The Dragon Round (Dragon #1)(16)
“I wouldn’t have a hand in Hanoshi deaths either,” she says. “Your Trust didn’t come to me. I went to them. I said I could help.”
“They trusted you?” he says.
Ayden, deep in the mountains west of Hanosh, has been the city’s chief rival in the Six Cities Trading League since it was allowed to join. Their admission ended a ruinous war and ushered in four decades of mutual prosperity, but for the last several years they’ve been taking baby steps toward another conflict. There’s not enough money to go around. Pirates who’ve plundered Hanoshi ships are rumored to have been Aydeni privateers. Bandits who’ve attacked Hanoshi caravans are suspected of being backed by Ayden. Not that Hanosh doesn’t have its own agents in Ayden to steal their trade secrets. Not that they aren’t rumored to have attacked Aydeni traders too. Denying Hanosh the golden shield it needed to fight the flox was the first adult step, even if Ayden claims they only took it because two years ago Hanosh gouged them on the price of grain after a drought doomed their crops.
“Of course they didn’t trust me,” Everlyn says. “They thought I was a saboteur, maybe a venomist. But my patients, the shipowners’ wives, they vouched for me.”
Owners aren’t easily swayed, and their wives don’t sway lightly: Where’s the profit? Jeryon figures her advocates still consider it fashionable to have an Aydeni apothecary, just as some still wear boots and plain smocks instead of returning to sandals and embroidered chitons and mantles. To get her on the Comber would signal their power.
“Which brings us back to the Tallan River,” he says. “An actual agent probably would have been briefed on it.” He lays his arms over the gunwales. “The sea is shaped like the bow of a boat pointing north. That—” he points to the starboard oarlock, “is Chorem. And this—” he points to the larboard oarlock, “is Yness. Eryn Point is a couple hands forward, where the center thwart would go. Everything aft of the oarlocks is ocean: trackless, empty ocean. Now—”
As he scoots forward, Everlyn tucks her knees tighter.
Jeryon puts his left foot on the bottom beneath the starboard oarlock. “The current is fifty miles wide,” he says, “a bit wider than my sandal in boat scale. It leaves the ocean here, runs up my left leg, around my back, and down my right leg into the sea here.” He plants his right foot under the larboard oarlock. “And we are here.” He puts his finger on the bottom between his knees, amidships, and too close to his crotch, in Everlyn’s opinion. “Do you see our problem?”
The poth had hated her loremasters. When she was twelve her father discovered that she was running away from them to tramp through the woods with a forest warden. The warden convinced him that Everlyn, whatever her talent for sums, had a real devotion to herb-lore and healing. So her father gave Everlyn to her for schooling. She broke her slate in joy.
“How fast does the current run?” she asks.
“Correct,” Jeryon says. “Six knots. The Comber could cross it in four or five hours under full sail and oar, entering the river north of Eryn Point and letting it carry the galley down to the mouth of the bay. If we had oars to reach it, we would cross more slowly and be carried much farther south. Hopefully we’d make it to Yness before being swept to sea.”
“But we have no oars,” she says.
“Or water, which makes the issue moot. We’ll be dead of thirst before we make it across.”
“So we have no chance?”
“Not according to my mates’ calculations,” Jeryon says.
2
* * *
“Which brings us,” Jeryon continues, “to the second thing you need to know. I will get you to Hanosh so you can testify against my crew.”
“I could write it down,” she says, “and save you the trouble of saving me too.”
“We don’t have anything to write with,” he says. Jeryon reads her like a manifest: “Smock. Boots. Presumably undergarments.” She scowls. “Those sticks in your hair, let me see them,” he says. She looks skeptical. He says, “I won’t run off,” and holds out his hand.
She draws the pair of long steel pins from her bun. Her hair unfurls. Her neck sweats. “Why do you need them?” she says.
He tests their points, which are oddly sharp, and taps them together. Their surfaces are mottled like flowing water. “Gift from one of your company ladies?” he says. “These aren’t cheap.”
“Not everything has a price,” she says.
“In Hanosh it does.” He crosses his right leg and with one of the pins worries the seam of his pant leg. He says, “I bet someone came to you for help and discovered afterward that she was also suffering from a touch of embarrassment. So she paid you with these. Her husband’s going to be very upset when he finds out. What did you palm while Solet was searching you?”
Startled, the poth says, “You saw that?”
“Never lose sight of a person’s hand,” he says. “That’s Solet’s weakness. He’s easily distracted.”
The poth reaches into her pocket and removes a purple phial. “For cuts and burns.”
“Handy, if we live long enough to be cut.” He looks at the sun. “We will be burned. Especially you.” Her upland skin is more golden than his, what the Hanoshi described in better times as “tea with honey” and now call “milky.”