on a pipeful of herbs. A curved sword rested on her knee. "The lady's resting -"
"The lady can speak for herself," a voice called through the cabin door beside her. "Let the scoundrels pass."
Stefen nudged past the scowling bodyguard, and palmed open the sliding door. Behind him, Valdir stooped under the doorway, holding the doorjamb tight against the sway that seemed not to trouble Stefen. "Thanks," Stef called softly, as Valdir slid the door closed. "Loa, it's been too long, I keep not -"
"Cut it out before I cut it out for you. What do you want?"
As she moved, Valdir heard a whisper like soft bells. She had been resting, evidently, lying atop a bunk swathed with silk cloths edged in gold. If she'd slept, it was in her boots and with a sword in arm's reach - a fine sword, to his eye, a delicately crafted hilt and a dull, curved blade that he was willing to bet could cut moonlight. "But a moment of your time," asked Stefen. In the tiny cabin, they were close enough that Valdir could almost feel his muscles tensing.
"Time don't belong to me." Could be a proverb, or a complaint. She sat up slowly, and then stood, leaning lazily on a post of the bed built into her cabin.
In Haven, he might have taken Loa for a stagehand. She was dressed simply and all in black, long dark hair tied behind her head, and she moved with the quiet grace of the professionally invisible - a trait also shared by the most accomplished fighters he'd ever known. Her face was strange to him. Not her sun-darkened skin or semicircular tattoo - the dawn at the horizon - which she shared with many of Cul Aber's washed-up sailors. But he had never met an Ifteli on his travels, nor been present for any of their rare delegations to Haven. Even in border-towns like Cul Aber - where he'd noticed Cejans, Hardornens, migrants from the wartorn south, even a few traders from the Eastern Empire - Iftelis did not congregate. Why, after all, would an Ifteli leave her blessed heartland?
Her dark, wide-set eyes seemed perpetually seeking, narrowing as they settled on Valdir, moving on in boredom as he failed to offer any cause for interest. Stefen, however, seemed to have earned her attention for at least a moment. "What you need from the Morn?" she asked. Her accent wasn't dissimilar to Stefen's. She was young, and her father much established on the river - Valdir realised she may have spent most of her life in Valdemar.
"Not the Morn, Loa. I need your own eyes," Stefen explained. "We're looking for someone," and he nodded at Valdir. "Was meant to have come over from Ceejay of late. Can't find no trace of the man, but we found some effects of his for sale at market this morning. I not heard of anyone crossing the river since the snowmelt came pouring off the hills, but no one knows the Culway's business like you do."
"Your friend was in Ceejay?" She looked at Valdir sharply. "What was his place there?"
It seemed a strange question, and he wasn't sure how thoroughly to answer. "He was trading horses," Valdir dutifully provided Harri's cover. "He'd headed north from the crossing at Peltford."
She frowned. "So he wandered? Cejans don't take so well to that. They think everyone has their place," and she laughed low at this absurdity. "They're born knowing what they are, where they are. Priest or warrior or artisan or usurer or slave. To not know your place is to be damned." She smiled darkly at Stefen. "I hear merchants say the priest class don't like them. But all priests like money," she shrugged, and then frowned thoughtfully. "Would he have brought any of his beasts back over the river?"
The question was like frigid water on his brain. "I don't know," Valdir answered truthfully, mind racing. :Fandes,: he called. :What about Thia? Did she die before or after Harren?:
"I know a few ferrymen who can take a beast, if it's docile and the money's right," Loa told him. "Risk attracting attention, mind. It's that bit harder for the harbourmaster to look the other way."
:I don't know,: Yfandes replied. :If they were in danger, perhaps they split up - unburdened, Thia could reach one of the fords further south faster than you might imagine -:
Given the speeds at which Yfandes had borne him, he was prepared to accept that. But - :If they split up, then how did someone kill both of them? Who could even catch up with a Companion?:
He felt her discomfort with his grim logic. :So they must have killed Thia first.:
Which, he knew, would have been difficult to accomplish. Maybe impossible for an assassin who had gone in believing Thia was merely a horse. Which meant that in the hours between the last time he'd spoken to Harri and the moment of his death, he'd blundered so badly that someone had known him for a Herald and had time to plan out Thia's death. He shook his head, feeling the parameters of the problem frustrate him, as if he were threading a needle with an unsteady hand. "I don't know either way, but if you've seen anyone cross the river these last few days...?"
She put a finger to her lips, and chewed at its end. "If that's all you want to know? Then no, I've not seen anyone cross the river. And I keep enough of an eye out at night that if someone had sailed over, I would know."
"But?" asked Stefen, no more oblivious to the tilt of her words than Valdir was.
"I can tell you nothing for nothing, fair's fair." She folded her hands in front of her. "You want to hear something strange, do you?" Valdir allowed himself to look curious without pleading. "I got something strange you might want to hear. But I want to know I can get something worth having in return."
"Oh come on," blustered Stefen. "I come here to deal with you, not with the Morn. You know what I'm made of, and -"
"This ain't for you," Loa noted calmly. "I ain't trusting you with no one else's debts. You go your own way," she observed, and as Stefen's face twisted at the implication of his lack of fidelity, she crossed the cabin in a stride and opened a carved panel on the wall opposite her bed. She looked over her shoulder at Valdir, as if daring him to hold her eyes. "You don't deal with me without the Morn knowing you're good for what you owe us. So choose your weapon."
