His head seemed canted forward, too, as if the point of connection was higher on the back of the skull, but most interesting and disturbing of all was the confirmation of what Utta had thought only a rumor, but now knew as truth: Rafe’s fingers and toes were webbed, although most of the time it did not show.
Could all the childhood stories be true, then? Were the Skimmers a different race entirely, like the Rooftoppers surely must be?
“What do your people say?” Utta asked him suddenly, then realized she was speaking thoughts aloud that he couldn’t possibly understand. “About where they came from, I mean?”
He looked up at her, wrinkling the skin of his brow in distrust. “Why do you ask?”
“I am curious, I suppose. I grew up in the Vuttish Isles, and none of your folk still live there, although there are stories that they did...”
“Stories?” he said bitterly. “I’ll trow there were.” “What do you mean?”
“That were all ours once, your Vuttland.” “It was?”
He snorted. “Wasn’t it? Didn’t our kings rule there, with the Great Moot? Didn’t the Golden Shoal come to rest there, at the rock of Egye-Var?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. “Then why did they leave?”
“Should ask T’chayan Redhand, shouldn’t you?” “Who is that?”
His eyes widened. He was not pretending—he was truly astonished. “Don’t know T’chayan the Killer? The man who murdered most all my kind in the islands, women and spawn, too, drove our people out of our home and hunted us wherever we went with his dogs and his arrows?”
She blinked, surprised. “Do you mean King Tane the White?” Utta was better read than most of her fellow Vuttlanders, especially because she had gone away, first to the women’s remove at Connord, then to the Eastmarch convent to complete her Zorian novitiate. In fact, she knew more of history than most men, but what the Skimmer youth said was new to her. “Tane is not so well known to us now. I may have heard his name once or twice when I was a girl. When Connord conquered the isles and converted the Vuttish Isles to the Trigonate faith, much of our old history was lost.”
“Your people do not remember T’chayan Redhand?” The Skimmer youth shook his head in stunned horror. “Sure, you’re lying to tease me, then. Your people don’t repent his bloody deeds, or at least celebrate them?”
“What are the two of you going on about?” demanded Merolanna, poking her head out from the hood she had made of the sealskin.
Sister Utta shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she told Rafe. “Truly, I am. My people have forgotten, I suppose, but that doesn’t mean we should have.”
He shut his mouth with an almost audible snap and refused to talk anymore, or even look at Utta, as though she herself had just returned from the long task of eradicating all memory of the wrongs done to his forebears.
The day was cold and cloudy, with intermittent rain. The fog that lingered in the mainland city seemed weirdly heavy to Utta, like clouds that lay on the ocean instead of hanging in the sky. She could make out a few landmarks jutting through the murk, the market flagpoles and all the temple spires, but the mists made them seem something else, perhaps the skeletal ribs of ancient monsters.
Rafe moved the boat ably through the high waves as they got closer to land; Merolanna alternately clutched the side of the boat and Utta. At times they actually lifted off the benches, then slammed down hard in the next trough. For the first time, Utta wished she had changed back into women’s clothes, since they would have offered more protection for her rapidly bruising fundament.
At last they were through and into the shallows. Rafe grounded the boat on a sandbar. “If you walk up that way, won’t get your feet too wet,” he said.
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“For one silver urchin? You’ll want a bodyguard or a troop of soldiers, and you won’t get them for one merely urchin, will you? I said I’d bring you here and take you back. Means I’ll sit and wait, not go in ’mongst the Old Ones. Their kind don’t like my kind.”
Utta helped Merolanna out, but despite the duchess’ best efforts, the hems of her long skirts still dragged in the water. “Why don’t they like you?”
“Us?” Rafe laughed. His face changed when he did it, looked both more and less like an ordinary man’s. “Because we stayed behind, didn’t we?”
Utta did not get to ask any more questions because just at that moment Merolanna slipped and fell. As the older woman floundered in the shallow water, Utta struggled to lift her until Rafe jumped lightly out of the boat to help. Together the two of them managed to get the dowager duchess upright again.
“Merciful Zoria, look at me!” Merolanna groaned. “I am soaking wet! I’ll catch my death of something, that’s sure.”
“Here, wait,” said the young Skimmer, then splashed back to the boat. He returned with the sealskin. “Wrap this around you.”
“Thank you,” said Merolanna with a certain amount of ceremony—certainly more than this isolated cove had seen in some time, Utta could not help thinking. “You are very kind.”
“Still not going with you, though.” Rafe waded back to the boat.
“Your Grace, I suspected this was not a good idea before. Now I am certain of it.” Sister Utta was trying her best not to peer at the empty houses on either side of the Port Road because they didn’t really seem empty: the black holes of their windows seemed something more sinister, the eye sockets of skulls or the mouths of dragon caves. Even here on the outskirts of town, where the houses were low and the winds brisk, the fog still hung in cobwebby tendrils and it was hard to see more than a few dozen paces ahead. “I think we should go back to the castle.”
“Do not try to change my mind, Sister. I have come all the way here and I will speak to the fairy folk. They can kill me if they want, but I will at least ask them what became of my son.”
But if they kill you, why would they let me go? Utta did not speak this thought aloud, not out of any desire to spare Merolanna’s feelings, but because in her growing hopelessness, suspended in this foggy dreamworld as if they were ghosts roaming aimlessly in the realms of Kernios, she did not think it would make any difference. Utta knew she had cast her sticks, as the old gambler’s saying went, and now she must shake out her coppers.
They walked slowly up a steep road, Merolanna dripping with every step, into the open, rain-sprinkled cobbles of Blossom Market Square—not a place to buy flowers, but the venerable home of the mainland fish market, whose famous stink had been jestingly memorialized in its name. Other than the still-pungent memories of market days past, the square seemed empty now, the awnings and tents gone, the people all fled to the castle or to cities further south, but Utta could not rid herself of the sense of being watched. If anything, it grew stronger as she walked with the duchess across the open space, so that each step seemed slower and more difficult, as though the mist was getting into her very bones, making them sodden and heavy. It was almost a relief when a figure stepped out of a shadowed arch at the edge of the market and stood waiting for them.
Utta had prepared herself for virtually anything, her imagination fueled by the books in the castle library and the tales of her Vuttish grandmother. She was ready for giants, or monsters, or even beautiful, godlike creatures. She was not as well prepared for an ordinary mortal man in a simple, homespun robe.