She plucked a splinter of wood from under one fingernail, then swung her feet onto the floor, bent over, and began wringing out her hair. More water dripped from her impartially onto the floor and the bunk. Apart from the water and her old dagger on a new belt, of shells linked together with bronze wire, she wore nothing.
Torvik was annoyed briefly, that she would spend so much time grooming herself before explaining her return from the dead. Then he remembered his mother's words: "Even the fiercest woman will groom herself when she is uneasy. Or when she wants to look her best for her chosen man. In that, we are a trifle like cats."
What moved Mirraleen now? Torvik's heart was not to his throat; indeed, he could not have said precisely where it was. It did seem to be beating faster.
"Welcome aboard, dear friend," he said at last. "I did not command a search for you, because I thought you might have reasons for hiding."
"Also, because you wanted to search for me yourself," Mirraleen said. She unhooked two links of the bronze wire and hung the belt of shells on a peg, then stood up. "It is as well. I wanted to come to you with none knowing."
At that moment, Torvik knew that he would someday tell his sons: "Remember, desire can make the nimblest tongue turn to stone." Certainly his had.
Mirraleen stepped close, then closer still, and kissed him. Her lips tasted of honey and salt, and of something that Torvik could only compare to a summer meadow somehow blooming under the sea, with fish browsing on kelp instead of sheep on the fresh grass.
His arms took on a life of their own. He drew Mirraleen tightly against him, without caring whether either could breathe. He was dimly aware of her hands moving, until he was clad as she.
Then, for a long time, he did not know-or care-where he was or who he was or even if he was a person separate from Mirraleen.
Wilthur the Brown had learned the spell he was now using under the name of the Eye of Uchuno. Whether it still deserved that name, the mage did not know. Certainly Uchuno himself (a Red Robe) would have disapproved of Wilthur's use of this scrying magic, if Uchuno had not been dead for five centuries.
Wilthur, however, was alive. So were a good dozen or more of those who had been led by the Servants of Silence in the abduction of Torvik. Abandoned by their masters, they had fled inland, preferring death amid the magical monsters to what they suspected awaited them in the fleet.
They would have been right, had the mage not unleashed the Eye of Uchuno. The spell needed a large amount of melted volcanic glass as its material element, but in Wilthur's new home that was as abundant as moss in a forest. Sent abroad, it took the form of a gigantic red eye that could blaze with all-consuming fire when its master wished to cease scrying and feed.
Through the Eye Wilthur could feed on many things. Just now he wished to feed on the terror of the man whom the Eye was pursuing. The man had spent all of the previous night and all of today stumbling ever higher on the Green Mountain. Sometimes he wondered why neither animals nor plants attacked him, and once he halted and tried to drink at a stream.
Wilthur promptly turned the stream boiling hot. The man ran off like a mad thing, and his cries nearly warned the minotaurs in their outpost. But there were only five of them now, and they wisely did not step outside Lujimar's warding spell. They had arms and food in plenty to stand off any material attack, or so they thought. Their time would come. Meanwhile, it was the time of the pursued man.
He was a lean, scant-bearded fellow, who from his balding pate had to be older than he seemed. But he ran well, and now that he saw the cliff at his back, he seemed ready to turn and fight.
It would be a pathetic spectacle when he did, one that Wilthur intended to prolong as much as possible. He sought fear now, as some men sought ecstasy.
With a few syllables and a wave of his lesser staff, Wilthur brought a faint crimson glow to the crystal sphere hanging from the ceiling. It was now ready to receive, bind, and preserve the man's fear as a root cellar preserves a sack of turnips in the winter.
Some of Wilthur's more potent spells needed fear, just as others needed blood-in amounts that no necromancer would have countenanced for a moment. But the opinion of others had not bound Wilthur even before he came to Suivinari Island, and still less here.
On Suivinari, he was far more than man, more even than mage. Not yet a god, that he knew, but within his own borders (both physical and magical) all but immune to the gods' attacks.
A good first step.
The Eye began spinning a web of fire around the man, giving pain to lend savor to the fear. The man drew his knife-and the fire melted it in his hand before he could have hoped to slay himself.
Biting his lip against the pain of his charred hand, the man strode toward the cliff, pushing his way through the web of fire as if it were gossamer. Wilthur readied a further tightening of the web, to melt the rock under the man's feet and hold him in place.
Then the ground quivered. It was no more violent than the quivering of a crystal glass touched by a spoon. But the quivering found a fault in the cliff. The whole face of rock, higher than the mast of the tallest ship, peeled away, and the man went with it.
The last sensation Wilthur had from the man was relief, mingled with joy at going to meet his long-dead wife again. Somehow a ghastly death had become a welcome boon. It was no work of his, Wilthur knew. And he doubted that the answer lay on the island.
But if the earthquake came from somewhere else, how had it entered the island's defenses?
He was ready to send the Eye scrying farther afield, when the crystal globe, ready for the dead man's fear, dropped from the ceiling. The table was stone; the crystal shattered. Wilthur saw blood start from a cut on the back of his hand, drop onto the table, and vanish as if it had fallen on sand.
The mage was glad that no other crystal spheres were ready. Otherwise one might have sucked in and held ready his own fear.
Torvik thought that a god might have felt as he did, if the god had taken human shape and joined with one like Mirraleen-if there were any like Mirraleen. The god would also find something missing from his life afterward, as Torvik knew he would find missing from his.
The difference, the sailor thought, was in his favor. He would not have eternity to miss Mirraleen. A mere fifty or sixty years, and he and his memories would be dust, while she still swam sleek and fair through the seas of Krynn.
This hardly worried him now. Indeed, very little could worry anyone in Mirraleen's arms. But something was worrying Mirraleen. She had stiffened in his embrace, then slipped entirely out of it. With the silence of a spirit, she padded across the cabin and opened the port by which she had entered.
Torvik briefly contemplated her, as fair in some ways from behind as she was in other ways from in front. Then he decided that what made her this uneasy might have to do with the sea-and he was still Red Elf's captain.
There was only room for one at the port, and when Mirraleen made way for Torvik, he did not know what he expected to see. Storms, monsters, portents, or Dimernesti swimming openly in their elven form among the ships?
Instead he saw only gleaming slack tidewater, the loom of the island with the two peaks only just falling into shadow, and the lights coming of in the ships. Nothing he had not seen for a score of nights before this.
"Can you hear it?" Mirraleen said.
"Hear what?"
"The-the cry of the mountains, and the sea calling back."
Torvik knew that Mirraleen commanded magic. How else would she have healed herself of the bruises from her beating at the hands of the Servants of Silence? But this went beyond what he was ready to believe.