He looked into her startling collection of metalwork - vicious long knives, the curved swords the pirates favoured, the heavy longswords that had dogged his childhood, short spears with hooked heads, all polished to a sheen and set in their place in pairs. Even as he examined the rest he instinctively reached for a long, light rapier - exactly the kind of blade he worked best with.
"No hesitation," she noted with respect. "Never mind I don't know your name..."
No, you don't. He tested the blade's weight, finding it sound and comfortable in his hand. "Valdir," he answered - a Herald in deed, announcing the name of another. His grasp on his cover felt weak, his hands preoccupied. Valdir had never wielded a weapon before. "So now you want me to go ashore and fight you to prove I deserve your favour?"
Loa laughed at him.
"That one ain't so bad," Stefen claimed, his voice shaking. "Got some room to move about, at least."
Valdir leaned on his swordpoint on the jetty, watching the Morn clear the deck of the cargo barge moored up the jetty from the Sunrise. He found himself doubting Stefen's word - unladen, the boat pitched unsteadily as the pirates tossed ropes and tools into the corners of its open deck. "It's not where I would have chosen to fight a duel," he answered.
"She's chosen worse before now," Stefen assured him. He was already holding Valdir's tattered cloak, and he rearranged its folds with distracted delicacy. "You've fought a lot of duels?"
"None," he replied truthfully. He'd killed more than enough people to find the idea of using swords to resolve petty status squabbles abhorrent. Loa, evidently, had not. She sat on the jetty twenty paces away, sword over her folded knees, oblivious to Valdir's scrutiny. It was evident why she favoured fighting in small arenas - her poor reach would leave her vulnerable on a open field. "Has she much experience of war?"
"A city brawl now and then, they ain't pretty. Silona's got other enforcers, but he don't trust no one to give orders on land except Loa. Blood thicker than the river, even in this weather."
Valdir nodded. Exile sense; put your hands to work with anyone, but trust only your own. Being unable to set foot in Valdemar doubtless made it even harder for Silona to trust his associates. "Any idea how she is at cut-and-run?"
"You think she'd give you a chance to challenge her at something she was bad at?" Stef asked, tapping his toe on the dock. "She learned that style from some fancy fencer from Ceejay - he weren't no slave, so I bet he'd lost a wager he weren't good for. She got a lot of tricks from him, and then some. And she always throws in a few she shouldn't," Stefen informed him. "How about you? Where you learn to fight?" he asked.
The topic had never arisen for Valdir before, and he hadn't time to think of anything too far from the truth. "I, uh, grew up on a farm in western Valdemar, not so far from the Pelagirs. His lordship made sure all the boys of the manor learned to fight, because we saw bandits and strange beasts sometimes." Stefen's eyes widened. It wasn't quite true - no magical beast had been seen in Forst Reach until years after he left. But it was convenient.
"Hells," muttered Stef. "And you're what, how old?"
"Thirty-one," he lied. He'd been groused at by enough of his peers about his face not showing his age.
"Well, now I know how your hair turned so white. You survive Pelagir beasties and Karsites, Loa ain't gonna end you."
Valdir wasn't inclined to take his chances on that. He fed energy into his physical shields, and readied a spell-net to deploy should he fall. I'm confident I can stop her from killing me. But how far do I have to go to make her talk? Magic won't help me here. I haven't a choice but to play by her rules...
"You just got to hold your own," Stefen told him, as if he'd voiced his worries aloud. "She's fast, but I dare say she never fought a real soldier. Only this kind of scum." Scum with river-legs and little better to do but fight each other over nothing - but Stefen nudged him, shoulder to shoulder, and the content of Stef's words was suddenly of little import. He felt his own frustration ripple through Stefen and return to him as a steady, bright confidence.
He blinked. The water below their feet might as well have started flowing upriver; his emotions had shifted so smoothly he would never have noticed had he not known of Stefen's Gift. And they don't know. Even you don't really know. All anyone knows is, being close to you makes them feel powerful. Like they can do anything so long as you're on their side.
Loa rose to her feet as the pirates leapt from the tiny boat one by one. Valdir took his cue, and looked back at Stefen once as he followed her down the jetty, his sword already held at the defensive, his hand slack and ready to move. She stepped aboard before he reached her, her movements still full of understated grace. Watching the boat rock beneath her light steps, Valdir swallowed hard and jumped aboard, and Loa turned to smile at him.
"Never hesitate," she told him. Advice, or a proposed common credo. She was too young to dispense wisdom, so young that everything she'd done must have been accomplished by speed alone. Gods, I've never fought anyone so tiny - Loa was smaller than Jisa, and looked barely older. She manipulated the mooring-ropes with seasoned, easy hands, loosing knots, tightening them seconds later, hard stopping the boat's drift downriver. Valdir reflexively dropped into a crouch, his feet spreading for balance, unable to trust the water that Loa simply moved with. She hadn't twitched, hadn't given the least sign that she found it strange to be in an open-topped boat in a raging river, now roped about twice her height away from the jetty.
She's in her element.
She drew her sword, and trod the boards to the far end of the boat, a bare fifteen feet from him. Valdir clutched his rapier, shifted on his feet to find his equilibrium - and as she turned, he felt the deck below him rise in the water, his only warning as she sprang at him. A flying step, her body but a counterweight to her blade.
He dodged aside. It had been a dangerous blow to not land, and he countered clumsily with the boat rocking under him. She wasn't where he thought she was - too small, too used to the motion. It was all he could do to catch her next blow.
