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  “Tomorrow, we take the road and go directly to Rochil.” He pressed his fists to his temples to alleviate the pain. It did not help, and blood ran from his nose. It was dark enough that Vlad did not see it. She is so close. Only seven miles. Tomorrow I will free her.

  “Are you sure? Our scouts did not find them, and Windcross is in front of us, perhaps ten miles from here. There are plenty of places to go from there.”

  Seven miles as the crow flies from here to Rochil. How many miles on the road? Ten? Twenty? “There is something that you should know. I have no idea why, but I am Fate’s Seer of the Realm now, and I can see things from far away. I know it sounds strange, but trust me, and keep this to yourself; no one else must know about it. I saw Saliné and Bucur at the Albatross Inn in Rochil. I know the place; I stayed there two years ago.”

  Under the faint light of the dawn, they moved on the steep slope leading down from the ridge. It took them more than an hour to reach the road, when the first golden spark spread along the horizon – the path led east again – and another hour to reach the still sleeping town. The gate was not yet open. Codrin knocked on the hard wood until a guard finally came, annoyed by the intrusion.

  “What do you want? Don’t you see that the gate is closed? It will open in half an hour.”

  “A girl was kidnapped three days ago and brought to Rochil last evening. She is in danger. Let me enter with five men.” Codrin stretched out his hand and placed a galben in the man’s palm.

  The guard blinked and tested the coin without looking at it. This is my lucky day. A galben will pay for two nights with my whore. But he can pay for wine for one evening for me and my men too. “I need another galben for my men.” He got it and opened the gate.

  “Vlad, you stay here with the rest of the men. Stay out of sight and watch the gate. Pintea, Lisandru and you three,” Codrin gestured quickly at his men, “come with me.”

  They rode like a storm through the silent streets, and the few people out walking leaned stepped hastily back against the walls. Their horses’ hooves scraped sparks from the old cobblestones, metallic noise chasing the silent morning, echoing between the walls, waking the still sleeping town.

  “Keep my horse ready,” Codrin said and dismounted in front of the inn. “Pintea, come with me.” There was a man standing guard in front of the door, but he moved quickly away, as soon as the two men walked toward him, and let them enter. There was no one in the saloon. Codrin went to the counter and banged his fist on it. “Innkeeper!” he shouted, and a burly man came out from a room behind the counter. “A girl with auburn hair, dressed in a dark blue riding suit, was kidnapped. I have information that she is now here.”

  The man looked at him, pondering how much he could extract for his knowledge. A second look at Codrin changed his mind. “They left an hour ago. Go to the harbor. Look for the Sea Lion.”

  “Thank you,” Codrin said and stormed out of the inn.

  It took them fifteen minutes to reach the harbor. Already far, Sea Lion was heading toward the high sea. Codrin closed his eyes. There was no way to reach the ship, and there was no other ship in the small harbor, only boats. He took out his spyglass and searched the Sea Lion: on the stern, he saw Saliné. She was alone.

  “Lisandru, take my banner and plant it there.” He pointed at a tall pole on the edge of the quay.

  The young man halted his horse close to the pole and, while Pintea kept it in place, he stood up in the saddle, placed an arm around the pole and unfurled the banner in the moderate wind.

  On the ship, Saliné was looking at the quay, knowing that whatever chance she had to escape had disappeared when the ship set sail. She saw riders coming to the quay, but they were far away, and she ignored them at first. Then she saw the banner. Codrin. She smiled sadly through her tears and waved.

  Codrin waved at her too, but she could not see his gesture, and even with his spyglass, he could not see Saliné’s tears running down her face, stolen by the breeze, small salted drops landing in an ocean as large as her sorrow.

  You came too late Codrin, but at least you tried.

  Shoulders slumped, Codrin stood with the spyglass stuck to his eye. Slowly, Saliné became a point, then the ship became a point, lost in the distance. Unaware of anything around him, he watched, gripping the spyglass with one hand and the sea wall with the other.

  Vlad placed a hand on Codrin’s shoulders and said, “There is nothing more we can do now. We need to go.”

  Codrin forced himself to stand up straight and take a deep breath. Eyes closed, he saw Rochil on the map in Severin and cursed it. He had lost Saliné again. And later, when they asked around the harbor, he was not able to learn where the Sea Lion was heading. Half of the people he asked said south, the other half said north.

  Chapter 4 – Io Capitan

  The Mother Storm hit them in the evening of the same day they left Rochil, under Codrin’s sad scrutiny. The wind came from south-west, danced in a frenzy, then turned north-west. Like a fish caught on the hook, the ship followed the wind, and for three days they traveled farther and farther from land. Even Dolgan, the tough captain of the ship, one of the only five captains given the title of Io Capitan on both the ocean and Southern Sea, prayed to Fate, his eyes fixing the compass while there were still some traces of light. In the sailors’ world, the Io Capitan was the equivalent of the Wraith for the protectors or the Black Dervils for the mercenaries, and in the old Alban language, Io Capitan meant ‘I the Captain’. The compass was an Alban relic, and had been his family’s pride; only a few remained in existence after six hundred years. There were old maps too, but no one had gone so far west for many generations. His father was a captain, and so were his father and his father before. Their stories were passed from father to son, and there was one which made Dolgan tremble. The story of the Misty Island, a deserted place where the water and wind were poisoned.

