The Chernagor Pirates

affairs… and you can take that last however you want.”

“Don’t be silly,” Grus answered, still calm. “Of course I did. You’re married to my daughter. You’re my grandchildren’s father. If you do something that’s liable to hurt them, of course I’ll try to stop you.”

Lanius hadn’t expected him to be quite so frank. He wondered whether that frankness made things better or worse. “You have no shame at all, do you?” he said.

“Where my family is concerned? Very little, though I’ve probably been too soft on Ortalis over the years,” Grus said. “He’s embarrassed me more times than I wish he had, but that isn’t what you meant, and I know it isn’t. I’ll do whatever I think I have to do. If you want to be angry at me, go ahead. You’re entitled to.”

And no matter how angry you are, you can’t do anything about it. That was the other thing Grus meant. He was right, too, as Lanius knew only too well. His impotence was at times more galling than at others. This… He couldn’t even protect a woman he still insisted to himself he loved. What could be more humiliating than that? Nothing he could think of. • “Where did you send her?” he asked after a long silence.

Some of the tension went out of Grus’ shoulders. He must have realized he’d won. He said, “You know I won’t tell you that. You’ll find out sooner or later, but you won’t be up in arms about it by the time you do.”

His obvious assumption that he knew exactly how Lanius worked only irked the younger man more. So did the alarming suspicion that he might be right. Lanius said, “At least tell me how much you’re giving her. Is she really taken care of?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.” Grus named a sum. Lanius blinked; he might not have been so generous himself. Grus set a hand on his shoulder. He shook it off. Grus shrugged. “I told you, I’m not going to get angry at you, and you can go right ahead and be angry at me. We’ll sort it out later.”

“Will we?” Lanius said tonelessly, but Grus had turned away. He wasn’t even listening anymore.

Lanius slept by himself that night. Sosia hadn’t wanted to sleep beside him since finding out about Cristata. He didn’t care to sleep by her now, either. He knew he would have to make peace sooner or later, but sooner or later wasn’t yet.

He thought he woke in the middle of the night. Then he realized it was a dream, but not the sort of dream he would have wanted. The Banished One’s inhumanly cold, inhumanly beautiful features stared at him.

“You see what your friends are worth?” the Banished One asked with a mocking laugh. “Who has hurt you worse—Grus, or I?”

“You hurt the whole kingdom,” Lanius answered.

“Who cares about the kingdom? Who has hurt you?”

“Go away,” Lanius said uselessly.

“You can have your revenge,” the Banished One went on, as though the king hadn’t said a word. “You can make Grus pay, you can make Grus weep, for what he has done to you. Think on it. You can make him suffer, as he has made you suffer. The chance for vengeance is given to few men. Reach out with both hands and take it.”

Lanius would have liked nothing better than revenge. He’d already had flights of fantasy filled with nothing else. But, even dreaming, he understood that anything the Banished One wanted was something to be wary of. And so, not without a certain regret, he said “No.”

“Fool! Ass! Knave! Jackanapes! Wretch who lives only for a day, and will not make himself happy for some puny part of his puny little life!” the Banished One cried. “Die weeping, then, and have what you deserve!”

The next thing Lanius knew, he was awake again, and drenched in sweat despite the winter chill. He wished the Banished One would choose to afflict someone else. He himself was getting to know the one who had been Milvago much too well.

Land-travel in winter was sometimes easier than it was in spring or fall. In winter, rain didn’t turn roads to mud. Land travel was sometimes also the only choice in winter, for the rivers near the city of Avornis could freeze. After Grus’ troubles with Lanius, he was glad to get away from the capital any way he could. If the other king tried to get out of line, he would hear about it and deal with it before anything too drastic could happen. He had no doubt of that.

Once Grus reached the unfrozen portion of the Granicus, he went faster still—by river galley downstream to the seaside port of Dodona. The man who met him at the quays was neither bureaucrat nor politician, neither general nor commodore. Plegadis was a shipwright and carpenter, the best Avornis had.

