So Qinnitan had little to do as the coastline bobbed past but watch and wait… and think. As she gnawed the piece of tack one of Vilas’ sons had tossed her as offhandedly as if she had been a dog she wondered how long she had until the nameless man handed her over to the autarch. Agamid was days behind them but the Jellonian headlands were still out of sight ahead. Where were they going? If they were following the autarch, why was Sulepis traveling so far north? Surely he would gain more from conquering vast Hierosol with all its treasure and its control of the northern side of the Osteian Sea. Why would the most powerful monarch in the world sail all the way north to the forested hinterlands of Eion?
For that matter, why had the autarch gone to such trouble to take Qinnitan from her family in the first place? It had never made any sense, never once. Why choose a girl for a royal wife whose father was a petty priest? Why do nothing with her or to her except for some kind of bizarre religious instruction?
And why had the northern king Olin taken an interest in her as well? He had been a kind man, but that alone should not have made him single her out from all the other girls working in the Hierosoline stronghold.
Hold a moment. Qinnitan stood, suddenly full of excited thought, but within two steps she had come to the limit of the rope that bound her. She swallowed her frustration, determined to hang onto the thought. The autarch had chosen her for something that she had never understood. Now he was heading north, up the coast of Eion. The foreign king, the prisoner, had thought he recognized something in Qinnitan—a resemblance, had he said? Was that where the autarch was going—to the land of the foreign king, Olin? Was that where everyone was headed?
It still made no real sense, but for that moment, out on the featureless, trackless ocean and surrounded by enemies, she felt as though she had touched something true.
With nothing to do and little to eat Qinnitan did not sleep well. At night she often huddled in her thin blanket for hours, trying to push away imaginings of what the autarch had in store for her as she waited for the blessed release of sleep. In the mornings she kept her eyes closed long past the time she was completely awake, listening to the keening of seabirds and praying to fall asleep again, to flee back into oblivion for even a short time, but it seldom happened. Often she woke while even her captor was still asleep, only Vilas or one of his sons on duty at the tiller.
After a few days of watching her nameless jailer Qinnitan came to realize he was a creature of patterns: he woke up every morning at the same time, just as the first coppery light of dawn was bleeding up from the eastern horizon. Then, directly after waking each day he put himself through a series of stretching movements, going from one to the other with the predictability of the great clock in the Orchard Palace’s main tower, as though he were made of wheels and gears instead of flesh and blood. Then, as Qinnitan watched through slitted eyes, pretending to be asleep, this pale, unexceptional man who held her life in his hands would take a small black bottle out of his cloak, pull out the stopper, then dip what looked like a needle or a tiny twig into the bottle before withdrawing it and licking whatever he had drawn out. The container would then be stopped with great care and bottle and needle would disappear into his cloak once more. He would then generally eat some dried fish and drink a little water. Morning after morning the stretching rituals and the bottle continued, unchanged.
What was in the black glass container? Qinnitan had no idea. It looked like poison, but why would a man take poison by his own choice? Perhaps it was some powerful physic. Still, even though she could make little sense of it, the ritual was something to think about—to think about long and carefully. With nothing else left to her she had begun to hoard ideas like a miser hoarded coins.
Qinnitan lay silent, eyes closed, but she had grown so sensitive to changes in the hour and temperature that she could feel the first warmth of approaching morning push gently against her chill face.
How could she escape from her captor? And, if that failed, how could she end her life before he gave her to the autarch? She would welcome even as horrid a death as Luian’s—the strangler had at least been relatively quick. It was what the autarch’s servants would do to her while she lived that terrified her…
Her thoughts were interrupted by the quiet clink of the stopper being pushed back into the black bottle, and then by the even more surprising sound of her captor’s voice.
“I know you are not asleep. Your breathing is different. Stop pretending.”
Qinnitan opened her eyes. He was staring at her, his own eyes strangely bright, glittering as though with some secret jest. As he tucked the bottle away in his cloak the wiry muscles moved like snakes beneath the skin of his forearms. He was horribly strong, she knew that, and quick as a cat. How could she hope to get away from him?
“What is your name?” she asked for perhaps the hundredth time. He watched her, his lip minutely curled in amusement or contempt.
“Vo,” he said abruptly. “It means ‘of.’ But I am not ‘of ’ anything. I am the end, not the beginning.”
Qinnitan was so startled by this little speech that for a moment she could think of nothing to say. “I… I don’t understand.” She struggled to keep her voice calm, as if it was nothing unusual for this silent killer to divulge something about himself. “Vo?”
“My father was from Perikal. His father was a baron. The family name was ‘Vo Jovandil,’ but my father disgraced it.” He laughed. There was something wrong with him, she thought, something strange and feverish. Qinnitan was almost afraid to continue. “So he cut off his last name and went to war. He was captured by the autarch and became a White Hound.”
Even to Qinnitan, who had lived much of her life in the isolation of the Hive and the Seclusion, the name of the autarch’s troop of northern killers was enough to make her heart skip a beat. So that was why a white man from Eion spoke such perfect Xixian. “And… and your mother?”
“She was a whore.” He said it offhandedly, but he turned his gaze away from her for the first time, looking out at the gleam of sunrise spreading across the horizon like a burning slick of oil. “All women are whores, but she was honest about it. He killed her.”
“What? Your father killed your mother?”
Now he turned back to her, his eyes dull with contempt. “She asked for it. She struck him. So he beat her head in.”
Qinnitan no longer wanted to keep him talking. She could only raise shaking hands as if to keep such things away from her.
“I would have killed her, too,” Vo said, then got up and walked across the gently rocking deck to talk to the old fisherman Vilas, who was minding the tiller.
Qinnitan sat crouched down against the stiff, chill breeze for as long as she could, then clambered along the bench to the rail where she vomited up the meager contents of her stomach. When she had finished she lay with her cheek against the cold, wet wood of the rail. The coastline itself was almost invisible, shrouded by fog, so that the boat seemed to travel through some lonely place between worlds.
Something had definitely changed. In the following days Vo grew positively conversational, at least compared to what he had been. As the shallop crept northward along the coast it became his habit when he finished his morning ritual to talk to her a little. Occasionally he even mentioned places he had been and things he had seen, tiny fragments of his life and history, although he never again spoke of either of his parents. Qinnitan did her best to listen closely, although sometimes it was hard: this man Vo seemed to make no distinction between a meal he ate and a man he killed. There was nothing friendly in his talk, nothing of ordinary interaction. It seemed instead a kind of compulsion that came upon him when he had finished licking the needle, as though whatever lurked inside the poison bottle made him too ecstatic to remain silent. The fever never lasted long, though, and often he was angry and resentful with her later on, giving her less food or treating her roughly for no reason, as though she had tricked him into speech.