Weight of Stone (10 page)

The deep sea, so far from the root of the Vine, was unkind to Vinearts. Master Malech could not find him here. And yet … the taint came from beyond The Berengia, traveled throughout the Vin Lands … the sea serpents had swum through this sea, through waves that passed from shore to shore. Had they left their mark? Could those same waves and winds help him now?

The thought stirred the faintest flicker of hope. Help. He had spent time among Giordan’s weathervines, yes, at the Vineart’s invitation. The act Sar Anton and Washer Darian had used to accuse him of in their
plot to snare Vineart Giordan … he had sought to ask the vines only if their master was tainted. Had they known he sought to clear their Vineart? If he had not taken but been given … if the quiet-magic were freely offered …

And if they had let him in once, would they allow him use once again?

Jerzy went back to one of the new water casks, dipping his hand in and wetting his tongue with the handful of fresh water, trying to summon the wind-driven magic. Caught up within his own senses, it took him a moment to realize that there was something else in his awareness. Like the smell of distant smoke on a clear day, or the taste of rain in the wind: quiet-magic, so quiet he had not even sensed it rising to his summons, natural as breathing.

He turned back to the railing, his face lifted to the afternoon sun, his mouth open as though tasting
vina,
letting it settle on his tongue and touch the roof of his mouth, drawing air in to spread the sensation through all of his senses. There was no space for distractions or doubts. A Vineart must never show weakness, his master said.

“There.”

“Where?”

Jerzy was only vaguely aware of Ao now standing behind him, turning as he turned, trying to catch sight or sound of what the Vineart was following. Mahault stood very still, just watching.

“That way.” Jerzy followed his instincts, walking forward and to his right until he was up against the railing once again. “That direction. Faint, so faint … but I can … that way.”

“Are you sure?”

Doubt entered, and the connection broke, the quiet-magic fleeing. Jerzy felt his shoulders sag, his head dipping forward so that his chin rested on his chest, his hair flopping into his face until he shoved it back with a distracted gesture. “No. I’m not sure of anything. But there is no taint to the east, nothing I can detect. It’s west and southward, like a … like the trail a snail leaves. I can see it glisten.”

“In the air?”

“No. Not … I don’t know. I just know it’s there. Or I could. It’s gone now.”

Mahl was obviously dubious, but a glare from Ao kept her silent.

“Can you follow it?”

“No. I can find it again, I think.” The feel, the Sense of the taint lingered within him, a deep hole filled with an impossibly smooth darkness pressing against him, like being surrounded by mustus, but slicker, heavier. It was as familiar as the feel of earth under his fingers, and as foreign, as unthinkable as …

His imagination failed him. Like the feel of rot in the vines, or a blight in the grapes, he simply knew that it was
wrong.

“We need to go west,” he said finally. “West and then south.”

“West … past Ifran? Jerzy, do you have any idea how long that would take us?” Ao had a trader’s memory for maps, and his normally sleepy-looking eyes were wide as he calculated the distance in his head. Ifran was a place shrouded in mystery and legend, populated with wild beasts and nomadic people who ate their elders and sacrificed their young, and other impossibly wild tales. While Iajan sailors, noted explorers and cartographers with a powerful prince funding their discoveries, had ventured onto Irfan’s coastline in recent decades, none penetrated deeply. It was an entire land outside Sin Washer’s solace, untouched since the days of the ancient Ettonian Empire—and even then, the Emperor took tribute in the form of exotic animals and precious stones, and left the people unconquered, and unknown.

“The westing wind brings the taint. West, and south. I don’t know more than that.”

Ao looked at Mahault, as though hoping for support, but she was merely watching Jerzy, waiting. A soldier’s patience, Jerzy thought suddenly.

“It’s almost dark. We should stay here for the night,” Ao said, giving in without much grace. “Get a good night’s sleep, all three of us, instead of one person keeping watch.”

“Someone would have to keep watch anyway,” Mahl said. “In case someone came on us, or came up from shore, or—”

“We need to go,” Jerzy interrupted. The taint lingered under his skin and made him itch. “We need to be under sail.” He didn’t know why, but something told him that it was not safe to remain here any longer—they had lingered in one place too long already. The wind pushed at him, willing them to be gone, promising to fill their sails and take them where they needed to go.

