“Looks like you’re the one wanted, Red.” A scrawny little courier nudged Connor.
“So it seems.” Connor gathered up his markers. “Think it means extra pay?”
“Extra trouble’s more like it,” the naval mate said sourly, “from all the running around I saw on the Admiral’s flagship last night.” She quirked a wry smile. “If you’re an oaf, why’s the Harbor Jaw want you?”
“Because he’s your good-at-his-job oaf, as opposed to the rest of us stupid, lazy, rotten, thieving, and so on types of oaf,” the tall guard retorted, and everyone who was used to the Harbor Commander’s insults, which were both plentiful and equally spread about, nodded in agreement. “But Red, here, is your rarity: your real oaf, of the sort that trips over his own feet.”
Connor left on the others’ good-natured laughter, smiling and shaking his head.
You’re seen just once stumbling on the cobblestones, and everyone calls you an oaf. That was all right. He was used to it. People had been calling him an absent-minded oaf, a fool, a stumbling fumbler, all his life, because only a very few knew the truth: that when his gaze was turned upward in seeming vacancy, he was listening to the speech of birds. Or when he was standing in the stable looking as if he’d lost his wits, he was listening to the rumbles and whuffs of the horses, and what they had to say about their riders. Most of which he would never repeat.
He’d understood the speech of animals and birds all his life, and only within the past couple of years had he come to perceive the long, slow rhythms of thought shared by trees, plains-connected grasses, and other silent, living things.
But to his fellow humans he was absent-minded, maybe a little slow, who could fight well with a quarterstaff but refused to carry a sword. He also had a knack for using artifacts of the very old, very mysterious magic left behind by the Iyon Daiyin.
And so he had an easy life here, with good pay. All he had to do was sit with the magical object called the Eye, and determine through its changing colors if those the Commander had cause to question spoke the truth as they knew it. It turned out Connor was the very best at that.
He reached for the staff leaning against the door and hurried out into the court. The day was hot. Sun glared off the stones. In the distance, sea birds squabbled over food. He looked about for the pair of jackdaws that had so unaccountably appeared on his travels the summer before, and several times since, usually when his life was about to change.
Uh oh. There, and there. One perched on the roof of the Commander’s headquarters, the other on the roof of the thick stone building used as a holding cell for prisoners. Their black jackdaw heads twitched from side to side, first one eye, then the other, but the birds did not cry out.
Extra guards had been posted at every pathway leading up or down, as well as around the building. As he passed, they nodded or flicked hands in greeting, and Connor nodded back.
Connor reached the doorway just as a tall older woman emerged, the other Eye-Reader. “There you are. Commander wants you for this one.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “This is a stinker, everyone’s sayin’.”
Connor lowered his voice. “One of the Skull Pirates?”
“Near as bad. Some say worse. One of the rowers told us they think they caught one a’ Black Hood o’ Tomad’s fleet.”
Connor whistled softly as the woman gave him a grateful smile and retreated to the scribes’ chamber, which had been her first job until the Commander discovered that sometimes she could “read” the Eye. But it always gave her a terrible headache. Connor was the only one who could read it all the time.
Connor slipped past the waiting room where all the first-year runners waited to be sent on errands. He ducked past the extra guards, and the sea captains in the green of the Okidai Navy.
As soon as Connor reached the doorway, the Commander, a short, squat man with a long gray beard, sat back in his chair. “There you are!”
Connor rested his staff just inside the door.
The tall, thin Fleet Admiral was also there, his lined, sour face impatient. His fine green coat was freshly brushed, and his scarlet sash of office meant he was going up the mountain to the royal castle for an interview. The Admiral, everyone knew, hated being on land, and he also hated dressing up, so his appearance meant not just urgent but
royal
business.
Connor bowed to both, then moved to the carved wooden chest on the other side of the room. No one liked to touch the strange object called the Eye, though everyone who came looking for a job was tried out on it as a matter of course.
Connor lifted it out, careful to grasp it by the twisted brass supporting rods that were made in the form of vines. He avoided touching the sphere set within it.
