MacClain and Sondheim forgot their prior disagreements and blunted these two, then handed their vials to Dana.
“No more nymphs here,” Gareth confirmed, after returning from a prickly saunter. “And none on th’other side. Sun’s a-lowering.”
“Did you see her?” Sondheim asked, with a catch in his voice.
“No!” Gareth said, and chuckled like a young raven.
Very strange, gloomy, difficult to absorb… And yet here Reynard was, leaping from the boat through the rough waters, tugging a rope to make it easier for Dana to transfer, for she was clearly exhausted.
Manuel and Reynard were told to climb out on the wave-splashed, boulder-strewn base of the final rock to wait. The lone nymph they had seen days before from the galleon had not yet split. MacClain and Gareth, clinging to the pillar high above Manuel, kept watch for swimming nymphs, for not all came up in one season, and not all came from the same batches of eggs at the same time—and of course, the same time could be different in this strange clime for every year, even every month!
It was Nem’s turn for the last nymph. He climbed out on the tree and performed the blunting quickly, drawing and capping another vial of brown fluid before they all returned to the boat and launched through darkening waters.
Reynard had fallen into a deep gloom, but he rowed beside Manuel, whose strength was a match for the others. If they were favored by the Eaters, as Dana and Kaiholo seemed to share the opinion they were, then Manuel was the superior in favor, for unless Reynard was more naïve than he thought he was, and less observant, there had seemed to be some resentment by Kaiholo of Manuel, some feeling that one of the high ones—a powerful and very old one, perhaps equal to this Afrique, Calybo—had shared her time with the old man, as well as himself.
Had that been the one named Guldreth? A high one, just beneath the sky—could such a one be a Vanir, whatever they were?
The waves were more intense now, and the boat moved off from the sharp rocks. The sun burned somber orange above the far mists, and then descended, and twilight took hold of the last of their day.
An hour later, Dana ordered the boat back in, and they began the journey back to the coast. Dana’s satchel was full. She seemed satisfied, but Manuel still had questions.
“How do ye know all nymphs are found?” Manuel asked. “Kaiholo saith there could be five or more.”
Gareth scoffed. “Eaters often tell us in their visits.”
“How? When they come and take their due?”
Gareth looked aside.
“It was not an Eater that told ye, but a man,” Manuel reminded them.
“And was he wrong?” Dana asked. Her head lolled as if she were half asleep.
“And what happened to the first people who arrived, when they found the drakes?” Reynard asked. “How did you all learn—”
“Enough,” Dana murmured.
Sondheim looked toward the distant sound of breakers on the beach. They did not see the galleon again; it had probably sunk, and with it, all hope Reynard had of building another boat to get away from the island. Unless he could purloin one of those currachs, or a boat like this one…
“Be not sad,” Nem said with a youthful brightness Reynard could neither understand nor share. “Life is good here. Challenging, but good. And never boring!”
Reynard could make out the glowing of the waves on the beach, and the others pulled the oars with great, grunting strokes, as if the island might try to resist, to slough them off, unless they used their full effort.
Just before the boat’s prow pushed up on sand and shingle, something out in the sea, between the islands, gave a tremendous groan, peaking in an awful shriek, as if a monster had been savaged and left to die.
Reynard cried out. The others leaped over the sides and dragged the boat with Reynard still on a thwart, too terrified to move. Gareth reached around his torso and pulled him out with a single burly arm, then planted him several steps up the beach.
Nem grinned. “Always alive, always a challenge!” the boy said, face flushed. “There are more things here than drakes and Eaters, newcomer,” he said to Reynard. “Many more!”
The Scout’s Tale
AS EVENING FELL, Maggie carried her lantern under the covered walkway, ignoring the painted beams every twenty feet, as she always did. Still, scalp tingling, she glanced up and saw several with sailing ships, and two illustrating drakes and their offshore breeding rocks. One showed glistening shadows fighting with armored men.
Maggie picked up her pace.
The world outside their isle had been in obvious turmoil for over a thousand years, with pilgrims, refugees, sailors, and wanderers seeking new lands and the hope of new lives, as well as new histories. Zodiako had once been half its present size, with a quarter the population. In the last century, as measured so imperfectly here, many hundreds had arrived on the southwestern shore and found their way into Maggie’s town, and not just fishermen but freebooters—some English, some Portuguese, a few Dutch. Earlier there had been Norse and Danish voyagers—her people—and earlier still, brown, sun-kissed folk from the far Pacific and Asia, who had soon built great canoes and fled to other islands in the ring of Tir Na Nog, islands more friendly to their needs.
But most of those visitors had arrived before Maggie’s time, and according to those who knew and had lived here even then, the migrations had not been nearly so large and frequent. Now, apparently, hundreds of explorers, unsure of whether their motivation was discovery or wealth, were finding ways around the unmapped regions of the greater world, and arriving more and more often on their isle’s shores by the dozens of vessels every year.
The Eaters disposed of most of them, and since these new arrivals were not protected, and were not explicitly part of Hel’s pact, there was nothing the townspeople could do.
At the end of the covered walkway, the parliament building, made of shaped and cut lava, rose ten yards above a green quadrangle dotted with trees brought from other lands. Trees native to this isle were not much suited to servitude or town life, or any sort of domestication. While trees from the lively woods might not just walk away, as some thought, when early builders had tried to make use of them, before they were cut down, they often died of themselves and took on unpleasant forms, as if they had once been people—and who knew? A thousand years or more before, some of the townspeople might have become trees, and that could happen again, anytime… Who could judge? Crafters could imagine anything.
Stepping up to a side entrance, a thick oaken gate mounted in the stone wall, she took a steel key out of the satchel. She inserted it into a great black lock and opened the gate to a hall that ended on steps that led up to the nave of the temple and another locked door that went left to her room in a far basement corner, where drakish matters were discussed. Her chief scout, Anutha, gone for days now, had her own key and had entered a short time earlier—no doubt after rounds at the smallest of the town’s three taverns. Maggie could hear her singing in rugged sweet tones, words she did not quite understand, perhaps in Shelta or Zigrany, languages she knew Anutha was familiar with from her contacts with Travelers.
She opened the door and swung it wide. Anutha sat on a bench behind Maggie’s hewn desk. The scout was thin, in her middle years, but very strong and fit, with short-cut gray hair. Her regular garb was a jerkin and pants of black and brown leather, with shiny gray nymph-shell greaves. She looked up as the door opened, eyes both bleary and weary.