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“Bring . . . bow . . . and . . . arrow case,” Ferin managed to get out.
“I’ll go back for ’em,” muttered Karrilke. She maneuvered Ferin over her shoulder and carefully made her way astern, keeping one hand ready to grab at a stay or rail as the deck rolled and pitched under her feet, far less than she would have wanted, for it meant they were slowing again. There was almost no breath of wind, and the sails hung limp and useless.
The rowers’ chorus could be clearly heard now, even without the benefit of a breeze to blow their chant to the fishing boat. They were close, and closing.
Karrilke laid Ferin down by the post of the tiller, as gently as she could. Ferin hung over the rail, fighting back the pain, trying to focus her eyes on what lay behind, the dark mass that looked like a monster eating up the silver wake of their own passage.
There were small fires aboard the pursuing raider, spots of red light, that perhaps to some would suggest lit torches, a strange thing to have on a wooden ship. Ferin knew better. As she continued to look, and her eyes adapted to the starlight, she noted that most of the ship’s oars, though over the side, were held or lashed high. Only six oars a side stroked the water, but those six moved deep and with inexorable force.
“Only six a side are actually rowing,” she said. “But those twelve are wood-weirds, or something similar. Untiring, and easily four or five times as strong as the strongest warrior. There must also be at least twelve witches or shamans aboard, with their keepers. No, thirteen, for the wind-eater could not also command a wood-weird.”
“No ordinary raider,” said Karrilke, who had returned with Ferin’s bow and arrow case, and her fur cloak, which the captain laid over the girl’s legs.
“Sky Horse is a small clan; they could not have so many sorcerers. A dozen such: that is the full strength of two clans, at least,” said Ferin. She felt a leaden weight forming in her stomach, which she refused to accept as the beginnings of despair. “The tribes never normally ride together. And all sent to sea, which they hate and fear, as they do all deep water? This must be the doing of the Witch With No Face.”
“The Witch With No Face?” asked Karrilke.
“If we live, I will tell you of her,” said Ferin. She nocked an arrow, but did not draw, peering into the night while trying to ignore the pain that began in her ankle and coursed its way along her leg, stabbing at her in time with her heartbeat.
No targets presented themselves on the raider. It was directly in line behind them, some eighty paces back, but drawing a little closer with every dip and sweep of its oars, pushing ahead as the fishing boat wallowed with flapping sails.
The wind altered. A few points. Sails filled, Karrilke’s children hauled on sheets, Karrilke herself took the tiller and heaved it, hoping to catch as much of the wind as possible.
A silhouette, something a shade darker than the night sky, appeared atop the long curved prow of the raider, someone standing for a better look.
The wind-eater.
Ferin caught the acrid stench of Free Magic, carried in on that blessed wind, the wind that was already fading, pulled back from their sails by sorcery.
She was sitting, on a swaying platform, a drumbeat of pain echoing from ankle to leg to head, her eyes blurred. It was night.
Ferin drew and shot, and her arrow sped across the starlit waters.
Chapter Ten
THE THREAT OF FREE MAGIC
Northern Side of the Wall, the Old Kingdom
The bells fell silent as Lirael ran from the Wall. They quieted almost as soon as she left the northern gate, back into a warm spring evening and the last soft light of day, with the stars just beginning to be visible in the darkening sky. Despite the bells’ stillness, she ran on another fifty paces before she stopped and took her hands away from the bandolier. Her golden hand was glowing more brightly than usual, she noted, a corona of unknown Charter marks floating around her fingers, none that were anything to do with the spells Sam had cast there. But these marks faded as she glanced at them, and were gone even as she tried to memorize them for later research.
The guards came running out, six of them carrying Nick, or rather what she presumed must be Nick, because right now what they bore was a cocoon of golden fire, almost too bright to look upon. Marks from the northern face of the Wall were still rushing across to join this brilliant shroud of Charter Magic, but as the guards continued on, the rivers of light fell back. Then, a dozen or more paces away, the marks that enclosed Nick either faded or sank into him, and Lirael could see him again. Still unconscious and unaware of what had occurred in crossing the Wall.
