“Show me,” Tchazzar growled. He pivoted, grabbed her by the forearm, jerked her into an embrace, and planted his mouth on hers. Although her staff gave her a measure of protection against flame, she could still feel that his lips and probing tongue were blistering hot.
He’d caught her by surprise, and once again, although she knew how she should respond, she couldn’t control her revulsion. As she strained to pull away from him, it was all she could do to curb the impulse to knee him in the groin or resort to one of the other wrestling tricks Aoth had taught her.
Tchazzar was stronger than she was, and for a moment, it seemed that he wasn’t going to let her escape. Then his arms opened all at once. She reeled backward and banged her shoulders against the iron bars at the front of one of the cells. One of the prisoners on the other side yelped as if it meant something terrible was going to happen to them.
“I’m sorry,” Jhesrhi panted, fighting the urge to scour her lips with her sleeve. “You startled me.”
“That night in the orchard,” Tchazzar said, “I thought we were making progress. But now it seems like nothing’s changed.”
“It has,” Jhesrhi said. “It is. It’s just that, like I told you, I need time.”
“And I gave it to you,” the dragon said. “But be careful it doesn’t run out.”
Medrash, Balasar, and Khouryn stood at the rail of the carrack and watched the three Chessentan warships sail out of the north. They were still tiny with distance but not as tiny as they’d been.
Unsteady on her feet-she hadn’t acquired her sea legs yet-Vishva approached. Brown-scaled, with puckered scars on her face where she’d worn her piercings before her clan cast her out for the disgrace of dragon worship, she was one of the Platinum Cadre’s officers and the person who’d begged Medrash to purge her and her fellow cultists of Tiamat’s influence.
“Are they going to catch us?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” Medrash said, “and if they do, we’ll make them wish they hadn’t.”
“Glad to hear it.” Vishva bobbed her head and opened her arms slightly then moved off.
“I’d really rather the Chessentans not intercept us,” said Khouryn, keeping his voice low. “They’ve got us outnumbered, and I never got around to training your fellows to fight on shipboard.”
It still seemed strange to Medrash to hear the Cadre warriors referred to as his, in any sense. Adhering to the common prejudice, his own clan elders had raised him to despise wyrms and those who revered them; thus he’d taken command of the cultists with reluctance. But a good deal had happened since then, and he didn’t feel the same disdain anymore.
“I wonder if our weather witch can do any more,” Khouryn continued, glancing in Biri’s direction.
The white-scaled wizard stood near the stern, where both masts and sails were in front of her. She stared at them and chanted, mostly whispering, but sometimes raising her voice to a howl. At those moments, she accompanied her incantation with sweeps and jabs of a wand that was evidently solid to the touch but looked like a spindly, gray wisp of cloud.
“She’s doing as much as anyone could,” Balasar said. “She explained to me that she’s having to force the winds to blow contrary to their natural inclination.”
“I don’t doubt her ability,” Khouryn said. “But I still wish Jhesrhi were here.”
“I don’t know that I can help her,” Medrash said. “I’ve never done anything comparable before. But I’m going to give it a try. Excuse me.”
He looked around for a clear section of deck. Clear, of course, was a relative term in the cramped confines of a troop ship, with the sheets running every which way, mariners scrambling around to accomplish their various tasks, and everyone else gawking at the oncoming Chessentan vessels. But toward the bow and to starboard, on the opposite side from the enemy, there was a strip of space that should do.
He walked there, stood in the center, and took a breath, centering himself. Then he snatched his broadsword from its scabbard and stepped forward. He cut to the head, spun back around, parried an imaginary thrust to the heart, and riposted. It was a training dance, one intended to prepare a swordsman who might someday have to fight in a tight little alleyway or tunnel.
The final move of the dance was to sheathe one’s sword. Medrash did so and reviewed his performance. He assumed the ready position then grabbed for his blade again.
As he danced the brief dance-it was only twelve moves all together-repeatedly, he turned, struck, and parried faster and faster. His focus sharpened and narrowed until he was acutely aware of his own body and weapon, his phantom attackers, the equally hypothetical walls hemming him in on either side, and nothing else. A kind of exultation overtook him.
Many warriors and athletes knew that pure, primal feeling. Maybe other sorts of folk, musicians and craftsmen, perhaps, experienced something similar when they practiced their particular skills. Medrash couldn’t say. But he did know that for the god-touched, the exhilaration could serve as a gateway to something grander still.
He didn’t perceive Torm’s presence all at once. It wasn’t that the god was being coy, but rather that Medrash’s exertions were gradually heightening his awareness. And even when he became entirely cognizant and executed the last three actions of the dance for the final time, he didn’t truly see the deity. But he had a sense of the Loyal Fury as a dragonborn warlord taller than the tallest giant and made of golden light, looming over the ship with a greatsword canted casually over his shoulder.
Even as he caught his breath, Medrash recognized another presence too. A silvery, wedge-shaped head at the top of a serpentine neck towered even higher than Torm, the better, perhaps, to see past him.
Medrash wasn’t altogether surprised. The Loyal Fury, who’d rescued a weak, timid child from misery and humiliation, would always be his patron deity. But as poor Patrin had tried to teach him, Torm and Bahamut were comrades, and the latter, too, had occasionally helped Medrash in what he now understood to be his struggle against Tiamat, the Platinum Dragon’s archenemy, and her minions.
And he evidently meant to help now. It made sense, for one of Bahamut’s titles was Lord of the North Wind.
Medrash raised his sword in a salute and opened himself to whatever gift the dragon god might choose to give. Nostrils flaring, Bahamut sucked in a breath. His jaws snapped open, and he spewed it forth again.
Intense cold and a sense of relentless pressure stabbed into the core of Medrash’s body, or perhaps his soul. He cried out, staggered, and grabbed a sheet to keep from falling but not because the sensation was painful. Somehow it wasn’t. It was simply overwhelming.
Balasar and Khouryn came scurrying. Medrash raised his hand to signal that he was all right. He looked up again, but as his instincts had already told him, Torm and Bahamut had vanished as soon as they finished bestowing their blessing.
Since they were no longer present to receive his thanks, he strode to Biri. Though it still wasn’t painful, the power pent up inside him turned, tumbled, pushed, swelled, and generally sought release. He felt as if he’d swallowed a tornado or a beehive.
Though intent on her magic, Biri spotted him coming from the corner of her eye. She recited a tercet, bobbed the wand of cloudstuff on the rhyming word at the end of each line as though she counting three of something, and that apparently brought her to a point where she could safely take a break. Breathing heavily, she turned and gave him an inquiring look.
“I think I can make your magic stronger,” he said. “I’ve received a gift of power to pass along.”
“Divine power?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, “but the gods know who you are and what you do. I think that when it transfers to you, it will come in a form you can use.”
“I’m game,” she said. “What do we do?”
“You face the sails just like before, and I’ll rest my hands on your shoulders.” He grinned. “Although it may make Balasar jealous.”
“Really?” she asked, and for that moment she sounded like a hopeful, love-struck maiden, not a battle- seasoned adept in the midst of an arduous task.
“Really,” he said. He waved toward the masts. “Shall we?”