He drove her back with forceful parries - he had to. Her attacks had little force, but the speed alone could have driven him into the river. She sprang back, sending the boat rocking before she lunged again. He barely evaded her, and he felt the wind kiss his ribs where her blade had brushed his shirt.
The boat swayed so hard its edge skimmed the water, and his eyes swam with its motion - focusing on any fixed point would have been fatal. The Winter Sunrise rose up and down in his vision, a pack of jeering sailors crowding on its decks. A few more had joined Stefen on the jetty. The ship headed upward in his eyes as Loa rose from her crouch, and he saw movement belowdecks - a shadow behind a thick glass window, a flickering flame.
He hadn't time to think more on it. Just hold her, he repeated to himself, finding his balance and driving her back with his blade. Her speed - her lack of hesitation - will wear her down.
He parried her next blow, cutting back toward her feet, and Loa leapt away from him, landing with a thump that shook through his bones. Their eyes met as he lunged towards her, hoping to find an advantage. She almost recovered - almost - and he felt her blade give under his own. Your strength's gone -
She slipped aside, ducked under his attempt to trap her. Gods, but being so small made her infuriatingly hard to pin down. She circled him, testing his reach with her swordpoint - and her eyes widened.
Valdir felt a silence behind him. The raucous pirates had stilled. He glanced at the Sunrise, and saw them part aside on the deck, pulling themselves into unsteady salutes. Loa raised a perfunctory hand. Stefen was frozen in place, as if in dreamlike paralysis, Valdir's cloak clutched in his pale knuckles as his eyes twitched.
Hands touched the ornate rail above the Sunrise's deck. Long hands gloved in calfskin; arms draped in folds of gold-edged silk. "Daughter, I saw you were taking the measure of this man," Silona said. He spoke slowly, with a lilt that Loa lacked.
She lowered her sword. "He's done well." She spoke carefully, with just a drip of teenage condescention, admitting nothing to either of them. I almost had you, he knew now.
"What does he want of us?"
"My eyes," explainied Loa. "I don't give them away."
"We owe trust only to the strong." Loa nodded, wearing the blankly respectful look known by every child ever faced by an elder's platitudes. Silona stepped down on to the jetty, glancing up at the sky as if in warning to the sun itself. Testing his bonds - Silona must often promenade the liminal lip of Cul Aber's harbour, and knew these splinters of Valdemar were safe for him, but who would trust he knew the rules of gods or demons?
Stefen turned to salute him, his shaking hand dropping Valdir's cloak to the boards. "Milord Silona."
"Truceman," replied Silona. "You vouched for him." Stefen didn't reply.
"He done well," Loa repeated, lifting her swordpoint to gesture at Valdir; he took a step back from the quiverring bladepoint. "I sooner he be on our side too -"
"Stefen's on no one's side," Silona noted.
Stefen hesitated, and once again Valdir wondered at the implicit threat held over him here. "No one owns me," Stefen told him softly, and Silona smiled as if this statement were absurd.
"You thought your word enough for the Morn. All words, never any light - I know your way. Loa, where favours are cheap and loyalty of value, I think strength is not measure enough." He stared at Valdir with narrowed eyes, as if with menace he could unmask his worth and his agenda. "This wasn't a test," he declared, and without his eyes leaving Valdir's he backhanded Stefen hard in the stomach, sending him reeling into the river.
-->Part 7
Beside him, Valdir still heard Stefen's foot tap in a soft, declining rhythm, fading into the sound of the city. Tantras had vanished down the streets, his mind growing distant as a far moon behind the thick clouds hanging over river. Stefen paused, and as another crowd of sailors shoved past them, he slid around the corner of the tavern porch into the street, leaving Valdir to almost get his nose bloodied by the swinging door.
There had been times in his life that he found himself immensely frustrated that, while he was entirely capable of discovering what someone was thinking, he couldn't do it. Wouldn't. But he wanted to reach right past Stefen's calculating scowl and know its elusive meaning.
"Out of sight," Stefen murmured. He hooked his thumbs in his belt, and leaned cautiously one way and then another, looking either way down the street. "I wait all my life to see a Herald, and then..."
Heralds don't come here. Why would they? A small city, with civic machinery well in place - a portmaster and borderguards and patrolling watchmen, and functionaries sending reports and meagre tax remittances - would often be omitted from circuit to allow Heralds to focus on more distant climes. There haven't been enough of us since the war began, and we don't come close enough to see the machinery turn -
Stefen softly sang the opening bars of a song as he looked around the crowded streets. Not the Demonsbane song. It was the Shadow Stalker song, and it sent a strange pain through him - fell, dissonant memories, distortions of a life that wasn't Valdir's. He chewed on the inside of his cheek as Stef looked about, thinking. Soon enough, he fell silent. "Follow me quick," Stef told him, and he was gone in a flash, down the street and into a tiny alley.
Valdir followed. He was realising how consistently the routes Stefen picked were not those he would have walked alone himself; thin paths, shaded and and thick with grime and litter. Unpatrolled streets. Valdir was prepared to hold his nose in deference to his guide's aversion to the light of the law than part ways from his only source.
I don't like leaning on only one source. It reminded him none too comfortably of being in Highjorune, stumbling in darkness and reliant on one shuttered, flickering candle of insight. If there's anyone else who would tell me as much of Cul Aber as Stefen, I haven't the time to find them. Harri's been dead for a day and a half.
