The flames showed her nothing, leaving only a dull, jabbing pain in her corneas. She breathed in, felt the circulation come alive in her chest. She pushed that wonderful, vivacious energy down into her gut, where it could feed her whole body. She breathed out. All the pain went with it.
She reached into the coals bare-handed, turned them around curiously, as if the secrets of the future had hidden under them like worms. She knew they did that, sometimes. But for her effort, nothing wriggled free.
Was she asking the wrong questions?
Beside her, the master sat sternly, quietly. He looked impatient in his stillness, but she’d seen him go on like that for half a day. Virtue and vice, like two sides of the same coin for the old practitioner. It inspired her, and she looked with renewed vigor into the smoldering coals, the licking flames, and the fuming smoke…
But to no avail. All she could see was her own reflection, and that of the horizon behind her, where a dark patch of stormy weather had thankfully refrained from coming landward. She sighed, pulling her hand from the coals and shaking off the hot soot.
“Do you think the future unfurls itself like a scroll of well-reasoned science?” snapped the master.
“Of course not,” she bit back, “but this is getting me nowhere.”
“If there is time left in the day,” he commanded, and left it at that.
She turned back wordlessly to the fire, sighing to her mirrored double. But her mirrored double didn’t sigh back.
Dawn’s light blanched the darkness. It had been a clear night, cool and still. Now, the breeze came sputtering down the eastern mountains. Three morning stars still glared above the eager crown of sunlight coming over the lazy, gray peaks. Mierel the Soter, however, didn’t see them. He was looking west, toward a shelf of blackness in the steely sky. A cloud. It sat in the distance like some impetuous omen, jealously lounging on the horizon. Never approaching, never dissipating. The air shivered gently with cool humidity, a bright snap of relief here at the end of summer. It smelled heavy, and salty, and not without a perceptible hint of destiny.
Nice weather, thought Mierel, if a bit clammy.
They sat around an open hearth, eight travelers on four benches, in a room with no walls. Tall, smooth pillars of speckled granite held its lumber-raftered roof up by the corners. The coals crackled within, shorn-short flames flickering in whorls as fits of wind danced through the porticoes.
A pair of Litherians, dressed in their familiar, rope-belted tunics and high sandals, occupied the southern bench. They whispered, leaning their broad, puckered lips close to each other’s ear, and smiled, giggling. One bearded, one beardless. One young and thin, one old and stout. How was it, Mierel wondered, that a whole nation of men shared the same bizarre fetish?
To the north, an altogether less familiar duo--Galites, dark skinned, with billowy, layered robes. Beyond that, the similarities ended. One darker, with warm and wet, shiny black eyes, a flat nose, and a broad chin bearded in bluish wool. Even his face looked muscular, capped with an elaborate turban, its outer swatch sheer orange, and embedded with glittering garnets. The other was shorter, oddly portly. His jaw, soft and round. He had a long, hawk nose, beneath which a thin arc of waxed-tight whiskers reached up beside his burning, red eyes. He seemed perpetually to wear a toothy grin, brow furrowed and bald head dimpled over the crown.
If Mierel had ever seen Galites, it was only in the heat of battle, under darkness of night, or blinded by the glare of a warlike noon. When he looked at them, he felt their foreignness. He felt his own foreignness, too--and keenly so.
Across from the Sprunishmen sat the strangest pair of all, and Mierel hardly cared to entertain their presence. One of these, the only woman in this strange assembly, was currently kneeling before the hearth, stoking the flames with her bare hands. She had all the orange reflection of them in her eyes, and, Mierel thought disdainfully, the characteristic vacancy of a fortune-teller. She and her male companion were dressed the same, with simple shirts tucked under simple jackets. Simple trousers pillowing down, tied off by foot wrappings a bit above the ankle. They were otherwise completely unadorned, bearing stern faces and uttering terse, commanding shots at each other.
Mierel huffed, and knocked the ash from his pipe as he leaned forward to spit. A satisfying pop sizzled up from the coals.
There were a thousand unexplainable arts, he had often mused, from ant husbandry to astral telephony. Reading the future, however, was a fool’s effort. He had a particular distrust of oracles, but tinkers and witches fared little better in his estimations. Cynical truths, that’s all it was. Tragedy, always just around the corner. Shouldn’t need some wizened old bitch to tell you about it. And for fair fortunes, well…it was the greater fool who believed any bit of that.
