The Compass Rose

“How can you do your duty if you’re asleep on your feet? We’ve been on this boat all day. We’re beyond the Tibran lines. There are no bandits or river pirates between Ukiny and Turysh. We took care of the last band ourselves two years ago, remember? Sleep. I’m tempted to sleep myself.”

He didn’t want to admit it, but she was right. He needed to sleep. “We should go to the cabin.” They would have more protection there.

“It’s too hot. If you’re that worried about my breathing, ask Uskenda’s courier to keep an eye out.”

“Excellent thought.” He could tell by her expression when he stood that she hadn’t expected him to take her suggestion seriously and was none too pleased that he had. But he would take no chances with his naitan.

The courier, an amiable young man, seemed surprised and not a little nervous at Torchay’s approach. Those in bodyguard’s black often evoked that reaction. Still, the courier willingly agreed with a little puffing out of his chest to move his chair closer and keep watch.

Torchay stretched out on the long wooden chair, arranged the cushions behind his back, stuffed one under his head and closed his eyes. But now that he had the opportunity to sleep, it eluded him.

Sounds intruded—the slap of water along the boat’s sides, the creak of the sail’s rigging, the murmur of voices as the boatmen talked and laughed among themselves. He could feel the hum of magic over his skin as the naitan on shift directed the pocket of winds pushing them against the current. He opened his eyes a slit to be sure his own naitan hadn’t moved. Their chairs sat side by side, wooden flanks touching, but too far for him to sense her continued presence.

“Oh for—” She took his hand, laced her fingers through his. “There. Now you’ll know if I decide to run away.”

Content, he closed his eyes again. The sounds swelled then faded away as he categorized and dismissed them. Without their distraction, his mind began to buzz. He was seriously worried. The not-breathing business was only a small part of it. Though she tried to pretend otherwise, something more had happened to Kallista when that dark and deadly magic swept through her.

She dreamed things that came true. She saw people who weren’t there and talked to them. Dead people, by her own words. Torchay felt a faint chill slide down his spine. West magic was as much a gift of the One as any other. He believed that. But it still unnerved him by its very nature. Not that it mattered. His place was by her side.

She could manifest magic from all four cardinal directions at once and his place would not change. He was her bodyguard. Her welfare, her life was in his charge. And that was why he worried. That, and the fact that he loved her, had loved her for years.

He’d loved her since she took the blame for the fiasco he’d caused, almost getting them both killed in their first year together, in his first combat. He’d been wounded, nearly gutted, spent months with the healers recovering. She’d visited nearly every day. And when he came out, she insisted he be reinstated as her bodyguard. How could he not love a woman like that?

There had been a great deal of hero worship about it at first, but after nine years at her side, he loved her for her flaws as well as her virtues. He would never inflict his emotions on her. She didn’t want it. Her highly disciplined, carefully controlled, duty-bound life had no room for anything as messy as love. But he could pour his devotion out on her without having to speak the words. It had taken nine years to gather the courage to speak of friendship. That was enough.

Shouts from the front of the ship brought Torchay bolt upright out of a sound sleep he didn’t remember falling into. The lanterns on the very back of the ship held back the night’s darkness. He had been asleep for quite some time. He still held Kallista’s hand clasped in his.

Torchay stood, releasing her hand. “I had better go see what that is. Go back to the room and wait for me.”

She gave him her “think again, Sergeant” look and followed him down the narrow walkway beside the passenger cabins.

Just past the cabin area where a passageway cut from one side of the ship to the other, half a dozen crew members were standing over a huddled figure crouched on the deck, arms folded protectively around its head.

“What’s happening?” Torchay asked.

Kallista leaned over the boat’s rail to look around him, trying for a better sight of the situation. Torchay elbowed her back upright with a snarl to stay hidden. She crouched to peer beneath his elbow. His protectiveness could be so annoying.

“We found a stowaway. A Tibran spy.” One of the sailors kicked at their find.

“Don’t hurt me. Please don’t!” the stowaway cried in the high-pitched voice of a child or woman. “I mean no harm. I’m no one. I’m not a spy.”

Kallista tried to squeeze past Torchay. She should have known better. The man could give lessons in immovable to mountains. “What are you, then?” she called past the barricade of his body.

“A woman. Only a woman.” The stowaway shuffled around on her knees to face Kallista’s direction as much as she could. She wore a torn and dirt-stained tunic. Her hair was chopped raggedly short, matted with more dirt, and her thin arms were dirtier yet.

All the crew members had stopped their abuse to stare at Kallista. Even Torchay looked over his shoulder at her until he recalled his duty and swung around to face front.

“Tibran?” Kallista said. “Are you Tibran?”

“No longer. I was born in Haav, over the sea, but I have left Tibre. I am here and here I wish to stay.” Still curled into a ball, the woman stretched her hands along the deck, reaching toward Kallista in supplication.

“Why? Why abandon your home?”

“It has never been my home.” The woman’s bitterness startled Kallista.

“Do you understand her, naitan?” one of the crew members asked. Kallista thought he was a boat’s officer since he wore a tunic rather than going about bare-chested like most of the other males in the crew.

“Yes.” She almost continued with a question but thought better of it. Setting her hand against Torchay’s taut back, she leaned forward and murmured in his ear, “Please tell me you understand what she’s saying.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Torchay turned his head slightly to reply. “No, Captain. I cannot. Is it—could you be speaking Tibran?”

Kallista sighed, letting her forehead come to rest on his shoulder. She was so very tired of waking up every day to discover some new peculiarity about herself, some new magic that had made its home inside her. She wanted it to stop. “I suppose it must be,” she said. “She says she’s from Haav. Isn’t that one of their ports?”

“I believe so, naitan.”

“She also says she’s left Tibre. She wants to be Adaran now.”

“Oh, she does, does she?”

Kallista could feel the suspicion bristling from Torchay like some prickly cloak.

“Naitan.” The tunic-clad officer spoke again. “Captain’s compliments, and would you come to the foredeck and assist in interrogating this stowaway?”

“Yes, sir, I would be happy to.” Kallista straightened.

Torchay held his position while the stowaway was hauled to her feet and hustled up the gangway to the high foredeck at the prow of the boat. Only when the party was a certain prescribed distance ahead did he follow, always keeping himself interposed between Kallista and the Tibran.

“I doubt that poor child is much of a threat.” Kallista stalked slowly behind Torchay’s broad back.

“As do I. But anything is possible, and I will not be careless of your life.”

As she rolled her eyes, he spoke again. “And do no’ roll your eyes at me.”

Mouth open in surprise, Kallista halted two steps down from the high deck. “How do you know—”

He turned and held out his hand to escort her the rest of the way. A smile lurked in his eyes and nowhere else on his solemn face. “Because you always do when I say such things.”

She shook her head, smiling despite herself as she took the hand he offered. “I think you have been my bodyguard far too long.”

The stowaway stood before the stout, stern-faced captain, shivering in the night’s warmth. Obviously a woman, now her delicate build and surprisingly full breasts could be seen, she hugged herself, head down, eyes on the deck beneath her bare filthy feet.

Kallista greeted the riverboat captain, one of a prominent trading family based in Turysh. Kallista had known a number of her children in school before the lightning came.

“Who is she and what is she doing on my boat?” The captain clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on her heels waiting for Kallista to translate.

Hiding a sigh, she summoned military posture and took a step past Torchay to see the woman she was to interrogate. “Stand up straight,” she said, disturbed by the woman’s abject demeanor. “Have you no pride?”