Before the bird had arrived this morning, they were down three vessels plus the flagship. Those Vlad Li Tam had steamed forth to rendezvous with and his own vessel. She’d followed protocol and sent out two more when the distress bird reached them, informing her that a vessel was reefed and in need of repair. She’d also sent two additional engineers and a sizable portion of their repair parts. Now she knew both vessels and crew would not be coming back.
She added the numbers silently. Over two thousand souls lost or gods knew where.
She smelled treachery but could not discern whose. Someone within the House, perhaps the First Son, though the notion was unheard-of. In all of these generations, never had there been division within House Li Tam. Still, the note seemed real enough, and she could not discount it. She still held it in her hand and periodically, stopped pacing long enough to read it again.
Windwir a ruse, the coded message said. We are betrayed by our own. Save what can be saved. There was no mistaking the seal and signature. It was her father, Vlad Li Tam. But the message bird had been from one of the ships they’d most recently dispatched. Its feathers were singed.
Her brow furrowed and she bit her lip. A ruse. Betrayed by our own. She lowered her hand and looked again at the flurry of activity around her as the longboats were loaded and rowed out to tall iron ships that belched steam into a cloudless sky. The engines were up, and they neared their last load.
When Baryk approached, her feet were back to moving across the water-packed sand. “We’re nearly finished. Two more trips and we’ll have everything.” His voice lowered. “Are we leaving the trade goods?”
Rae Li Tam pondered this. “Yes,” she said. “We will leave them. But spread word that we go south. And leave birds for that direction with feed for six months.”
Baryk nodded, then his face softened. “How are you?”
She forced a smile at his concern. He was a strong partner, and she was grateful that her father had approved the match. There was logic and purpose behind the pairing. “I’m fine,” she said. “Focused on what must be done.” But underneath the words, she was afraid.
“Where are we going, then?”
She shook her head and moved her hands low and to her side. Not here. Not until we are at sea.
He read the movements, then nodded. “I understand.” He looked out to the ships, cupping a hand over his eyes against the sun. “I’m going out with this lot,” he said. “I’ll check the armaments and the watch rotations.” He looked back to her, his mouth suddenly grim. “You think the others are lost, then.”
She swallowed against the fear she felt. “I do. I think we’ve been brought to this place and Father just figured that out. I think he was lured out to sea.”
Removed from the Named Lands. Set apart from them. Far apart and by his own kin-the only predators who could match Lord Vlad Li Tam of House Li Tam. She thought of wolves hunting in the northern timberlands and shivered despite the tropical heat that baked her skin, hanging heavy and hot in her lungs.
Save what can be saved. She realized Baryk was speaking, though his words were lost to her. “I’m sorry?”
“I said he’s a crafty old hawk. Perhaps the note means he’s safe.”
But something within her told Rae Li Tam that was not to be hoped for. Something whispered that her father may indeed still be alive but could not possibly be safe. “We can’t afford to think that he is. Which means everything changes. No birds without my consent-I want the coops locked and under guard.”
“I’ll pass the word,” he said. Then, Baryk leaned in close and kissed her quickly on the cheek. “I’ll see you aboard.”
He moved off quickly, shouting for two young men to wait for him as they prepared to cast off their boat. Rae Li Tam watched him climb over the bow and settle onto one of the benches. When he inclined his head toward her, she returned his gesture of respect.
Then she was back to pacing and barking orders, pointing and calling out to this one or that one while her mind continued spinning.
Half of the fleet was gone now, though the vessels had not carried full complements. It would mean cramped quarters on the remaining ships.
And slower speeds.
But if there was a threat to the House-from within the House-it would not be speed that saved them. It would be strategy and misdirection, craft and deception-all skills she’d learned at her father’s feet during the forty years she’d served him before settling into her married retirement with Baryk in their villa on the Outer Emerald Coast outside the city-state P’Shaal Tov. Certainly, she’d still served her father during those quieter years, often putting her skills as an apothecary to work. Three years of pretending to be a boy acolyte with the Androfrancines now made her the New World’s leading authority on all things chemical with the Order fallen. From time to time, her father required those services of her. And she’d agreed to provide them when he’d approved her request to take Baryk as husband and live with the warpriest near the city-state he’d served most his life.
