But now she knew, and she made sure Knot was behaving properly, still as stone as he clung to the craggy rock face like a fly upon the wall.
Pernie hefted the spear, pitching the back end of it at a steep angle so as not to bump against the rock. She wished Djoveeve would hurry up and move.
Like a strike of lightning, Djoveeve’s own blunted spear came hurtling up at her, so quickly all Pernie could do was jump. If she’d taken the time to urge Knot to move, she would have been struck full on.
She dropped straight down, knowing she’d land loudly when she hit the shallow water, but as she fell, her arm suddenly wrenched upward when she hit the end of Knot’s rope. For an instant, she thought he might be strong enough to hold on, but he was not. His little feet, unprepared for the shock, lost their grip, and down he came on top of her, the two of them landing, first Pernie, then the bug, with a tremendous splash.
Before Pernie could clear her eyes, Djoveeve was nearly upon her, a wooden knife in her hand. Just before the old assassin could make the token slice across Pernie’s throat, Knot was dragging Pernie back up the crater wall, the pulse of his fear throbbing in his insect brain.
Pernie swung beneath him like a clock pendulum, bouncing off the rock face and getting scratched up everywhere. He’d nearly dragged her all the way over the lip of the crater by the time she got him to stop. She tilted her head back, looking up to see where she was, then reached up with her free hand, prepared to climb up the rope. Two hard objects thudded against her chest, one after the next in rapid fire. She looked down again and saw that both of Djoveeve’s wooden knives had left black charcoal marks on her, one right below the next. She would have been a pincushion if those knives were real.
“You’ve got to get that creature under control,” the ancient bodyguard intoned, though needlessly. “It’s going to get you killed.”
Pernie hung motionlessly for a moment, her shoulder hurting from the initial jolt and all her scratches beginning to burn. She sighed, frustrated, and simply dangled there like some droopy little anchor dropped halfway into an empty sea.
“And I saw the butt of your spear above the ridgeline,” Djoveeve was saying when Pernie finally began paying attention to her again. “How many times do I have to tell you that your illusions are weak? You can’t hide like an elf any more than you can run like one. You’ve got to think. You must use your powers
and
your brain.”
Pernie didn’t want to hear another lecture today. And she didn’t want to hear what she couldn’t do. She didn’t want to hear how she was weak and how she was going to die. Again. That’s all anyone ever told her here. “You’re going to die,” they all said. Always with some big stupid “if” to go along. Well, if there were that many
if
s going to kill her, then she expected she ought to be dead by now.
She hung there for a little longer, watching Djoveeve talk. The words made flat and round shapes of the old assassin’s mouth as it moved, but the sounds all faded away. The woman was merely part of the scenery. A dull part, in brown leather, lost against the bright colors of the elven island with all its creatures and sounds and nothingness. Pernie didn’t want to listen anymore.
And she was tired of eating fish.
The pain in her shoulder throbbed and broke her reverie. She might have been drifting off to sleep. She prompted Knot to pull her out of the crater slowly so as not to cause further injury. She climbed onto his back once they were up, and she set him off at a run. She was done with lessons for today. And this time, unlike last time, she was going to go someplace they couldn’t find.
The biggest advantage in studying with Djoveeve out of the cave was that the old woman couldn’t keep up with her anymore. Not for speed. Djoveeve’s jaguar form wasn’t fast enough, and her skills in transmutation prevented her from taking the shape of birds—Pernie didn’t know why, but she’d figured out the weakness all the same. Which meant that Pernie could outrun her. The problem—the thing that Pernie had learned the last two times she’d tried to run away—was what the old mage-assassin couldn’t manage in speed, she more than made up for in tracking ability. The woman was harder to get away from than a bloodhound or a scavenger drake.
But this time Pernie had a better plan. Riding Knot through the jungle was a tough way to run. The leaves and branches and brambles got in her way. It was impossible not to leave a trail of broken vegetation when she rode through the trees, much less her scent.
But the last time she’d gone out, she discovered something new, if belatedly: Knot left no footprints in the sand. She thought that maybe, because of it, he might not leave any scent behind as well.
So this time, as she streaked off, away from Djoveeve’s lectures, she headed straight for the ocean as fast as Knot could go. Soon enough, she made it to the coast. She’d gone north last time she was here, so this time she decided to try the south. She saw that there was a high set of cliffs a few measures down. It appeared as if the beach might end there, but she knew Knot could climb them if there wasn’t enough beach to go around.
Soon she discovered that there were enough rocks along the base of them to make it at least partway around, but Knot didn’t like the cool mist of the water so near his feet. Rather than fight with him, she directed him a few spans up the wall and urged him to carry on. She’d gotten good at riding him along vertical faces, hooking her heels over the edge of his segmented shell, just above where his legs emerged, and leaning back carefully, just enough for balance, but not so far as to brush her back against the cliff. At the speeds Knot ran, and with altitude, that would mean death.
She well knew that what she was doing would get her yelled at if Kettle saw, but she’d been so long away from the flour-doused old kitchen matron that she’d nearly forgotten what being scolded was all about. Seawind didn’t scold. He was quick with a cuff or a blow, but he never scolded her like a child. And Djoveeve only lectured. Endlessly. None of them yelled at her, either. Pernie never thought she’d miss such a thing, being hollered at, but she did. Well, not exactly the yelling part, but the rest of it. She missed the look in Kettle’s face. The look after the yelling was done, when Kettle’s eyes sometimes filled with frightened tears.
Nobody cried for her here.
She tried not to cry too. But her shoulder hurt and she missed Kettle and she was tired of eating fish. She’d done everything they said, and she never complained hardly at all. But she was tired, and it wasn’t fun anymore.
She wanted to go home.