Afternoon was already drawing in, and from the alleyways Cul Aber seemed thick with layers of shadows, cast beyond its own walls - hooks stretched across the land and the river. It's all, everything I've seen of the Cul Aber, from Stef's word. I can't separate him from the city. He had a sense of the two paths coinciding - Harri's death, Stefen's life, crossing like lines of magic.
He tried to keep his bearings as Stefen picked his way down the backstreets - Stefen kept a hand to the wall, feeling out his way along the weather-worn stones as if they spoke to him. Southeast, paralleling the curve in the river that the whole city crooked around. Stefen's other hand rested near his belt - over a purse, perhaps, though they seemed alone save for stoop-smokers and children picking through whatever rubbish hadn't been swept clean by the vicious winds.
"Stefen," a voice called.
Stefen stumbled to a halt - the first time Valdir had seen him be less than graceful. "Who goes there?"
A shadow arose from a pile of alley-scraps - stained cloth, a cracked wooden staff, the man beneath it even thinner and paler than Stefen. Valdir gasped as he saw blood seeping through ragged clothes. The man lifted his hood, revealing a fresh gash on his scalp, a bruise obliterating the crude Scale tattoo on his withered face. "It's Dotrid, sir, begging your service." Stefen stepped back from him, a grimace on his face. "I can pay you for passage through Rockharbour land -"
"Passage? I don't play ferryman since truce," Stefen explained patiently, addressing the injured man as if he were mad. There was a tension written in his back that his voice did not admit to. He had risen on the balls of his feet, as if ready to run away from the decrepit old man.
"They broke truce," Dotrid explained, leaning on his stick and waving at his wounds. "Ain't no truce no more. You look at this -"
"Who you piss off this time?" Stef asked longsufferingly. Valdir cautiously opened his empathic senses, and found uncertainty colouring Stefen's aura dark.
"No one! They say Yorann put word out that Dotrid snitched on a Rockharbour man, and got every fence in the Grand Bazaar put under arrest! But I never! Who would do such a vile thing!"
Stefen bit his lip, and glanced back at Valdir, as if to check he was still close. He appeared oddly relieved. "You're daft. What you want me to do of it?"
"Take me to talk to Yorann, and I'll tell him -"
"You'll tell him you're daft," muttered Stefen. He stared at the ground, calculating. "Listen. I got places to be. If I sees you here this time tomorrow, and you got three silver for me, I'll do it, coin first."
Dotrid's stick rattled against the wall. "Three silver first? I say, that's steep for a favour for a longstanding friend to you -" but Stefen was already striding off, tripping so fast down the alleyway it was hard for Valdir to keep up with him. They reached another main street, and Stefen ducked across it and into the backstreets beyond. Only there did he slow for a moment to allow Valdir to catch up to him.
"That was Dotrid the Snitch, also known as Dotrid the Liar," he explained. "He's got himself a reputation - watchmen are the only ones listen to him, guess cause he says all kinds of things they like hearing."
"You don't like him," Valdir observed. Stef's words had carried more than the ordinary disdain that he would have expected toward an alleged informant - he really didn't like the man. There had been a thick, angry disgust in his words.
"If he shows up with my money and wants to call on Yorann for another beating, no skin off my nose..." He shrugged. "But he ain't no friend of mine. He was one of Berte's hangers-on."
Valdir felt that he'd reached into a thicket of thorns, so far in that the words would snag sharp on his skin whether he should retreat or go deeper. But the Empath in him could only reach out and grasp at them. "Your keeper's crowd?"
Stefen's face curled. "Yeah. She and I had a tenement gaff for a while - types like Dotrid were always over there, wheedling for something or giving her something for something. After she died, I go out one day to sing for pennies and I come home and find him and two more smoking in my bed like they owned the place, 'cause that's what they always did when they had some and nowhere to go with it and who cared if she was fucking dead, they still felt had more right to be at Berte's place than I did." He looked away suddenly, staring down the street toward the river. "So damn right I don't like him, but he had me worried for a second."
"About what?" Valdir breathed.
"The truce," Stefen frowned. "Dare say Dotrid had it coming, but I don't like when I see someone's face beat in on my watch. I seen too many troubles today," and he looked at Valdir significantly. "New faces round, old ones getting caved in. Things out of place and the law crawling on them and riling the Rockharbour - ain't asking, but I can't rule out any reasons as to why," he said delicately, and tilted his head.
"What do you mean?" Valdir asked carefully.
Stefen's voice dropped low. "I ain't asking or aught. But case you forgot, not two hours ago we met a Scale man thought you was in rough straits with the law, and now I hear they're walking on the Rockharbour and Yorann's out for blood, and a Herald shown up like out of a song and riding down the Causeway?"
A shiver ran up Valdir's back. "No - I'm not -"
"Ain't asking what's is or not," Stefen reiterated, quite firmly. "Never matters what's true or not. I only wonder what they're all thinking of you."
Me too. Often, he thought grimly, and closed his eyes. Valdir is just a harmless minstrel. He's only here because I don't want to make trouble. He tried to find his mistake, running back in his mind through the streets they'd walked, listening for hoofbeats. So Tantras kicked a hornet's nest at the Grand Bazaar...? He felt himself blunder through the delicate ecology of chalk-marks and territorial violence. Tantras had guides of his own - but they less sensitive than Valdir's, and tragically aware of Tantras's position above them.
