their only other authority was a once-a-summer folkmoot.
'You're welcome. We were glad to help.' Adira's hair and face and clothes were smudged with ashes, and she reeked like a campfire, but she was happy because her charges had fought the fire bravely and won over the townsfolk, and a daring captain loved to see a crazy scheme succeed. Her Circle of Seven attended her, some proud, some embarrassed. All chugged beer handed 'round by a tavernkeeper who'd rolled up a keg on a barrow. Throats were parched from eating smoke.
Adira slurped and said, 'We never sought trouble. Rather we hunt Johan, Tyrant of Tirras, who is our enemy.'
Adira let the name hang in the air. She'd thrown all her dice on this calculated gamble. Sooner or later Buzzard's Bay would learn why the pirates had come. Best get it out while half the town was assembled and grateful.
'Johan is Emperor of the Northern Realms, as you must know,' announced Adira. 'What you don't know is that we hail from Palmyra, the first obstacle crushed under his boot on the march into the sands of the Sukurvia. Our alliance of southerners opposed him until a sandstorm smothered them. Yet Johan crawled out of some hole and escaped, and he still sows mischief. We want to stop him. For that, we need your help.'
Buzzing murmurs. Adira watched faces closely. Anger and regret glowered, but none was directed at her.
''We know Johan,' said the priest. He pitched his voice high as if preaching. 'He enslaves our mountain kinsmen. We saw signs of the great sandstorm. Even here the sky was dark for days. Sand rained on the Blue Mountains to the east, an event never witnessed. Though many of our cousins died, we blame not you, but Johan. He is evil incarnate. Destruction follows in his wake as death and despair trail a dragon.'
'This is Johan's work.' Adira nodded at the charred and ruined warehouses and ships. 'Or that of his agents.'
The crowd rustled at the word 'agents.'
Virgil muttered to the Circle, 'Destruction follows in our wake, too.'
Simone jabbed his ribs.
With half a town listening raptly, Adira told how Johan had escaped east and found 'this child of the forest,' meaning
Jedit, which drew a laugh. Laughter died as Palmyra's mayor recounted the savagery that ravaged her marketplace.
Throat raspy and seared, Adira finished, 'We tracked Johan here, only to learn he killed a kindly old sage named Hebe.'
'We imagine it was he,' corrected Bardolph the cleric. 'No one witnessed his crime. Among our kind, only a confession or two witnesses can sink a criminal.'
'Johan killed her, Bardolph.' A broad-chested man with a yellow-gray beard had eyes and face red from fighting fires. 'We all know it, even if we can't prove it. No one else had reason. Hebe was poor as a mouse and harmless and well liked. Ofttimes she tended ailments for no pay when the fishing was poor. The murderer had to be Johan, a stranger wreaking havoc and hate. But I want to know why he killed her.'
'I can't say for certain,' returned Adira, 'except Johan dislikes leaving witnesses alive. Most likely Johan asked Hebe some questions, since she's local, and he doesn't know the region. We don't know what the tyrant seeks or where he goes, but both must link to magic. Hebe was a spellcaster, but only a small sage, you say, so it's unlikely Johan needed sorcery. That leaves only local knowledge. What might be Johan's destination that relates to magic?'
'Which way did he go?' asked a woman in a thick, soot-stained shawl. 'Someone had to see the tyrant leave town. He rode in a sedan chair, and we don't see many of them! And he had that big crowd to feed!'
Murmurs drifted through the crowd. Heads were scratched. With Bardolph moderating, people came forward to offer facts. A vintner sold Johan's scribe three casks of wine. Johan's dotty old seer bought new shoes. The barbarian bearers had purchased a peck of oysters. As hours of testimony and debate dragged, Adira Strongheart gritted her teeth and stifled the urge to scream over dreary details. She was relieved that Johan had not booked passage or bought a ship. If the cruel tyrant sailed into the sunset, he might as well visit the Mist Moon for all Adira could find him.
Then someone mumbled that Johan's party vanished.
'Vanished?' blurted Adira. 'How so?'
'Dunno.' A blond, beardless lad was reluctant to speak. 'I saw them quit the Dandysprat. The barbarians scooched, so the master might mount the chair. I thought it a powerful queer time to be departin', for t'was after midnight. Where could they walk by night? But the bald man waved a hand and off they trotted. South. Johan craned his head around like a vulture, but he didn't see me in the shadows. Lucky, I was, I know now! Then he twinkled his fingers, an' the whole party disappeared!'
'Invisible,' said Adira, who possessed that trick herself.
'Yes, cap'n. Must'a been.'
'South, they turned?' Musing, Adira faced that way. Night cloaked the coast, but Adira had seen that a rugged rise verged on a high plain, then trees.
She asked, 'Are there roads along the coast through the forest?'
'We only venture south in ships,' said a dark-tanned woman. 'Precious little beachhead exists along the Storm Coast. Not till you round Sheep's Head.'
Past that bald knob, the shore veered east to become the Craggy Coast on the way to Bryce.
'There's ox-paths for logging, but they dead-end,' said a logger. 'They don't like us venturing too deep.'
''They'?' Adira wished she could throttle these slow-speaking folk and shake out quicker answers.
'The people of the pines,' said a lithe woman in furs with the look of a scout. 'They don't welcome trespassers. They allow some logging, for they like coin to buy our iron and brassware. Too, they barter furs. But they ain't friendly about it.'
'Arboria,' put in Bardolph, 'so they name the pinelands.
A mysterious clan. They've reappeared these past three years. For decades before they were gone.'
'Where?' asked Jasmine Boreal, a wanderer of the woods. 'Why disappear for decades, then come back?'
'And what,' asked Adira, 'could Johan seek in the depths of a dismal forest?'
Fear skittered on the night wind. People stared at the ground. Puzzled, Adira repeated the question.
With a pained sigh, the cleric Bardolph admitted, 'Legend speaks of… an undying mage who inhabits a castle in the forest.'
'Name?' prompted Adira.
More gloom. Bardolph shook his head. 'We dare not invoke her name. The less said, the better. But be warned. She's capable of greater evil than Johan can conceive.'
'She?' Adira waited, but no one sullied the silence. Finally she sighed and rubbed her smudged nose. She craved a solid meal, a bath, and a day's sleep, but likely she'd get none. Pondering the sparse news, she mentally shrugged. Many mages were undying or very old. Johan was centuries old, by all accounts. Yet he'd been bested by a ragtag army and Hazezon Tamar's sorcery.
For just a moment, the pirate queen's thoughts drifted to her ex'husband. She wondered what Haz was doing now and how he might have aided her quest. Mostly she wondered how two people so in love couldn't live together. Their marriage-had had to end peaceably before it erupted in blood. Still…
'Dira?' Simone the Siren touched her chief's elbow.
'What? Oh. Bless me, I'm luffing.' Adira's apology made the Circle glance about in amazement. 'It makes sense. Johan would visit a local mage to learn about another mage living in the nearby forest, then he'd kill the informant to cover his tracks. He hired agents to slow us further.'
'Oh, yes,' said Bardolph. 'You mentioned agents before. Do you suspect someone in Buzzard's Bay stirred up strife?'
'I know it,' said the pirate chief. 'Meaning no offense, but one minute I was talking to your sheriff civil as I might, and the next some fluff sparkled in the air. Everyone turned ugly and riotous, including my crew, and here we be.'
'Oy, I remember!' A lean man in the crowd rose on tiptoe to peer around. 'It was Darswin and his gang
