“That hovel!” Dovian interrupted. “A disgrace that you ever spent a night there.”
“I remember your words exactly,” Spratling continued. “You said…”
“Who would have thought,” the shadow had said, pushing into the hut behind a yellow lantern held high, “that you could find a prince just anywhere these days? I guess some of us are lucky.”
Dariel might have remembered the words well, as he said, but that night it took him a moment to realize what was happening. He had been three days in hiding. Some portion of him still thought the guardian might return, though in deeper regions he had already started to give up on all hope. What a familiar voice, he’d thought. But whose was it, and how was it here? Dariel knew he recognized it, but for a few frightened moments he could not place it within the context of this mountain hut.
The shadow moved closer. “Are you all right, rascal? Don’t be scared. It’s Val. It’s Val come to help you out.”
Val? Dariel thought. Val from the caverns below the palace-the feeder of the kitchen ovens…His Val! He got to his feet, stumbled forward, and fell against the man’s chest. Once he inhaled the salty, pungent, coal-smoked largeness of him, he released a horde of pent-up fears in great sobs. He clenched Val’s shirt in his fists and rubbed his tears and snotty nose into the fabric, as would a baby ill to the point of delirium with cold and fever.
“Oh, don’t do that, lad,” Val said softly. “Don’t do that. Things will be all right now.”
And, true to his word, they were. At least, they were as all right as possible in the circumstances. It turned out that Val had been on his way home to Candovia, one of many in the migration spurred by the war. He had happened upon Dariel’s guardian by pure chance in a makeshift camp pitched at the side of the highway of fleeing refugees. The man was well into a bottle of plum wine and did not mind confessing to anyone around him that he had been personal guardian to one of the king’s children. Val had situated himself close enough to smell the man’s sickly-sweet breath. He probed him until he confessed just who he had been looking after and where he had left his duty and turned coward. He could not find the person he was meant to deliver the boy to! He was gone, probably dead, and the guardian had no further instructions as to how to proceed. And with the news coming from all around-Maeander in Candovia, Hanish having destroyed the army at Alecian Fields-there was nothing he could do for the boy anymore. Sure, he’d left him to his own fate, but what else could he have done?
Val never exactly described what he did to the guardian, except to mutter something about how he would have to gum nothing harder than goat cheese for the rest of his days, or something like that. It did not make a bit of sense to the boy, but the visual image it conjured in him held his perplexed attention for much of the long walk Val led him on. He knew just the place for them, Val had said, a grand and expansive place in which to disappear. For much of the journey the boy rode atop the Candovian’s shoulders, a leg to either side of his neck, fingers intertwined in the man’s curly mass of hair.
They were three days coming out of the mountains, and by the fourth Dariel could smell the salt in the air. That afternoon, half asleep on the man’s shoulders, Dariel heard Val say, “Look, lad. That’s no sea, there. That’s a place a whole race of men could hide upon.”
They had paused on a bluff with a view of all the world to their west. Even though Dariel had lived all of his years on an island he could tell in a glance that the body of water before them was different. It was not the turquoise blue or the marine green that he was used to. Instead, the water was a slate-dark color a shade under black, undulating with swelling surges that conveyed their force through slow bulk. Near the shoreline, crests of countless waves rose like liquid mountains, seemed to hang stretched to the air for a moment, then curled over into a foaming chaos. Occasionally, the clap of the wave’s impact slapped against his ears, always strangely timed, in a way impossible to match sight with the sound. Staring from atop his giant’s shoulders, Dariel had never seen anything as awesome in its power and scale.
“That’s the tongue of the Gray Slopes,” Val said. “It is a boundless ocean. That’s where you’ll vanish from your father’s world and emerge into mine instead.”
Dariel had not said anything in response. For weeks now there had been a vague fear hanging over him, as ever present as the sky. Some portion of him had never believed he could carry on without his family. He would vanish without them. The world would swallow him. The Giver’s fingers would pluck him from the earth and flick him into nothingness. He feared he was of no more substance than a flame and just as easily extinguished. But here he was. The world carried on as it always had, and he still moved through it. He went on; he had something at his center just as solid and real as the rest of the world. He really could vanish from one world and emerge into another, he thought. Vanish and emerge anew…
That was exactly what he had done. Val gave him a new life, bestowed on him a new name even as he took one for himself. He taught him that the tales he had told of being a blood-soaked pirate in his youth were not just make-believe, as the boy had thought. Val-Dovian, in short for his native country-came from the long line of raiders he had claimed. On arriving back among the Outer Isles it did not take him long to reestablish himself and set about building a fleet of ships and getting sailors to man them. The world was ripe for plunder. The Known World was in near chaos, grudgingly coming to terms with Hanish Mein’s new rule. Many groups jostled to find a place in the redistribution of power this entailed. Val sailed with Dariel tucked under his wing; taught him everything he could about sailing and fighting, pirating, commanding men; about surviving this cruelest of existences.
That which came before-the palace of Acacia, his role as prince, his father’s empire, and three others born of him and his mother, Aleera Akaran-well, it seemed to be clearer in Val’s mind than in Dariel’s. Why try to hold on to people he would never see again? He had been so young that his memories had not stuck in his head with an ordered clarity. Yes, there were images. There were moments of emotion that seemed to take him by the neck and close off the air to his lungs. There were times when he awoke from dreams fearing that something was horribly wrong, but he grew to tolerate this as the years passed. Maybe such was just what it meant to be alive.
Spratling-yes, that was his name now and there was no reason to slip back to that scared child persona any more than he had to-flipped open the small latch of the chest and tipped the contents onto Dovian’s bed, a slithering tumble of gold coins. The man stared at them, ran his fingers over them, tested their feel on his palm. He whispered that this was it. This was just what they had needed. This would fund everything…
He plucked up an object between his fingers and held it up to a ribbon of sunlight. It was gold-gold colored at least, though the workmanship was almost too fine and sharp edged for such a soft metal. The shape of it was unusual. It was the thickness of a large coin, slightly square, ridged along one end, inscribed with markings that might have been writing but which bore no similarity to any language either of them had seen. There was a single hole at its center, just slightly oblong.
Spratling had not noticed it before. “What is it?”
Dovian thought on this for some time. Spratling could almost see him sorting through his memories, a lifetime’s catalog of labeled and priced treasures. “I’ve no idea,” he finally said. “It’s a fine thing, though.” He pressed it to the young man’s chest. “Here. Keep it there around your neck. If you ever get in trouble and need a fast fortune you can melt it down and make coins. It’s yours. The rest of this is more than we need for what we have planned. Bring me those charts and look them over.”
Spratling did so, spreading the familiar images across the cot and sitting on the edge of the bed. He loved moments like this, when Val seemed to forget his ailments and the two of them got lost in contemplation, like a father and a son, scheming, planning, dreaming a swashbuckling world into existence. In many ways Spratling was still the boy Dariel had been. He had no inkling yet of how much that was soon to change.