‘You had a ship?’
‘By rights of salvage, aye. I was the one who brought Coltaine’s wounded to Aren. And that’s the thanks I get.’
‘You could always punch her in the face. That’s what you usually end up doing to your superiors, sooner or later.’
‘I could at that. I’d have to get past Gamet, of course. The point I was making is this: she’s never commanded anything more than a damned noble household, and here she’s been handed three legions and told to reconquer an entire subcontinent.’ He glanced sidelong at Strings. ‘There wasn’t many Falari made it into the Bridgeburners. Bad timing, I think, but there was one.’
‘Aye, and I’m him.’
After a moment, Gesler grinned and held out his hand. ‘Strings. Fiddler. Sure.’
They clasped wrists. To Strings, the other man’s hand and arm felt like solid stone.
‘There’s an inn down the street,’ Gesler continued. ‘We need to swap stories, and I guarantee you, mine’s got yours beat by far.’
‘Oh, Gesler,’ Strings sighed, ‘I think you’re in for a surprise.’
CHAPTER SIX
We came within sight of the island, close enough to gaze into the depths through the ancient cedars and firs. And it seemed there was motion within that gloom, as if the shadows of long dead and long fallen trees still remained, swaying and shifting on ghostly winds…
Quon Sea Charting Expedition of
Drift Avalii
Hedoranas
The journey home had been enough, if only to return one last time to the place of beginnings, to crumbled reminiscences amidst sea-thrust coral sands above the tide line, the handful of abandoned shacks battered by countless storms into withered skeletons of wood. Nets lay buried in glistening drifts blinding white in the harsh sunlight. And the track that had led down from the road, overgrown now with wind-twisted grasses… no place from the past survived unchanged, and here, in this small fisher village on the coast of Itko Kan, Hood had walked with thorough and absolute deliberation, leaving not a single soul in his wake.
Barring the one man who had now returned. And the daughter of that man, who had once been possessed by a god.
And in the leaning shack that had once housed them both-its frond-woven roof long since stripped away-with the broad, shallow-draught fisherboat close by now showing but a prow and a stern, the rest buried beneath the coral sand, the father had laid himself down and slept.
Crokus had awakened to soft weeping. Sitting up, he had seen Apsalar kneeling beside the still form of her father. There were plenty of footprints on the floor of the shack from the previous evening’s random explorations, but Crokus noted one set in particular, prints large and far apart yet far too lightly pressed into the damp sand. A silent arrival in the night just past, crossing the single chamber to stand square-footed beside Rellock. Where it had gone after that left no markings in the sand.
A shiver rippled through the Daru. It was one thing for an old man to die in his sleep, but it was another for Hood himself-or one of his minions-to physically arrive to collect the man’s soul.
Apsalar’s grief was quiet, barely heard above the hiss of waves on the beach, the faint whistle of the wind through the warped slats in the shack’s walls. She knelt with bowed head, face hidden beneath her long black hair that hung so appropriately like a shawl. Her hands were closed around her father’s right hand.
Crokus made no move towards her. In the months of their travelling together, he had come, perversely, to know her less and less. Her soul’s depths had become unfathomable, and whatever lay at its heart was otherworldly and… not quite human.
The god that had possessed her-Cotillion, the Rope, Patron of Assassins within the House of Shadow-had been a mortal man, once, the one known as Dancer who had stood at the Emperor’s side, who had purportedly shared Kellanved’s fate at Laseen’s hands. Of course, neither had died in truth. Instead, they had ascended. Crokus had no idea how such a thing could come to be. Ascendancy was but one of the countless mysteries of the world, a world where uncertainty ruled all-god and mortal alike-and its rules were impenetrable. But, it seemed to him, to ascend was also to surrender . Embracing what to all intents and purposes could be called immortality, was, he had begun to believe, presaged by a turning away. Was it not a mortal’s fate-fate, he knew, was the wrong word, but he could think of no other-was it not a mortal’s fate, then, to embrace life itself, as one would a lover? Life, with all its fraught, momentary fragility.
And could life not be called a mortal’s first lover? A lover whose embrace was then rejected in that fiery crucible of ascendancy?