Wolf's Blood (40 page)

“I don’t think so.”

“Then I think the matter is irrelevant to the current situation. Isende has no living parents whose permission she must ask. Indeed, I have the impression that even before we encountered them she and Tiniel had cut themselves off from their living kin in Gak. So, let us dismiss the matter of your appearance for a time, shall we? It is certainly something Isende could not have missed. If she has continued to show interest in you—as she has done—then she must have arrived at some agreement within herself regarding it.”

Plik poured hot water over tea leaves and brought the pot back to the table. Going to a small cabinet to one side of the room, he took out a sealed jar that held some rather hard cookies.

“They are fine if you dunk them first in your tea,” Plik said. “Otherwise, I have been told they break teeth. Now, let us talk about why you think that being on an island might be an element in a potential relationship with Isende.”

Derian nodded. “What if she’s only interested in me because there are so few available men?”

“That’s hardly true,” Plik said. “I can think of five or six unattached men who are of an age for Isende to be interested in them. If one raises the age limit, there are even more. True, few of these are from the New World, but given that Isende’s culture and yours are not at all alike, I cannot believe she is drawn to you simply because you remind her of home. If she was seeking that, Harjeedian would be a better candidate for her affections.”

Derian had to admit this was true.

“A more serious matter,” Plik went on, “would be if you fear that Isende is only interested in you because of your relative prominence in the local community.”

Derian hadn’t wanted to bring this up. It sounded too much like bragging, but the idea had occurred to him.

Plik went on, “This may be part of your appeal, but I think I detected some interest in you even before you acquired your role as informal mayor. Indeed, even in the early days of our meeting, she seemed interested in you.”

“A hero to the rescue,” Derian said, “one who rather inconveniently turns into his horse.”

Plik swatted Derian’s hand, dunked a cookie into a newly poured cup of tea, and said, “I thought we agreed that was not an issue. What is an issue is whether you wish to encourage Isende, or to put her off. I suggest you make your choice relatively soon. Her interest in you is more and more apparent, and over the last several days you have seemed to return it. As you noted, this is an island, and since there is very little to talk about, people pay an inordinate amount of attention to each other’s lives.”

“I know,” Derian said. “Half of what I do is straighten out mistakes regarding who is getting what from whom and why someone else should get what that one has. And I’ve heard gossip about other people. I guess I thought I’d been discreet enough that no one had noticed.”

“You have been, mostly,” Plik assured him, “but Isende has been watching you with hero worship in her eyes for quite a while now. You didn’t need to do much to raise speculation.”

Derian sighed. “So I do need to make a decision, soon, or that girl is going to feel a fool—and have nowhere to hide her head.”

“Don’t start up with her out of some misplaced pity,” Plik scolded. “That would be worse.”

“I know,” Derian said. “I know. It’s just it’s hard enough to believe any nice young woman could be interested in me, without worrying about conducting a relationship in public.”

Plik smiled. “Why not start by talking openly with Isende? Tell her your concerns. Find out what she thinks. Then move on from there. You might learn things about her you don’t even suspect.”

Derian looked suspiciously at the twinkling eyes framed in the raccoon mask. “You haven’t talked to her already, have you?”

Plik looked completely innocent. “Me? I’m more likely to talk to her brother. He is my closest neighbor. But as odd as you persist in seeing the maimalodalum—or creatures like yourself—I think we are all quite alike under our skins. Where romance enters the picture, the human heart beats very strongly.”

Derian dunked a cookie, and as he bit into it he found himself thinking of Firekeeper and her impossible love for a creature who didn’t even come close to matching her in shape or species. Now that he thought about it, he—especially if Isende was interested—had it easy.

BRYESSIDAN COULD HARDLY believe Horse Moon was galloping past the full, and that Lion Moon—and with it the launching of the fleet under the command of King Hurwin—was padding swiftly forward. The fleet would not finish grouping for at least a moonspan. Some estimates held that departure would not be possible until sometime in early Bear Moon—but that was hardly any time for the amount of work that still needed to be done.

