Dog in the Dark

Chapter Twenty-six

Three days later, Magiere stood near the front mast of the Cloud Queen as the ship sailed south on its long run toward the port of Sorano. The deep cut above her temple was healing quickly, though not immediately as had other wounds she’d taken before.

Her world had settled into a brief calm.

“No, not like that,” Wayfarer said. “Use smaller stitches.”

“I am!” retorted the small boy who was sitting beside her and helping her mend a fishing net.

“He’s doing fine,” Paolo put in, sitting on her other side and peeling potatoes. “Stop bossing him around.”

“He needs to learn,” the girl insisted.

Magiere almost smiled. On that last terrible night in Drist, Brot’an had retrieved Wayfarer and Paolo—and all their gear—with astonishing speed. Not long after, Hatchinstall had returned with the crew who’d been onshore. Dirken and a few freed slaves had filled in the lighter duties requiring less skill. With a skeleton crew, the captain had set sail.

Paolo had taken over as the cook’s assistant, along with the boy, named Alberto, whom Dirken had brought. For some reason Alberto was quite taken with Wayfarer; he was likely charmed by her strangeness and beauty. When Leesil mentioned trying to get the two boys home, Dirken had shaken his head.

“Alberto has no home,” Dirken explained. “And Paolo can’t go back to his. If he does, his village chief will have proof that he broke his contract.”

Magiere had bitten down anger upon hearing this. Even freeing the boys might not stop what would come—only delay it. There seemed to be no answer that wouldn’t leave more victims.

However, when Captain Bassett expressed an interest in keeping Dirken as a deckhand, the man made it clear that if he stayed, so did the boys. Paolo didn’t object, and in truth, Magiere thought he was better off with Dirken than with parents who’d sell him to pay a debt.

So ... it seemed one worry had been settled.

Thinking on other worries, Magiere touched her forehead lightly.

Back on the night of the rescue and reclaiming of the Cloud Queen, when she had gone down to her cabin, she’d found Leesil and Chap waiting for her.

Leesil sat in silence on the bunk’s edge. At the sight of her, he began mothering her obsessively, trying to dress the wound in her scalp. It made her shrink in shame, and she pushed his hands away. If she’d only stopped at that. She’d made a bad mistake again in thinking ...

If she could just make that wound go away, it would be as if it had never happened, as if what she’d done—losing herself again—had never happened. She could let her hunger rise, let it fire her flesh, until the wound was gone without a trace.

But she didn’t even get the notion out before Leesil came at her and pinned her against the cabin wall.

“Don’t you even try,” he warned. “You let it scar.”

Chap was watching the whole time. His silence was enough for Magiere to know that he agreed.

How many scars did Leesil have for being there beside her? She couldn’t even count them from memory. There and then she hadn’t been able to look either Leesil or Chap in the eyes, and had hung her head and hid until Leesil’s arms closed around her.

Now Magiere looked toward the bow. There sat Chap a few paces behind Brot’an; he was watching the shadow-gripper’s back. Brot’an had been nearly silent ever since returning from the hotel back in Drist, and she was beginning to understand how much his determination to protect her mission was costing him.

If Chap had been suspicious of Brot’an before, it was worse now. Apparently Brot’an had known the anmaglâhk team had reached Drist to hunt her and Leesil again. He’d kept this to himself, using it and all of them to trap their enemies ... his enemies. But the old assassin had closed his own trap at the right moment.

He always did what he believed was right—whether or not it was. She could hardly fault him, considering how often she’d done the same. And now she was back on course, heading for the far-off Suman Empire.

At the bang of a door, Magiere looked back.

Leesil stepped out of the nearer aftcastle door. He was slightly pale and sick already, but being back at sea hadn’t put him down as it had before. Perhaps he’d kept his sea legs in their short stay in Drist. Spotting her, he crossed quickly and put his arms around her to pull her back against his chest.

That was what she needed now most of all.

He said nothing for a while, and when she tilted her head aside to look at him, he was watching Wayfarer and the two boys chatting away at their work. He looked around until he spotted Dirken repairing a sail. The man looked much cleaner, dressed in some borrowed clothing.

“Is there anything he can’t do?” Leesil asked.

“Not that I’ve seen yet,” she whispered.

Perhaps these moments were all about avoiding what they didn’t want to talk about anymore—the orbs.

“You did a good thing,” she added, nodding toward the boys, “in getting them off that slave ship.”

“Anyone would have done the same.”

No, they wouldn’t have, and he knew it, but she didn’t argue. He’d never known how to take a compliment—and she didn’t often give them. But she could tell he had something else on his mind.

“Bassett blames us,” he finally said, “for so many of his men being killed. I don’t think he’ll forgive or forget. He wasn’t in a position to throw us off in Drist, but he suggested we leave at the next port.”

She couldn’t blame the captain. A third of his crew had been murdered.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “We’ll find another ship.”

Turning around, she pressed her face into his shoulder. They’d survived another day, and he was still here beside her. A shortsighted way to look at things, but she didn’t dare say or even think more than that as she held on to him.