He opened his eyes again, and found Stefen glancing at him while pretending not to. Stef shrugged, and continued up the alleyway, rising up to the river-wall, feet sliding on loose and slippery cobbles. Tread careful, Valdir warned himself as the water grew loud in his ears. The swollen river spread before them, so vast and stormy that the land beyond - far and foreign Ceejay - seemed an unreachable dream.
Valdir had seen little of the harbour when they'd passed by last night - only a few lights on the water. The riverfront was dotted with thick wooden jetties in a patchwork of disrepair. Barges and longships were moored here and there, perhaps a dozen in total, but in daylight hours his eyes were drawn immediately to the ship moored at the end of the longest of the jetties. He'd seen larger ships on Lake Evendim, but few even there; it could have been home to a dozen people and still carried cargo and cannon without trouble. The ship was stained dark and hung with lanterns. A half-dozen ruffians endured the cold to sit on the roof or the prow, an ale-jug passing from hand to hand. We walked near here last night - I heard their voices -
Stefen extended his right arm so fast that Valdir walked into it. He turned, spread his palm on Valdir's chest, then raised both hands to his face - not gentle, not kind, but interrogative, testing the heat of his skin, the strength of his pulse, lifting his brows as if searching his eyes for sanity, or at least sobriety. "I'm done telling you not to do this. But you go talk to the Morn without gold in your pocket, odds are, Silona's going to test you. Morn takes blood credit - doesn't lend favours to no one who can't prove they got the salt to pay them back," and Stefen looked at him measuringly. "You can handle yourself in a fight, right?" Valdir nodded. "You might have to. I got to say, I hope you're up to it, because," and he looked away, staring across the river. "I may be getting a taste for your madness."
Valdir felt the wind cut straight through his chest - freezing and unsettling him, pulling the layers of his self this way and that. He couldn't speak.
"I still telling you, it's not worth it," Stefen continued blithely. "Truth is the worst reason to do anything - you look for truth in a hash like this, all you going to find is evil, and it ain't like no songs from that war of yours. There's no glory on the river." Stefen looked at him with shadowed eyes - full of fear and sorrow and a strange recrimination - before turning back to the river and singing almost absently, "It was just a week till Sovvan, and the nights were turning chill..."
You're right about one thing - I'm certainly mad.
With that, Stefen leapt down the steps towards the dock where Silona's flagship was moored; almost immediately, four of the slouching sailors rose to their feet on the prow. The wind bit fierce, and Stefen strode the jetty ahead of Valdir with his cloak tight about him and his scarf struggling to escape, stray waves of spray scattering over the boards. They were soon close enough for him to read the ship's nameplate, though the first row of characters meant nothing to him - Ifteli script looked similar to Karsite, equally indecipherable; the Valdemaran letters beneath read Winter Sunrise.
With a hand to his eyes against the wind and the sun on the river, Valdir looked to the men who had made ready to receive them; apart from the semicircle Morn tattoos on their hands or faces, little marked them as alike to each other. The man closest to them seemed the oldest, perhaps because so much of him seemed torn and restitched, clumsily repaired after some fight or another, from his cloak to his boots to his glower at their approach. His face had the look of being kicked many a time, and the sword he brandished looked equally nicked and weathered.
Two were little more than boys; one looked Cejan, and Valdir wasn't sure about the other. They were otherwise made in the same image - jewels in their ears and knives worn openly in belt-sheaths. The Cejan lad had grown his hair out, and it was set in grimy blond coils. Behind them stood a man so tall and broad as to seem unmoveable; he was notably less battered than their leader, but then, who would dare?
"Stef. What's the trouble?" the first of them said, and Stefen nodded to him politely.
"Just paying a call on a lady, Thyll," and he flicked his cloak back over his shoulder to demonstrate that he carried no weapons. Valdir's eyes immediately dropped to his boots, but a casual glance didn't reveal a blade.
"And your friend?" Thyll's lips curled as he looked down at Valdir. "You sure Loa wants to meet him, because it won't be on my head if she don't."
"We wouldn't trouble her if it weren't of import." He spoke with a little of the same formality as he'd put on to play with the watchmen.
"You'll vouch for him?" asked Thyll suspiciously.
Valdir's heart froze when Stefen looked back at him, but his eyes were fleeting and unseeing, telling him only that he didn't care to see anything at all. Somewhere, he'd already made up his mind about what Valdir was. "Yes, on my soul I would," he answered solemnly.
"You don't have one," Thyll muttered, and he waved them aboard even as Stefen's blank eyes stared out across the river.
Stefen knew where he was going, lifting the hatch that led down into the ship's living quarters while Valdir was still catching his balance. The pirate children stifled laughter at him. He had noticed their odd bearing towards Stefen, and took heed of their empathic signals as he crossed the deck; Stefen's presence had provoked a strange blend of familiarity and fear. Not of Stefen, surely? He thought of Evendim legends that told of redheads being cursed. No, an Evendim crew would have tossed him overboard by now. There's some other history here.
Belowdecks, Stefen lead him toward the stern through a dark passage, Valdir stooping under the beams. He'd rarely stepped onto anything larger than a rowboat before - even the largest Evendim vessels were built by fishermen, with vast open holds and tight cabins to hole up from the rain. The Winter Sunrise was someone's home; opulent and varnished, and with space for comforts and treasures and a pack of guard dogs.
He smelt smoke, and its source soon came into view; another gilded young sailor, leaning on the ships' beams in an alcove, sucking on a pipeful of herbs. A curved sword rested on her knee. "The lady's resting -"
"The lady can speak for herself," a voice called through the cabin door beside her. "Let the scoundrels pass."