The Kingdom of the Mires was supplying fewer troops than many of her neighbors; the restrictions enacted after King Veztressidan’s defeat meant that the Mires did not have a standing army, only a smaller force meant to deal with domestic problems. However, most of the healers who would sail with the fleet were coming from the Mires, as were boxes and bales of powders, tinctures, and ointments to treat both shipboard illnesses and battlefield injuries.

Then there was the influx of seagoing traffic through the Mires’ own harbors. Since Hearthome was providing the launch point for the fleet, her harbors were crowded with ships receiving crews, equipment. and, in many cases, final outfittings or repairs in suddenly overworked dockyards. Therefore, many of the smaller ships bringing supplies were coming into the Mires’ harbors, where goods and troops were off-loaded and sent overland into Hearthome.

Meanwhile, the lack of a standing army meant that the Mires was hard-pressed to supply the armed force they had agreed to have ready to send through their gate in no less than two moonspans, and quite probably less.

Timing could not be exact. The old ship’s logs and maps King Hurwin had found had been exhaustively analyzed, the material in them compared to similar material in records archived in seaboard lands such as the Mires, Hearthome, and u-Chival. When differing points of origin were taken into account, the records seemed to agree that the voyage to the Nexus Islands would take no less than half a moonspan, and possibly as much as a full moonspan.

Bryessidan had been to sea, but always as a passenger, never in command of a vessel. Without Gidji’s help, all the talk of tides, currents, predominant winds, calms, and other, less comprehensible things would have sent him into a temper. As it was, he listened with what patience he could, taking copious notes, and counting on Gidji to explain the details to him later.

And those “laters” were becoming harder and harder to find. Their regular private meals had become intermittent, for in addition to advising her husband, Queen Gidji was taking over more and more of the routine jobs of rulership, both in preparation for the regency, and to free the king to deal with all the new problems arising from the planned project.

There were times Bryessidan wished the newly allied lands could all sit down. admit this had been a bad idea, and go back to their previous lives. Then something would happen—like a sudden outbreak of the summer spots in Pelland—and an outcry would arise for some medication only the Mires could supply, and Bryessidan would curse the Nexans for breaking their treaty, closing off the gates, and leaving all those people to suffer and, quite possibly, die for lack of herbs that now must be prepared as medication in advance of shipping lest they lose their virtue in the journey overland.

We need those gates
, he found himself thinking over and over again.
The Nexans have no right to shut us off from them!

Bryessidan found himself almost longing for the midpoint of Lion Moon, for then the fleet would be launched, and there could be no more calls for just a few more boxes of powdered willow, no more ships crowding his harbors with supplies for the fleet. Then he could give his full attention to training his army, and reassuring them—and himself—that they were equal to anything they would encounter on the other side of the gate.

He wished he believed it. Ever since invasion had been agreed upon, the gates had been allowed to lie dormant. The hope was that the Nexans would relax the vigilance that had been so evident during earlier transitions.

Some of Bryessidan’s allies had even wondered if the Nexans would reinstate use of the gates before the invasion. Of these, some thought that this would negate the need for an invasion. Others, however, drunk on the prospect of controlling those gates, thought that the best course of action would be to continue the invasion as planned, to send through a few shipments of goods as before, as a distraction, but with the intention that when the ships were in position the invasion would go forward as planned.

That’s something we’ll need to resolve before the fleet departs,
Bryessidan thought as he moved to don the heavy leather armor he wore for practice with his troops.
Once the fleet has gone, changing plans is going to be difficult.

Surmounting the communication problem had been one of the biggest hurdles. In the days before the Sorcerer’s Bane, long-distance magical communication had been routine, if never simple. However, although some of the old spells still existed they did not seem to work. Amelo Soapwort said that the Once Dead had been working on the problem for years, and had come to the conclusion that the spells might have relied upon a talent that was gone forever—or at least had yet to resurface.