The Admiral stared at it in distrust, scooting his chair away from where Connor was expected to sit.
Connor set the Eye carefully on the little table that was his station during his work day. The Eye was not glass, or crystal, or metal, but some strange combination of them all. Not only did the room reflect from its surface in brilliantly colored distortion, but it glittered with colors whose source no one could guess. Satisfied that it was stable, Connor dropped onto the waiting stool.
“You ready?” the Admiral snapped.
“Yes,” Connor said.
The Admiral turned to the Commander, who spoke to the guard messenger standing at the door: “Bring in the prisoner.” As the boy vanished in the direction of the stone holding cell, the Commander said to Connor, “There was a sea battle just beyond Purba. Most of the pirates had some kind of magical device that cloaked their longboats and helped them escape under the cover of rain.”
Magic—and pirates. That sounded bad.
“Someone thinks these pirates might be part of the Black Hood of Tomad’s fleet. You know how many rumors we’ve been hearing that they have magical devices to cloak their ships.”
Tomad was the name of the island cluster farthest east of the archipelago. Pirates had taken it some years ago, that much Connor had heard in local gossip. The rumors now insisted someone new had command, someone far worse than the former pirate commander. He was only known by the nickname ‘Black Hood.’
“So you’re looking for proof of the magic from this prisoner?” Connor asked.
The Commander nodded. “Most of ‘em got away in the boats, but this fellow was drunk, fell overboard, and no one wanted to come back and get him, so the Admiral put out a boat and plucked him out of the water.”
A pair of strong guards entered with a tousled, glum pirate between them, a scarred man of about forty. He looked as if had spent most of those forty years doing violent things against his fellow humans.
The guards thrust him onto a stool facing the Eye.
“You know what that is, don’t you?” the Commander said. “In case you don’t, it’s the Eye of Truth. If you lie, the stone shows it.”
“So?” the pirate snarled, crossing his arms. “What’s it to me? You Okidaino fools don’t hang or burn pirates, I know that much.”
“No one ever escapes the work parties,” the Harbor Commander said, smiling. “You get a nice magical bracelet that keeps you right in your place, all orderly and law-abiding. And if you decide to stray, well, you fall down like a sack of stones until your keepers decide to haul you up again and put you to work.”
Connor hid a grin. The Commander was both loud and rude to his subordinates, but when it came to questioning prisoners he was more polite than a courtier.
“And while it is true that on this island the death penalty is forbidden by law, you will not escape discomfort. For every lie you tell us, you will spend time in the stocks, before your sentence for whatever acts of piracy you’ve committed even begins. Do you know how much people around here hate pirates?” the Commander asked with great cheer. “Do you know the favorite game of the children in the harbor? Most of them are sons and daughters of those who have been victims of pirates. They like to play target practice with the garbage and droppings they pick up off the streets. I assure you, they
never
tire of target practice if they have a pirate to pelt.”
The pirate spat on the floor.
“Ready?” the Commander asked Connor.
The Admiral watched, his brow furious.
Connor carefully laid his hand on the sphere, and as always, felt the magic settle around him like a mantle made of cloud. The others quickly looked away from the Eye. Connor had learned that they thought the magical object somehow read their minds and showed their thoughts in those ever-winking and spinning colors. It was useless to explain that that wasn’t how it worked. He’d discovered that most people were afraid of powerful magical objects that they didn’t understand.
“Who was your prey?”
“No one. I come off of merchants out o’ Denlieff,” the pirate growled.
The Admiral and the Commander turned to Connor, who watched colors coalescing around their reflections in the Eye: the deep red of anger in the Admiral, the green of intent mixed with the orange of enjoyment in the Commander—and the darkness of the deliberate lie around the pirate. He never told them about their own revealing colors.
“He’s lying,” Connor said.
“No I ain’t!”
The Admiral snorted. “Stocks. I saw several children down there with a bushel of rotted stenchpuff berries.”
“Our friend here does seem to be volunteering for target practice,” the Commander suggested, grinning. “I do so hate it when the breeze carries the smell all the way up our mountain. Strange, how the sloonge bugs just love that stuff, and crawl all over the pirates’ skin, lapping it up.”
