The beach back that way, with his footprints drawing a lonely line across the sandy patches, was too familiar. He couldn’t face it. No more looking back, he told himself; face forward! If he had to walk all the way to Ethshar, he would walk, but surely, if he didn’t starve first, he would find a boat eventually. He glanced out to sea.
A sail was visible on the horizon, far to the southwest, but working its way east; apparently a little wind was still moving out on the water, as it was not ashore. An Ethsharitic trader, he guessed, already safely past Shan and its privateers; if he could only reach it, he would be well on his way, but he had no boat as yet. He trudged onward.
Scarcely a hundred yards farther along, as he rounded a dune, he spotted a boat pulled up on the sand some distance ahead. He stopped, astounded by his good fortune.
It was a small boat, without sails or deck so far as he could tell; it was either a rowboat or one intended for magical propulsion. It was the right way up, which was encouraging.
No one was in it, and he could see no one anywhere nearby; a gull cried overhead, startling him, but he saw no people.
He wondered why the boat had been left where it was, untended. He saw no house on the shore above it. Probably, he thought, it was an old wreck, and he had neither the means nor the knowledge to repair it.
Or maybe, it occurred to him, it was propelled and protected by magic, so that its owner could leave it anywhere without needing to worry about it.
Why here, though? He could see nothing that anyone would want on this stretch of sand.
No, it was probably a wreck, or a ship’s boat washed overboard in a storm and cast up here.
It was certainly worth investigating. He tried to work up some enthusiasm, breaking into an awkward trot — awkward because his feet hurt from their unaccustomed efforts, and because the battered sandals were not meant for such use.
As he neared the boat, his hopes rose steadily; by the time he reached it, he was actually cheerful. His luck had obviously changed. The little craft looked quite intact indeed, more than adequate to get him out to sea, where he might still catch that trader he had spotted. The boat was even partially equipped; a sound pair of oars was neatly tucked under the thwarts, and a canvas sack of some sort was wedged into the stern. He could still see no one around who might be the owner. If there were any magical protections on it, of course, he might not be able to use it. In that case, he might need to rely on his status as a fellow wizard to avoid trouble, assuming the owner was a wizard, and not a witch or a priest or a demonologist or one of the mysterious new warlocks or some other sort of magician.
His heart suddenly plunged into the pit of his belly. The owner, no, owners, had not vanished without a trace and left him their boat, after all. The lines of footprints wound their way across the beach and up the nearest dune.
Something looked odd about those footprints, however. He stared at them, puzzling.
One set was large and deep, the other smaller and shallower. They were very close together; not on top of each other, as they would be had one person followed the other, but very close to each other and exactly parallel. Not straight, by any means; they wove back and forth like a snake’s spine. In two spots the lines were broken by a small trampled area.
Tobas stared, and realization came to him, accompanied by a slow smile. He knew why these two people had pulled up on this lonely stretch of sandy beach, so far from anywhere, in the middle of the day, and why they had walked up over the dune, leaving the boat unguarded. People in love did foolish things, that well-known fact was why most people avoided romance and married for comfort and money. These two had probably had their arms about each other, accounting for how close their steps were to each other’s, and the trampled areas were undoubtedly where they had paused to kiss, an appetizer to the main course that was surely under way somewhere in the dunes, inaudible over the hiss of the surf. An open boat, he imagined, would be too crowded and too unsteady a place.
They might return at any moment, though. Hurriedly, he shoved the boat down into the water. The keel scraped heavily over the sand, then floated free on an incoming wave. Tobas pushed it out until he stood knee-deep in the surf, then grabbed the gunwale and steadied it.
He was just clambering in when a bearded, black-haired head appeared above the dune where the footprints had led.
“Hey!” the man called, plainly upset by what he saw.
The woman’s head appeared beside him.
Tobas ignored them both and yanked the oars from their stowage. “Hey, that’s our boat!” the man called. He was clambering up the dune now, tugging his sandy tunic into place.
Tobas got the oars into the oarlocks, splashed their blades into the water, leaned forward, and pulled, refusing to worry about any damage he might do if the oar blades caught on rocks hidden in the sand.
The boat slewed out into the water, and Tobas pulled harder on one side, turning the bow out to sea. Each stroke moved him visibly farther from shore; the bottom dropped off quickly, so that, by the third or fourth pull, the oars were no longer in danger of striking sand.
“Come back!” the woman cried, running down the beach toward him. “Come back with our boat!”
Tobas found himself facing her as the boat swung around. He smiled at her as she stopped at the water’s edge, already several yards away; she was very young, surely not yet eighteen, perhaps younger than himself, and handsome despite her rumpled brown hair and sandy, disheveled skirt and tunic.
“I’m sorry,” he called out. “But it’s an emergency. I’ll bring it back if I can!” A twinge of guilt struck him. Teasing young lovers was a long-standing tradition in Telven, but stealing their boat might have serious consequences. “Listen,” he called. “If you go a mile west, then a league due north, you’ll reach the village of Telven; they’ll help you there! Tell them T-” He stopped, hesitant to give his right name, but then shrugged and went on. “Tell them Tobas the apprentice wizard sent you!”
“But... our boat!” the woman cried, ankle-deep in the foaming water. The man stood beside her, knuckles on his hips, glaring silently at Tobas’ receding figure.
“I’m sorry,” Tobas repeated, “but I need it more than you do!” That said, he devoted his entire attention to rowing and paid no more attention to the boat’s rightful owners. He had a ship to catch.
CHAPTER 4
What little wind there was came from the northeast, helping Tobas along and hindering the ship he sought to intercept. He quickly found himself well out at sea, the coastline a vague blur in the distance. He glanced back over his shoulder and caught sight of the sail, far off his starboard bow; the ship was still hull-down on the horizon.
He looked back at the fading land again, and his nerve failed him. If the wind shifted, or if the ship decided to gain more sea room by running south, he would have no chance of catching it, and he dared not lose sight of the land completely. He was no navigator; he might be lost at sea. Generally, of course, he could find east and west by the sun, and he knew that the land was to the north, but there might be clouds, or a current might carry him west into the endless western ocean that extended from the south edge of the World to the north, uninterrupted by land. He looked at the sail, decided that it was, in fact, coming closer, and pulled the dripping oars inboard. He would wait. Why tire himself out and go farther out than was safe or necessary?
After a moment of sitting quietly, hearing only the faint slapping of the waves against the sides of his boat and the water dripping from the oars into the bottom, he remembered the canvas sack in the stern. This, he decided, would be an ideal time to see what was in it. Moving very carefully, he was out well past the breakers, but the sea was still rolling the boat gently, and he did not care to capsize it, he pulled the bag out and opened it.