Treason's Shore (52 page)

Unfortunately, she was the one surprised when her misgivings were not shared by the coalition of Sarendan independents. They welcomed Fangras’ return.

And so did the Chwahir, which was an even greater surprise.

She watched the ship visits through her glass as the independents and the Fox Banner captains traded news.
Where the Chwahir approve, trouble follows,
Deliyeth thought.

Until the Fox Banner Fleet arrived, the captains had agreed to meet aboard Captain Deliyeth’s own flagship to plan the attack. Deliyeth heard less planning than arguing.

Everyone agreed that Ymar’s main port, Jaro, was the most important at that end of the strait.

They agreed that this was the reason the last remaining outpost of Venn held it.

They agreed that the small but effective fleet of Venn warships that had appeared to reinforce Jaro when the winds had changed that summer had to mean more were coming.

The Venn themselves had put out the word that they would return in force. But the long summer season with its driving west winds had brought no more Venn. That fact, coupled with rumors of the Venn defeat by the Marlovans the summer before that, had caused this gathering: Deliyeth knew that despite all the trumpetings about freeing the strait from the oppressors, everyone wanted to make sure no one else got control of Jaro.

What they couldn’t agree on was how to get rid of the Venn once they drew them out into the water. No one wanted a land battle, as rumor had it there were far too many Venn warriors left in Ymar.

The flat-faced, black-haired Chwahir insisted they fight in battle lines, because they always fought in line. The flamboyantly dressed east coast independents wanted to try running attacks, which might work against a haphazard fleet but not against Venn. You didn’t frighten Venn by sailing down their sides shooting fire arrows. They sent their swift, maneuver-able raiders to surround
you,
and next thing you knew, you were either dead or floating in the water, hoping the undersea folk didn’t drag you down and put fins on you.

The half a dozen determined Ymarans, whose entire kingdom was on the verge of rising in a last and desperate attempt to win free of the Venn yoke, watched everyone. They had not had a good navy for two generations, the last two queens having relied on trade and diplomacy to ward off trouble.

This unwarlike policy, all knew, had drawn the Venn to occupy Ymar as their first step in taking all of Drael. So the Ymarans were forced into alliance with Everon, which still had a semblance of a navy—mostly converted fishers that had taken refuge with the rest of the Fleet Guild off of Bren. The rest had been burned or taken outright.

But the alliance refused to accept Delieyeth as commander. “You never won anything,” one of the independents said bluntly. “All you did was hide.”

In the two weeks between the arrival of the Fox Banner Fleet and its five flagships, four meetings were held, each breaking up when no one could agree with anyone else. Angry captains rowed back to complain to subordinates, and as soon as the sun went down, sent unlit rowboats back and forth to confer secretly with allies.

Then the rakish, black-sided trysail
Death
appeared with four other capital ships sailing on station as exact as any navy could wish for, the fast little scout
Vixen
just aft of
Death
.

Deliyeth watched the pirates brail up with a well-trained flash of sail—and hated how rowboats splashed down from every one of the allied flagships. Though they all rowed toward her, as they had been doing, she knew before they converged that leadership of the allied fleet waited somewhere in the air for that hard-faced pirate captain to take.

Cold late-winter light rippled over the plain bulkheads of her cabin as the gathered captains argued, reasoned, pointed, thumped, redrew their favorite battle plans on the slate, and smacked gloved hands on her chart depicting Jaro and the coastal inlets and islands surrounding The Fangs.

Deliyeth glared at the Fox Banner commander, a tall, black-clad, red-haired tough with a bloodred ruby hanging from his ear. A
pirate
trophy, flaunted before law-abiding people. He had spoken scarcely a dozen words since his arrival on deck, and all those had been greetings or acknowledgment of introductions. But as soon as the meeting started, Deliyeth noticed irritably how all the others turned his way as the Chwahir admiral Halog issued a stately reiteration of her old argument in her slow, difficult Sartoran.
At least no one accepted her as commander, either. Everybody hates the Chwahir
.

As soon as Halog was done, one of the Khanerenth captains thumped the table. “You can’t fight in line, they got those big three-masters with those prows. They’ll just run you down!” Then he turned his head, and gestured to the pirate. “Tell them, Fox!”

Silence inside the cabin made the outside sounds distinct: the thump of feet on deck, the creak of masts and clack of blocks. Water whoosh-splashed along the hull and in the distance, a first mate bawled orders onboard one of the alliance fleet’s vessels lying a cable’s length away.

Captain Deliyeth watched in disgust as everyone waited for Fox to speak as he gazed at her chart. She said, “I don’t recall ever hearing that
you’ve
fought Venn on the sea.”

“Haven’t,” Fox retorted. His Sartoran was excellent, though the consonants were clipped in the manner of the Marlovans. “But I’ve seen them drilling. Their Battlegroups are twenty-seven ships. They travel in line when they’re on the sweep, but form up into the arrowhead if they go on the attack.”

He leaned forward, picking up the chalk. When no one objected, he pulled the slate toward him and used the sponge to wipe away Deliyeth’s own carefully drawn plan, which was a last and desperate attempt to please everyone by having them attack in groups. Only who would go first?

Fox sketched three inverted triangles forming a larger inverted triangle, and then those triangles, in triplicate, formed into yet a larger triangle, all sailing in such tight formation they would be as effective as a real arrowhead in cutting enemy battle lines. “This is what we will see. The Venn were so well drilled they stayed on station no matter how bad the weather, so that attempting to cut between them could get you rammed as well as surrounded.”

