‘I have come to surrender, and to beg your mercy for my warriors.’ The second surprise of the moment was the woman’s voice, soft and gentle, far divorced from the commanding voice with which she had ordered the abortive attack. ‘You have a power, that is obvious, and I cannot risk more of my soldiers’ lives against you.’
Steven beamed. ‘Well, I’m glad you came to your senses before-’ Brynne pushed in front of him, her knife drawn and ready.
‘Brynne, what are you doing?’
A tense murmur rippled through the ruffians assembled along the shore as they watched the interchange. Garec retreated several steps and drew his bow, ready to fire in an instant.
Brynne placed her knife at the woman’s throat and with her free hand reached behind the pirate’s back to withdraw an evil-looking dagger with a curved blade and a short wooden handle. ‘Steven, I appreciate what you did with the rocks, and that tremendous wave, but you still have a lot to learn.’ She tossed the dagger to Mark. ‘One doesn’t get to be the leader of a band like this by surrendering at the first sign of trouble.’
Steven paled.
‘She was going to kill you, so they-’ she nodded towards the pirate ranks inching slowly along the beach, ‘-could kill the rest of us.’
Angry and embarrassed with himself, Steven cursed aloud in English, a string of epithets that left Mark shaking his head in admiration at his friend’s grasp of the vernacular. Recovering, Steven summed it all up with a rousing, ‘Son of an open-sored Atlantic City whore!’ and stepped forward as if to punch the woman hard across the face.
She raised her own fists, but rather than backing away, she taunted him, ‘Go ahead, sorcerer, kill me. The way you pined over Rezak back there, I’m surprised you didn’t kiss him goodbye.’ She stared up at him, her eyes fierce. ‘What’s the matter, sorcerer, don’t like confrontation? Afraid to kill me?’
Rezak. Steven would remember that. He looked down at the unsavoury character glaring at him. ‘I’m not a sorcerer,’ he said.
‘Look at that,’ the woman said. Steven fell back several paces as she shoved him hard and laughed, ‘You are afraid to kill me.’ Around them, members of her pirate band laughed and hooted uproariously. The woman spat at Steven’s feet and, reeking confidence, stepped towards him.
In an instant Brynne was between them again, the hunting knife drawn. Steven barely had time to blink before Brynne had flicked her wrist twice and taken off both the woman’s earlobes. She sounded deadly serious when she told the pirate leader, ‘I, however, am not afraid to kill you.’
The woman recognised Brynne’s unemotional savagery and lowered her fists. She drew a wet kerchief from around her neck and dabbed at the blood that dripped steadily from her ears. ‘I am wondering how you managed to get in here,’ she said offhandedly, not sounding in the least bit threatened. ‘You could not have come from the river with such a vessel-’ she indicated the Capina Fair, ‘-and I know you didn’t enter this cavern through-’ She hesitated, as if discarding certain words, ‘through other places. So unless you used magic to get inside, I have to assume you have lived your entire lives down here and I have simply never seen you before. It is possible. This is a large lake, and an even larger cavern. And yet, I find that unlikely, because I have met the other permanent inhabitants of this cave on several occasions, and they tend to be a good deal hairier, blinder, and-’ she smiled at Steven for the first time ‘-less attractive than the lot of you.’ She squeezed blood out of the kerchief, then bent down to rinse it in the lake before reapplying it to her ears – although they were still bleeding freely, she didn’t appear to be terribly upset about it.
‘So, sorcerer, how did you get down here?’
For the first time, Steven noticed she was using just one hand, her right hand: her left had either been hanging limply at her side or slightly behind her back since she had joined them on the beach. Looking down at it now, he noticed she was curling and straightening different fingers in a repeating pattern. Behind her, the pirates were standing perfectly still. He thought they looked to be somewhat closer than they had been when he first stood up from the dead man’s body, but perhaps that was a trick of the light. He couldn’t see the raiders assembled behind the first row or two, but there was some movement, as if they were shuffling nervously from side to side, or trying to move without being detected.
Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw it. A big man, older but tough-looking, with a shaved head and a long scar running across the outside of his neck, was watching the woman’s fingers intently. He was bleeding from several lacerations on his face and arms, but like the woman with the now neatly clipped earlobes, he did not seem to notice his wounds. Instead he stared between Brynne and Mark, watching the curling and straightening of the woman’s fingers.
She was sending messages to him. It was a code. Steven couldn’t work out what the patterns meant, but there was no question the woman before him, still carrying on about him being a sorcerer, was sending orders to the ranks behind her. Steven was almost dazed: he was watching the scene unfold as if he were just a bystander. Now the big pirate began sending a message to someone flanking Steven and the others. The man’s hand rested quietly on his thigh, then, slowly, his index and then ring fingers curled up beneath his palm. It was the tiniest of gestures, almost impossible to catch if you weren’t looking for it. Steven assumed they had been ordered to gather their weapons and prepare an assault. The scarred man curled and waggled his fingers over and over again; Steven guessed he was communicating with the group back along the beach, behind Mark and Brynne.
His mind raced: an attack was coming, and it would come from both sides at once. He had to act fast. The woman, obviously their leader, was still taunting him, but now Steven understood why. It was a ruse: buy time. Rearm. We have seen his magic, but we have also seen he is unwilling to kill. If he is unwilling to kill, we can take him and the others. Prepare. Prepare in silence.
This band had not looked to be an organised fighting force, but Steven realised he had been horribly wrong: they were much more than that; this was a group of people who had been together long enough to be able to read one another’s thoughts. They’d come out of the lake in certain positions not by chance, but because of what would come next. Those who could read the code were in front, because any shuffling of ranks after they had all assembled on the beach would have been suspicious.
This was no ragtag band, and now they were coming for Steven and the Ronan partisans.
Looking to Mark and Garec, Steven tried his own form of nonverbal communication to get them to move in close. Brynne was still by his side, her knife drawn and held loosely in one hand. After a moment, Mark took a few steps forward, but Garec was wary, not sure he should give up his vantage point against the cavern wall, where he was in a good position to shoot into either group. Steven cried out in his mind, and sneaked quick but piercing glances at Garec, all the while trying not to give anything away to the enemy leader before him.
Come over here, Garec. Come over here. I can’t protect you if you don’t get your sorry self over here now. Steven willed the bowman to understand. His grip on the staff tightened.
Garec understood that Steven was trying to tell him something, but he had no idea what. Get ready? Shoot someone? Draw more arrows? What? Confused, Garec looked left, then right, then back at Steven, trying to work out what he was supposed to do. They had moved. The pirates, both groups, had crept forward without anyone noticing. It was only a pace or two, and it had taken them some time, but they were inexorably closing the gap between themselves and the travellers. After what felt like an eternity to Steven, Garec seemed to get the message. The bowman started to grin, then recovered himself and wiped his face clear of all expression. He hastily took stock of what he had, and what he would need to continue this fight in close quarters.