Four times in fifteen years had her father required anything of her. Most recently, it had been a recipe for her sister’s procreative work with the Gypsy King-a simple enough task. Each assignment had come with little information and she’d given herself to the work gladly. And though she’d have paid every last coin she owned to please her father, he had arranged generous compensation for each assignment.
But then the triple-coded note had come last year, and she’d known for the first time that her father had encountered something that had changed him, some kind of respect-based fear that drove him to retreat. Within weeks of that fateful bird, and after a short but impassioned conversation culminating in their first raised voices as a couple, she and Baryk had packed what they could not live without, sold off what they could, and had arrived at the Tam Estates to see the iron ships laying in their cargo at anchor in the bay. They joined in the work of loading while her father, Vlad Li Tam, burned the books of his family’s work and prepared to flee the Named Lands.
Or did he go a-hunting? she wondered.
Perhaps, she thought, it was both.
Regardless, after seven months at sea, moving at a leisurely, methodical pace, something had happened. The armada was halved, and though some part of her felt the compulsion to know, she knew there was little chance of discovering what might have happened to her father and to the rest of her family.
Save what can be saved. There was finality in those words, and despite her best hope, she sensed that some night soon, once they were safely to sea and steaming toward points unknown to all but her, she would sit at her writing table in her cramped captain’s quarters aboard the new Tam family flagship. She would give herself, for a moment, to grief and compose a poem to honor her father’s passing.
Even as her mind laid out these nets, her feet moved across the sand and her voice rang out with command. Years away, and yet the mantle fell easily to her as the oldest of Vlad Li Tam’s surviving children in the absence of his First Son or his First Grandson.
When the beach was cleared, and when she walked the village paths to be sure none were left behind, she went to the last boat where it waited in the surf.
Confusion colored the faces of the Dayfather and his people. Sadness and surprise rode his young niece’s eyes. They’d expected a longer visit-more attempts to make permanent those bonds of kin-clave Vlad Li Tam had negotiated with the young girl-and despite Rae’s best diplomacy, they’d not understood and she’d refused to alarm them.
If there is danger to them, she thought, my warning will offer no aid. Best to leave with as little said as possible.
She stood in the surf now and felt the warm water licking at her feet and ankles. She raised her hand in farewell and watched as the Dayfather and his kin did the same.
Then, she let the young men in the longboat lift her aboard and she fixed her eyes to the northeast.
In the end, it was the sand that told her where they would flee. The one place that none traveled these days.
Home to the Named Lands, she thought, and then around the horn.
Above her, a dark shape circled in the sky. Larger and blacker than a seagull, it flew ever-widening circles.
A raven of some kind. Out of place this far at sea, but not impossibly so.
“You are a long way from home,” she said to the bird.
As if hearing her, the bird stopped its circling and shot south as straight and fast as an arrow.
What prey do you seek? And when she asked it, she knew she meant the question both for the bird and for her father, also fled south.
Sighing, she shifted on the uncomfortable wooden bench and gave her mind to the web of strategy and misdirection she must now lay down for her family on her father’s behalf.
Winters
The Chambers of the Book were stifling hot, and Winters found herself opening the front of her shirt, using the loose fabric to fan cooler air onto her breasts and into her armpits.
Outside, she knew there was fresh snow and a coming blizzard. How had it become so unseasonably warm here?
She walked quickly, following the cavern’s spiraling descent. She’d reached the Last Chapter of the book now, watching the dated spines of each volume. She stretched out a hand and let her dirty fingers trail over them.
She could not remember how many volumes there were now. But the Book of Dreaming Kings was a paper serpent over half a league long, shelves carved into the stone walls containing each volume.
As Winters walked, the cavern grew hotter, and an intense light built below. Music drifted up to her, and she recognized it as a solitary harp. A stinging breeze watered her eyes.