Stefen nudged past the scowling bodyguard, and palmed open the sliding door. Behind him, Valdir stooped under the doorway, holding the doorjamb tight against the sway that seemed not to trouble Stefen. "Thanks," Stef called softly, as Valdir slid the door closed. "Loa, it's been too long, I keep not -"
"Cut it out before I cut it out for you. What do you want?"
As she moved, Valdir heard a whisper like soft bells. She had been resting, evidently, lying atop a bunk swathed with silk cloths edged in gold. If she'd slept, it was in her boots and with a sword in arm's reach - a fine sword, to his eye, a delicately crafted hilt and a dull, curved blade that he was willing to bet could cut moonlight. "But a moment of your time," asked Stefen. In the tiny cabin, they were close enough that Valdir could almost feel his muscles tensing.
"Time don't belong to me." Could be a proverb, or a complaint. She sat up slowly, and then stood, leaning lazily on a post of the bed built into her cabin.
In Haven, he might have taken Loa for a stagehand. She was dressed simply and all in black, long dark hair tied behind her head, and she moved with the quiet grace of the professionally invisible - a trait also shared by the most accomplished fighters he'd ever known. Her face was strange to him. Not her sun-darkened skin or semicircular tattoo - the dawn at the horizon - which she shared with many of Cul Aber's washed-up sailors. But he had never met an Ifteli on his travels, nor been present for any of their rare delegations to Haven. Even in border-towns like Cul Aber - where he'd noticed Cejans, Hardornens, migrants from the wartorn south, even a few traders from the Eastern Empire - Iftelis did not congregate. Why, after all, would an Ifteli leave her blessed heartland?
Her dark, wide-set eyes seemed perpetually seeking, narrowing as they settled on Valdir, moving on in boredom as he failed to offer any cause for interest. Stefen, however, seemed to have earned her attention for at least a moment. "What you need from the Morn?" she asked. Her accent wasn't dissimilar to Stefen's. She was young, and her father much established on the river - Valdir realised she may have spent most of her life in Valdemar.
"Not the Morn, Loa. I need your own eyes," Stefen explained. "We're looking for someone," and he nodded at Valdir. "Was meant to have come over from Ceejay of late. Can't find no trace of the man, but we found some effects of his for sale at market this morning. I not heard of anyone crossing the river since the snowmelt came pouring off the hills, but no one knows the Culway's business like you do."
"Your friend was in Ceejay?" She looked at Valdir sharply. "What was his place there?"
It seemed a strange question, and he wasn't sure how thoroughly to answer. "He was trading horses," Valdir dutifully provided Harri's cover. "He'd headed north from the crossing at Peltford."
She frowned. "So he wandered? Cejans don't take so well to that. They think everyone has their place," and she laughed low at this absurdity. "They're born knowing what they are, where they are. Priest or warrior or artisan or usurer or slave. To not know your place is to be damned." She smiled darkly at Stefen. "I hear merchants say the priest class don't like them. But all priests like money," she shrugged, and then frowned thoughtfully. "Would he have brought any of his beasts back over the river?"
The question was like frigid water on his brain. "I don't know," Valdir answered truthfully, mind racing. :Fandes,: he called. :What about Thia? Did she die before or after Harren?:
"I know a few ferrymen who can take a beast, if it's docile and the money's right," Loa told him. "Risk attracting attention, mind. It's that bit harder for the harbourmaster to look the other way."
:I don't know,: Yfandes replied. :If they were in danger, perhaps they split up - unburdened, Thia could reach one of the fords further south faster than you might imagine -:
Given the speeds at which Yfandes had borne him, he was prepared to accept that. But - :If they split up, then how did someone kill both of them? Who could even catch up with a Companion?:
He felt her discomfort with his grim logic. :So they must have killed Thia first.:
Which, he knew, would have been difficult to accomplish. Maybe impossible for an assassin who had gone in believing Thia was merely a horse. Which meant that in the hours between the last time he'd spoken to Harri and the moment of his death, he'd blundered so badly that someone had known him for a Herald and had time to plan out Thia's death. He shook his head, feeling the parameters of the problem frustrate him, as if he were threading a needle with an unsteady hand. "I don't know either way, but if you've seen anyone cross the river these last few days...?"
She put a finger to her lips, and chewed at its end. "If that's all you want to know? Then no, I've not seen anyone cross the river. And I keep enough of an eye out at night that if someone had sailed over, I would know."
"But?" asked Stefen, no more oblivious to the tilt of her words than Valdir was.
"I can tell you nothing for nothing, fair's fair." She folded her hands in front of her. "You want to hear something strange, do you?" Valdir allowed himself to look curious without pleading. "I got something strange you might want to hear. But I want to know I can get something worth having in return."
"Oh come on," blustered Stefen. "I come here to deal with you, not with the Morn. You know what I'm made of, and -"
"This ain't for you," Loa noted calmly. "I ain't trusting you with no one else's debts. You go your own way," she observed, and as Stefen's face twisted at the implication of his lack of fidelity, she crossed the cabin in a stride and opened a carved panel on the wall opposite her bed. She looked over her shoulder at Valdir, as if daring him to hold her eyes. "You don't deal with me without the Morn knowing you're good for what you owe us. So choose your weapon."
