“Are you satisfied with the work I did on your face, Pil?”
“Yes. Thank you,” she muttered.
“You don’t have to sound so grudging about it. I could have given you three nostrils, but I didn’t.”
She didn’t smile a bit. “Bib, I need you to teach me about sorcery before you lead everybody off and get killed for no good reason, or nearly no reason, and certainly no reason for me to go off and do it. You go without me. Once you teach me what I need, then you can go whatever way you want when we dock. I’ll go the other way.”
I crossed my arms and leaned back. “That was an elegant request. I feel flattered all to hell. Why should I spend a second helping you now?”
“I’ll owe you a favor, sorcerer to sorcerer.”
“Well . . . I have often found it useful for other sorcerers to owe me favors. All right, let’s begin.” I didn’t anticipate a difficult lesson, because Pil’s sorcery problem was a lack of confidence. I didn’t know how Dixon had trained her, but she had ended up uncertain, even hesitant. “Pil, what did Dixon tell you sorcery is all about?”
The young woman opened her mouth and then paused. “I don’t think he ever said a thing about it. At all. Isn’t that strange? I just assumed it’s all about magic.”
“Well, it’s not!” I frowned. “Not all of it, anyway. Any sorcerer worth a damn can get by without magic most of the time. Sorcery’s not about learning, either. Some sorcerers are as stupid as baby birds. You wouldn’t be far wrong to say it’s about arrogance, but that’s not exactly it, either.”
“What is it, then?” I could hardly hear her over the water rushing against the hull.
I took a deep breath. “You can do just about anything as a sorcerer if you’re willing to give up enough of yourself in trade. And that’s a cost nobody can question but you.”
Pil nodded and then gazed out at the ocean. “That’s a lot.”
“Hell, that’s not even the big part. Listen now. Since you can do anything, you’re responsible for everything. Everything in your life, at least.”
She leaned away from me and stared. “No. That’s foolish, and you can’t tell me it’s not. What if somebody holds a knife to my throat and forces me to do something? Or what if they trick me?”
“That doesn’t matter a damn. Even if they make you fall in love with them, it still doesn’t matter. Nobody else is on the hook for making things happen to you—not gods, not men, not a broke-leg jackrabbit. If you don’t like something, figure out a way to change it. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“No.” She shook her head, squinting.
“When you were tickling my privates with a sharp knife, whose fault was that? Don’t bother to answer. It was my fault for letting a pretty girl distract me.”
“You’re trying to trick me about something,” she said slowly.
“If I succeeded, whose fault would it be?” I leaned against the deck rail and patted her arm. “Sorcerer, you are the willing author of all the good and all the bad in your existence. That’s what sorcery is about. You don’t need to look so terrified. Since all sorcerers are people, and since people are flimsy, unreliable pains in the ass, we often fall short of the standard.”
Pil leaned on the railing beside me and watched the ship’s wake. I kept quiet and let her stare until she said, “I guess it’s too late to say I don’t want to be a sorcerer.”
“Not even a little bit. You could decide to never again use magic and to ignore the gods like they were a rash on somebody else’s butt. Stick to that the rest of your life, and your existence as a sorcerer would be over. But it’s a nearly impossible vow to keep.”
Pil gave me a faint smile. “I can see that. The first time something horrible happened, something I could make better with magic, I’d be calling Fingit’s name like a lover.”
“Yes, you probably would.”
“All right, then!” Pil stood straight. I could imagine her clapping her hands together to dust them off. “A favor for you.” She said it like it was a chore such as brushing her teeth. “I owe you one favor. Or is there anything you need now?”
“No, nothing I can think of.”
“Fine.” She gave what might have been her idea of a wise, inscrutable sorcerer nod, and I managed not to smile. “Bib, thank you for telling me all that. I might have died ignorant, and that would have been a shame.”
I gave her my idea of a wise sorcerer nod in return. People have told me that when I nod in this way, I look like my dog has just bitten my best friend. It seems to confuse people, so I’ve seen no call to alter it.
Pil led the way back to the bow. Whistler was guarding us against the crew. Halla and Bea stood staring over the gunwale at the swells. I saw Bea reach over and squeeze Halla’s arm before leaning on tiptoe to murmur something to the much taller woman. I stopped dead. Bea would have surprised me less if she’d pulled a tiger’s ears and sung to it in baby talk.
The two women kept conversing. I wanted to know everything about their unexpected conversation, but I couldn’t think of a subtle way to ask. Finally, I walked over to stand on the other side of Bea and said, “So, what are we talking about?”
Both women glared at me as if I were a mouse in their soup. Neither one spoke.
I said, “The ocean sure is pretty. It’s full of secrets, which is why so many ships are at the bottom of it. It’s a