Lirael cautiously walked toward the guards, as they moved toward her. She kept her hands across the bells, in case they should begin to stir again, but they did not. This confirmed her suspicion that it was an interaction that required the power inherent in the Wall, not just the Free Magic that lurked within Nicholas Sayre.
Captain Anlow came hurrying out of the gate, followed by the remainder of her detachment. She came straight to Lirael, looking more anxious than she wished to show, Lirael was sure. Up until a few minutes ago, the captain had been the very model of a tough officer of the Guard, willing to take on anything and, in the process, show the young Abhorsen-in-Waiting that she knew best.
“Is that going to happen again?” asked Anlow. “And . . . what was it?”
“I don’t know,” said Lirael. She gestured to the guards to lay Nick down, and knelt down next to him as they did so. She hesitated for a moment, then touched two fingers to his baptismal Charter mark.
She felt the warm welcome of the Charter and fell into the endless flow of marks. There was no corruption here, nothing that was anything different from when she touched any true mark. But she could feel a massive force of Free Magic behind the Charter . . . or under . . . or somehow kept back from somewhere else that was undefined . . . something she could not conceptually grasp, because the Charter was endless, but then there was something beyond or behind it . . .
A slight headache began to form between her eyes.
Lirael leaned back and stood up.
“I don’t know, Captain,” she said. “His Charter mark is unsullied, he is as much part of it as we are . . . but he is also deeply . . . deeply full of Free Magic. And he has lost a lot of blood. My healing spell still works upon him, but he is very weak . . .”
Lirael’s voice trailed off as she tried to think what she should do.
“Selemi’s back at Barhedrin,” said Anlow, her voice dubious. “Our chief healer. He has much experience with common wounds and illnesses, as healer and mage.”
“Thank you,” said Lirael. She was already forming a plan in her mind. It was one she was reluctant to adopt, though already she knew it was the only choice. “But this is a most uncommon . . . um . . . condition.”
“You’ll take him to Belisaere, then?” asked Anlow. Lirael could hear the relief in the captain’s voice.
Lirael had thought of that. But this wasn’t the kind of thing that even the most experienced of the healers in the city hospital could deal with. Even if Sabriel and Touchstone were there, she doubted they would know what was going on with Nick. They were both very po
werful Charter Mages, of course, and fine healers themselves. But this wasn’t a medical problem but a mystery, one rooted in the nature of Free Magic and the Charter.
The best place for solving any kind of mystery like that, or even beginning to work out the nature of such a mystery, was in the Great Library of the Clayr. And in conjunction with that, the very best healers of all the Kingdom were to be found in the Infirmary of the Clayr.
Which meant it was finally time for Lirael to go back to her childhood home, something she had been putting off for months, despite a number of invitations and even some quite pointed suggestions from Sabriel. To return to the Clayr’s Glacier, where she had been both extraordinarily unhappy, and never happier. But all those happy memories of the place were deeply entwined with memories of the Disreputable Dog, once her only and still her truest friend. Even though the Dog was no longer in the living world, and Lirael knew she would never see her again.
“No,” said Lirael slowly. “Not Belisaere.”
She took a deep breath, shutting away memories she hadn’t wanted to face, blocking off the feelings that rose in her when she thought of the Glacier, her life there, the Dog, all her cousins and aunts and relatives. The Clayr, the great family she had never really belonged to, and never would. Who had, in the end, effectively cast her out. Even if they didn’t think of it that way.
“No,” repeated Lirael, after a long pause. “Not Belisaere. I’ll take him to the Clayr’s Glacier. That’s the best place.”
“We’ll rig a proper stretcher between two horses, then,” said Anlow, visibly more cheerful with the prospect of this particular problem departing from her area of command. “You’ll fly him back in your paperwing?”
“Yes,” said Lirael. That was another thing. She’d grown somewhat used to flying paperwings, but it was only six weeks since she’d first flown alone, and she’d never flown with a passenger, let alone one who was some kind of Free Magic reservoir. Hopefully the paperwing would agree to carry him . . .
