The Song of Andiene - By Elisa Blaisdell Page 0,54

threaten him. He feared the grizanes; they are long gone from our land. He fears any with magic … ” and Syresh gave her a sidelong look as he remembered where he was. If tales were true, this land was but a wraith, a wisp of mist. If one word were spoken amiss, the solid rock, the firm sea-sand, would melt and flow to nothingness.

Andiene smiled. “So he has not gained much joy from what he won?”

“No. The city has not answered to him. It cannot, when you are the rightful heir. The bells ring by men’s hands alone. He walks like a man who sees treachery in every man’s face, his hand on his dagger hilt, afraid to turn his back away from the solid wall.”

“Good,” she said. “That will fit my plan well.”

He longed to ask her questions, but her silence was forbidding. At last she rose, and buried the fire in ashes. “There is a bed for you,” she said, pointing to the nest of branches, as she walked away to find her own sleeping place.

The leaves were soft; the branches were springy. Syresh did not sleep any less soundly because the land that bore him was fashioned of magic. When he woke, the sun was high. Andiene knelt beside him. “Up! We have work to do.”

He soon discovered what work there was on this barren strand, as the two of them walked along the shore, gathering the splintered boards that the sea had brought to land. The current had scattered the bones of the ship far and wide along the shore.

“What do we do with these?” asked Syresh, as he dragged another weighty plank back to the pile. Andiene dropped the plank that she was pulling.

“Rest a while. When we have enough that are sound, we bind them together with vines, and sail east. What, did you mean to stay forever in this land that is no land?”

“No, my lady, no, but I had thought that you could … ”

She read his unfinished thought. “I am no ruler over the waves, to tell them to part and let me walk dry-shod to the other shore. But I can call up a current that will drive us ashore in a safe land.”

“What land is safe for you, my lady?”

She answered with a question. “Why had the usurper set to sea?”

“To visit Daner Reji, in the north kingdom, Montrubeja. That king’s father sheltered him for many years, after your father drove him out. The forests are restless, so I have been told, so it seemed safer to go by sea. We were returning before the summer’s heat.”

“And what of the land to the south? With whom does that king stand?”

“Oreja sides with no kingdom that I know of. The lord of that land trusts no man. He watches and waits.”

“Would there be spies there, to send their stories north to the usurper?”

“Yes. As in all lands.”

Her voice was confident. “Then we will go there.”

So they gathered their wrackwood and built their raft. They were slowed in their work by the coming ashore of three more bodies—two sailors, and one, a nobleman, a comrade of Syresh. They took them and carried them up to what seemed the fittest place, a bare outcropping of rock, sheer cliff on the seaward side. It was a proper enough place to lay men to rest in a strange land.

With each new sight of death, Andiene grew more silent and remote. She did not speak of her past; she said not one word of the part she had played in raising the sorcerer’s storm. Syresh did not ask her. He was sworn to her service, better for him not to know.

The raft they built was nothing that he would have willingly have trusted himself to. The vines bound the planks loosely, so that they shuddered and swayed with every step, and wide gaps opened up between them, where any who wished could peer down into the sea.

Syresh tested it with his foot. “This will carry us to the other shore?”

“The sea would seem to be your doom, one way or another,” she said. Although her tone was light, there was steel behind the words, reminding him of his oath of obedience. He seated himself cautiously on one end of the raft. Andiene stepped nimbly through the water and climbed onto the other end.

She faced the land; Syresh looked out over the ever-changing sea.

“Say farewell to the land that sheltered you,” she said, and her