Instead of creeping inside the tent some of the men erected for her use in the stern, Winloki sat up all night. Yet by the time dawn crept like a shadow over the ocean—and the boat had not been swamped or sunk—she began to share, tentatively, some of the confidence the others felt. And when the rim of the sun rose up from the waters, setting the entire ocean on fire, she had to allow that there was something rather fine in this battle the men fought with wind and wave.
But in daylight the ocean appeared much wider, the horizon less defined, as if sea and sky were all one element. Without landmarks she was unable to gain any true idea of their progress; it seemed they might hang suspended forever in this vast blue nothingness.
Then Camhóinhann moved past her, his red robes whipping in the wind, and there was a flash of silver as he drew one of his long knives.
And so it comes, she thought on an indrawn breath, bracing herself for the worst, closing her eyes so as not to see the blow when it fell. Long moments passed, during which she counted each heartbeat. But the blow never came.
When she could no longer bear the suspense, she opened her eyes. She realized (as her body should have told her, even with her eyes closed) that the boat was no longer moving, except for a gentle up-and-down motion with the almost imperceptible rise and fall of the water. The air was utterly still, a dead calm that some part of her understood could not have occurred naturally.
The High Priest stood in the prow, looking out across the water. Once—twice—three times he cried out words in that language she almost understood, and each time he spoke, Winloki had a sense of warring elements, an intolerable strain.
His withered hand sketched runes on the air; she could see them written there like silver fire. The air turned dark, and she could see it move—not as any ordinary wind, invisible but for its effect on what it passes, but as a thing in motion itself. She realized with a thrill that he was working a powerful spell, instinctively recognized magic on a scale she had never experienced, had scarcely even imagined before.
The turbulence increased until Camhóinhann stood at the center of a great vortex of dark winds. Chaos roared around him, yet he remained there unmoved, immovable. The only light in that unnatural darkness was he himself, a lurid glowing figure that it almost hurt the eyes to gaze on.
Then, as quickly as it had begun, the disturbance subsided. It was broad daylight again. In the sudden deafening silence, a low wave hit the side of the boat, and then another. In a moment she was moving again, up one great billow and down another, plunging her prow into the water so that the spray flew. All was as it had been before—but for Winloki the whole world had changed.
“What did you do?” she asked, just above a whisper.
He turned and stepped away from the side. The awful glamour of his spell-casting was still on him.
“There is a line just here on the bottom of the sea. It is one of many—some on the ocean floor, some on the surface of the earth—and we call them ley lines. They are the veins and arteries that carry the Blood of the World. And the Blood of the World is power. Wind and fire, storms, earthquakes, tidal waves, these are but a few of the ways that power expresses itself. All things would exist in a state of perpetual stasis without it.
“I have tapped that power, as a miner taps into a rich vein of ore. And with it I have created a line of my own, just under the surface of the water. Anyone who follows after us will call up a great storm and gale as soon as they cross that line.”
Winloki felt a flare of indignation; she did not believe for a moment that anyone was actually following to rescue her, but she could not be so careless as he was of the lives of strangers. “That might be anyone; you might catch anyone in your trap. You could sink a hundred ships!”
The glamour around him was beginning to fade. His face looked more haggard and hollow than ever, the flat golden eyes even more remote. “The line will exist for a few days only. There is very little chance that anyone who is not pursuing us will be harmed; traders do not sail these waters, and fishermen rarely come out this far. In truth, a large ship and an experienced crew might even be able to ride out the storm.”
Winloki twisted her fingers in the coarse brown wool of her cloak. This was the power she had yearned for, the inheritance so long denied her—turned to mindless destruction. As he used it, it was a wicked thing. Yet having seen, how could she forget; remembering, how could she not wish to experience that power again, if only at second hand?
“You might, for all that, kill innocent people, people who have no idea of interfering,” she insisted in a small voice.
Something in his face changed, something moved behind his eyes—she did not deceive herself that it was regret, or grief, or any such human emotion, yet it was more than she expected.
Then he shrugged his broad shoulders and turned away. “That is, unfortunately, a risk we will have to take.”
For two days and two nights, one or the other of the Furiádhin kept a steady wind in their sails. On the morning of the third day they landed on a forested shore, where a little creek flowed into the Necke and the trees came down almost to the water. From the sea, they had spotted a town of considerable size, with a fine harbor behind a substantial breakwater, but Camhóinhann had chosen this isolated spot a mile or two to the east instead.
Having no further use for the boat, they ran her aground in the shallows and waded in knee-deep water up to the beach. After that, the men made themselves busy establishing a camp, just above the tideline where the woods began. Winloki settled down on a fallen log and watched the acolytes help the guards to unload the boat: kilting up their coarse black robes, splashing back and forth through the water while the tide flowed in and out. Afterward, some of them gathered firewood and kindled a blaze, and before long preparations for a meal were well under way. Winloki had no idea what they were cooking, but it promised to be more delicate fare than the dried fish and hardtack they had all subsisted on for two days.
But what place is this? she wondered. Taking stock of her surroundings, she was suddenly appalled by her own ignorance.
She might have excused that ignorance by reminding herself that she had never been interested in maps or geography, her thirst for knowledge being amply satisfied by the things she had learned in the Healers’
House. But if she was honest—and what use now being anything else?—Winloki knew she had been very careful to learn no more than she must about distant lands, fearing that knowledge might lead her away from Skyrra and the people she loved by providing her with a name and a history she had no wish to claim.
A strategy that has proved singularly unsuccessful, she admitted with a sigh. For the greater world had reached out to claim her, and her carefully cultivated ignorance had protected her not one whit!
She ransacked her memory, trying to remember names of places: Arkenfell, Pehlidor, Weye. Thäerie, Malindor, Rheithûn. Oh…but what was the good of remembering the names when their proximity to Skyrra and to each other was what she needed to know—and the very thing she did not. Finally, she was forced to swallow her pride and ask.
“Mistlewald,” said Efflam. “At least by my reckoning. Though we may be just over the border in Arkenfell.”
Then Winloki was even more ashamed. That much, at least, she should have remembered, that Mistlewald and Arkenfell were just across the channel from Skyrra.
Would the people here aid me if they knew I was a prisoner? Would the ancient kinship and friendship between Skyrra and Mistlewald be strong enough, their distrust of strangers out of the south deep enough, to rouse them to action on her behalf? She knew there was little chance she would ever have the opportunity to find out. The Furiádhin would keep her away from towns and villages, in order to avoid