Through it all the young woman stood still, her arms raised out to either side, impassive as they worked. She remembered that her long-ago father had sometimes stood in a similar posture as he was dressed. Perhaps, she thought, she had not come so far from her origins as she believed. Before she became the priestess, she had answered to the name Mena. Now she was Maeben. Not so different. She sometimes remembered her family with a clarity that stunned her, but most of the time she saw them as still images that resided within frames, like portraits hung on the wall of her mind. She even saw herself this way. Princess Mena, dressed in too much clothing, a jeweled brooch at her neck, and royal pins in her hair. She recalled two of her siblings well, but again her memory kept them frozen in differing postures: earnest Aliver, so concerned over his place in the world, and good-hearted Dariel, innocent and eager to please. Corinn she could not picture entirely. This troubled her. She should have known her sister best of all, but in fact she was the hardest to pin to an identifiable character. None of it mattered, though. Whether she liked it or not, that existence was behind her. Her life was now about something else entirely.
One morning years ago she woke from sleep, knowing before she opened her eyes that she was afloat on a tiny, bucking skiff. She looked up at the boundless white-blue sky. If she lifted her head, she would see all around her the same heaving whitecaps of the open ocean that she had scanned for days already, and for the first time this filled her more with weariness than with fear. She sat up. Her Talayan guardian was a taciturn man. He conspicuously avoided looking at her, keeping his dark eyes turned toward the far horizon or up at the billowing sail or off to either side, taking in the shape of the swells.
She felt no inhibition about staring at him candidly, studying his lean face, watching how skillfully he functioned even with two fingers missing from his left hand. He used it without hesitation but with strange hooked motions that trapped her eyes and would not let them move on. She had rarely seen any sort of bodily deformity on Acacia. Never among the servants, certainly, and visiting dignitaries would have hidden any such wound. He did not seem as large a man as she had first thought, but maybe she was just losing perspective, he being the only figure in view inside a small boat and against the backdrop of the ocean’s vastness. Large or not, he was a soldier. He wore his short sword at his waist. The hilt of his long sword was just visible from where it jutted out of a compartment in the deck. From its placement it almost seemed that he had tried to hide it.
For the hundredth time she felt compelled to shake her head at the absurdity of it all. She had believed his claim that this plan was all of her father’s devising, but that did not make it seem any more sensible. It was this man’s face that she had first beheld when she opened the door to her room on Kidnaban. Him that she had chosen to trust as they mounted two ponies and made off on a coastal road. In the woods he had shorn her hair with goat shears. He had her put on rough clothes and explained that their story-should they need one-was that she was a boy indentured to him to pay a familial debt. As it turned out, nobody asked about her anyway.
They sailed from port to port, booking passage where and when they could, and it was not until they reached Bocoum that the man opted to purchase the small vessel they now sailed in. He haggled for it for nearly an hour, as she watched it all, mystified. She asked him several times why they were traveling this way, but he ever directed her only to read the letter he had presented to her. In it, written in Thaddeus’s hand, was an all-too-brief explanation. The best way for her to slip into hiding was to do so without fanfare, drawing no unwanted attention, requesting no luxuries. Nobody would dream that the Akaran children would travel with only a single protector; thus they could hide in plain sight and proceed unmolested. It was imperative that they leave no signs somebody could later piece together and follow. This, she reasoned, was why they could no longer appear to have the kingdom’s finances to draw upon. The pretense, to say the least, was becoming tiresome.
“Where are you taking me?” Mena asked.
The guardian craned his neck around and took in the sea behind them for a moment. Mena noticed he did this often, every minute or so, as if it were a compulsion that his reserved manner could not subdue. “I am doing as ordered,” he said.
“I know that. But where have you been ordered to take me?”
“To the Vumu Archipelago. Just as I told you yesterday and the day before, Princess.”
“Why?”
“I do not know. I am just doing as ordered.”
“Will you take me home instead?”
His eyes touched on her for a moment, an emotion in them that she could not read. Then he looked back out over the sea again. “I cannot. Even if I wanted to…I cannot. I understand that you are scared, but all that I can do to help you I am doing.”
“How long will it take to get there?”
“A few more days. It depends on the wind, the currents.” He motioned with his hand as if he distrusted these things, was not even quite sure where they were located.
Mena stared at him, unimpressed. “Anyway, I did not say that I was scared. You are the one who is scared. Why do you keep peering about? What are you looking at?”
He scowled at her and then set his eyes forward as if he would not answer. But something in his respect for her family-however it might have been altered by recent events-chastened him. “There is a boat,” he finally said, “behind us. And closing.”
And so there was. It was tiny as yet. She would have passed her eyes across it, thinking it just the whitecaps on some wave. It surged into and out of view as it, and they, rose and fell. At first she did not believe that it was following them. How could he tell that for certain on such a heaving expanse? But an hour later she thought perhaps it was and maybe it was somewhat nearer already. Each time it emerged from a trough and cut through the peak of a wave it seemed to have closed distance. Mena asked the Talayan if they should wait for it. Perhaps it had been sent from Acacia to find them. Maybe they could turn back now. The guardian did not answer, neither did he alter their course or lower the sail. It did not much matter, though. The other boat was faster. It had longer lines and a wider billow of sail. It gained on them steadily, propelled by a gathering storm. Or perhaps it dragged the storm behind it. It was hard to say which directed the other.
Gusts of wind ripped talons across the water and buffeted the boat like a toy. The waves rose to increasing heights. By late in the afternoon the other boat had pulled abreast of them and cut the water at the same rate, separated by a hundred yards and then less, then still less. A lone man crewed the vessel. Mena had scarcely picked him out and was straining to observe details about him-still hoping to find him a messenger from her father-when he rose to his feet. He stood a moment, finding his equilibrium. He held what looked like a pole in his hand. The guardian must have seen this, too. He hissed a curse under his breath. He motioned for Mena to come near him, saying something she could not understand. She thought he wanted her to take hold of the tiller he held clenched under his armpit. Or perhaps the rope his hands fumbled and yanked at. Either way, the alarm in his voice and gestures froze her. She did neither. They climbed the face of a wave and launched screaming onto its back, their sail so filled with angry air, Mena feared they might lift out of the water and fly away like a kite untethered.
For a moment they were alone in a valley. Then they were two again. The other vessel came sliding down the back of a wave toward them, the prow hissing as it cut the slick back of the water. The pursuer flung the pole-now obviously a spear-with a force that almost toppled him forward out of the boat. It flew toward and pierced the center of the guardian’s breast as if it belonged in no other portion of the world. He released the tiller and grasped the spear shaft. He did not try to pull it out, but he did seem to want to support the weight of it. He coughed up a gush of blood, and then, reaching behind with one hand, he pulled himself backward, over the lip of the gunwale. He plopped into the water and was gone.