Kardan thrust again, the sword still not reaching its goal.
Bubbles escaped from his lips, rising past his eyes, and his chest felt tighter and tighter as the impulse to take a breath grew almost unbearable.
The siren darted backwards with a wiggle of her tail.
He kicked forward, but she stayed just out of reach of his sword.
The air in his lungs was nearly gone.
But he was now within a few feet of Hadros.
Air still dribbled from the king’s mouth, but his eyes were closed.
Kardan waved his sword at the siren a final time, grabbed the other king by the collar, and planted his feet on the stony bottom.
The sharp stones bit with a pain that broke even through the cold-induced numbness.
But he kicked off with all his strength, tugging Hadros upwards.
The surface before his straining eyes was a wavering green ceiling, seeming impossibly far.
With his sword still in one hand and the other wrapped around Hadros’s collar, he could not use his arms to swim.
Inert and waterlogged, the king could have weighed a thousand pounds.
He gave a great gasp as his head broke through the surface at last, the air on salty lips tasting sweeter than he had ever known it.
The sailors reached over the railing, grabbing both kings.
They were heaved back into the ship, the water pouring from them, as the shore party emerged from the trees.
Hadros flopped motionless on the deck.
Kardan bent over him, pushing rhythmically and desperately on the shoulder blades, willing him still to be alive.
About two gallons of salt water came up all at once and ran across the deck.
Kardan pushed again, and another gallon followed.
Hadros gave a grunt and lifted his head.
The sailors bent to help him turn over and sit up.
Kardan stepped back, shivering uncontrollably as a sailor handed him a dry cloak.
Gizor and his party seemed to realize something had happened, for he shouted at the warriors as they scrambled into the skiff.
Their voices seemed very distant, and Kardan’s attention all focused on the black-bearded figure before him.
Hadros passed a hand unsteadily across his face, wiping away the wet.
Kardan, watching him, found himself wondering why he had saved his life.
This would have been the perfect opportunity to get revenge for ten years of humiliation.
He would not even have had to do anything himself to harm him—all he had to do was come back to the surface alone.
But he had certainly saved him.
He knelt beside Hadros again, helping the sailors strip off the king’s dripping clothing.
“Are you all right?” he heard himself asking concernedly.
Hadros wavered a little but managed a smile as he tried to squeeze some of the water from his beard.
“While you’re at it, Kardan,” he said with almost a chuckle, “I expect my knife is at the bottom of the cove.
Would you mind going back for it?”
Then he passed out.
King Hadros insisted on continuing north the next day, waving away Kardan’s concern irritably, though he sat rather than stood by the rail and kept massaging his knee.
He stationed three warriors with harpoons before the mast, close above the white water foaming around the throat of the dragon prow, watching for sirens and for other creatures from deep under the sea.
“Is it always so, well, exciting to go on a war expedition?” Queen Arane asked with an ironic expression.
“My kingdom has been free of wars since my father’s time, and this is my first experience of such a thing.”
“This isn’t a war expedition,” said Hadros with a wolfish smile.
“This is just a little trip.”
Kardan also watched for sea creatures, but his attention was caught instead by a flock of geese, very high up, flying south fast.
“That may be a portent of trouble before us,” he commented.
“Geese should not be flying for another two months or more.”
“There have been strange rumors from the north all this year,” replied Hadros.
“Yet I still had not thought to see a siren so far south.”
But as they rowed onward against a steady wind, they saw no more creatures of voima.
“The wind shouldn’t be blowing from the north like this in the middle of summer,” he muttered.
“Does Roric have powers he’s never told me about?”
“All of us have powers within us,” said Queen Arane pleasantly, seating herself beside him.
“The difficulty is to recognize and use them.”
“Strength of mind, strength of arm—that’s one thing, Arane,” said the king slowly.
“But there is something going on in this world that I don’t like.
Kardan’s Mirror-seer is gone, and, though I didn’t tell you this before, so is the Weaver.
He’d been right there in his cave—or
her
cave, some would say—since I was a boy, and the stories say many generations longer than that, but when I went up to ask him where Roric had gone, it was as empty as though no one had ever lived there.”
Kardan lifted his head sharply from watching the waves.
If wild creatures of voima were growing bolder and stalking this world, and if those who interpreted the powers of voima to mortals were retreating, then they might find not just danger ahead but the lords of voima themselves.
He had already this trip seen a number of things he would not before have believed.
When they pulled into a cove that evening, Hadros said grimly, “Tonight I spend on land.”
“Are you not concerned for the rare
forest
sirens?” asked the queen with a small smile, but Hadros ignored her.
He stepped fairly agilely into the skiff and allowed himself to be rowed to shore with a handful of warriors.
Another trip brought Kardan and the queen, along with the awnings from the ship to rig as tents.
