The Cursed Blade went instantly dark and cold.
Shivering, clutching his wounded hand, afraid of looking at it, Haplo crouched on his knees, doubled over, sick and retching.
A blow hit the ship. A timber above the human snapped, caved in. Hugh the Hand gave a great bellow. Water poured down on top of him, on both of them. Haplo was drenched. His magic was gone.
The dog barked warningly. A red glow lit the interior of the cabin. Haplo looked outside the window. The Cursed Blade was dead, apparently, but the dragon-snake had not vanished as had the tytan and the bat. The knife had summoned it, and now it would not be dismissed. But the dragon-snake saw that the ship was now breaking apart; those inside had a chance to escape. The snake couldn’t afford to wait. Its tail struck the ship again.
“Marit,” Haplo whispered. His throat was raw; he couldn’t talk. She was far from where the water was pouring in, and since the ship was listing in the opposite direction, she was still relatively dry.
“The steering stone!” He knew she couldn’t hear him; the words had come out a croak. He tried again. “The stone! Use it...”
She either heard or seized on the same idea herself. She could see at a glance the effect the water was having on her own magic, and now she understood why Haplo had covered the steering stone with the leather vest. The dragon-snake’s eyes glowed hideously. It read her thoughts, understood her intent. Its toothless maw opened.
Marit cast one frightened glance at it, then resolutely ignored it. She snatched the leather vest off the stone.
Crouching over it, protecting the magic from the dripping water with her body, she wrapped her hands around it.
The dragon-snake struck. The ship seemed to Haplo to explode. Water swept him away; he was sinking beneath it.
Then strong arms caught him, held him. A voice spoke to him, soothed him. All pain vanished. He rested, drifting on the water’s surface, at peace with himself.
The voice called again.
He opened his eyes, looked up and saw...
Alfred.
20
“No! Don’t leave us! Take us with you! Take us with you!”
“Oh, stop it, Roland, for Orn’s sake,” the elf snapped testily. “They’re gone.”
The human glowered at his companion and, more for the sake of defiance than because he thought he might accomplish anything constructive, he continued to wave his arms and shout at the strange ship, which was no longer even in sight.
At length, feeling a fool and growing tired of waving his arms above his head, Roland left off shouting and turned around to take his frustration out on the elf.
“It’s your fault we lost them, Quindiniar!”
“Mine?” Paithan gaped.
“Yes, yours. If you’d let me talk to them when they first landed, I could have made contact. But you thought you saw a tytan inside! Hah! One of those monsters couldn’t get its little toe into that ship,” Roland scoffed.
“I saw what I saw,” returned Paithan sullenly. “And you couldn’t have talked to them anyway. The ship was all covered with those weird pictures, like that Haplo’s ship, when he was here. You remember him?”
“Our savior? I remember. Brought us here to this blasted citadel. Him and the old man.[26] I’d like to have both of them in front of me right now.” Roland swung a clenched fist, which, quite by accident, smacked Paithan in the shoulder.
“Oh, sorry,” Roland muttered.
“You did that on purpose!” Paithan nursed his bruised arm.
“Bosh. You got in my way. You’re always getting in my way.”
“Me getting in your way! You’re the one who keeps following me around! We divided this city into two halves. If you’d stay in your half, as we agreed, I wouldn’t get in your way.”
“You’d like that!” Roland jeered. “Rega and I stay on our side and starve to death while you and your bitch of a sister grow fat—”
“Fat! Fat!” Paithan had switched to elven, as he often did when exasperated—and he seemed to be speaking a lot more elven these days. “Where do you think we’re getting food?”
“I don’t know, but you spend a lot of time in that fool Star Chamber or whatever you call it.” Roland was deliberately and irritably speaking human.
“Yes, I’m growing food there. In the darkness. Aleatha and I are living on mushrooms. And don’t call my sister names.”
“I wouldn’t put it past you. Either of you. And I’ll call her exactly what she is—a scheming little bit—”
“Scheming little what?” came a throaty, sleepy voice from the shadows. Roland choked, coughed, glowered in the voice’s general direction.
“Oh, hello, Thea,” Paithan greeted his sister without enthusiasm. “I didn’t know you were here.”
An elven woman stepped into Pryan’s eternal sunlight. One might guess, from her languorous appearance, that she had just waked from a nap. By the look in her blue eyes, her sleep had been filled with sweet dreams. Her ashen-blond hair was disheveled; her clothes appeared to have been thrown on hastily, were just the tiniest bit disarranged. The fabric and lace seemed to want some strong male hand to shift them into proper place—or to take them off and start over.
She stayed in the sunlight only a few moments, long enough to let it shine on her hair. Then she glided back into the shadows cast by the high city wall surrounding the plaza. Bright light was damaging to her fair complexion and made wrinkles. Languidly she leaned against the wall and regarded Roland with an amusement which glittered sapphire blue from beneath long and sleepy eyelashes.
“What were you about to call me?” Aleatha asked again, eventually growing bored at hearing him stammer and sputter.
“You know well enough what you are,” Roland managed to get out at last.
“No, I don’t.” Aleatha’s eyes opened wide for just a fraction of a second, long enough to absorb him inside; then—as if the effort were too exhausting—she lowered the lashes again. Cast him out. “But why don’t you meet me in the maze garden at winetime and tell me.”
Roland muttered something to the effect that he’d meet her in hell first and—his face mottled—stalked off.
“You shouldn’t tease him like that, Thea,” said Paithan when Roland was out of earshot. “Humans are like savage dogs. Baiting only makes them—”
“More savage?” suggested Aleatha with a smile.
“You may find toying with him amusing, but it makes him damn difficult to live with,” Paithan told his sister.
He began walking back through the human section of the city toward the main part of the citadel. Aleatha fell into slow step beside him.
“I wish you’d just leave him alone,” Paithan added.
“But he’s the only source of entertainment I have in this dreary place,” Aleatha protested. She glanced at her brother; a slight frown marred the delicate beauty of her face. “What’s the matter with you, Pait? You never used to scold me like this. I swear, you’re getting more like Gallic every day—a stringy old maid—”
“Stop it, Thea!” Paithan caught hold of her wrist, jerked her around to face him. “Don’t you talk about her like that. Gallic had her faults, but she held our family together. Now she’s dead and father’s dead and we’re all going to die and—”
Aleatha snatched her hand away, used it to slap her brother across his face.
“Don’t say that!”
Paithan rubbed his stinging cheek, regarded his sister grimly. “Hit me as much as you like, Thea, it won’t change things. We’re going to run out of food eventually. When that happens—” He shrugged.
“We’ll go out and find more,” Aleatha said. Two spots of fevered color burned in her cheeks. “There’s loads of food out there: plants, fruit—”
“Tytans,” Paithan said dryly.
Gathering up her full skirts, which were admittedly growing a bit frayed at the hem, Aleatha flounced off, moving at a much more rapid pace than previously.
26
Haplo was tricked by the wizard Zifnab into transporting the human siblings Roland and Rega and the elven siblings Paithan and Aleatha and the dwarf Drugar to the Sartan citadel on Pryan. Their adventures are recorded in Elven Star, vol. 2 of