"It must stop!" Gerrard shouted, standing in the saddle. "Forward, all of you. Fight the caterans. Kill them, if you must. Stop the massacre!"

Orim was nearly dead in smoke and flame when she felt ChoManno's hands upon her. She could not have spoken to him. Her lungs were suffused in smoke. Nor could she see him, but his rescuing arms were sure as they wrapped her and lifted her and carried her alive from the pyre. He strode from the oven-hot room and across wicker causeways.

Orim's eyes streamed, unseeing, beneath her turban and coin-braided hair. She clung to him, coughing poison from her lungs.

Then, they were clear, on shore. He laid her down on scorched reeds. The sounds of battle receded. The distant fighting slowly died.

"You're… alive," Orim choked out, her eyes swimming.

"You're alive," came the glad response. The voice was not Cho-Manno's. It was a woman's-strong and familiar.

"Sisay?" gasped Orim.

"Yes!" Sisay said, laughing happily. "Yes, it's me!"

Rubbing tears from her eyes, Orim said, "What are you… what are you doing here?"

"We came to rescue you," Sisay replied as she daubed a cloth at Orim's eyes. "And to get Weatherlight."

A look of dread crossed Orim's features. Her face went very white. "You came… with Mercadians… with those killing… monsters?"

Sisay's eyes darkened. "Yes. But we didn't know about all of this. We thought the Cho-Arrim were the monsters. Even now, Gerrard is calling off the caterans. He even killed a few that wouldn't stop fighting."

Teeth gritting, Orim sat up at last. "Gerrard. I should have known…" Eyes at last clear, she struggled to stand. "Take me to him."

"You're too weak," Sisay objected.

Orim wrenched her arm free, disproving the objection.

"All right. All right. I'll take you."

Weatherlight's captain and her healer walked arm in arm across the battlefield. The dead lay all around. With shame and despair, Sisay's eyes traced out shattered skulls and punctured hearts. Orim's eyes were full of death too, but they overflowed with tears of loss and fury. Scorch marks covered the sides of trees. Huts on the lagoon burned. Dead floated in the dark waters.

At least-at last-there were no more roars, no more screams.

Ahead, Weatherlight's deck swarmed with Mercadians and caterans. They had lashed the ship to shore, tossed off the scaling vines, and positioned a makeshift gangplank to one side. The vessel was well guarded. Even now, Tahngarth and Takara followed a cateran enforcer below decks.

On the nearby shore stood another familiar figure: Gerrard. He stared at his ship. His face was battle-scarred and weary, but he bore the look of a man seeing an old friend. As Orim and Sisay approached, Gerrard turned, and his glad look deepened. "Orim. You're alive! It's so good to see you!"

"Kravchak!" she hissed. "I wish I weren't alive. I would gladly die if I could bring back all the people you slaughtered today!"

"Orim?" Gerrard asked wonderingly.

The healer glared at him. Her eyes were dancing with sparks. "Look at what you have done, Gerrard. Look who you have brought with you." She gestured to the Mercadians and caterans, who stood watching her curiously.

"We came to rescue you, to recover the ship. What's the matter with you? I thought you'd be glad to see us. I thought"

"You thought nothing! You're just like them. You only take things! You never give! Instead, you take and take, and always with the point of a sword! What about Is-Shada? Is-Meisha? TaSpon? And all the others?" She gestured to where a few of the Mercadian soldiers were still piling corpses. "What about ChoManno?" Her voice caught, and then she recovered herself. "They paid the price for your greed."

"Orim, I don't understand…"

"No, of course not! How could you? You've never made an effort to understand anything."

"All right, that's enough!" Gerrard shouted. "A massacre occurred here today. An atrocity. I gave the order that set it off, yes, but as soon as I found out what was happening, I put an end to it. I didn't come for massacre. I came to rescue you and Weatherlight-"

"You don't even know what that ship is! You don't even know the power it has. You've spent all your life running from your Legacy, but now, when someone else finds the true worth of it, you come with swords and monsters to take it back?"

"I'm sorry for what happened here," Gerrard said contritely. He looked out over the fields of dead. "I am very sorry. But I didn't declare this war. These folk stole my ship, and I came to get it back."

"The ship is secure," said a new voice. So intent had the argument been that Gerrard and Orim had not noticed the approach of a four-armed cateran enforcer and his henchmen. The creature was crimson from his knobby head to his taloned feet. Only his fangs remained white, and they smiled gruesomely. "Per your orders."

"Thank you, Xcric," Gerrard replied coolly. "Just now, I'm in the middle of something." He turned back toward Orim.

"Yes, you are," the cateran hissed. He seized Gerrard's wrists and locked shackles over them.

Gerrard spun in sudden shock. "What is this?"

"You are under arrest, Commander," Xcric said, grinning.

Sisay reached for her sword, only to have shackles snap closed over her wrists too. A whole party of cateran enforcers surrounded them.

"Arrest? And what is the charge?"

"Murder of those in your command," Xcric said. "You ordered the Mercadian guard to attack my forces. You yourself killed two of my soldiers."

"This is ludicrous," Gerrard growled. Orim was also imprisoned now. Aboard Weatherlight, Tahngarth and Takara stood, similarly chained. "You have no authority-"

"On the contrary, the magistrate himself hired me and my band. He anticipated such treachery from you. I am empowered to imprison you and your coconspirators and press into service whatever Cho-Arrim wizards and workers are needed to convey Weatherlight back to Mercadia. Now, I am finished with you. Take him to the Jhovall corral."

Gerrard struggled against the caterans that dragged him away. "You can't take my ship! The magistrate can't renege on the deal."

Xcric smiled. "He does not renege. You bargained for troops to regain your ship. You did not bargain for the ship itself."

Guards pushed Takara and Tahngarth up beside Sisay and Orim. Together, the bridge crew of Weatherlight staggered in chains across the field of the dead.

Takara's red hair gleamed with firelight. She said bitingly, "I knew it had been too easy. Nothing here is as it seems."

Book II

Chapter 10

Gerrard stood amid a huge, jeering throng. He'd been washed. His clothes were cleaned and pressed. The rust bands had been scrubbed from his wrists. The cuts and burns and bruises of the Rushwood now lurked beneath a thick coat of powder makeup. A Mercadian coiffeur had trimmed, polished, and set his hair and beard. He had never looked cleaner or more handsome.

Gerrard was not simply a military prisoner. He was a political prize.

"Behold, people of Mercadia!" cried a stout nobleman from a nearby dais. His gold-embroidered robes gleamed against the dark shadow of Mount Mercadia, towering above. His eyes swept the huge crowd that had gathered in the lower market. A sour turn of corpulent lips showed how little he enjoyed speaking the vulgar language of the commoners. "Behold our prisonerLegendary Gerrard, giant killer!"

Boos and hisses came from the throng. The multifarious roar of the marketplace this morning had been stilled when the soldiers had returned with their prize. Now, the warring shouts united in a single purpose-the humiliation of the foreign traitor.