Magic, even quiet-magic, did not work like that, but he felt the truth of it nonetheless.

“All right, then.” Mahault heard the urgency in him, and gave way, shooting a look at Ao that made him back down as well. “Is everything secured down below?”

“Tied and stashed,” Jerzy replied.

“Then let’s be off. I’ll take first stand at the wheel. Ao, you’re best at maps, can you plot a possible course?”

“Aye, Captain,” the trader said, bowing with only slight mockery before going to unlash the sails, while Jerzy leaned over the rail to pull up the weigh-anchor. The weight had gone over easily enough, but his arms ached by the time the heavy clay forms cleared the railing. He managed to get them onto the deck without dropping them on his toes, and coiled the rope carefully on top so that it didn’t catch or snag, before going to help Ao with the sails.

“Haul out there,” the trader told him, “the way I showed you—careful!”

Despite his help, they managed to get the triangular sails raised without mishap. There were long oars stashed belowdeck, to be used if the ship was becalmed, but they required more arms than they had onboard. Thankfully, the winds cooperated just as Jerzy had felt they would, filling the sails and moving the ship forward at a slow but steady pace.

By the time the sun dipped below the watery horizon, leaving the sky around it streaked with reds and blues, they were in open water. The sky behind them was already blue-black, the sweep of stars spreading as
the daylight faded. Jerzy stood at the prow of the ship and breathed in the air, trying to recapture a feel of the taint—but it was gone.

“You’ve finally got your sea legs,” Ao noted, his sharp gaze taking Jerzy in from head to toe, as though assessing a horse or crate of goods.

“Perhaps.” He thought about telling Ao of his experience in the water, but the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t speak about any of it: the freedom, the sudden fear, the quiet-magic itself. He was still not accustomed to sharing things with another person; a slave kept to himself, and a Vineart … he listened and learned, he did not tell others or share his thoughts. Vinearts were meant to stand alone; that was the cost of their magic. Jerzy was only now beginning to understand that the rest of the world did not live that way.

Maybe that was why he felt so comfortable with Mahl. She, too, understood the importance of keeping your own thoughts. Ao, on the other hand, used words to disarm and provoke. Like the drinking trick he had used on Jerzy when they first met, pretending to match him sip for sip of ale, while actually dumping his mugs onto the floor. Not out of malice, but because he was curious to see what Jerzy might say when drunk. The fact that Jerzy said very little had made Ao respect him more, not less. Jerzy still found that odd—that Ao wanted information and yet was pleased when he didn’t get it.

The world was a confusing place, and Jerzy wanted only to be back in his vineyards, on familiar ground, doing familiar things, where the lessons he needed to learn were already known, the risks and rewards established. Tradition was safe. The cycle of the vines was security, knowing your place in the world at all times.

He did not know his place at all now, only where he wished to be, and where he was.

“Where do you think we’re going?” Ao asked, leaning his elbows on the railing and staring out across the horizon. The wind was just enough to tangle Jerzy’s hair, and he wished briefly that he had replaced his kerchief, to keep the strands out of his face. Perhaps he could cut it short.

“I don’t know,” Jerzy said, amused at how the trader’s question matched his own thoughts. “I don’t have a map, clearly marked out. I don’t even have a picture or a name. Just a sense of …” He couldn’t describe it, not to Ao. To Malech, or Giordan, or another Vineart, maybe. They had the language to understand him. Ao, untouched by the Sense, unmarked by the mustus, could not understand how Jerzy thought or saw.

“If we keep heading in this direction, we’ll be past Iaja and into the open ocean in … oh, a week or so. I don’t suppose you could whip up a wind that would move us along faster, the way you summon fire?”

Vineart Giordan could have. Sailors paid solid coin for his spellwines, to raise winds and calm seas. Farmers used them to bring rain in drought, and dry the skies during floods.

They were delicate, stubborn grapes, requiring that Giordan literally give his own blood to tame them into accepting incantation. Only aethervines were more difficult to work. Jerzy had tasted the mustus, had sunk his fingers into the soil around their roots and heard their whispers in his head. He could taste the wind … but he could not control it. Without a spellwine, with its specific incantation, he could not decant anything useful.