The sun had set and the moon was low in the sky as they finished their bread and ale and lit a small fire.
Kardan slept only uneasily, although the other king fell asleep at once and filled the night air with loud snores.
Kardan had spent just long enough on the ship that he missed its motion, and the solid earth beneath him seemed to keep slowly rising and falling, jerking him from his dreams.
When he turned over, trying unsuccessfully to find a way to lie such that the pebbles did not bite into his rib cage or the cold sea breezes find the nape of his neck, the sounds of wind in the trees and waves on the shore could have been the hungry mumbling of some great creature, and even the coals of their fire looked back at him like living eyes.
The eastern sky, above the rocky ridge that followed this part of the coast, had just started to lighten with summer’s early dawn when he rolled over for the hundredth time, started to close his eyes again, and abruptly lifted himself on an elbow instead.
That sounded different from the sounds he had been hearing all night.
He nudged Hadros, whose snores stopped in mid-breath, and closed his hand around his sword’s hilt.
He could see them now:
furtive, hunched shapes just beyond the ring of their tents.
As he squinted in the faint light, he saw one cautiously lift a flap of awning and reach inside.
His first thought was for Arane, but the queen’s tent was on the opposite side from these creatures.
He scrambled to his feet with a shout, Hadros only a second slower.
He could see now they were men, men almost naked, their hair thick and matted around their faces.
“Do not attack us!” cried one as Kardan leaped toward him.
His voice was low-pitched and rough, and he held up a pink palm.
Yellow teeth showed in an ingratiating smile.
“We just—
We just want some food.”
The warriors had the little group of hairy men surrounded now.
Kardan’s warriors especially seemed to be enjoying this.
The hairy men certainly looked harmless, smaller than any members of the war-party, unarmed, eyes glinting in the dimness from out of their tangled hair.
Gizor One-hand put the point of his sword under one’s chin.
“Thieves,” growled Hadros.
“We ought to kill you on the spot as a lesson to all thieves.”
But he slid his sword back into its sheath as he spoke and gestured to Gizor to do the same.
After a moment he grunted and complied, and the rest of the warriors did as well.
Kardan, however, kept his hilt clenched in a sweaty hand.
“Do we have some stale bread or rancid butter we can give them?” Hadros asked over his shoulder.
That is when they attacked.
With a cry that was more bark than shout, the one closest to Hadros threw himself on him.
Sharp teeth glinted in a long snout, and the claws at the end of the fingers ripped at the king’s jerkin.
Knocked off balance, Hadros staggered backwards, and teeth snapped at his throat as he went down.
The warriors, yelling, all scrambled for their weapons.
Kardan, the only one with a sword in his hand, sprang forward, all his weight behind his thrust.
His blade dragged on fur, caught on a rib, then slid into the heart of the creature about to bite the king’s neck.
It collapsed with a howl, falling backwards as Hadros scrambled free.
He had his sword out now and leaped wildly at the next hairy creature, but it melted away before him.
The warriors were all shouting and swinging their swords, just avoiding decapitating each other.
Kardan planted a foot against the dying creature before him and jerked his blade free.
A touch came on his shoulder.
He spun around ready to thrust again and found himself looking from a foot away into Hadros’s eyes.
“Back to back!” shouted the king, apparently unconcerned about nearly being run through by the man who had saved him only a few seconds earlier.
But as Kardan whirled around, feeling the other’s muscular back against his, Hadros commented mildly, “Unless, of course, you planned to measure swords with me this morning.”
Their enemies were gone.
They raced away on all fours, howling, and disappeared into the black and rocky woods before the slowly lightening sky could ever show them clearly.
Gizor and the warriors, slower on two legs, pursued them.
But the one that Kardan had killed was still there.
Hadros turned it over with his foot.
The eyes were open, staring glassily, and a long tongue lolled from its sharp-toothed snout.
It looked almost—but not quite—like a wolf.
Queen Arane, well wrapped in a cloak and with a knife in her hand, came out of her tent with her warriors on either side.
She had for once nothing to say.
Kardan eyed her suspiciously, wondering what powers of voima
she
might have that had, so far, protected her.
The kings’ warriors returned from a brief and unsuccessful chase to stare at the creature Kardan had killed.
“What is it?” one warrior asked in horror.
Several turned charms over in their fingers.
“Shape-changer,” Hadros said.
“I should have known better than to think these were the thieves and beggars they wanted to seem.
But I haven’t seen a shape-changer in twenty-five years.
Is it merely fate that we should meet both a siren and these shape-changers, in lands where I have never seen such creatures before, or did someone very powerful send them against us?
“If we keep on being attacked by creatures of voima,” he added when no one dared answer, “we’re going to have trouble catching Roric.
At this rate, I’ll have to take a stint at the oars myself.”
He kicked the creature, rolling it back on its face, exposing again the bloody hole where the sword had gone in.