Deliyeth and Halog both had to concede.

“This is how their Commander Durasnir defeated us in your year 3903,” Halog said. “We had nearly won, but our forces did not hold line.” She indicated Deliyeth and herself. “Chwahir and Everoneth separated, each leaving the other to first strike in combing that formation.”

“You can’t comb an arrowhead like combing a line,” Fox said. “What we call threading a needle. You’ll find yourself surrounded, and while you’re desperately putting out the fires they pinpoint all over your ship, their marines board fore and aft.”

No one argued. While no ships boarded by the Venn had survived, the older Chwahir and Deliyeth herself had witnessed this tactic. They had only survived by outrunning their chasers.

“The one advantage we’ve got is when we have the wind, we are much faster.” Fox swept a hand over the chart. “We have to use that.”

The Chwahir just sat, watchful dark gazes moving between the speakers. The Khanerenth captains cut in with “Hah!” “That’s right!” The Ymarans whispered.

“My suggestion is to adapt their tactics. We send a line to cut across upwind of them, laying down a heavy smoke layer. Then we send our fastest ships in a modified arrowhead to wedge between their first and third groups, using fire heavily so they won’t want to close. We’re adept at using fire, and even Venn can’t see any better than we can in smoke. If they stay too tight, they might ram one another.”

Captain Deliyeth shifted uncomfortably.
Pirate tactics
. Ship battles, when necessary, were board and carry. Those were the rules of the sea. You didn’t kill unarmed civilians, and if someone surrendered, you either put them overboard in their longboats, or treated them decently until they paid their ransom or the king traded them for something he wanted.

But the Venn killed everyone onboard and took the ships to be remade in their own fashion.

“We want them to break formation,” Fox continued. “If they do that, we can take them piecemeal in squads. They have bigger ships, but we’ve got the numbers. And speed.”

One of the Chwahir said, “They have the raiders.”

“So we set our small craft on the raiders, teams of three to one. For now—and this is why we need to act fast—we have the Venn outnumbered.”

“Though their capital ships are bigger than anything we sail.” Commander Halog spoke, nodding slightly at Fox. “They know we are out here. We Chwahir will attack their guard ships around Jaro. Draw them out.”

That gnarled old woman hadn’t given Captain Deliyeth that much cooperation in weeks of talk.

Deliyeth said, “I concur that the Chwahir can draw them out, as they have the biggest fleet among us. But who is going to lead this wedge aimed between the Venn arrowhead vessels?”

Fox’s eyes widened. “Didn’t I say the fastest ships?” He laid his hands mockingly to his chest and opened them out.

The captains cut glances sideways at each other, making little movements of shoulders, hands, heads; a consensus reached without a word spoken.

Captain Deliyeth forced her voice to neutrality. “Then let us depart at once. I smell spring coming off the land, and that means we won’t be able to trust to the east wind staying steady.”

Chapter Thirty-three

“
R
ISE up, Capn’nan!” Keth Arveas-Andahi whispered, shaking Captain Han. “We’re riding out
today!
”

Han snorted and sat up in bed. Cold air touched the side of her face, and she wiped her mouth against her shoulder. She’d been awake worrying and hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Somehow it had happened, but the way she felt, she’d slept maybe a glass or two.

The girls’ dormitory was icy cold, most burrowed in their blankets. Han scrambled out of bed, the cold stones jerking her into wakefulness.

“Meet us downstairs soon’s you’re dressed.” Keth ran out, his new boots clacking on the stones.

Han scowled at her new gear bag, packed and ready. She hurried with her travel clothes down to the bath. Afterward she met the rest in the mess hall, where nearly the entire castle was gathered to see them off.

The Harskialdna was everywhere, joking and laughing with men and women, even the children. Ndand-Jarlan surprised him with a fierce hug just before he sat down to the table and whispered something that caused him to laugh.

The men sent up a shout that rang against the stones above, smoke-blackened from the fires of the of summer 3914, or the Fourteen, as the Marlovans had begun to call the Battle of Andahi.

Han scarcely noticed what she was eating. The time had come, and even more than before she veered between pride and shame, as most of her friends gave her little mementos they’d made, and the adults whispered how proud they were of her. Those whispers made her feel worse, and she was glad when they mounted up and rode out the south gate.

The ride up was slow, mostly accomplished single file, as the sides of the pass were still piled high with snow. Each morning the children stamped the frozen runnels of snowmelt, enjoying the tinkle and crunch. Those first few days Keth and Han stayed together, neither daring to impose their scrubby young selves on the dragoons who had been riding around with the Harskialdna all winter.

But by the end of the first week, Keth had begun daring a question or two, and when he didn’t get swatted down for his temerity, he’d taken to riding with the men.

Han rode behind the King’s Runners, staring at their blue-covered backs and wishing she dared to talk to them.

As Inda rode slowly up the pass, he thought about how good it felt to be going home, leaving behind a job well done. A job that had been fun. He chuckled from time to time, relishing the memory of his and Cama’s strutting ride all over the north. Why couldn’t life always be that fun? They’d never tired of retelling the old jokes from their scrub days, but even more fun was that competition to outdo the other in frost. One day Inda managed to get fourteen weapons distributed about his person before taking horse. Though the prick of knife blades in odd places was annyoing, he’d almost laughed aloud at the faces gathered alongside the road to watch them ride.