He looked into her startling collection of metalwork - vicious long knives, the curved swords the pirates favoured, the heavy longswords that had dogged his childhood, short spears with hooked heads, all polished to a sheen and set in their place in pairs. Even as he examined the rest he instinctively reached for a long, light rapier - exactly the kind of blade he worked best with.
"No hesitation," she noted with respect. "Never mind I don't know your name..."
No, you don't. He tested the blade's weight, finding it sound and comfortable in his hand. "Valdir," he answered - a Herald in deed, announcing the name of another. His grasp on his cover felt weak, his hands preoccupied. Valdir had never wielded a weapon before. "So now you want me to go ashore and fight you to prove I deserve your favour?"
Loa laughed at him.
"That one ain't so bad," Stefen claimed, his voice shaking. "Got some room to move about, at least."
Valdir leaned on his swordpoint on the jetty, watching the Morn clear the deck of the cargo barge moored up the jetty from the Sunrise. He found himself doubting Stefen's word - unladen, the boat pitched unsteadily as the pirates tossed ropes and tools into the corners of its open deck. "It's not where I would have chosen to fight a duel," he answered.
"She's chosen worse before now," Stefen assured him. He was already holding Valdir's tattered cloak, and he rearranged its folds with distracted delicacy. "You've fought a lot of duels?"
"None," he replied truthfully. He'd killed more than enough people to find the idea of using swords to resolve petty status squabbles abhorrent. Loa, evidently, had not. She sat on the jetty twenty paces away, sword over her folded knees, oblivious to Valdir's scrutiny. It was evident why she favoured fighting in small arenas - her poor reach would leave her vulnerable on a open field. "Has she much experience of war?"
"A city brawl now and then, they ain't pretty. Silona's got other enforcers, but he don't trust no one to give orders on land except Loa. Blood thicker than the river, even in this weather."
Valdir nodded. Exile sense; put your hands to work with anyone, but trust only your own. Being unable to set foot in Valdemar doubtless made it even harder for Silona to trust his associates. "Any idea how she is at cut-and-run?"
"You think she'd give you a chance to challenge her at something she was bad at?" Stef asked, tapping his toe on the dock. "She learned that style from some fancy fencer from Ceejay - he weren't no slave, so I bet he'd lost a wager he weren't good for. She got a lot of tricks from him, and then some. And she always throws in a few she shouldn't," Stefen informed him. "How about you? Where you learn to fight?" he asked.
The topic had never arisen for Valdir before, and he hadn't time to think of anything too far from the truth. "I, uh, grew up on a farm in western Valdemar, not so far from the Pelagirs. His lordship made sure all the boys of the manor learned to fight, because we saw bandits and strange beasts sometimes." Stefen's eyes widened. It wasn't quite true - no magical beast had been seen in Forst Reach until years after he left. But it was convenient.
"Hells," muttered Stef. "And you're what, how old?"
"Thirty-one," he lied. He'd been groused at by enough of his peers about his face not showing his age.
"Well, now I know how your hair turned so white. You survive Pelagir beasties and Karsites, Loa ain't gonna end you."
Valdir wasn't inclined to take his chances on that. He fed energy into his physical shields, and readied a spell-net to deploy should he fall. I'm confident I can stop her from killing me. But how far do I have to go to make her talk? Magic won't help me here. I haven't a choice but to play by her rules...
"You just got to hold your own," Stefen told him, as if he'd voiced his worries aloud. "She's fast, but I dare say she never fought a real soldier. Only this kind of scum." Scum with river-legs and little better to do but fight each other over nothing - but Stefen nudged him, shoulder to shoulder, and the content of Stef's words was suddenly of little import. He felt his own frustration ripple through Stefen and return to him as a steady, bright confidence.
He blinked. The water below their feet might as well have started flowing upriver; his emotions had shifted so smoothly he would never have noticed had he not known of Stefen's Gift. And they don't know. Even you don't really know. All anyone knows is, being close to you makes them feel powerful. Like they can do anything so long as you're on their side.
Loa rose to her feet as the pirates leapt from the tiny boat one by one. Valdir took his cue, and looked back at Stefen once as he followed her down the jetty, his sword already held at the defensive, his hand slack and ready to move. She stepped aboard before he reached her, her movements still full of understated grace. Watching the boat rock beneath her light steps, Valdir swallowed hard and jumped aboard, and Loa turned to smile at him.
"Never hesitate," she told him. Advice, or a proposed common credo. She was too young to dispense wisdom, so young that everything she'd done must have been accomplished by speed alone. Gods, I've never fought anyone so tiny - Loa was smaller than Jisa, and looked barely older. She manipulated the mooring-ropes with seasoned, easy hands, loosing knots, tightening them seconds later, hard stopping the boat's drift downriver. Valdir reflexively dropped into a crouch, his feet spreading for balance, unable to trust the water that Loa simply moved with. She hadn't twitched, hadn't given the least sign that she found it strange to be in an open-topped boat in a raging river, now roped about twice her height away from the jetty.
She's in her element.
She drew her sword, and trod the boards to the far end of the boat, a bare fifteen feet from him. Valdir clutched his rapier, shifted on his feet to find his equilibrium - and as she turned, he felt the deck below him rise in the water, his only warning as she sprang at him. A flying step, her body but a counterweight to her blade.
He dodged aside. It had been a dangerous blow to not land, and he countered clumsily with the boat rocking under him. She wasn't where he thought she was - too small, too used to the motion. It was all he could do to catch her next blow.