Muttering as much, Mierel beckoned a mote of shimmering heat with the meticulous wag of a finger, a sparky ember floating from the hot coals like a snowflake turned in the breeze, and allowed it to dissipate slowly over his hard, pale hands, rubbing the warmth between them.
“How long are they going to make us wait?” he whined. But no answer came--six of those present hadn’t the words to furnish one. Ayricalt of the Isles, his one companion, stayed characteristically silent, his eyes fixed on the shadowed horizon. The ember of his pipe had long since extinguished, but he kept it between his teeth. The pewter heads of two sleeping serpents, eyes of cold, black ash, wound around the long, straight pipe stem. Sooty powder fell inertly from their shared maw. Every so often, Ayricalt shook out his long, black hair--with an almost convulsive shiver--and set about tucking the wind-blown strays back into his thonged ponytail. And more ash fell from his uncurved pipe’s mouth.
“Ayry,” Mierel caught his attention, harkening him back to the present. Ayricalt shook to attention, blinking like he’d just remembered how, and glanced at his companion. His eyes were the blue of mountain snowcaps, shrinking in the summer. His lips, tight, steely folds, welded together by rusty stripes of scar. Everything about him looked unnervingly hard. Hard lines describing his long, straight face. Creases pressed sharply at the sides of his mouth, and beneath his eyes. Something about the climate, Mierel thought. He’d never looked that way back home.
“Where do you suppose they’re from?” Ayricalt asked, gesturing minutely toward the fortune-teller and her elder. He had the same, placid tone as always. The voice of a mild-mannered farmer, perhaps. A bit sad, too--curiously so. Like something had happened in his past which had shaken the fight out of all his words. Anyway, hadn’t shaken the fight out of the rest of him.
Mierel frowned, but--welcoming at least the distraction--rubbed his chin in a ponderous way. He rifled through his scant knowledge of the greater world. They could be Galites, perhaps. After all, there was a darkness to their skin--and more types of Galites than could fill a tome. Then again, Mierel had seen darker Litherians, in his day. Their hair shot from their heads in wiry waves, hard and shiny as curved, steel blades.
“If you’ve ever spoken to a Litherian,” he began, “then you’ll know that they’re more boastful than brave. More bark than bite.” He shook the last white puff of ash from his pipe bowl, and cleared his throat. “It doesn’t take long for them to start talking about their southern neighbors. Oh, all kinds of stories about them. Strange folk, strange powers. Illusions, witch-kings. Lots of fire--that always seems to make an impression. Lightning, too, depending on the teller. Can’t remember what they’re bloody called, of course.”
Ayricalt nodded slowly, but said nothing more. The witch pulled her arms from the fire, reclining with a bitter, pouty look. And the eight sat once again in silence, save for the girlish murmuring of the Litherians.
When, at last, they were ushered from the hearth, they went without comment. The vizier of Ellusen--a man of mysterious appellation and prodigious dimension who, being the only person in Elusen apparently capable of speaking Sprunish, had become a gratingly familiar presence to Ayricalt and Mierel--beckoned them with hasty chops of his square hand, frowning angrily.
“Time to leave, mercenary,” he hissed toward Mierel, who’d offered only a foreboding scowl in greeting.
“With pleasure,” he muttered toward Ayricalt.
They all stood, in their own good time, to the vizier’s apparent chagrin. All except the strange man and woman, who shot up from their respite directly, and duly marched off in the indicated direction.
What rituals had been performed? Mierel scoffed to consider. After all, only one god mattered: Ans the Horselord. The Creator, and the Will. And he did not concede to the petty mewling of kings or queens--or priests, for that matter, or fucking peasants, either. But each of the eight travelers received their auspices in turn. Oil and ash, lanyards of braided palm and sashes of bay laurel. They filed in solemn procession, flanked by all the priests and nobles, the great and good of Ellusen. Down the hill from the open hearth, they followed the city’s areterial avenue right down to the docks.
A hodgepodge of chanting, variously earnest and perfunctory, wailed and murmured, berated Mierel’s ears. Worse than battle, he thought, biting down a sneer. They carried on, straight across the gangplank, boarding the vessel which would carry them across the cooling sea, into the fated, shadowed horizon.
