From Whence You Came (4 page)

The decantation to raise the wind was a simple one. The trick was to make sure the wind did only what you wanted it to, no more and no less. While a Vineart could use blood-magic to influence a decantation, Bradhai had no desire to show off; he merely directed the spellwine to do what he had created it for.

“Rise and speed, sweet to our need.” There was a skill to speaking decantations without swallowing the spellwine; Bradhai did it without hesitation. “Carry us hence, south and east: go.”

The sails overhead snapped and belled, as more wind rose to join them, jumping the
ladysong
like a stone skipped from a child's hand, driving it ahead of the serpent even now rising in their wake.

“Ahead, Captain! Forward a th' bow and down!”

“Washer's piss,” the Captain swore, and started shouting commands to the other sailors already in motion.

“What is happening?” Bradhai looked around, bewildered. “I did as you asked, I filled the sails.”

“You did,” Hernán agreed, clearly just as mystified. 

“The other one swung around,” the Captain said, in between shouting commands, the man in front of him hauling hard on the wheel. Bradhai felt the
ladysong
swing under him like a hard-reined horse. “They're trying to drive us somewhere.”

“That's impossible.” Hernán was certain of that, it seemed.

“Don't tell me, Shipsmaster; tell
them
!”

“Sta'board and down!”

Unable to help himself, Bradhai jumped down from the aft deck and, dodging sailors who cursed him without stopping, he went to the railing, and looked over. There was nothing that he could see, and he wondered if the ship's eyes had been mistaken – and then the water changed color, darkened. He realized that from that distance above, the eyes had been able to see far further down, predicting the –

The beast burst from the water, and Bradhai stumbled back, soaked with the sea brine. He did not think, he could not think, but his mouth flooded with
vin
-tinged saliva, and he swallowed, muttering what he'd meant to be a prayer to Sin Washer, but instead came out as a command:

“First Vine, defend us. First Vine, protect us.”

And the magic within him rose to the words, driven by the
vin magica
in his mouth, and the
magica
within him, shoving the beast away with a blast of wind, sharp with the scent of land and sun, anathema to such a creature of the briny depths.

It let out a sound that was neither shriek nor scream nor bellow, swung its great head around as though looking for the source of the magic, then shuddered and sank below the waters as swiftly as it had arrived.

“Gone, Captain! They're all gone!”

Bradhai stumbled back a pace or two, until his back was against something solid. He had used blood-magic. In public, in the presence of outsiders, he had called on the
magica
within every Vineart. The extension of a Vineart's Sense, the ability to use magic without drawing on the vin, was not something for outsiders to know. Had anyone noticed? His heart raced more from this new fear than aftermath of the serpent-driven danger. 

No. No one had noticed. They were all too busy thanking the silent gods that the beasts had left them unmolested. No one had seen what he had done –

“Vineart!”

He turned, uneasy, and saw Hernán standing at the upper rail, expression unreadable.

Hernán  had seen
something
. But all the Shipsmaster said was, “Come with me.”

The Captain's quarters were cramped, and sparsely decorated. Despite the nautical design of the bunk, and the table that was bolted to the wall, Bradhai felt strangely at home. That comfort did not last long.

“You drove them off.”

“I? I filled the sails with wind as you asked.”

“No.” Hernán shook his head. “I saw you. You did something, although I don't know what and the beasts gave up. What did you do?”

“Shipsmaster.” Bradhai put on his best placating voice, the one he'd learned as a slave, sharing space with so many others who were not always of good temperament. “I had no spellwine to hand; I decanted no spell.” Neither of those was true, in the absolute sense: a Vineart lived and breathed spellvines from the time they were bought as slaves until the day they died; the vines were on his skin, in his breath, in his blood. And a decantation was merely the key to a spellwine's use – for a Vineart, those doors were never locked. But he had not lied: he had used no spellwine, decanted no spell.

“Those beasts worked together.” The Captain accepted Bradhai's denial, and moved on to more pressing concerns. “Serpents do not do that, Shipsmaster. They do not school, they are solitary creatures. And they are not that large!” He seemed offended, as though their size was a personal affront to him and his ship.

Bradhai was slightly relieved to hear that those monsters were oddities.

“Larger?” Hernán asked.

“By a length, at least. Mebbe more. And two of them? Two, working together, like hunting dogs!”

He wasn't going to let go of that branch any time soon, it seemed.

Bradhai was suddenly, unutterably weary – pulling blood-magic had a cost, always – and in no mood to listen to the two of them squabble over what was and was not possible. “You brought me here to prove that my spells worked, that they were not responsible for the loss of your ships. I might suggest, Shipsmaster, that you look to these larger, fiercer beasts as the cause – had a ship, unprepared, been caught between two or three such…”

He did not want to think what might have happened to the
ladysong
, had the creatures decided to attack it as they had the leviathan.

“Having done my service, and proven myself,” he said, “I will leave you to find your solutions. If you would return me to shore, I will make my own way home.”

“No.”

Bradhai licked his lips, tasting the sea-spray still on his skin. Or perhaps it was sweat. “Shipsmaster…”

“You did something. You drove off that beast, ended the attack. Whatever you did, even if you don't know how, saved us. I need to know what it was. I need to be able to share it with the rest of our ships.”

“You cannot hold me here.”

They could, of course: he had no way of getting to shore, and the thought of trying to steal one of the lowboats they used for ferrying while in port, and striking out on his own.... Even without the recent demonstration, the ocean was a fearsome thing for a man alone. Knowing what lurked below the surface? No.

He looked to the Captain, not expecting an ally, and was not surprised to see a frown on that weathered face. He clearly was not comfortable with the idea of restraining a Vineart, but neither would he argue with the Shipsmaster.

