“No, it’s not,” Leofsig’s father answered. “I had a son in the army, the Forthwegian army”--he couldn’t resist the dig, and Hengist’s mouth tightened--”and my other boy’s gone, and who can say what happened to him? No one in Gromheort knows where Ealstan is. He might have fallen off the face of the earth.”
“I never have understood what happened the day he disappeared, Hestan, the day Sidroc got hurt,” Hengist said. “If I did understand it, I think I might have something more to say to you.” He turned on his heel and walked away.
“He’s liable to be more dangerous than Sidroc,” Leofsig said in dismay after his uncle had gone.
“I don’t think so,” Hestan answered, and then, with one more sigh, “I hope not. He has other things than us on his mind right now, anyhow.”
“Now that he won’t have Sidroc staying with him, he ought to move out of here and find a place of his own,” Leofsig said.
“Do you think so?” His father sounded genuinely curious. “My notion has always been that it’s better to have him where we can keep an eye on him than to let him go off on his own and brood. Am I wrong?”
Leofsig considered. “No, I don’t suppose you are. I wish you were, but I don’t think you are.”
From the hallway, Conberge called, “Are you decent in there? If you are, Mother and I would like to finish cooking.”
“Come ahead,” Leofsig said. “I have a better appetite for pork stew than I do for quarreling right now.” His father raised an eyebrow, then solemnly nodded.
Twenty
For the first time since an egg from an Algarvian dragon killed Eforiel, Cornelu was back in his element: riding a leviathan in search of the most harm he could do to King Mezentio’s followers. The leviathan, a Lagoan beast, wasn’t trained up to the standards of the Sibian navy, but she was still young, and she could learn. He’d already seen as much.
True, these days Cornelu patrolled the Strait of Valmiera, not the narrower channel that separated Sibiu from the mainland of Derlavai. His own kingdom remained under Algarvian occupation. Powers above, his own wife remained under Algarvian occupation. But he was fighting back again.
He tapped the leviathan in a pattern the same in the Lagoan service as it had been in that of Sibiu. Obediently, the great beast raised the front part of her body out of the water, lifting Cornelu with it so he could see farther. If an Algarvian ship glided down a ley line without his seeing it, he could hardly try to sink it.
Even with the added range to his vision, he saw nothing but sea and sky. He tapped the leviathan again, and it sank back down into the water. By the way the beast quivered under him, he knew it thought rearing was part of an enjoyable game. That was all right with him. He would enjoy the game if it led him to Algarvians. King Mezentio’s men wouldn’t, but sending them to the bottom would only make Cornelu happier.
“Now,” he muttered, “I think we’ve been traveling along a ley line, but I’d better make sure.”
Like the skintight suit he wore, his belt was made of rubber. He took from one of the pouches on the belt an instrument of bronze and glass. Inside the hollow glass sphere that made up the bulk of it were two vanes of thinnest gold leaf. They stood well apart from each other.
Cornelu let out a satisfied grunt. That the vanes repelled each other showed they were in the presence of sorcerous energy--and the only sources of sorcerous energy out on the ocean were the ley lines that formed a grid on sea and land alike. If Cornelu waited here long enough, a ship was sure to pass close by.
But he had no idea how long
He turned his instrument this way and that in his hands, watching the gold-leaf vanes flutter as he did. He knew they spread wider when parallel to a ley line than when perpendicular to it. As he’d thought, the line on which he’d positioned himself and his leviathan ran from northeast to southwest. Without hesitation, he urged the leviathan in the latter direction, toward the coast of Algarvian-occupied Valmiera and of Algarve itself.
“If you don’t go where the bees are, you won’t get any honey,” he told the leviathan. Talking to this new beast wasn’t like talking with Eforiel. He’d told his old leviathan everything. With this one, he still felt a certain reserve. He wasn’t sure how much it understood, either--after all, it spoke Lagoan, not Sibian. Cornelu knew that was an absurd conceit, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind.
The leviathan swam along happily enough. It was doing what it would have done had it never made the acquaintance of mankind: foraging. When it got into a school of mackerel, its long toothy jaws opened and closed, snapping up fish after fish. The only notice it took of