Right now this moment was the only thing that mattered. Not the orbs, not Wynn’s warnings of a war already coming, and not that all Leesil wanted was to take her home.

Chap watched Brot’an’s broad back and wondered how to rid himself of the aging assassin. No matter the end result, Brot’an had intentionally used Leesil again, and Magiere this time, in a ploy of his own. And what angered Chap more was that Magiere still seemed willing to keep company with Brot’an. She believed Brot’an’s thin excuse—an obvious lie—that he was here to protect her and her “purpose.”

Chap settled upon the deck and lowered his head upon his paws.

The crux was that he did not yet know Brot’an’s true agenda. He needed that to prove to Magiere that Brot’an served only himself. He needed to learn Brot’an’s every secret, all the reasons why he was truly here. And worse, Chap remembered what Wynn had secretly revealed to him concerning the orbs.

Wynn was now under the protection of a premin named Hawes. And Hawes had theorized, from the way the first discovered orb of Water had eaten the moisture from the icy stone cavern in which it was found, that each orb by its Element might be able to do the same. Everything in Existence was composed of those metaphoric Elements, and if all orbs could be used at once and focused on one chosen target ...

Chap did not want to imagine what could be done with such a “weapon” as that. He kept eyeing the back of the old assassin, who was now at war with his own caste ... with Most Aged Father.

Brot’an could never be allowed to lay a hand on a single orb, or use one to go after the others that had already been retrieved. Brot’an could not be there when the next orb was found, though until its location was known, removing him was not possible. Not until he’d been stripped of every secret.

Until then Chap lingered in the dark.

What was in a name? Everything.

Brot’ân’duivé had not always believed this. The life of an anmaglâhk balanced upon the invisible shifting line between life and death, whether it was that of one’s self or another. Pragmatism was required in all things within silence and shadows.

Even in youth, when he had first gone before the ancestors, he had no interest, let alone belief, in omens, portents, and fates. That had come later, under the tutelage of Cuirin’nên’a’s mother, Léshil’s grandmother ... his beloved Eillean. But she had only nurtured what was seeded in him on the night he went for name-taking in the ancestors’ burial grounds.

All who went in youth took a name by what they experienced there. The ancestors had not appeared to him as they had to Sheli’câlhad. The ancestors had not spoken to him as they had to Léshil ... Leshiârelaohk. All he had seen ... was a dog.

A great mastiff with a near-black coat, so dark he did not see it at first, came snarling out of the shadowing oaks surrounding the tawny glowing tree called Roise Chârmune. A broad, iron-spiked collar was buckled around its thick neck—it was a human war dog.

And he was afraid.

In a lunge, it snapped at him, kept coming, until it drove him away from the tree of his people’s ancestors. Then it twisted and rolled upon the earth in a snarling mass until it tore the collar off and left it lying on the ground.

The mastiff came at him again.

He fled backward, farther and farther, until he stopped between the ringed oaks. It lunged in close enough to snap at his face in a sudden rise upon its hind legs.

Awash in fear, he refused to yield any more ground.

The mastiff turned away. It went to Roise Chârmune, curled up with its head upon its huge paws, and went to sleep.

None of this made sense, and he crept in on the dog below the tree; he was close enough that it could have pulled him down and killed him.

The mastiff opened its eyes without a sound, looked up at him, and he froze.

He did not dare take his eyes from its dark ones as he watched for any sign of an attack. Then the mastiff, with the glow of the tawny wood upon its dark coat, raised its great head and eyes to Roise Chârmune.

The mastiff settled into a peaceful sleep ... as if it had served its purpose.

He had not understood what it had meant. Back then the dog seemed only the shadow of a father who had vehemently denounced his choice to seek a place among the Anmaglâhk. Not even that would turn him from a life of service, and he chose a taken name out of spite.

Brot’ân’duivé had not known then what was in a name.

A name had ... purpose.

Leanâlhâm, the Child of Sorrow, had become Sheli’câlhad, To a Lost Way. What that meant had yet to be seen, needed to be seen, regardless of the fact that she now hid behind the name of Wayfarer.

Osha, the Sudden Breeze, had fallen from the ways of the Anmaglâhk and bore a sword of a strange make, though it had been created from the same metal as the weapons and tools of an anmaglâhk. And with that, he had also returned with a handful of black feathers, now fletched to his arrows’ shafts, and five arrowheads made of the white metal.

Even this Brot’ân’duivé did not yet understand.

But he knew his name.

Like the mastiff that turned upon him, he had turned upon his own and been branded a traitor by his own caste. Like the mastiff, he guarded something more precious than himself in breaking free of his master.

Most Aged Father, that worm that ate the wood of his people, remained among them while Brot’ân’duivé had been driven from them.

Still, this, too, had a purpose.

Somewhere there was a way to end that sickness, that thing who would end his people for no other reasons besides paranoia and madness. There was no cost too high to stop that.

Brot’ân’duivé, by his taken name, would follow this course, alone if need be and cast out like ... the Dog in the Dark.