If a storm did blow, he feared that his lady would hardly be seen on deck. Even he might need luck to uphold the honor of the knights and keep down his own food.
But now the mate was striding aft, drawing his sword, and saluting Pirvan with the blade held against his lips. As was his own custom as well as that of the knights, he returned salute for salute.
"Sir Pirvan, Knight of the Rose," the mate said evenly, "you are bidden to accompany me in my boat, to the ship Shield of Virtue."
"Is this a council of war?" Pirvan replied. "If so, Sir Niebar is by law appointed to speak for the Knights of Solamnia."
The mate grinned-and Pirvan realized that the man could hardly be older than Gerik. Increased commerce by sea was doing more than creating new breeds of ship. It was making mates and even captains out of youths and maidens.
"A council," the mate said, "but those who invite you are not thinking of war."
"You make me curious. Have you names for them?"
"Do Tarothin Red Robe and Sirbones, priest of Mishakal, have a place in your memory?"
Pirvan's jaw dropped too far for a knight's dignity. He had heard in a letter from Tarothin that his old companion and his friend might be sailing with the fleet, but had thought this a pious hope. Neither was much in the grace of the kingpriest, and made no secret of it.
"An honored place," Pirvan answered finally. "But if they are asking for me, then Lady Haimya must be with me."
"Ah-I am in haste, with other duties-"
"She will not delay us. She will, however, push me over the side some dark night, or perhaps even some bright day, if I do not bring her to see our old friends."
Gerik lurched up from the depths of sleep like a drunkard climbing a hill. His first sensation was that he must have slept fearfully late for the day to be so bright. Then came a thought that perhaps they would have a fine day at Tirabot. Even this far south, spring did come in time, and with it such fine days.
At last came the knowledge that he was not alone in his bed, that the person beside him was a woman, and that she was holding him.
"Ellysta, I hope?" he whispered.
"You doubt it?" came her sleepy reply.
"I hope that any time I share a bed with a woman, I remember her name the next morning," Gerik added playfully. "To do otherwise is rude."
"I knew you were gentle of character as well as blood."
Gerik looked at the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. "Blood is what the council will have," he said. "Ours, if we are late for the meeting."
Too many thoughts of that meeting crashed in on his still half-mazed wits. He groaned.
"You look as if you would like to go back to sleep, meeting or not," Ellysta said.
Gerik sighed. "Perhaps I would. I was having a lovely dream. I was in a garden, and a woman and I were picking roses.
"I don't know if it was you," he added, and she stuck out her tongue at him. "She wore a veil and a long robe."
Ellysta sat up. Sunlight played across fair, freckled skin that had largely healed of its wounds and was hidden by neither veil nor gown. "Go on," she urged.
"We were picking roses, as I said. Then we found this purple one, as big as a cabbage. We wouldn't have dared pick it, but it floated off its stem all by itself. It floated up like a soap bubble, until it was between us, and its perfume-it drew us both toward it until our lips touched on opposite sides of the rose."
"And then?"
"I started waking up," Gerik said, climbing out of bed.
Ellysta propped herself up on the cushions, draping a blanket over her legs. "It's more than the meeting that troubles you, Gerik. Is it the message from your father?"
His suspicions that she was a spy for his enemies twitched briefly, but did not come back to life. "Yes," he answered.
"I do not ask more. If I did, and you answered because we were bedmates, others would be jealous."
Gerik grinned. "Bertsa Wylum, do you suppose?"
"Pah!" Ellysta said, miming spitting. "She is old enough to be your mother. No, I mean jealousy of what you tell me, not of what else we do."
Gerik realized that he had just been given an unsubtle piece of advice in a most subtle manner. Ellysta, he decided, could make her fortune going on embassies. She could probably persuade minotaurs that it was honorable to let someone else have what they wanted.
But he had now told her either too much or too little. "The message holds no bad news," he went on. "But it was-my father wrote it in a secret language, lawful only among the Knights of Solamnia. He also told me where to find the key that let me read the letter.
"I am the son of a knight, but not one myself. My father has-well, some would say that he has broken Oath and defied Measure."
Ellysta put her chin on her knees and wrapped her arms around her legs. This was her pose of meditation. It also dislodged the blanket, which made her a rather distracting sight for Gerik. He hoped she finished meditating soon.
"You are keeping a knight's holding, are you not? Or even the property of the Order of the Rose?" she asked suddenly.
"Some of both," Gerik said. "It would take too long to explain."
"I will listen some other time," she said, which was as close as Gerik could imagine to being an order without actually using words of command. "But the Oath and the Measure also allow you to act in your father's place in certain matters."
"Some, yes. Not all."
"Then by common law, responsibility implies authority and authority gives rights. Rights to know what is needed to carry out your tasks."
"And reading that letter was, therefore, one of my rights?"
Ellysta clapped her hands, then kissed him. Gerik stopped feeling like the pupil to her teacher and instead more like a man with a woman.
Ellysta's eyes widened, and she asked, "You have already read the letter, you say?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Then she kissed him in a way that made further talk both needless and impossible.
Tarothin and Sirbones were aboard Shield of Virtue, which was the largest ship Pirvan had ever seen. She loomed above the boat like a keep above a rider on a pony, and she seemed to have more people aboard her than Pirvan had hairs in his beard.
High-built from fore to aft, with a bowsprit as long as some seagoing ships and four masts, she clearly needed every bit of sail those masts could spread to move. Pirvan hoped her size gave her seaworthiness in proportion, or she would only be a way of taking more sailors to Zeboim's realm than any ship before her.
They met their friends in Tarothin's cabin, which was the only place aboard ship safe from eavesdroppers.
"Let us make haste," Tarothin began without preamble. "I have a warding spell on this cabin that not only shuts out ears and magic but hides its own existence. It only lasts about ten minutes at full strength, though, and renewing it would take an hour. I'm not as young as I was."
Tarothin had to be rising sixty, but looked far better than he had when he and Pirvan parted two years ago. Sirbones, on the other hand, looked neither better nor worse, neither more robust nor more frail. The priest, Pirvan decided, had doubtless looked middle-aged when he was an apprentice.
Pirvan spoke briefly of what had befallen him and Haimya during the last two years, of their reasons for sailing to Suivinari Island, and of the peril facing Gerik at Tirabot. He had no intention of spending more time than necessary in the cabin, spell or no spell. It had less than enough space and hardly more than enough air to keep four people comfortable.
Tarothin was reassuring. "It will be more than a while before the kingpriest sanctions private war," the mage said, "even for such as House Dirivan. New to his office, he cannot be sure that all who turn their household guards into private hosts and wall in their estates will be his friends.