As she looked out over the ocean in the direction where she thought Kurr might lie, she thought of all of them sitting at the table having tea. Kettle was serving up a plate of roast meat and steaming carrots; the carrots would be bright orange and dripping with butter and beat-sugar sauce. She could smell the wine and hear Kettle yelling at Master Altin for trying to give her some. “Ya can’t give a wee lass wine!” she would say. And Altin had tried to give Pernie wine before. He said wine was good for her. Master Tytamon had said it was too before he died.
But then Orli had come along and broken the world. And her people had killed everyone, or at least gotten them all killed. And now she was trying to take Master Altin away and ruin everything while Pernie was stuck here with the stupid, boring elves.
They said they’d let her go home when she could pass their stupid test, when she’d mastered the spear and wasn’t afraid of that nasty old orc, but now she knew they never would. Djoveeve would just go on talking forever, and they’d never let her go. She was already really good with the elven spear. Only last night she’d struck Djoveeve hard upon the knee when they were practicing in the cave. Really hard. It almost knocked her down. Next time she
would
knock her down.
But there wouldn’t be a next time. She was going to get out of here somehow.
The cliff face fell away before her as Knot whisked them along toward the end of its length. It appeared that the flat rock face was giving way, the cliffs opening onto a little cove. The cliff rose up again on the other side, some fifty spans away.
She had no idea how long she’d been lost in thought; riding Knot had become second nature to her, but he was very fast, and she was sure she’d never been here before.
She directed Knot around the corner carefully and slowly; rounding a bend as sharp as that was a complicated affair. Doing so required that Pernie turn to face the rock, and that Knot bend himself around the corner and stop while she scooted around him from one face to the next. But soon they were around it, and she saw that she’d come upon a horseshoe-shaped cove. It was at least two hundred spans deep and nearly as wide at its widest point toward the back. And it had a bright pink beach!
Pernie sent Knot a threatening thought and had him descend at a gradual angle until they could get to the narrow strip of sand. It was obvious that this place was like no other beach she’d seen before, and she’d seen plenty since coming to String. For starters, the sand was as pink as a poodle’s tongue, and it was so soft it reminded her of goose down like the kind Kettle made pillows with, luxurious and inviting. She stepped off Knot and hopped around in it for a time, enjoying the warmth and softness of it on her feet. She flung handfuls of it into the air and saw that it sparkled like a million tiny jewels.
She paused, realizing that she’d been giggling loudly, and turned quickly round, looking back the way she had come. Djoveeve was nowhere to be found. Though that was hardly cause for comfort given the nature of what the ancient woman had been doing these last three hundred years.
She tipped her head back and scanned the edge of the cliff all around, rather like Djoveeve had been doing while searching for her back at the crater they’d been practicing in. There was no sign of movement up there, though there might have been a hundred elves hiding in the trees for all Pernie could tell.
She brought her gaze back to the cove itself and saw that the crescent-shaped beach fronted an odd stand of trees, hundreds and hundreds of them, all roughly the same. They were palm trees, not unlike those that she’d seen all over the island here, but these, all of them, grew in pairs, two trunks wound around together, and seeming to share a single tuft of fronds at the top, a great mass of them all jumbled together like the green head of some spiked mace.
She went immediately to investigate, bidding Knot to curl up in a ball with just the right dose of fear, a mental blast of pain, his own, remembered and echoed back at him. It worked, of course, and confident that he was properly subdued, she left him rolled up there to go see about the trees.
Upon closer inspection, she discovered that the palm trunks had a texture like hard wax, each of them soft at the surface, but firm enough when pressed. She tried to cut into one of them with her fingernail, but she could not, and for a time, it amused her to think that they might be made out of enchanted snot.
She strolled from one to the next, noting that some had round growths like coconuts on them and some did not. But beyond this difference, they were all the same variety, and were it not for the random and haphazard dispersing of the trees, she might have thought they’d been planted here all at once.
The cove was much deeper than it looked from high above, and Pernie spent nearly an hour wandering around in its depths before she grew bored of its constancy. Unlike the rest of the jungle on the island, this place was completely without variety. After a time, she decided there was nothing novel about the trees at all.
So she returned to the beach and Knot still lying there in a ball.
She bade him unroll himself and checked his thoughts to see if he was hungry. He was, which was not a surprise. She didn’t mind feeding him just now, as it gave her something to do.
With a great deal of grunting and yanking, she pulled the silk bag filled with sap off her spear shaft, making it little more than a slender quarterstaff. Still, it would suffice, and she took it right out into the waves. Surely there would be some shallow-water fish to find.
She spent some time wading deeper and deeper out, and by the time she was nearly to the mouth of the cove, which she recognized by the change in water color as the seabed dropped off steeply over a shelf, she heard the familiar bark of Djoveeve calling her name. “Do not move another step,” the old woman called, just emerging from her jaguar form. “Come back inland now.”
“No,” shouted Pernie. “Don’t tell me what to do.” Just for that, she made her way directly toward the edge of the sea shelf rather than looking around for fish. Besides, she’d probably find the fish she was looking for out there.
Had it not been for the fact that her spear shaft stuck out a pace in front of her, Pernie would have walked right into the magic barrier that evaporated the smooth black wood instead. The back half of her weapon dipped into the water behind her, having lost the counterbalance of the front, and it was the reflex following that feeling that stopped her, even before her brain had time to make sense of what her eyes had seen.
She stared at the scant half-hand’s width of black wood that remained jutting out from where she gripped the weapon in her fist. There was a faint and unfamiliar smell, and the end where it had been dissolved was cut cleanly and polished as smoothly as if a craftsman had decided to make it that way.
She flipped what remained of it around and, taking a half step back, poked it forward again.