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They sat down, and Pirvan remembered hearing someone growl, “Lucky man, cuddling that sword-wench.” He remembered somebody else suggesting that the first speaker keep his tongue between his teeth if he wished to have either.

Then, for quite a long time, there didn’t seem to be anything worth remembering.

* * * * *

By the time Pirvan and Haimya were asleep, wrapped up in the blanket and each other, Golden Cup was safe. The heavy line came ashore with a rush, as six stout sailors heaved on it. The moment it was secured to the bollards, everyone who could lay a hand on the slack of the line did so and hauled the ship around until its bow pointed north and most of the strain was off the anchor.

In that fashion the ship rode out the rest of the storm, with no more rigging lost and no more leaking than manning the pumps every other hour could handle. The raft even made a second trip, bringing jugs of hot tea (as Pirvan had hoped, laced with brandy) and porridge loaded with raisins and salt pork.

The food was even more welcome than hot drinks; Haimya and Pirvan both awoke ready to slaughter and cook one of their comrades on the rock. By the time the pots were empty, the wind was dropping so fast that even Pirvan could notice it. Soon afterward, the flag signal for everyone to return aboard rose on the stump of the foremast.

“I wager we’ll be upanchoring and heading for Karthay the moment they’ve rigged a foremast,” Grimsoar said. He pointed at a crowd on the forecastle. “They’ve got a spare bowsprit already out, ready to be lashed in place.”

Pirvan’s curiosity about the whys and wherefores of this operation was not easily answered. Grimsoar was explaining a process that he understood tolerably well (two years at sea teaches a man much about the sailor’s arts), but his listener not at all.

About Tarothin and the naga, Grimsoar was able to offer more to satisfy Pirvan’s curiosity. At least he was, after he’d led the smaller man farther up the rock and out of earshot of both the wakeful Haimya and the other sailors preparing to cast off the lines.

“What he said he did-and all this was to the lady, and I was overhearing-”

“Without being seen?”

“Am I invisible?”

Pirvan smiled. “You will be, if you’ve offended either of them. I will push you off the rocks.”

“You and which regiment?”

“So what did Tarothin say?”

It seemed that he had used a single spell, potent and thoroughly neutral, to reverse the paralysis of Haimya and Pirvan and inflict the same on the naga. It would not die unless something large and hungry came along before it regained its senses enough to flee.

Meanwhile, it was sending out cries of distress, inaudible to human or most other ears, but painful to its fellow water nagas. Any such who heard the cry would flee the area of the Flower Rocks as if the sea had begun to boil.

“Nagas have a place in the gods’ balancing of things,” Grimsoar said. “Or at least that’s what neutrality makes our friend believe.”

“I don’t dispute that,” Pirvan said. “As long as that place is some ways from where I am.”

“He said that, too,” Grimsoar replied. “Just before he fell to the deck.”

“He is-”

“Sleeping it off, I judge. So does the ship’s herbalist and the merchant princess, who know a deal more of this than I do. I reckon casting the spells left him in worse shape than you or Haimya.”

There was a bright side to that, Pirvan realized. Tarothin would be some while recovering his strength. During that time he could hardly teach Eskaia much about magic. He had won the goodwill of Golden Cup’s crew, but if he had the plans Haimya had mentioned, he might lose that of Josclyn Encuintras. What might come of that looked no more encouraging now than the first time Pirvan had heard of the games of the lady and the wizard.

With no fitting reply ready to hand, Pirvan scrambled down the rocks to join the raft party.

* * * * *

A slow voyage from the Flower Rocks (if one was unfortunate enough to enter those waters at all) was normally three to four days. Golden Cup took seven and the better part of the eighth.

It was sailing through contrary winds, with two and a half masts, rigging that was more knots and splices than rope, and sails that looked like garments a beggar would have scorned. The hull was strained, the leaks seemed to be gaining, and between repairs, pumping, and the ordinary duties of a large ship at sea, the crew got little rest and less sleep.

The one consolation was generous rations. No one could doubt they were going to have to put in at Karthay, to repair and replenish. Stores that had been intended for the whole voyage to the Crater Gulf and back were now distributed at every meal, and often at other times and less formally as well. (“It would only spoil if we don’t finish it off,” Grimsoar said one night, speaking of a large jar of pickled and spiced vegetables.)

The generous diet helped bring back the strength of the hurt and the weary, Tarothin among them. When he walked the deck now to take the air, men who had crossed to the other side now crowded around him, asking his advice or simply kneeling in thanks before him.

He was polite about the counsel but, to Pirvan’s eye, seemed sorely tried by the worship. The thief wondered if it was genuine modesty (something not unheard of in wizards, but rare) or merely the good sense to realize that adulation could turn into blazing hostility the moment he disappointed one of his worshipers.

There was also little enough that Pirvan could do if Tarothin was wanting in judgment. Readily taking the advice of commonfolk was almost unheard of, even in the most moderate of magic-workers.

There was even less he could do about Haimya’s moodiness, which disturbed him rather more than anything that could have come to Tarothin. The guard-maid kept her distance even more than she had before the storm, and not only from Pirvan. Any man who approached her, even to thank her for saving him, met a glare and sometimes words that nailed his feet to the deck and his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

Pirvan’s only consolation was that no one thought he and Haimya were lovers, and he was not, therefore, in any measure responsible for her mood. As to learning what kept her so uneasy, he could as well have learned the landscape of the Abyss. It would not have been harder, and it might have been less perilous.

Before he forced himself to feign indifference to Haimya’s mood (from which she suffered as much as anyone, he could not help noticing), Pirvan had seriously contemplated asking Lady Eskaia. But the contemplation was brief and ended in silence. The mistress was as protective of her maid’s secrets as the maid was of hers; Pirvan would be on the shore in Karthay when the ship sailed if he even hinted at such a breach of confidence.

Thus matters stood, when on the eighth day, toward sunset, Golden Cup crept into the west harbor of Karthay.

* * * * *

Like the greater part of Ansalon, Karthay, city and surrounding lands alike, owed nominal allegiance to Istar the Mighty. Like more than a few of the more notable lands, states, and powers, the word “nominal” spoke louder and more truly than the word “allegiance.”

It was a rebellion or at least a manifesto of pinpricks, rather than any overt acts of defiance. But there was a long history of fraudulent money changings, shoddy merchandise (though not where it would endanger life, merely digestion, marriage, chastity, or profit), and suspiciously well-timed tavern brawls.

“One of these days,” Kurulus confided to Pirvan, “Istar’s going to pull together a decent fleet of her own. Then we’ll sit across the mouth of the gulf, get our own ships in and out, and lock up Karthay’s like a lot of temple virgins.”

“Um,” Pirvan said, or something like it. This was the third day in Karthay, and apart from two visits from port officials, they’d had no contact with the shore. The harbor seemed as busy as he’d been promised it would be, even more colorful than Istar’s with a good strength of sea barbarian ships, but not at all welcoming.