“So she’s ready for me to see, is she?” Grus said.

Plegadis nodded. He was a sun-darkened, broad-shouldered man with engagingly ugly features, a nose that had once been straighter than it was now, and a dark brown bushy beard liberally streaked with gray. “Do you really need to ask, Your Majesty?” he said, pointing. “Stands out from everything else we make, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, just a bit,” Grus answered. “Yes, just a bit.”

Plegadis laughed out loud. Grus stared at the Avornan copy of a Chernagor pirate ship. Sure enough, it towered over everything else tied up at the quays of Dodona. To someone used to the low, sleek lines of river galleys, it looked blocky, even ugly, but Grus had seen what ships like this were worth.

“Is she as sturdy as she looks?” the king asked.

“I should hope so.” The shipwright sounded offended. “I didn’t just copy her shape, Your Majesty. I matched lines and timber and canvas, too, as best I could. She’s ready to take to the open sea, and to do as well as a Chernagor ship would.”

Grus nodded. “That’s what I wanted. How soon can I have more just like her—a proper fleet?”

“Give me the timber and the carpenters and it won’t be too long— middle of summer, maybe,” Plegadis answered. “Getting sailors who know what they’re doing in a ship like this… That’ll take a little while, too.”

“I understand.” Grus eyed the tall, tall masts. “Handling all that canvas will take a lot of practice by itself.”

“We do have some Chernagor prisoners to teach us the ropes,” Plegadis said. When a shipwright used that phrase, he wasn’t joking or spitting out a cliche. He meant exactly what the words implied.

He wasn’t joking, but was he being careful enough? “Have you had a wizard check these Chernagors?” Grus asked. “We may have some of the same worries with them that we do with the Menteshe, and even with the thralls. I’m not saying we will, but we may.”

Plegadis’ grimace showed a broken front tooth. “I didn’t even think of that, Your Majesty, but I’ll see to it, I promise you. What I was going to tell you is, some of the fishermen here make better crew for this Chernagor ship than a lot of river-galley men. They know what to do with a good-sized sail, where on a galley it’s row, row, row all the time.”

“Yes, I can see how that might be so.” Grus looked east, out to the Azanian Sea. It seemed to go on and on forever. He’d felt that even more strongly when he went out on it in a river galley. He’d also felt badly out of his element. He’d gotten away with fighting on the sea, but he wasn’t eager to try it again in ships not made for it. Would I be more ready to try it in a monster like that? he wondered. Once I had a good crew, I think I might be. Out loud, he went on, “I don’t care where the men come from, as long as you get them.”

“Good. That’s the right attitude.” Plegadis nodded. “We have to lick those Chernagor bastards. I’m not fussy about how. They did us a lot of harm, and they’d better find out they can’t get away with nonsense like that. I’ll tell you something else, too. Along this coast, plenty of fishermen’ll think an ordinary sailor’s wages look pretty good, poor miserable devils.”

“I believe it,” Grus answered. The eastern coast was Avornis’ forgotten land. If a king wanted to make a man disappear, he sent him to the Maze. If a man wanted to disappear on his own, he came to the coast. Even tax collectors often overlooked this part of the kingdom. Grus knew he had until the Chernagors descended on it. He added, “If all this makes us tie the coast to the rest of Avornis, some good will have come from it.”

To his surprise, Plegadis hesitated before nodding again. “Well, I think so, too, Your Majesty, or I suppose I do. But you’ll find people up and down the coast who won’t. They like being… on their own, you might say.”

“How did they like it when the pirates burned their towns and stole their silver and raped their women?” Grus asked. “They were glad enough to see us after that.”

“Oh, yes.” The shipwright’s smile was as crooked as that tooth of his. “But they got over it pretty quick.” Grus started to smile. He started to, but he didn’t. Once again, Plegadis hadn’t been joking.