As he reached the deck, Mierel looked back morosely to the land. Not a land he much cared for, it had to be said. Nor one in which he’d been for very long. But he had only greater maligned feelings toward the wide sea, and the sloshing, capricious modes of travel thereon. Those few first predictable lurches of the deck above the heaving tide below had already made him queasy.
So he leaned on the rails as a dozen nude sailors worked their curious preparations behind him. He looked over the assembled crowd, fairly disgusted by the ceremony of it all. It reeked of desperation. The last time they’d been sent off with fanfare…well, it hadn’t ended nicely for the fanfarers.
The crowd was thinning, as those who were left shifted their focus to chugging wine from jars and variously hocking and devouring street food.
Any chance to feast, thought Mierel. This seemed a specifically poor one, though. Group of unintelligible foreigners loaded up on a boat to…what? Slay a monster, presumably. But the cloud…
Mierel didn’t look west, he didn’t need to. Plenty of chances to see it on the forthcoming voyage. And Mierel knew, well enough--he’d been from one end of Noria to the bitterest hinterlands of Sprune. Storms didn’t just sit there, day in and day out. They moved, shifted, dissolved, or grew. And, as a rule, they weren’t caused by violent, idiot beasts, either. Something didn’t add up.
But Ayricalt, who spent his youth in the not-so-mild-weathered islands far to the north, didn’t seem bothered at all. So Mierel gritted his teeth, conspired to voice his complaints as often as possible, and made no effort to resist.
The plank was lifted, scraped back onto the deck by a quartet of yelping slaves with ravaged complexions. The sound of oars cutting through water met the wind. The remaining crowd, sinking into the spirit of public debauchery, cheered. Mierel watched them, shrinking, with a disdainful sentimentality. Through it all, a great shining square emerged, rising slowly like a silver wave over the shoulders of the crowded assembly. A palanquin, and through the vertex of its drawn curtains, Mierel spied the bald and ink-patched scalp of Astoriana, Queen of the Ellusenese.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He spat into the sea foam. It did little to abate his nausea.
“You’re not the plaything of queens and courtiers, Ayricalt,” snapped Mierel, almost shouting over the resonant sea spray, the surf slapping against the merchant vessel’s hull. “You could just say ‘no,’ for once in your hoofs damned life. And I’m not the plaything of you.” Ayricalt frowned, as if hiding some inappropriate amusement. “I could say ‘no,’ too.”
“We’ll be fine, Mierel,” he plied, rather quickly. “I’m glad you’re here.” He knew an empty threat when he heard one, Mierel realized. And he’d been hearing them, intermittently, all day long.
“Well of course I came. The Horselord knows you’re as helpless as a grounded sea star without me. I just wish we knew what we’re really getting into.”
Now Ayricalt’s frown found an unfortunate integrity. They had spent the past week richly comforted, but for this growing anxiety of purpose. Only the vizier of Ellusen spoke any Sprunish, and he could hardly be bothered to spare more than the barest few minutes for these adventurers.
“You know about sea stars?” he asked seriously. Mierel rolled his eyes.
Ostensibly, they were hunting some monster. They knew their destination, too--the Bluebird Isles, a ring of islands some hundred or so miles from the coast. It didn’t take much imagination to figure that they were heading into a pirate den, into the very heart of that distant storm, and no doubt a breeding ground for discontent with the queen’s rule. Details, though, were sparsely given.
“There’s a troll on the northern road. Halfway to Eel Bend.” That’s what their first employer, Lady Pyebel of Trout Rock, had told them. Clear instructions. Granted, when Mierel really thought about it, the information hadn’t much helped. They’d found the big, stony monster right where she’d said. And they’d known that the big, stony monster would be a big, stony monster. Still got their asses nearly pounded in by a ton of rock. Ayricalt, with enough broken ribs to ground a boar. He’d spent the next week muttering, when he spoke at all.
In fact, he had to admit (silently, and only to himself) that advance knowledge had made precious little impact in their erstwhile endeavors. Still, he would have preferred something. What the hell kind of monsters even lived out on these fringe, little islands? Certainly not arbor wolves. Anyway, the more the issue ate at him, the more jealously he admired his companion’s ruminant ambivalence. And, conversely, the more it irritated him.
Still, they spent their time together, now--though in miserable spirits. Ayricalt, continuing a habit he’d demonstrated on the voyage to Ellusen, paced the decks at all waking hours. Mierel tagged along, avoiding the dark, damp hold where he’d spent the previous voyage--rolling dice with the scabetic oarsmen slaves, relieving them of precious and meager belongings.
