Fantasy fiction; Magic -- Fiction; Science fiction; Witches -- Fiction
She was roused by feet beating in rhythm and the sound of distant
shouts; a big round spot of light swung slowly from side to side across
the door. Last night had shown her a jug and a basin beneath the
let-down leaf that formed a writing table, but the water was so cold it
gave her goose-pimples. The new dress would need taking in at the
shoulders, so after trying it, she returned to the old before stepping
toward the deck along a passage that held three more doors like her own.
Two men in yokes were pushing and relaxing on opposite sides of a
pivoted bar (to steer the ship, she supposed), under the orders of an
officer in a green cap. One of the workers was the curl-bearded man who
had accosted Dame Domijaiek the evening before. He relaxed one hand to
touch his forelock and had the grace to look sheepish. The officer
hardly looked at her; he was watching the masts that rose on every side
and the small boats about, for they were well out into the Bredafloss,
moving steadily downstream, though the sails hung so flat, it seemed
they could contain no air at all.
Lalette stepped past the steersmen to watch the slow pageant of river
moving by, and heard a step. Ser Brog; he touched his cap and invited
her to breakfast, down a flight of steep stairs and along another
passage to an apartment at the rear of the ship. A skylight threw
dappled gleams across a table laid for five, with food already on it.
Another man was standing by; Ser Brog presented the second mate, and as
he did so, a big officer with a firm chin and bags under his eyes came
in with an air of great hurry and sat down without waiting for the rest.
This was the captain, Ser Mülvedo; he bounced half an inch from his seat
when his name was mentioned, and fell to eating while the rest were
taking their places.
Lalette thought his courtesy somewhat strange to one who wore a badge of
good condition, and it was stranger still when a youngish officer
entered, to be greeted by the Captain with; “You are tardy. You know the
rule of the ship. Take your meal with the crew.”
The young officer went out sourly, but not before Lalette recognized him
as the one who had directed her toward the lazarette. The meal went on
in silence; when the Captain rose, so did the others, and Ser Brog
touched Lalette’s arm to take her to the deck again. The spring air was
fine, the stream-bank all tricked out in tender green. Lalette looked
(and felt with a thrill of delight that all was really now spring for
her, she was free from the old life and everything to win), but Ser Brog
was speaking.
“I am sorry to dream,” she said.
“Why, dreams do be what we grow by. I would be saying that you had
brought luck and fair weather on our leave-taking—for all but Tegval.”
“The one sent from his breakfast?”
“He.” The cargo-overseer laughed. “Our third mate is an admirable young
man, with only one flaw—that he has discovered how admirable he is and
does not stint his own admiration.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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