  Keeping his hands steady on the helm, Dolgan closed his eyes. The darkness was now so deep that eyes closed or eyes open made no difference. “Farno, Matais, Paulus,” he whispered backward a long list of ancestors, and continued up to the ninth one, Nicos. “That was the one... That was the one who went to the Misty Island. Most of his men died, touched by some plague. Only Nicos and three sailors escaped from a crew of twenty. How did they manage to escape and return? He was a tough man, an Io Capitan too.” Eyes closed, he tried to remember the Jurnos, the family journal that was buried in the cellar of his ancestral home. Each time a new generation took command of a ship, the novice captain, the Novo, was brought to the cellar by the elders, the journal was unearthed and he was given one night to read it. The next morning, the Novo would bury it again, before going to take command of his ship. Years later, when the captain had retired and become a Veteranis, he would go again to the cellar, to write his story in the Jurnos, if he had one to share. Not all the captains experience trouble or wonder worth leaving to posterity. Eight more captains had lived and died after Nicos, but only two had added a new story to the Jurnos, and they were far less important, and terrifying, than the tale of Misty Island and its dangers.

  Something clicked in Dolgan’s mind, and he remembered what he had read twenty years ago, when he was the Novo. The plague, and even worse the descriptions, the drawings. Even after so many years his stomach churned. Hours after being touched by the plague wind, the men started to rot alive. They could no longer eat or drink, and withered in atrocious pain. Their hair fell out; their bodies shriveled. Rotten, their flesh fell too, revealing their bones. Within three days all were corpses. “I don’t want to go there. I prefer to die by drowning, than by the plague.” He strained his muscles and turned the wheel a notch. The storm tried to wrestle him, but Dolgan was a strong man, and the ship changed course, heading a little more to the west. Its hard timbers complained and trembled in the wind. It may shatter, Dolgan thought, but the ship resisted the assault of the storm, at least for now.

  Chased by the gale, they continued west-north-west for
two more days, and Dolgan rarely left his place on deck. The wind of the storm tore at him, biting deep, but the knowledge that if they did not make a landfall soon, they would all be dead when the ship reached the end of the ocean, the end of the world, bit even harder. The ship shivered in a sudden squall, leaning to port at a dangerous angle, pulling him away from his worries, and Dolgan held on to a spar near the wheel until the deck returned to an almost horizontal position, timbers squealing. More turns like this, and all my worries will sink together with the ship.

  The sudden shock threw people out of their beds, and they struggled to recover in the darkness. Saliné occupied a cabin with Aron, Bucur and their Spatar. None of them had eaten since they left the Albatross Inn. Their stomachs empty, they still had the impulse to retch from time to time. In the first two days, they tried to wash the vomit from the floor, then they gave up, and the room smelled worse than a military camp latrine. Strangely, they became accustomed to the stench. Of all of them, Aron was the most affected by the rolling and pitching of the ship, and he remained in his bed, more unconscious than not. After the most recent shock, he was now lying in the middle of the room, his clothes soaked in whatever vomit was on the floor. A rat scurried in the shadows cast by the hanging oil lantern on the wall. It sniffed at him and went away. Bucur was able to grasp the foot of the bed, and was now lying along it, unable to stand. For whatever reason, Saliné and the Spatar had fared better and, grudgingly, they climbed into their beds.

  When the ship recovered, Dolgan forced himself to consult the map deeply engraved in his mind. There were precious old maps in his cabin, but after so many years, he no longer needed them. It did not take him long to recall what he already knew; there was no land toward the west, and soon the ocean would fall off the end of the world. The Misty Island was not a land; it was a coffin. The worst of the worst. The sailors were accustomed to the idea of drowning; they were not accustomed to the horror of rotting alive.

  There’s more storm to come, Dolgan thought, and perhaps things that no one has seen for centuries. And a lot of unknown sea. I fear the unknown, and I dream of it. Perhaps the unknown will put some land in front of us. Any land but the Misty Island. The tiniest isle with a bay to shelter us from the storm. I’ve set myself against the sea all my life and I’ve always won. I always will.

  Dolgan was hungry and his body ached from gripping the wheel for so long, but he could trust no one else to steer the ship now. With the next lighting, he forced his eyes to check the compass and his brain to calculate an approximate position. He failed. The cut of the cold wind stopped his mind from wandering and kept him awake. To sleep now would be more than foolish, it would be death. You’ll wake from that sleep in the deep seas, among mermaids, he thought, stretched his arms to ease the cramped muscles in his back, and pulled his cloak tighter around him. They say that the mermaids are beautiful and treacherous. I would like to feel one in my arms. Are they warm, like a woman? Or cold, like a fish? There was nothing to see through the darkness, yet in his mind he saw that the sails were trimmed and the wheel was secured. He saw a mermaid too. He could not decide if she was warm or cold. Patiently, he settled back and prayed to Fate for his tiny island.

