Toby worked the engine to keep them in position—they didn’t drop anchor, just kept a visual fix.
The little boat came back through the surf, rode through light as a shell, with fair expertise. Bren heaved a sigh of relief. Cenedi committed his two juniormost, Toby had another tank filled, traded the empty, and off they went, another lengthy passage. A light crossed the sky, in the distance, a plane, but far from them.
Barb came back, and another exchange of fuel tanks. Then Tano and Algini went with her.
Bren gripped the rail and watched until they were safely ashore, paced, and realized he was pacing. The next load was more supply.
Bren went to stand by Toby. Just to stand there for a while. “Goes without saying,” he said. “But shouldn’t go unsaid, how much I owe you.”
“Wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” Toby said, and they stood there a while more, spending the agonizing wait content in each other’s company, in idiot remarks about the weather.
“Where are you going next?” Toby asked him.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Depends on what we find. We have names, people we may be able to rely on.”
“You be damned careful about it,” Toby said.
“Oh, yes,” he said, and heaved a pent breath.
Two more of Cenedi’s men went the long, slow trip.
“Wish I could go in with you,” Toby said out of a long silence.
“I’m glad you’re going back,” he said, “and, brother?”
“Yes?”
“Go home. I’ll phone when I can. Don’t hang around this coast to watch. When they know where we got in, they’ll be over this place like gnats on jam.”
“And where I am, they’ll think that’s where you got in.”
“Don’t even say it, don’t think about running a diversion, Toby. Leave that to the military. Don’t give me one more thing to worry about. Promise me.”
“I promise,” Toby said, but Toby would lie, in extremity. So would he. It was, he thought, a damned nasty habit in their family.
“Wouldn’t help us anyway,” he said to Toby. “We’ll be away from this coast fast as we can find transport, that’s the one thing I can say.”
“Just don’t take chances, Bren.”
“Mutual.”
This trip it was Cenedi and the dowager. “You will go with Lord Bren,” Ilisidi said to Cajeiri, buckling on a life preserver. “And you will do exactly what he says.”
“Yes, mani-ma,” Cajeiri said.
After the dowager left there was no restraining the boy. It was a thousand questions, most of them, in some form, Where are we, and Where are we going, nandi? It seemed forever while the boat clawed its way back through the surf. Forever, and far too short a time to talk to Toby, once Cajeiri was in his care. He had things he wanted to say, none of them quite finding words, none of them that he managed to say, except, when Barb came back and took on her last spare fuel can, “I want to see you on the holidays.”
“Think you can settle things by then?”
“I’ve got, what, four months? Sure. Time enough.” It was a jibe in the face of fate. He resisted superstition. “Just when you get out of here, go.”
“I’m going to marry her, Bren.”
He swallowed every objection. Every thought of objection. “Good,” he said. “Good. If you’re happy—that’s what I care about. Go home and do that.”
The little boat bumped the hull. He had to take Cajeiri down the ladder. He stopped to hug his brother long and hard, and to try to fill up all the missed chances in one long breath. “Luck,” Toby said.
Then it was down the ladder, Cajeiri last, and unsteady when he hit the cockleshell of a boat, rocking as it was in the chop. Bren yanked Cajeiri down onto a seat and sat down, himself.
“Can you swim, young sir?” Bren asked him, checking the fastening of the life preserver, that at least fit Cajeiri’s young body.
“A little,” Cajeiri said.
Which meant not at all in this rough sea. “Then stay still in center of the boat. Precisely in the center. Neither of us wants to fall in.”
“We’re off,” Barb said cheerfully. “They’re kind of disappearing into the rocks, out there, but they’re waiting for you.”
“Good,” he said. He didn’t know how to make conversation with Barb, let alone now, when everything in the world was riding on their getting inshore and Toby getting out again. He did as he’d told Cajeiri to do, centered himself in the boat and held on for the ride. Barb had her hands full, and the bow smacked down with fierce jolts as they went, white water boiling past the sides. Spray drenched them.
“May one turn around?” Cajeiri asked, wanting a better view.
“Keep your weight centered, young gentleman, and you may turn.”
Cajeiri did, quickly, as they rode the waves in, with ominous dark rocks on one hand and the other.
The engine throttled back, then Barb shoved the throttle hard, and they knifed through the boiling white.
A single dark figure waited for them as their keel hissed up onto the shingle—Cenedi, by the silver in his hair. Cenedi gave his hand to Cajeiri and pulled him out. Tossed the life preserver back aboard.
“Bren?” Barb said. “Be careful.”
He shed his own life preserver, Toby’s gear. “Make him happy,” he said to her while she was switching fuel tanks, last thing before he cleared the boat and ran up the shingle to the rocks.
He didn’t look back until he was in shadow, with Cenedi and Cajeiri and the rest of them, with all their gear. Then he looked over the top of a rounded boulder and saw the runabout fighting the surf. He watched, wet and freezing in the wind, until he saw the boat meet up with the Brighter Days—he couldn’t see Barb get out or Toby help her, but that was what he figured was happening.
He watched, chilled through, aware Jago had thrown a thermal sheet around him, watched as they began to move. Watched as she turned for the open sea.
“Good luck,” he mouthed, and, feeling a hand on his shoulder and a presence behind him, looked back at Banichi, who was urging him to get up and move.
He did that—looked back again, but now the boat was only a wedge of white behind the surf, headed home.
Chapter 7
They gathered in a small rocky slot well up on the headland, the dowager struggling considerably at the last of the climb up a rugged slope. She sat down on a rock under the overhang of a branch, and leaned both hands against her cane. One was not supposed to notice this fact, but Cenedi quietly proffered a small cup of water from his flask, and she took it gladly enough.
It was the darkest part of the night. The cloud that had filmed the west at sunset swept on across the sky and blotted out the stars above them. That made it more difficult to see, but it also made it harder for them to be seen, and that gave them a little time to catch their breath and to reconnoiter.
“We must get transport to come to us,” Cenedi said to them. “We are moving too slowly. If we can find a place for a few of us to wait—” Cenedi would never say that the dowager and the boy and likely the paidhi-aiji were the few of us in question, but Bren had no difficulty understanding there might be theft, mayhem, even casualties in the process of acquiring that transport, actions in which the few might be an inconvenience. They were at a crossroads of their plans, either to find a secure place where they might leave their weaker members in fortified safety, with allies, while the rest of them attempted to raise support—or go all together. Bren was not unhappy when Banichi supported the principle of stealth and rapid movement, which was their Guild’s general preference, and all of them going together into the interior.