“No,” he said in response. “No, I can’t.”

He could, a voice like a soft breeze whispered to him. He had lifted himself out of the water, hovered in the air, and done it without spellwines. He could fill the sails with wind and speed them on their way….

No. Jerzy refused the temptation. His master lit flame with a touch of his fingers, closed wounds by merely pressing on them. But that was after a lifetime of working with his legacies of firevines and healvines, of letting their essence blend with the magic within him. Someday, Jerzy, too, would be able to do that, and he would welcome it.

The magic he had worked that afternoon with a legacy he had not been granted? It scared him down to his bones, and he would not willingly do it again. There were Commands and traditions for a reason. Breaking them … no. He was
not
apostate.

“I don’t think I’ll need magic,” he said suddenly, distracted. “Look ahead.”

The sky, clear only moments ago, was filling with dark clouds, blotting out the bright stars.

“Storm,” Ao said, destroying Jerzy’s hope for fair winds. “Bad one. Damn it, I knew we should have stayed in the cove.”

“Storm ahead!” Mahl called out from her post at the wheel, and Ao raised his hand to let her know they had already seen it.

“You’re the Vineart, Jer, you know the weather better than us. What do you think?”

Jerzy stared at the clouds, trying to sense their mood. Was this just rain coming toward them? Or a hard blow? He couldn’t tell.

“Let’s try to ride it out,” he said finally.

T
HAT
, J
ERZY DECIDED
a little while later, had been a very bad decision. The ship crested over another wave and plunged back down, bow first, even as she tipped back and forth. He would throw up, save there was nothing left in his stomach. His right hand was wrapped in a lead rope, while his left braced him against the wheel-cabin, and the wind and rain hammered at him from all sides. Mahl was at the wheel just ahead of him, a rope tied around her waist to keep her there, both hands clenched around the wheel, while Ao braced her from behind. Every time the ship jolted, they staggered together, two soaking-wet figures occasionally outlined by the crack of lightning that came down from the sky.

He could feel the timbers shake under his feet, the wood shivering as it was pressured from every side. He had no affinity for its dead wood, no sense of its nature the way he did living vines, but even he could tell that the ship would not last much more of this storm.

His mouth was dry with fear and the residual bitterness of his vomit, but he sucked his cheeks in anyway, ignoring the bitterness, searching for some moisture to draw on. If he could bring enough saliva onto his tongue, he could summon quiet-magic, and …

And do what?

Even Giordan could not calm this storm; not even Master Vineart Conna, renowned for his weatherspells, could still the fury that had been unleashed. It was a wild creature of wind and rain, raging down from the skies with the full force of Nature and magic behind it.

That much Jerzy knew: this was no purely natural storm. Under the salt of the wind and sea, and the sweet taste of the rain, there was a scent of magic that he recognized. Here, the nose of it was thin and stretched, enough that he thought the storm was merely a side effect of something else, spun out by actions elsewhere and crashing into a natural storm. Somewhere, someone was using a windspell; sheer bad luck that they were caught in it.

That was the danger and the delicacy of a weatherspell, and why Master Malech preferred not to use them himself; such a decantation did not stay in one place but raced with the wind from one field to the next, across entire lands … and across the sea as well.

There was a sharp crack and another bolt of lightning cut through the dark, this one heading straight for the mainsail. Jerzy flinched, warned by some instinct even as the smell of burning wood touched his nose.

“Fire!” he yelled, hastily untangling his hand from the rope. “Fire!”

Another wave came over the side of the boat, swamping the deck and hitting against Jerzy’s knees hard enough to make him stagger. The rain might have put out the fire under ordinary circumstances, but the wind whipped the white-hot flames into greater fierceness, and it leaped, like a living thing, the sail catching in an instant, sparks dropping down to the deck, cinders that sizzled and caught, tiny fires springing to life.

A firespell could counter those flames, control them. If he had just one mouthful of a firewine, if he had a few more years’ experience in his blood, he might be able to save the ship.