  “Go below, Captain. I will take this watch.” The Secondo was pulling himself up by the railings, his face discolored with fatigue, eyes sunken. He leaned heavily against the rails to steady himself, retching a little. “I dreamt of land, sunny and calm, and a young woman making food for me, then coming to my bed. Venison and that good wine from Tolosa. I don’t remember what was better, the woman or the food. All I had when I woke up was more retching. There’s a strong reek of death below decks. I’ll take the watch. What’s the course?”

  “Wherever the wind takes us.” Go to sleep for an hour. Even for fifteen minutes, Dolgan, and you’ll be fresh for another half day.

  “Where’s the haven you promised us? Fate knows that there is no land from here to where the water falls off the end of the world. We’ll all die.”

  “You are drunk with fear. Hold your tongue and go back below. Sleep.” If you can.

  “Drunk from too much water,” Secondo mumbled, framed in the low light of the sea lantern that hung above his head, swaying with the pitch of the ship. He shrugged and left the captain alone.

  I’m tired. I’m so tired. Dolgan closed his eyes, and opened them quickly. But I feel something. My fingers are itching. There is something there, in front of us. Death perhaps.

  The lightning brought the world to life. It was a thick thing, like the vein of a great god.

  “Land ahead. Turn to port. Turn to port!” the watcher cried.

  Dolgan felt the cry more than he heard it at first. Then, in the howl of the wind, he heard the wailing scream of the lookout again. He unlocked the wheel, and turned it hard to port. He exerted all the strength he could muster as the rudder crashed against the current. The whole ship shuddered. With the next flash of lightning he saw: the coast was barely five hundred yards ahead, great black towers of rock pounded by the angry sea. The foaming line of surf stretched left and right, broken here and there. The wind was lifting huge swathes of spume, hurling them at the blackness, at the ship. The ship began to swing with increasing amplitude as the wind grew stronger. The storm carried the ship as if it was a toy, and all the ropes of the three masts took the strain, singing from that immense tension, and they were making headway, parallel to the rocks, when he saw the great wave thundering through the night. “Wave!” Dolgan shouted, though no one could hear him.

  The sea fell on the ship and water flooded the deck, cascading away through the gaps, and he gasped for air. Another wave roared across decks, and Dolgan locked both arms through the wheel. In the cabins below, people rolled across the floors, dancing to the tune of the waves, most of them unable to feel anything. The shock brought the unconscious Aron into Saliné’s bed, and his heavy body ended up half covering her. She placed her arm around his neck, trying to strangle him. She tried and tried, but in her weakness she wouldn’t have been able to strangle a rat, never mind this hulk of a man. Resigned, Saliné tried to push him from her and out of her bed. She was too weak for that too. Aron went away on his own, when the next wave turned the ship in the opposite direction. Saliné had to cling to the bed with all her feeble strength. She was lucky at least that this wave was smaller.

  Water foamed along the deck and took one sailor with it, then brought back the corpse of the one who had fallen into the sea before. Eyes straining, Dolgan searched desperately for a channel to escape from the rocks. There was no steady line of sight, everything came to him in spurts, lit by sporadic flashes of lightning. There was a crack, a wild shudder as the keel scraped the sharp edges of the rocks below and he saw the oak timbers burst apart and the sea flood in. He shook his head at the darkness, and the fantasy vanished from his mind. The ship resisted but, like a wounded bull, it was fighting to escape his control. Then he saw the channel, and pushed all his will into turning the wheel. “A palm’s width. A palm’s width is all I need. Fate, give me that. Give me that palm.”

  In the mouth of the channel, the sea became mad, driven by the storm, constricted by the rocks. Huge waves smashed at the jagged land, then reeled back against the ship until the waves clashed among themselves and broke into all four azimuths of the world. Driven by Dolgan’s desperation, the wheel turned in time and, like a giant toy, the ship was swiftly sucked into the channel. Soon, the strait broadened and the ship slowed, but ahead the rocks seemed to grow abruptly, towering over them. The current slid by on one side, taking the ship, trying to turn it and pass it to its doom. “I won’t let you win!” Dolgan cried and fought to turn the wheel, his muscles knotted against the strain. Driven by the sea, the ship fought back. The wind suddenly changed course and the sea became his ally, speeding the ship through the gap, into the bay beyond. A fresh vein of lightning revealed the almost calm sea. Dolgan howled his victory and collapsed over the wheel. I hope that my beauty can carry us back from
here. His last thought before darkness swallowed him.

  Chapter 5 – Maud

  They were riding too slowly for Octavian’s taste, and no one was willing to talk. The guards of the Circle were still in shock at Verenius’s death. He was the second Primus Itinerant to be hanged by Codrin. Octavian did not share their grief, but he understood the need to put a mask of sorrow on his face, and keep silent too. The ten soldiers from the escort Codrin had provided ignored them. The Circle was not very popular among his men. The Sage wished he could fly and get to Leyona as fast as possible. Pintea had a different order: delay, to give Codrin enough time to arrange his pieces on a chess board as large as Frankis.