The king’s face blanked at the word “confuse.” Its possible accuracy had taken him aback.
“—and the third, the most dangerous, which I cannot see.”
Aristocratic pique had animated Tenoctris during the past brief exchange, but now she slumped against the chair. Her eyelids fluttered but did not close, and she managed a weak smile.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s a great wizard against us, but that’s all I’ve been able to learn. He or she or it is so powerful that my spells show me nothing beyond the fact that there’s something to be seen—were I strong enough.”
There was commotion at the north gate of the fleet encampment, only a long bowshot distant from where Sharina and her friends were talking. Carus looked up, and muttered, “Nitker’s coming out to see me, since I’m not going to him.”
“Not a wizard but all the Children of the Mistress together, Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “Couldn’t that be what you’re seeing?”
The old woman shook her head. “No, child, there’s a single mind behind this,” she said. “One who’s weaving a pattern as subtle as anything our friend Ilna could manage. These Children and their Moon Wisdom are only threads. So are the Confederacy and the Count of Blaise. Human threads.”
Carus snorted and put his left foot back in the stirrup, preparing to mount. “I’ll bet on Ilna if it’s weaving to be done,” he said. “And as for those threads you’ve named—by this time tomorrow they won’t be a danger to us or to anybody else!”
“Gar—” Tenoctris began, showing how very tired she was. “Carus, you mustn’t act while the third threat still hides. That’s what our enemy wants.”
“I’ve never been one to sit on my hands and let the other fellow hit first!” Carus said, turning from his horse with a look of cold fury. “I’m not going to try to learn how to waste my time that way now!”
“Garric wouldn’t—”
“Your brother wouldn’t do a lot of things!” Carus said. “Your brother is a peasant! What do you want me to do? Challenge Lerdoc to a bout with quarterstaves?”
“I want you to be the King of the Isles,” Sharina said, standing straight with her hands clasped behind her back. “Instead of being a petulant boy who throws his book in the fire because he thinks it’s too hard for him to understand!”
The Blood Eagles on guard stiffened. They kept their backs to the royal party, but Attaper and the undercaptain turned so they could watch from the corners of their eyes.
Carus could have been carved from an oak tree. Continuing to meet his eyes, her tone still deliberate, Sharina added, “Besides, Lerdoc is old and fat. It wouldn’t be a fair bout.”
The king stepped forward and hugged Sharina, then lifted her in the crook of his left arm and snatched up Tenoctris with his right. It reminded Sharina of just how strong her brother really was.
“Well,” Carus said, laughter bright behind his words, “may the Lady forfend that a King of the Isles should be seen to act unfairly.”
He whirled the women in a full circle, then set them down and stepped back so that he could see both together. “The count is a fat old man, as you say, sister,” Carus said with continuing good humor. “But he has a son, Lerdain, a likely enough youth from all accounts. The apple of his father’s eye.”
“I’ve heard that,” Sharina said carefully. “Though Liane is the one who’d have the details.”
“I don’t need details,” said the king. “I need a pretty girl who can swim. Can you swim, sister?”
“Like a fish,” said Sharina. She spoke with same flat certainty that she’d have said her hair was blond, if that had been the question.
“Then between us,” King Carus said, “we may be able to save the Isles a battle.”
He handed Tenoctris into her sedan chair and gestured Sharina to her horse. As Carus himself mounted, he began to laugh with the amazed jollity of a prisoner just offered a passage to freedom.
19
The chill water clamped the muscles over Ilna’s rib cage tightly and dulled her need to breathe. The water-filled tunnel wasn’t quite as narrow as the passage between the pool and the outer world, but there wouldn’t have been room enough to swim properly even if Ilna had known how. She pulled herself along by her hands with an occasional kick against the walls when her toes found purchase.
She didn’t know if Alecto was following. She didn’t even know if she hoped Alecto was following. Ilna had given her companion as good a chance at salvation as she herself had, but she couldn’t pretend Alecto’s death would trouble her any worse than the wild girl’s continuing life would.
Ilna’s fingers were numb, and her lungs were a rolling fireball that seemed to be devouring everything around it. Eventually the blaze would absorb her brain and everything would stop, but until then she would keep on going.
Streaks of light pulsed across her eyes. How long could a salamander stay underwater? For hours, certainly; possibly for days. Ilna wasn’t sure if the tunnel was still going down; her body rubbed the slick stone, sometimes with her shoulders, sometimes with her hips. The only direction was forward.
Phosphorescence flooded over her—pinks and greens and yellows, all against a background of sickly blue. Ilna blew her lungs out, scarcely aware of what she was doing, and drew in a deep breath. The air didn’t have odors in that first moment: it was life, as simple as that. She’d been good as dead, and now she breathed again.
Alecto surfaced noisily, flinging up a spray of rainbow droplets. “Sister take me!” she cried. Then, “May the Pack grind my bones if I’m not glad to breathe again!”
Ilna dabbed her feet down, touched rock, and felt the panic in her throat subside. While she could appreciate the irony of escaping all manner of dangers only to drown at the point of safety, that wasn’t the story she wanted to be remembered for.
She bobbed—once, twice, and again—to reach the edge of the pool. She was smiling. I’m not sure I want to be remembered at all; and if I drowned here, there’d be precious little chance of anybody hearing the story anyhow.
Alecto, who could swim and who’d lost the cape, her only remaining garment, in the tunnel, squirmed up onto the shore with the litheness of a cormorant. She’d gripped her dagger in her teeth as she swam; now, ignoring Ilna’s struggle to climb out of the pool, she took the weapon in her hand again as she looked around.
There was plenty of light to see clearly, at least for eyes adapted during the long, dark crawl to reach this place. It was a cave, but it was much larger than the one immediately beyond the temple. Ilna looked up. At some points the curving roof was as high as she could’ve flung a stone.
Mushrooms and lichens covered the cave floor and ran up the walls and ceiling as well. They glowed in muted shades; to Ilna’s trained eye no two were precisely the same hue. The faded yellow of one mushroom lacked the green undertone of the otherwise identical bell sprouting beside it.
“How far back do you suppose this cave goes?” Alecto said, trying to keep concern out of her voice. She tapped a wall with her dagger butt; under a finger-thick coating of fungus, the bronze clacked on stone. “Is there a way out besides the way we came?”
“I have no idea,” Ilna said, keeping her comments to the literal truth. She supposed—as no doubt the wild girl did—that there wasn’t another way out; that there was no way at all now that Alecto’s rockslide had buried the temple along with the rest of the village.
It wouldn’t do any good to state the obvious, though. Besides, while it was superstition to believe the words might create the grim reality, when Ilna was trapped in a rocky tomb, she found herself closer to superstition than she cared to be.