When they ate, that night, they sat near the Litherians. Somehow, despite a lack of shared language, home felt more proximal in their company.
The Galite men, on the other hand, spent terrific intervals of the voyage in breathless speech. One would carry on for hours as the other listened attentively. Then, when this telling reached its eventual conclusion, their roles would reverse.
Mierel wondered how Ayricalt would fare at this exercise. Did he have enough words at his disposal? Mierel himself was no stranger to long-winded recitations. In many a bar and brothel, from the Storm Fort to the Blue City, he had played the raconteur. But these stories were dialogic, founded as much on speech as the intervals between: the call and response, the question and the silence, the sly change of expression and the rude gesture. To speak was to bore--all things must be in balance.
The Litherian men apparently understood this. As they rolled bones they traded only pithy remarks, a gruff laugh, then long moments of nothing but the knocking of dice. And they found dark corners of the hold to spend in the fleeting warmth of each other’s company. These were soldiers, Mierel knew, through and through, and this absurd journey merely another in a chronicle of campaigns. But no general marched this ragtag army. For how long could congress in the sick-ridden holds of a foreign vessel bolster morale?
Still, he observed their snickering forays into the darkness with envy. And when the rocking of the waves, and the growing darkness in the western skies, and all the lustful jealousy of those boneheaded Litherians had brought out the greatest cynic in him, Mierel wondered, petulantly, why he’d tagged along with Ayricalt in the first place.
On the second morning at sea, when the sky was still an iron blue, the two stern and modest strangers emerged from the hold. Their faces had not lost their typical stoicism. They came out of the door with careful, easy steps, shut it, and kneeled there at the base of the poop deck, one next to the other. Then they set about fussing with their clothes, belts, and pockets. Reaching under sleeves, inside their coats. Methodically and, though their movements were different, very much in concert. Rehearsed.
“Have to admit,” said Mierel, “I’d almost forgotten about them.” He was in a cheerier mood, inspired by the morning serenity and his strengthening sea legs. But he’d always liked mornings. Somehow, they felt furthest from both past and future. He watched with half-interested bemusement as the fortune-teller and her male companion carried on.
It could have been a prayer, or…an exercise? But it wasn’t. They were setting something on the deck. Bemusement precipitated into a sharp dread as Mierel realized that they were disarming.
Many knives of many shapes they laid before them. A few round medallions, too. Bronze, gold, iron. They said nothing throughout, and, when they’d finished, stayed knelt there like merchants presenting their wares.
“What the hell makes a fortune-teller do that?”
Ayricalt looked over at them and frowned. “A craven spirit, I suppose.” And he carried on pacing.
What did Mierel care? He put no stock in auguries, auspices, superstition or supernatural hogwash. If these fools wanted to drop their knives in the morning, they could pick them back up at night. And, he supposed, Ayricalt was right. They’d forfeited a battle that didn’t even exist. He frowned at them, then he looked off over the ship’s prow. Most of the western sky now fell obscured behind that stalwart, black cloud. Auguries and auspices.
Anyway, there was a limit to what one man could stomach.
“Ayricalt,” he said earnestly, seizing the big, pacing bastard by the flapping sleeve of his robe. Ayricalt looked in his eyes, and for an instant his face was a ghost, and his gaze was far beyond the dark horizon. He looked gray, pallid skin and colorless eyes and salt-sprayed hair.
“Yes, Mierel?” he replied, evenly. With a start, Mierel realized that this gray man was Ayricalt. The real Aryicalt, who grew up on those cold, northern islands.
“What are we doing here, Ayry?” Mierel still pleaded. He had the vague worry that he’d somehow lost his friend forever.
Ayricalt frowned. Then he shrugged. “Well it didn’t occur to me to say ‘no,’ Mierel.”
Mierel sighed. Still the same big, dull man. The same carved-ice lips glowering, the words pouring from them with their typically glacial pace. The same fearless warrior who, without any preparation (nor a single reason to trust Mierel), had helped him fight a one-ton mountain troll. The same warm body which had been a blessed flame of comfort in an otherwise cold and gloomy life. The same man, just grayer.
Perhaps it was nice to know, at least implicitly, that Ayricalt had his misgivings, too. Perhaps it was just more frustrating.
