"Kid, I don't know what to think. That's the gospel. I'm lost. I go half crazy worrying about it sometimes."
A body plopped down the other side of Kid. I glanced over. It was the Trolledyngjan, the final addition to our mad crew. We had picked him up off an Itaskian warship we had taken in our next-to-last battle. He had been confined to her brig.
He had a name, Torfin something, but nobody ever used it. He was one long drink of silence. I don't think he had spoken twenty words the whole time he had been aboard. He did not say anything now. He just looked at me and Mica.
We had tried to kill him once. Before he had become part of our crew. Back when we were raiders. We had attacked his ship. He had tried boarding us. Me and Mica had dumped him into the drink.
And then he had turned up aboard the Itaskian, and Colgrave had decided he ought to replace Student or Whaleboats.
A treaty of forgiveness passed between us without words being spoken.
Trolledyngjan said, "There be tales told in the Fatherland of the Oskoreien. The Wild Hunt. They be souls of the damned who ride Hell's stallions through the high range hunting the living."
The Kid passed him a hook and some line. He started fiddling with it. "What're you driving at?" I asked. "We be the Oskoreien of the sea." He baited his hook and flipped it over the side. We waited. Finally, he continued, "They tell of the Wild Hunt that they be hating none so much as they be hating one another."
We waited some more, but that was all he had to say.
It was enough. It made me think. He had stated a truth and had posed a question in a characteristically oblique Trolledyngjan manner.
Hatred had always been the one shared, unifying emotion aboard Dragon. And we hated each other more than any outsiders.
Only, we were getting along now. More or less.
The others saw it too. Even the Kid. "What's it mean. Bowman?" the boy asked.
"I don't know."
The changes were progressing. I no longer knew myself. If ever I had.
Fat Poppo laboriously clambered to the forecastle deck. His appearance was another declaration of how the crew regarded me.
"Welcome to the philosophy klatch, Poppo," I said. "What brings you dragging your ass all the way up off the maindeck?" He seldom moved if he did not have to, so fat and lazy was he.
He dropped to his knees behind me, whispered, "In the trees across the cove. Under the big dead one you guys been calling the hanging tree."
I looked. And I saw what he meant.
There were four of them, and they wore livery. Soldiers.
The honeymoon was over. "Mica, slide down and dig up the Old Man. Tell him to take a gander at what we've got under the hanging tree. Try to keep it casual."
Colgrave had been holed up in his cabin since we had dropped anchor. He was studying the wizard's things. He would not appreciate being disturbed.
But this was important. Maybe I made a mistake. The rest of us might not have been recognized. We were well-known, but there was nothing really unique about our appearances. Not the way Colgrave's was unique.
I reached for my bow and quietly strung it behind the mask of the railing.
IX
Jolgrave strode from his cabin dressed for a day at court. Mica dogged along behind him as he climbed to the poop. He turned his one grim eye on our watchers.
"The dead captain!"
It carried clearly over the water* Brush crackled. I leapt to my feet and pulled an arrow to my ear.
"It's them! That's the Archer!"
"Bowman. Let them run."
I relaxed. Colgrave was right. Wasting arrows had no point. I could not get them all. Not through the trees.
Still, a gesture seemed necessary....
One turned, stared back through a small opening in the foliage. He bore a spade-shaped shield. A griffin rampant was its device. I let fly with a waste arrow, a practice arrow. It pierced the griffin's eye.
I still had it. After however long it had been, my shafts still flew true.
The soldier's jaw dropped. I bowed mockingly.
"That wasn't smart," Priest told me.
"Couldn't help myself. I had to do it."
The black birds above cursed me in their squawky tongue. I glared my defiance.
My archery was my one skill, my one way of defying the universe and its perversity. The gesture had been important to me. It was a statement that the Bowman existed, that he was well, that his aim was still deadly. It was a graffito on the walls of time, screaming I AM!
Colgrave beckoned.
I shook in my seaboots. I was going to catch hell for defying orders....
But he did not mention my shot. Instead, he gathered Toke, Lank Tor, and myself, and told us: "The decision is at hand. Within two days the whole island will know we've returned. They'll know in Portsmouth in three days, in Itaskia in four. They won't endure us anymore. Our return will scare them so much that they'll send out every ship they have. They won't trust warlocks this time. They'll destroy us absolutely, with fire, at whatever cost we demand."
He stared at the western sea, his one good eye gazing on sights the rest of us could never see. He said again, "At whatever cost we demand."
Tor giggled. Fighting was his only love, his only joy. He did not care whether he would win or lose, only that he would be able to swing a blade in another battle. He was the same old Tor. I did not think there was anything in him capable of change. He was a hollow man.
Toke said, "There's no hope, then? We have to depart this plane memorialized by mountains of dead men and seas scattered with burning ships?"
I sighed. "There's nowhere to run, Toke. Destiny's winds have blown us into the narrow channel. We can't do anything but ride with the current."
Colgrave looked at me strangely. "That's odd talk from you, Bowman."
"I feel odd, Captain."
"There's still the sorcerer who recalled us," he said. "And we aren't forgotten of the gods. Not completely." He glanced at the black birds.
The creatures strained their necks toward us.
I surveyed my longtime home. Forward, against the base of the forecastle, I could discern a tiny, almost invisible patchlet of dark fog. I had not noticed it since the day the sorcerer had boarded us. I imagined it had always been there, unnoticed because it stayed behind the corner of my vision.
"I'll give my orders in the morning," Colgrave declared. "For today, celebrate. Our final celebration. Tor. See to the arms. Toke, tell Barley to use his keys."
My guts snapped into an agonized knot. Rum...!
"We'll sail at dawn," the Old Man told us. "Be ready. I'll tell you our destination then."
He scanned us once with that wicked eye, and it seemed that there was pain and care in his gaze. He left us there, stunned, and returned to his cabin.
Emotion? In Colgrave? It was almost too much to bear.
I returned to the forecastle and plopped my ass down between the Kid and Little Mica. I leaned back and stared at the clouds, at the green hills where four terrified soldiers were racing to unleash the hounds of doom. "Damned!" I muttered. "Damned. Damned. Damned."
The Kid was first to ask. "What did he say, Bowman?"
I glared at the hills as if my gaze could drop those Freylanders in their tracks. "We sail with the morning tide.
He hasn't decided where or why."
The Trolledyngjan hooked a sand shark. We went through the routine, dumped it back.
"Think it's the same one?" Priest asked. "It don't look any different."
"Why would it keep coming back?" Mica wanted to know.
The Kid asked me, "What do you think he'll decide. Bowman?"
"To spill blood. He's still Colgrave. He's still the dead captain. He only knows one way. The only question is who he'll go after."
"Oh."
"Give me a line." I baited my hook and flipped it over the rail. "Priest, Barley's passing out grog." I needed a drink something cruel. But I was not going to give in first.