The best magical communication that could be managed now was over a range about the equivalent to a day’s steady march by a lightly armored soldier. This was useful on land, but would be useless once the fleet headed out toward the Nexus Islands. Amelo and his associates had started an ambitious program to make certain that at least one Once Dead in every gate-transition group would know the spell and be ready to use it to facilitate communication between teams.

That plan, however admirable it might seem, had raised an entirely new problem. How do you arm and armor a force without resorting to the very iron that would interfere with the use of magic for communication and defense and, of course, to operate the gates themselves?

Although the heat at which iron was treated to make steel did something so that the metal did not interfere with the use of magic to the same extent, still, in quantity it continued to have a deleterious effect on the Once Dead’s ability to use their varied powers. Spellcasters suffered the most, probably because their ability was the least internalized, and spellcasters were the ones whose abilities would be the most useful.

Once again, Bryessidan found himself and his more senior advisors in high demand. King Veztressidan had been forced to find solutions to these problems and others like them back when he had attempted to reunite—or conquer, it was all a matter of point of view—the continent. Now the same people who a matter of moonspans before had viewed Bryessidan askance because of their apprehension that he would be inclined to repeat his father’s venture were trying to find a tactful way to ask Bryessidan to share what had been learned at that time.

“And some don’t even bother to be tactful,” Bryessidan complained to Gidji during one of their rare private meetings. “Queen Iline of Hearthome had the gall to write and inform me that it was my duty as a member of the allied forces to ride to Hearthome immediately upon receipt of her letter and allow myself to be grilled. Oh, and I was to bring with me Amelo, and any of my father’s sorcerers who were available so that they could share what I—who after all had been rather young at the time—might not know.”

“I assume you didn’t agree,” Gidji said, smiling slightly as she cut into a pastry stuffed with a finely chopped blend of duck and spring cress.

“I did not,” Bryessidan said. “And you’ll be impressed to know that I didn’t even call her ambassador in and tell him what a presumptuous twit I thought his mistress was being. And let me tell you, I was tempted to do so. I kept having this sense, reading between the lines of that letter as it were, that Queen Iline was informing me I had better do as she wished, because I owed obedience to the other nations since they had not wiped out the Mires ten years ago.”

“More like eleven, now,” Gidji said. “Or close enough. Yes, I am pleased. I think that one of the unanticipated side effects of this venture is going to be that Queen Iline’s people are going to insist that she name an heir. Already people are saying that the son who is generaling Hearthome’s gate force deserves the honor as reward for his patriotism. That is making Azure Towers very unhappy. Queen Anitra has had enough problems with Hearthome without seeing a war leader named heir apparent to her enemy’s throne. Behind the scenes, Anitra has factions who favor an end to Iline’s perpetual harrying of Azure Towers agitating for a less military-minded heir.”

“And how does this affect us?” Bryessidan asked.

“When we come out of this conflict,” Gidji said, “not only will our gate be reactivated, but we will have a standing military once more. Queen Anitra will support our keeping that force intact, because she can use her support of our need for a standing military to emphasize the threat she sees in Hearthome.”

“Ah …” Bryessidan said. “I’m afraid I’ve been thinking so much about immediate problems, I hadn’t considered any of this. For weeks, I haven’t thought beyond our taking the Nexus Islands.”

Gidji smiled. “You may have not, but there are those who are already thinking to those days. There are even those who say that this alliance is the beginning of a reunited Pelland—the continent as it was, not the kingdom that has claimed the name. Interesting, isn’t it? Your father’s dream may come true.”

“My father’s dream was that he rule all Pelland.”

“He or his son,” Gidji replied. “Come, my dear, think. Queen Anitra has named no heir apparent, and her people are happy enough with her that they have not agitated for her to do so. She might accept the Mire’s protection at first—later she might find it wise to make you or one of our children heir apparent.”