“You would keep me here against my will?” Bradhai had no idea how to sound menacing, but he tried to imply the very many ways that this would be a bad idea. He had no access to firewines, unless he could get hold of the ones already shipboard, but certainly if they tried to keep him here, he could ensure that their sails were becalmed for weeks.

“Of course not.” Hernán seemed horrified that Bradhai could think that. The Vineart's tension eased, and then the Shipsmaster said “But if you abandon us, we will have no choice but to admit that our ships were lost…because spellwines could not protect them, and the Vineart who supplied them turned his back on us.”

Shipsmaster Hernán could play the not-quite-a-lie game as well. And he wagered Bradhai's reputation on the throw. The Guild would rather blame Vinearts than accept that the seas had become too dangerous for single ships to transverse.

They stared at each other, and Bradhai broke first.
 

o0o

“Harini!” 

Her companion's voice was low, sweet, and well-modulated. It also carried like the fog's horn on a winter morning. 

“Harini, slow down. You walk too swiftly.” 

Rini did everything too swiftly. She walked too swiftly, she thought too swiftly, and assuredly she spoke too swiftly, without pausing to consider the ramifications and repercussions of her words. She had heard these laments since she was released from swaddling, and she had accepted them as truth.

She also did not care a leaf. 

“What is it, Je'heirba? I am busy.”

“Yes, I can see that. And where do you think you are going, with your long legs and your fast pace?” The older woman gestured grandly, her arm swinging out in an arc as though to indicate where, within the confines of the ship's length and width, her charge might be headed.

“I needed to think,” she said. “I couldn't stay cooped up in the cabin any longer.” 

They had been at-sea for three months, and the quarters given to her were half the size of her bed chamber at home. However, their size was not the reason she could not stay, nor was Je'heirba's constant fussing. Rather, it was the accusing weight of the manuscripts and calculations stacked on the desk, filled with information that she could not decipher. 

Interrupted in her attempt to walk away from her frustrations, Harini instead turned and went to the railing of the vessel, staring at the
cause
of her frustrations.

“Here.” Je'heirba placed a delicately woven wrap around her shoulders. 

Harini accepted it with a muttered word of thanks. It was cooler here, out on the cold waters, than it had been back home. They had come further north than she had thought they would, on her fool's chase. 

“I am right. I know I am right.”

“You are always right,” Je'heirba said.

“It is one thing to be right,” a third voice said. “It is another entirely to prove it.”

Normally, sailors would spit at the thought of a single woman on-board. The fact that no storms had stalled them, or beasts attacked, with
three
among the passengers, Rini could only assume the crew thought a small grace from one of the silent gods.

“I am
trying
,” Rini said in exasperation, slapping the railing lightly with her palms. “But how am I to do that when the rotted things will not show their face? A tease here, a sighting there, but not one will surface for more than a moment of time.”

The solitaire joined her in leaning against the railing, and Je'heirba, no longer required, faded back to the comfort of the cabin. The older woman did not look like a fighter; her body was rounded rather than lean, and she wore long wool skirts rather than the usual leathers of other solitaires Rini had met, but she had come well-recommended enough that her father had hired her on the spot, when his only daughter had insisted on making this voyage.

And there had been evidence enough of her competence, when she dispatched two would-be bandits on the way from Harini's father's house to the docks. The solitaire had not even drawn the sword that rode low on her hip, but simply flicked a thick-bladed knife from a sheath on her arm, sending it quivering into the first bandit's boot-toe, and warning him that the second one would cut off something higher and more dear to him.

Rini was a scholar, not a fighter, but she certainly understood competence, and had soon accepted the solitaire as a trusted companion and sounding board. 

“They're hiding from me. We have followed them in shallow waters and in deep, spotted them in prime feeding areas, and they see us, and leave. They are
avoiding
me.”

The solitaire managed to keep any tone of teasing out of her voice when she asked, “Do you give them credit not only for that much intelligence, but malice as well?”

“Yes. No. It's possible. No, it's not possible,” she admitted. “I am just frustrated.”

A year ago, she had seen a serpent swimming along the coast by her father's estate. It was not such an unusual thing: the serpents liked the warmer waters off the coast of Varsam for their breeding, and her people knew to leave them be.

But this one had been acting oddly, and Rini – who had been out in her little boat sketching the coastline, where a rockfall had occurred over the winter – had been intrigued enough to follow at a safe distance. And she had heard it singing.

Serpents did not sing. That was the stuff of legends, and Rini was a scholar, not a storyteller. But she had heard it making a low, sweet noise…. And another serpent had come to it. A full grown one, not a spawnling called to its mother. And it had sung in turn, their noises twining together into almost a melody.

And then they had sunk below the surface, and Rini neither saw nor heard them again.

But the sound preyed on her. There was nothing in any book she could read, nothing any source could tell her, that would explain it.

And so – being the daughter of a man wealthy enough to indulge her, as he had given her leave to pursue her curiosity since childhood, she had arranged this ship, and this voyage, to find other serpents, and listen to them sing.

But they were avoiding her.

Harini did not take to commerce, as the men of her family did, but her mind worked in the same fashion: she studied her goal, and did what seemed most effective to achieve that goal.

“Will you direct the captain to another route?”

“What would you advise?”

The solitaire considered the question, her moon-round face and soft features saved from appearing placid by the fierce intelligence behind those features. “You have been following migration trails, yes?” They had gone over the maps together, the scholar and the warrior, so she was merely confirming what she already knew. Rini did not bother to answer her, but merely waited.

“If these creatures are acting out of their nature, then perhaps we should not follow them according to that discarded nature. Go… against what we know them to do?”

Harini frowned. “But that would take us back south. If I return without something to show for it, my father will never countenance my setting sail again.”