“I ain’t lyin’! That thing is just—” The pirate cursed, long and loud.
The Commander said, “One more chance. State your name, and where you were born.”
“Lemoal Vebb—”
“That’s true,” Connor said, seeing the flicker of blue around the pirate’s head.
“—of Arpalon.”
The colors darkened again.
“Lie.”
“All right, guards, take him out—”
The pirate grimaced. “I was born in Damatras.”
“True.”
The pirate shifted uneasily on his stool.
“Who was your prey?”
The pirate shifted again. “Free trader. Brig.”
“A free trader!” The Admiral snorted. “Just another pirate.” He frowned. “But there were three pirates in your fleet when we intercepted you. I saw all that fire damage, and no prize.”
“We lost. Had to run,” the pirate muttered.
“Lost? Against a single trader, a brig?” The Admiral hooted, looking Connor’s way.
Connor shrugged—it was true.
“Damage,” the pirate snarled. “Bad storm.”
The Eye flowed with darker blues shot with red.
“We were in that storm as well, and there was not enough lightning for all the fire damage you took,” the Admiral said.
Outside the window behind the Admiral, a shadow flickered—a winged shadow. One of the jackdaws.
“So you are part of this new pirate commander’s fleet, then,” the Admiral stated. “The new one infesting Tomad Islands.”
The pirate shook his head. “Never heard o’ him—”
“Lie.”
“Only new hires,” the pirate muttered. “Testing us first.”
Both the Admiral and the Commander turned to Connor, who nodded.
“So you were hired to attack a free trader brig? Why?”
The pirate spat again, but the colors around him were the murky red-shot brown of fear.
The Admiral bunched up a fist, but the Harbor Commander raised a hand and said in a reasonable voice, “You are already in a lot of trouble, and I suspect your name has become known all over the main harbors of every southern island over a long, misspent career. Why not tell us why you were hired?”
“Because
he
will find out if I blab, that’s why,” the pirate snarled. “I’d rather sit in your stocks a year, or work in your mines ten years, for my own deeds, than tell you anything about
him
. He—he finds out. He
knows
, when people blab. And then he does things to you.”
“True,” Connor murmured. “At least, he believes it to be true.”
The pirate gave a grating laugh, one of those horrible laughs that has no humor in it. “Everyone says it’s true. You don’t want to cross Black Hood’s hawse. He has ears everywhere.”
The jackdaw drifted by the window again.
“That’s all I’m sayin’,” the pirate stated. “I’ll sit in your stocks. I’ll work in your mines. But if
he
finds out where I am, he will know I ain’t blabbed.”
And, on Connor’s nod, the Commander sighed. “Take him out.”
The guards tromped in, yanked up the pirate, and marched him away. The Admiral and the Commander looked at one another. “That’s the third one we’ve captured in as many months,” the Admiral said.
“We got two, last season. That pair didn’t even know as much as this one did.” The Commander sat back. “So you’ll cancel your interview with the king?”
The Admiral shook his head. “I can’t. I’ll have to go, even with no real information, except the reflected evidence, you might say. We know that this Black Hood is building a fleet, that much our friend Vebb told us. And it corroborates what I’ve gleaned elsewhere. I think we’re also seeing evidence that Black Hood is some kind of mage. I wish we knew whose ship they attacked—and why they attacked it.”
“What bothers me is his conviction that this Black Hood has spies everywhere. How? More important, who?”
Both men turned toward Connor, who watched their faces: question, doubt, then dismissal.
The Commander leaned forward, brows furrowed. “I know you’ve only been here a couple of months, boy, but I don’t take you for a spy. However, one thing I do know after a long career is, least heard, less said. Take off. You can have the rest of the day, since we brought you in early.”
Connor replaced the sphere in its case as the two moved away in low-voiced conversation. He retrieved his staff and walked to the other end of the court, away from the prison building. The jackdaws circled overhead, one high, one low.
Connor looked up, shading his hand against the sun, and said in his home language, “I wish you’d talk to me.”