“We could have stayed, Ayry, on the River Storm. We could be hunting. Bogeymen, or…”
“Arbor wolves?” Ayricalt suggested, and he smiled, meekly, but shook his head. “I think we’d worn out our welcome, Mierel.”
“Then north. That was the goal in the first place--to hunt rangers. Find ourselves some elven steel...”
At this, Ayricalt shook his head severely, the seaborne grimace reemerging across his gentle features. “Not when the barbarians are moving around so much. I’ve seen enough of their blood, Mierel--and they, mine.”
“Barbarians north, barbarians south,” grunted Mierel, knowing his companion to be right, but waving his hands dismissively. “Whose blood do you think we’ll be spilling here?”
But before Ayricalt could answer (and not that he would), Mierel noticed one of the Litherians leaning, beside his companion, just a few yards down the rail, snickering to himself.
“What’s so funny, smiles?” scoffed Mierel. “These Litherians--”
“You whine like a suckling,” said the stranger, in a well-practiced--if thickly accented--Sprunish. Then he laughed even harder. He had a broad, clean-shaven face, a thick head of dark, feathery curls which hung over his ears, and sad, shining brown eyes. His mouth cracked wide across his face as he smiled, revealing a flat-fronted mass of small, white teeth.
“These Litherians,” continued Mierel, red faced, “think it’s all just a joke. What’s the punchline, then, ‘citizen?’”
The Litherian looked back with mock chiding, and shook his head with a lilt of condescension. “For your information…” and here he looked Ayricalt up and down, squinting suspiciously, “...Sprunishmen, we are hunting monsters. They attack the good noble people of Elusenesphthenos. We are heroes, Sprunishmen. Champions. This is the chance for glory, and here you are complaining.” He let all the condescension fall into a single scoff, a single shake of his pretty head.
Not that he’d really answered Mierel’s question. Was everyone on this godsforsaken boat content to stay in the dark?
“Obviously,” he spat. “Obviously. I’ve hunted monsters from the Storm Fort to the banks of the Melk. I’ve slain the twisted fair folk of the Fost, and packs of arbor wolves in Noria.” He pointed toward that great shelf of darkness in the west. “And I like to fucking know what I’m getting into, understand?”
“The concerns of a coward,” offered the Litherian blandly.
“So, this,” Mierel hissed to his so far unruffled companion, “is why sellswords get rich in Lither. And why Litherian nobles turn to foreign queens for work. You want to see cowardice? Look at the tinkers. They’ve given up the fight before the fight even thought to come to them.”
The Litherian popped up from the rails, spreading his stance wide on the shifting deck. “I’ve skewered more sword-whores in a day,” he cried, “than citizens in my life.”
“Well,” Mierel shrugged, “sounds like you had one lucky day. Or, more likely, you’re just a liar.”
The Litherian shouted something Litherian, then turned away, seething furiously in his mother tongue. Meanwhile, his elder, a heavily bearded and mostly bald old soldier, slowly raised one broad hand up, then slapped it down against the side of his partner’s head. Mierel winced. It sounded audibly. And he whispered sternly into the younger’s ear. The younger nodded severely.
If Ayricalt hit me like that, thought Mierel…he had to physically shake the nascent fantasy from mind.
“Apologies, Sprunishmen,” said the younger, his prior vitriol all but vanished. “My name is Baramethi. And this,” he continued, stepping to the side, and raising one arm so as to frame the elder Litherian, “is Kordos, son of Kolcnos. Prince of Ithosphthoros.”
“The word means less by the day,” muttered Mierel, and Ayricalt jabbed him with an elbow. They bowed, and the old Litherian “prince” bowed back. “I’m Mierel,” he continued, attempting, in his own way, to reciprocate the civility, “and this is Ayry. Ayricalt of the Isles.”
Ayricalt frowned. “That’s ‘Prince of the--’”
“As for the Tushikans,” Baramethi interrupted, pointing to the kneeling strangers, all their possessions laid out plainly before them, “they are onto something, I think.” He tapped his nose, then pointed out to sea. Sure enough, a ship was approaching, head-on, from the gray distance. “If you’re so worried about the details,” he snickered, “you should try opening your own eyes.”
Auguries and auspices. Arrogant nobles and craven fortune tellers. Mierel put his hand at his hip, the heel of his palm pressing into the cold, iron pommel of his sword. He didn’t like this--any of this--one bit.