"And speaking of water I glanced suggestively at the water skin. The duke snapped his fingers, and the water carrier hurried to the front with the skin. He started to hand it to me, then thought better of it and shoved it at his boss. Let him take the risks.
"All praise to he who has survived the ordeal," the duke said, presenting the skin as if it were a trophy.
By extreme self-control, I managed not to snatch it; I only took it from his hands slowly, popped the cork, and shot a jet from it into my mouth, reflecting on the irony of cool wetness tasting so good, so soon after I had almost hoped I would never have to see another drop of it. I was going to have to be careful what I wished for.
A couple of men-at-arms were very willing to push the boat into the waves for me, saving my legs from wetness at the cost of their own dousing. I could have done it myself easily enough, but if they wanted to honor me, I was willing to let them. I was beginning to realize the value of status and prestige in a world like this one. Besides, it helped them feel as if they were doing something to get rid of me. I let go of an oar long enough to wave bye-bye, then managed to catch it again before it had quite slipped away into the next wave. It was going to take me a while to get used to having just a couple of pegs for an oarlock.
Nonetheless, I did manage to get the boat through the breakers and out beyond the bar - I could almost hear the soldiers snickering at my lack of seamanship, all the way out here. After all, on a little island like this, every able-bodied man must have started out as a fisherman or a sailor, even if he later became a soldier. They'd make fantastic marines.
Out into the swells, I shipped the oars and hoisted canvas. I'd learned to sail in the summers, out of sheer boredom - when you grow up near the Great Lakes, you have all sorts of opportunities for water sports. So I managed to get the sail up and catch a breeze without capsizing. My wake began to foam, and I was off.
Very quickly the wind picked up. I frowned, shivering and wishing I'd thought to ask the duke for a cloak, then glanced up at the sun. There wasn't much of it there.
I glared up at the clouds, willing them away - but I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. The day had dawned clear and sunny - very sunny. If it was clouding up so soon, it could just be a storm front moving in - or it could be Suettay, out to have another try at drowning me. If I had another storm blow up, there wouldn't be any Frisson around to hand me magic verses. I'd have to try to lull it by myself and I hated working magic on my own. It felt like surrender, somehow. Besides, I wasn't all that sure I could succeed.
None of that! I reminded myself sternly. Defeatist attitudes wouldn't help. Besides, I didn't really need to make the storm go away - just manage to get safely to shore.
Safely?
A nasty suspicion budded in my head and blossomed into the fullgrown conviction that the storm dying down just where it did hadn't been completely my doing. Suettay could have seen that I was going to win that round and kept wrestling just long enough to drive us onto the island, hoping that its xenophobic duke would do her dirty work for her, conveniently killing us off before we could do her any more damage. Maybe I hadn't won such a great victory, after all. Maybe it had really been a very deliberate conjuration by a very nasty sorceress.
Of course, she might have been doing me a favor - as a ghost, I could no doubt have had a much better time with Angelique than I could as a man.
I clamped down on that thought, hard. That way lay suicide, and losing all hope of getting Angelique completely free Of Suettay's machinations.
Careful, there, boy, I warned myself. You're coming perilously close to admitting that magic works in the here-and-now. No. Absolutely impossible. A philosophical absurdity. Which, of course, was the point - magic was completely illogical.
Completely?
I reined in my thoughts, exasperated. When would I ever learn to stop making sweeping generalizations? They always had exceptions. Okay - so maybe this universe was one of the exceptions?
I backed up against that one like a Missouri mule against an overloaded wagon. Somehow, I was constitutionally unable to accept the notion that magic might work, outside of a massively detailed hallucination. Possibly because if I allowed that it did, I would find it very hard to come up with a reason to avoid committing myself to one side or the other.
Or to Angelique?
Well, now, that was the advantage to being in love with a ghost. The vow, after all, reads, "Till death do us part," and death already had parted us - before we even got together.
Somehow, that sounded pretty thin, but I held onto it. All right. Try something else then. And hurry, stupid - those clouds have grown awfully thick and awfully low, and that breeze has a definite taste of rain to it.
Okay. I decided to suppose, just suppose, magic really did work in this world. How would I work my way out of this storm?
All right, so I was cheating. I put that issue aside and decided to deal with it when I had time.
Actually, I wasn't all that sure I wanted to get rid of the storm. Drifting without any wind at all wasn't exactly my idea of a picnic, either. If I could throttle it down, maybe, or direct it ... Or both. After all, the nymph Thyme was supposedly nearby, on one of these Mediterranean islands. I decided to work from that.
The wind veered. I knew, because my sail swung about almost ninety degrees. it creaked as the strength of the wind bellied it out to its limit, and the wind sang in the stays-sure enough, the music played! I noticed that, just as a burst of spray drenched my back and shoulders. I yelped - it was cold! But that didn't matter, because just then a giant kettledrum boomed overhead and rolled all about me, and its owner pulled the plug. Rain sluiced down, not bothering with individual drops, and I was soaked to the skin. Shivering, too, and my canvas sail groaned. I hitched around, alarmed, to lower it and my feet sloshed through a few inches of water. I stared down, feeling the first faint fingers of fear take hold as I realized I might ship enough water to sink.
All of a sudden, I was in favor of half measures. A little thunderstorm can be a blast, when you can revel in the wildness of the wind and the power of the storm-but when it's all directed right at you, it can be a little unnerving. Scaled down, mind you, I would probably have loved it - if I'd had a soulwester.
What harm could it do? I tried.
The thunder cracked and growled, and I could have sworn it cursed. But it faded even as it snarled, and the wind slackened. My sail groaned with relief, and the rain toned down to a heavy soaker with headstrong winds. I shivered and sneezed. Landing near Thyme's hideout wouldn't do me much good if I was dead of pneumonia when I got there, or even just delirious with fever. I thought of trying for that sou'wester, then rebuked myself for being greedy, not to say soft. What was a little rain, anyway? After all, yesterday I would have given anything for this. I gritted my teeth and held on. Over the waves that gale blew me. I lashed the line around a thwart and held on to the tiller for dear life. It wasn't too bad for the first hour, but then I began to get tired. It didn't help that I couldn't see too far in front of me, either-but after the second hour, my eyelids were drooping so much that it didn't matter terribly, either. How far could it be to Thyme's island, anyway? I thought these Mediterranean mountaintops came in archipelagoes.