“Guinalle could call up the Eryngo with Artifice, or I could,” Temar amended hastily as he caught Usara’s look of rebuke.
“We want every ship holding the blockade.” Halice shook her head. “We won’t net all the rats but I’ll be cursed if I’ll let them scurry back to Kalaven to plague us in some other season. Send them orders with your Artifice by all means; just to sink any boat that they see.”
“We don’t want them fetching up on Kellarin’s shores either.” Allin was tying up scraps of muslin filled with miserly spoonfuls of herbs.
“Indeed not.” Temar folded his arms in unconscious imitation of Halice, jaw set. “So we hit the landing as hard as we can in the first assault. That means you need every man who can hold a sword. I’m coming too.”
“Of course you are.” The mercenary’s smile was as fierce as it was unexpected. “This is your first real fight for your colony. You’ll be seen to be leading it, if I have to be standing behind you with a cattle prod.”
Allin’s kettle stopped in mid-pour, the wizard looking concerned. “Couldn’t you attack at night again? Wouldn’t you all be safer?”
“We won’t get away with that trick twice. If Muredarch isn’t setting double sentries at sunset, I’m the Elected of Col.” Halice’s words were more explanation than rebuke. Temar was glad to see it, though for a fleeting instant he did think it might make a pleasant change if Halice showed him the same forbearance.
“Besides, a raid at night’s one thing; a full assault is a whole different hand of runes,” the mercenary continued. “We need to see what everyone’s doing and when those pirates break, we want to know where they run. We’d lose them inside ten strides in those woods in the dark. The whole fight would end up as confused as two cats scrapping in a sack.”
“I can’t see us being able to use the archers as effectively as last time.” Usara took a steaming tisane, brow wrinkled in thought.
“No,” agreed Halice, taking a cup from Allin with a nod of thanks. “They’ve precious few arrows left, which is another reason we need Darni. ’Sar, when you bespeak Larissa, tell her we want whoever can still walk and wave a stick creating a diversion. If we can split the pirates even just a little, we can drive in a wedge.”
Allin set down her kettle. “Plenty of the captives we rescued will want to come. They’ve been saying as much.”
“They’re still too weak, however strong their hatred.” Temar’s grimace acknowledged that unwelcome truth. “Naldeth was half dead even before those swine threw him to the sharks.”
“A few days’ rest and food won’t give them the stamina for a real fight.” Halice turned to the open beach. “Banner sergeants to me!” she bellowed. “Let’s set about making a proper plan, shall we?” She took another swallow of tisane, grimacing at the heat, before throwing the sodden muslin lump into the fire where it hissed and smouldered. She poured the dregs to dampen the soil and picked up a stick to scrape an outline on the ground.
“Let me do that,” offered Pered but, as he spoke, the earth began to writhe beneath Halice’s twig, shaping itself into a representation of the pirates’ landing blurred by a misty ochre haze.
“Then let me do that instead.” Pered took one of the cups Allin was still holding and knocked on the door of the hut.
“Enter.” Guinalle’s voice was soft and she warned the artist with a finger to her lips. Men snored and shifted on their pallets and the air was rank with the scents of sleep, sweat and injury.
Pered handed her the cup. “I thought you were supposed to be resting.”
“With Halice shouting fit to be heard in the Otherworld?” She looked quizzically at him. “What’s the news?” She stood in the doorway and looked at Halice, Temar and Usara, dun, black and balding heads bent close together while Allin set about the more prosaic necessity of chopping meat from the island’s scurrying rodents to add to the hulled wheat she’d set soaking earlier.
“Planir tells us Ilkehan’s dead,” Pered explained.
“Wizards.” Guinalle clicked her tongue with irritation. “They couldn’t wait for me to make sure their path was clear?”
“No one wants to overtax your skills,” said Pered diplomatically. “Everyone’s aware how much your duties ask of you.”
Guinalle smiled into her cup of aromatic tisane. “Shiv’s a lucky man.”
Pered’s smile couldn’t rise above the apprehension plainly weighing heavily upon him. “We don’t know exactly what’s happened in the Ice Islands.”
“So Temar wants me to find out.” Guinalle reached for his blunt and ink-stained hand. “Let us see together.” She drew him into the frowsty gloom and set her cup down on a cluttered board resting on two trestles. “With a love such as you share to guide me, I could find Shiv in the Wildlands beyond Solura.” She murmured a soft incantation.
As a sudden vision of Shiv crouching in a thorn bush surprised her, Pered’s fingers tightened on her own. “He’s hiding? Are they in danger?” She felt unimaginable pain edge the artist’s unspoken thought. “Something’s wrong.”
“It’s all right.” Guinalle spoke directly to his common sense to answer the fears of his imagination. “Whatever they’ve been doing, it’s worn him out but rest will restore him. He seems well content with his work.”
“Where is he?” Pered wondered without speaking and the thought rang in the silence they shared within the bounds of enchantment.
“I cannot tell.” Guinalle shook her head. “But he feels safe.”
Pered understood her double meaning without need for explanation. Shiv believed himself to be safe and Guinalle sensed no immediate peril threatening him. “Are they all safe? Livak? Ryshad?”
“As far as I can tell.” Guinalle frowned; it was always so hard to read a mage’s thoughts unless they were actively working their own magic. She might be less confused about Usara if she could sense a little more of what he truly felt for her. Then she might not have to rely on someone like Pered to anchor her with his commitments and affections. She hastily set that irrelevance aside before Pered could pick it up and then a flood of images assailed her.
A grief-stricken woman hid hysterical tears behind bloodstained hands and long, tangled hair. Her wild emotions struck Guinalle like a slap in the face. Horror at the death of her protector was twisted by guilty relief that her life would no longer be a nerve-wracking dance around his whims and cruelty. A new brutal truth assailed that scant comfort. Without Ilkehan, who might claim her? If she avoided enslavement or concubinage, how would she eat?
Ruthless, Guinalle broke free of the woman’s incoherent thoughts, pulling Pered with her. Noiseless voices and half-glimpsed faces came and went. What manner of Artifice did these Elietimm learn, if they had so little discipline, so little self-control? Theirs was a brutal, caustic art, shocking reactions from people and using such self-betrayal to another’s undoing.
As unrestrained Artifice carried emotions hither and thither, Guinalle saw a balding man with solid, wind-scoured features determined to defend his land and people from whatever might follow from Ilkehan’s long-hoped-for death. A younger man saw his flank exposed by the loss of his ally. The image in his mind’s eye of an undefended keep on an exposed sandbar shifted into a more immediate terror of his own nakedness beneath a descending blade. Vivid imagination saw shining steel cut into white and trembling skin, blood scarlet on the silver blade, flesh and sinew parting. Fear liquefied his belly as he realised no one would care that he had yielded to Ilkehan only to save himself. Guinalle was startled to feel her own bowels gripe in sympathy.
Pered gasped. “I can’t do this, my lady”
Of course, he was far more susceptible than she. That was why she was so shaken. “Stay with me.” Guinalle wove an incantation to give him some surcease from the hubbub of emotion. She bolstered her own defences as hopes and fears and guesses and memories swirled through the aether, battering her self-control.