Osha’s declaration sank in. Magiere and the others had sailed away, and Osha was stuck here by his own choice. She couldn’t send him away, even if she wished to, and she couldn’t abandon him—not him—in a world he knew too little about. And worse ...
Some part of Wynn began to ache at the sight of Osha, as if she had stumbled upon something unwillingly lost nearly two years ago.
Chapter One
More than a half moon later and many leagues south from Calm Seatt, two days out from the port of Soráno, Magiere stood on the deck of the Cloud Queen and stared out over the ocean as wind pulled at her dark hair. Behind her, she heard a too-familiar squabble begin again.
“Paolo!” a female voice squeaked. “Look at what you’re doing. You’re wasting half that fish.”
“If you can do better,” someone answered, “I’ll take Alberto and go play rings ... and you can gut these all by yourself!”
Magiere shook her head and turned from the rail. A trio of young people sat on the edge of the large central cargo hatch, where they were attempting to clean and slice up a pile of fish for the ship’s cook. What had the cook been thinking in giving that task to these three?
Nearest to Magiere was a small boy named Alberto, and sitting beside him was a boy of about thirteen called Paolo. Both were now part of the ship’s crew. But the final member of the trio was the female scolder, who wasn’t part of the crew.
Wayfarer, once called Leanâlhâm, was only a passenger, like Magiere.
Even dressed in her faded maroon pullover and threadbare pants, Wayfarer was a beautiful girl, about sixteen years old. Beautiful even for her own kind, though perhaps more so to some humans’ eyes ... especially the boys’.
Wayfarer’s eyes had the unearthly largeness and slight slant of her mother’s people, the an’Cróan, but where the an’Cróans’ larger irises were amber, hers were the color of the dark, damp leaves and needles of the forest. Likewise, her hair was nearly brown rather than the white blond of elves. The reason for both oddities was that she was a quarter human.
Magiere’s eyes lingered with the usual mix of affection and worry on the girl, for in all that had happened before now on this voyage, Wayfarer was now her charge and Leesil’s.
The girl looked up to find Magiere watching her.
“Magiere,” Wayfarer implored, “would you come show Paolo what to do? Since he will not listen to me ... and is ruining perfectly good fish.”
In a way, such a firm request, tainted with a little ire, was a miracle unto itself. Not long ago, it had been a challenge to get the girl to speak at all. However, Magiere did not particularly relish the thought of jumping in the middle of this argument.
“I’ve got it,” a familiar voice called from the stern.
A slender figure jogged out of the aftcastle door to below, and a different affection flooded Magiere. Even after their years together, she still sometimes just stopped to take in the sight of Leesil.
With oblong ears less peaked than a full-blooded elf’s, he shared other traits with his mother’s—and Wayfarer’s—people of the eastern continent. Beneath a ratty green scarf wrapped around his head, strands of silky white-blond hair hung around his narrow, tan face. Beardless like full-blooded male elves, he was average height for a human, though short by an’Cróan standards, unlike Magiere, who was nearly as tall as he was. Even on the ship, he wore his old scarred-up hauberk with its iron rings.
While Magiere wore a hand-and-a-half, long-bladed falchion sheathed on her hip, and a white metal battle dagger at her back in a sheath, a pair of strange-looking winged punching blades hung in their odd sheaths from Leesil’s belt, strapped down against his thighs.
In the spring breeze, Magiere’s shirt clung to her beneath her studded leather hauberk. Pushing back her black hair, she knew its bloodred tint probably showed under the bright sun. Everyone here was now accustomed to that, just as she had grown used to her overly pale skin sometimes stinging under the bright sun’s glare.
Leesil’s amber-irised eyes, so subtly slanted, looked down at the trio. “What is ... problem?”
His grasp of Numanese, the more common language of this continent, was still questionable, but it was the only language Paolo and Alberto spoke.
“She says he’s ruining that fish,” Alberto answered in his small voice, jutting his short chin at Wayfarer.
“Am not!” Paolo added.
Magiere agreed with Wayfarer: there wasn’t much left of the fish that Paulo held.
Leesil knelt between the boys and eyed Paolo. “Give me knife. I show ... take out bones.”
With a sigh, Paolo surrendered his knife, and the argument ended.
Magiere raised her eyes and spotted the final two members of her group coming out of the aftcastle door. The one in the lead was nearly a head taller than anyone on board.
Coarse white-blond hair with streaks of gray among the strands marked him as old for an an’Cróan. He was deeply tan, with lines crinkling the corners of his mouth and his large amber-irised eyes, which at times never appeared to blink as he watched everything. But the feature that stood out most was the four pale scars—as if from claws—that ran at an angle down his forehead and through one high and slanted feathery eyebrow to skip over his right eye and reach his cheekbone.
Neither Magiere nor Leesil could pronounce his full an’Cróan name, so they’d shortened it to simply Brot’an.
Among the Anmaglâhk, that caste of assassins who viewed themselves as guardians of the an’Cróan, he was one of a few remaining “shadow-grippers,” the masters of the caste’s skills and ways. But Brot’an no longer wore his caste’s garb of forest gray hooded cloak, vestment, pants, and felt boots. Instead he wore simple breeches and a weatherworn jerkin—more scavenged human garb, like Wayfarer’s. Unlike the girl, who was merely trying to blend in among human cultures, the old assassin had an additional reason for his change of attire.
Brot’an was at war with his own caste, but to Magiere he was still an anmaglâhk. If she forgot that for even an instant, there were always those scars on his face to remind her.
“Another disagreement?” he asked, frowning slightly as he observed Leesil and the young ones.
“A squabble,” she answered.
“My people’s children do not ... ‘squabble.’” His eyes narrowed a little, as if Paolo and Alberto were a bad influence on Wayfarer.
“She’ll miss them when we have to leave,” Magiere countered.
“Perhaps.”
A deep growl pulled Magiere’s attention. Behind the tall shadow-gripper stood a large silver-gray wolf, almost bluish in the bright day.
Chap was taller than any wolf, for he wasn’t one. His body was that of a majay-hì, but he was different from even them and his mate, Lily, as was his daughter, Shade, though in a different way. He was a Fay spirit born years ago by his own choice into a majay-hì pup—a new Fay-born in the body of a Fay-descended being. And his daughter, Shade, shared half of that strangely mixed heritage.
Chap was also Magiere and Leesil’s guardian and guide—and an overbearing know-it-all. He also hated Brot’an, and he had a long list of reasons for this, which resulted in his penchant for watching the old assassin nearly all the time.
The dog rounded the old assassin and came closer to Magiere.
—Paolo is ... good ... for Wayfarer— ... —He ... lets her ... be a girl—
Those words rose in Magiere’s mind as Chap called them up in pieces from various memories he had seen in her over time. This was his new method of “speaking” to her, Leesil, or Wayfarer, though he never did so with Brot’an, as far as Magiere knew. Chap found he could never get inside the old assassin’s thoughts.