He drove her back with forceful parries - he had to. Her attacks had little force, but the speed alone could have driven him into the river. She sprang back, sending the boat rocking before she lunged again. He barely evaded her, and he felt the wind kiss his ribs where her blade had brushed his shirt.
The boat swayed so hard its edge skimmed the water, and his eyes swam with its motion - focusing on any fixed point would have been fatal. The Winter Sunrise rose up and down in his vision, a pack of jeering sailors crowding on its decks. A few more had joined Stefen on the jetty. The ship headed upward in his eyes as Loa rose from her crouch, and he saw movement belowdecks - a shadow behind a thick glass window, a flickering flame.
He hadn't time to think more on it. Just hold her, he repeated to himself, finding his balance and driving her back with his blade. Her speed - her lack of hesitation - will wear her down.
He parried her next blow, cutting back toward her feet, and Loa leapt away from him, landing with a thump that shook through his bones. Their eyes met as he lunged towards her, hoping to find an advantage. She almost recovered - almost - and he felt her blade give under his own. Your strength's gone -
She slipped aside, ducked under his attempt to trap her. Gods, but being so small made her infuriatingly hard to pin down. She circled him, testing his reach with her swordpoint - and her eyes widened.
Valdir felt a silence behind him. The raucous pirates had stilled. He glanced at the Sunrise, and saw them part aside on the deck, pulling themselves into unsteady salutes. Loa raised a perfunctory hand. Stefen was frozen in place, as if in dreamlike paralysis, Valdir's cloak clutched in his pale knuckles as his eyes twitched.
Hands touched the ornate rail above the Sunrise's deck. Long hands gloved in calfskin; arms draped in folds of gold-edged silk. "Daughter, I saw you were taking the measure of this man," Silona said. He spoke slowly, with a lilt that Loa lacked.
She lowered her sword. "He's done well." She spoke carefully, with just a drip of teenage condescention, admitting nothing to either of them. I almost had you, he knew now.
"What does he want of us?"
"My eyes," explainied Loa. "I don't give them away."
"We owe trust only to the strong." Loa nodded, wearing the blankly respectful look known by every child ever faced by an elder's platitudes. Silona stepped down on to the jetty, glancing up at the sky as if in warning to the sun itself. Testing his bonds - Silona must often promenade the liminal lip of Cul Aber's harbour, and knew these splinters of Valdemar were safe for him, but who would trust he knew the rules of gods or demons?
Stefen turned to salute him, his shaking hand dropping Valdir's cloak to the boards. "Milord Silona."
"Truceman," replied Silona. "You vouched for him." Stefen didn't reply.
"He done well," Loa repeated, lifting her swordpoint to gesture at Valdir; he took a step back from the quiverring bladepoint. "I sooner he be on our side too -"
"Stefen's on no one's side," Silona noted.
Stefen hesitated, and once again Valdir wondered at the implicit threat held over him here. "No one owns me," Stefen told him softly, and Silona smiled as if this statement were absurd.
"You thought your word enough for the Morn. All words, never any light - I know your way. Loa, where favours are cheap and loyalty of value, I think strength is not measure enough." He stared at Valdir with narrowed eyes, as if with menace he could unmask his worth and his agenda. "This wasn't a test," he declared, and without his eyes leaving Valdir's he backhanded Stefen hard in the stomach, sending him reeling into the river.
-->Part 7
no subject
Date: 2014-12-07 08:54 pm (UTC)Like this: Is Stefen continually singing about Vanyel's life because he's an obsessed fanboy (which he probably is in every potential alternate universe), or because he's beginning to guess/wishfully think?
What do Loa and the Morn know about Harren's "beasts," anyway? Did Harren did a good job of disguising his Companion? Is Silona starting to wonder?
And this last ... test, if it is a test, which I imagine it may still be whatever Silona says about it. Vanyel is perfectly capable of rescuing Stefen from a river, even a gross river in a slum. Whether he's capable of doing so while maintaining his alias of Valdir is another story. He is not, however, capable of leaving his fascinating ally to drown in the river.
I continue to be intrigued, and also deeply entertained.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-08 03:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 03:53 am (UTC)I do deeply enjoy the interest list. "Talia's van/stef rpf fandom" is 100% accurate. Let me think.
Well, cheer up emo herald-mage, obviously.
resurrected dead boyfriend
men who look like your dead boyfriend
woe
angst and woe
made-up words that mean 'gay'
internalized homophobia
magical sperm donation
magical guardian angel horses
sentient gay forest spirits
all tropes all the time
...I should probably stop now.
no subject
Date: 2014-12-10 04:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-12-08 03:15 am (UTC)Is Stefen continually singing about Vanyel's life because he's an obsessed fanboy (which he probably is in every potential alternate universe), or because he's beginning to guess/wishfully think?
I'm going with the former. I think he is using his fandom thoughts as an escape from stress. His timing is just a bit unfortunate.
I posted part 7 this evening... Hope I can get part 8 up soonish, as I worry I left it in an awkward place. :/
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Date: 2014-12-08 01:34 am (UTC)I am SO entertained and fascinated. This is wonderfully creative prose, and something far beyond "fanfiction."
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Date: 2014-12-08 01:51 am (UTC)(Which may not improve the cliffhanger situation. Um. i'm sorry.)
thank you thank you <3 I miss your fics, temptress. Undeath fluff/porn from you is much wanted.
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Date: 2014-12-08 03:13 am (UTC)On to the porn!