Wayfinder
                                   By: Janny Wurts
                                        ****
In heroic and high fantasy, the questing hero has a counterpart—the questing
heroine, who seeks not only help for her people, but a value for herself. Tough,
unselfish Sabin, apprentice to a hard life, is an excellent example of the breed. But,
as you might expect, having set up that pattern, author Janny Wurts transcends it,
liberating Sabin to find her own way.
                                        ****
Ciondo had blown out the lanterns for the night when Sabin remembered her
mistake. Lately arrived to help out on the sloop for the summer, she had forgotten to
bring in her jacket. It lay where it had been left, draped over the upturned keel of the
dory; wet by now in the fog, and growing redolent of the mildew that would speckle
its patched, sun-faded shoulders if someone did not crawl out of warm blankets and
fetch it up from the beach.
       The wind had risen. Gusts slammed and whined across the eaves, and
moaned through the windbreak of pines that lined the cliffs. Winter had revisited
since sundown; the drafts through the chinks held the scent of northern snow. The
floorboards, too, were cold under Sabin’s bare feet. She looked out through the
crack in the shutter, dressing quickly as she did so. The sky had given her a moon,
but a thin, ragged cloud cover sent shadows chasing in ink and silver across the sea.
The path to the harborside was steep, even dangerous, all rocks and twined roots
that could trip the unwary even in brightest sunlight.
      Stupid, she had been, and ever a fool for letting her mind stray in daydreams.
She longed to curse in irritation as her uncle did when his hands slipped on a net, but
she dreaded to raise a disturbance. The household was sleeping. Even her aunt who
wept in her pillow each night for the son just lost to the sea; Sabin’s cousin, who
was four years older than her undersized fourteen, and whose boots she could never
grow to fill.
      “A girl can work hard and master a boy’s chores,” Uncle Ciondo had
summed up gruffly. “But you will never be strong enough to take the place of a
man.”
      Yet the nets were heavy and the sloop was old, its scarred, patched planking
in constant need of repairs. A girl’s hands were better than going without, or so her
mother insisted. Grudgingly, Uncle Ciondo agreed that Aunt Kala would do better if
an empty chair no longer faced her through mealtimes. Sabin was given blankets and
a lumpy cot in the loft, and cast-off sailor’s clothing that smelled of cod and oakum,
poor gifts, but precious for the fact they could ill be spared.
      Her lapse over the jacket could not go unremedied.
       She fumbled and found her damp boots in the dark. Too lazy to bother with
trousers, she pulled on the man-size fisher’s smock that hung halfway to her knees.
The loose cuffs had to be rolled to free her hands. She knotted the waist with rope
to hold it from billowing in the wind, although in the deeps of the night, no one was
abroad to care if she ran outside half-clothed.
        The board floor squeaked to her step, and the outer latch clanged down as
she shut the weathered plank door. “Sabin,” she admonished as she hooked a heel
on the door stoop and caught herself short of a stumble, “Don’t you go tripping and
banging, or someone will mistake you for trouble and shoot you in the back for a
troll.”
       Except that no one in her village kept so much as a bow. The fisherfolk had
only rigging knives and cutlery for the kitchen, and those were risky things to be
throwing at trolls in the dark. Given any metal at all, and a troll will someday do
murder with it; or so her mother used to threaten to scare out her habit of mislaying
things. Sabin sighed at her failure, since her jacket was not hanging as it should to
dry on the hook by the hearth.
       Cloud cover smothered the moon. Past the garden gate, the trail to the sea
plunged deep into shadow. She stubbed her toes on corners of slate, and cursed like
a fishwife, since her uncle was not there to scold. The path switched back once,
twice, in tortuous descent. Westward it was faced by sheer rock cliffs, moss-grown,
and stuffed with old bird nests in the niches. The moon reemerged. The pines that
clawed foothold in on the lower slope moaned in the lash of the winds, their trunks
in stark silhouette against silver-lace sheets of spent breakers as they slid in fan
curves back to sea. Sabin tossed tangled hair from her eyes. The night was wild
around her. She could feel the great waves thud and boom over the barrier reefs
even through the leather of her bootsoles.
       A night to bring boat wrecks, she knew, the sea in her blood enough now that
her ear had attuned to its moods. She hurried as the slate path leveled out and gave
way at last to sand, ground of the same black stone, and unpleasant with chill in the
dark. The last fringe of trees passed behind, and she started across the crescent
beach. The moon went and came again. Out on the reefs, the high-flying spindrift
carved up by the rocks tossed like the manes of white horses; great herds there
seemed to be, galloping with arched necks, the surf roll became the thunder of
churning hooves. Sabin forgot the folly of the daydreams that had forced her out of
bed. As if someone’s voice had addressed her, she stopped very still and stared.
For a second the horses seemed real. There, the red flare of nostrils in the
moon-whitened planes of wedged faces, and now, a ringing neigh on the wind that
tore past her ears.
      Impossible, she insisted, and yet—
        A cloud scudded over the moon. Her wonder vanished, and she chided
herself. There was nothing. Only the tide-swept sand of the beach and herself, a
scarecrow figure of a girl with mussed hair and no sense, gawping at a span of wild
waters. The village idiot knew horses did not run in the sea. Sabin shivered and felt
cold. The dory lay beached above the tide-line, a brisk walk distant up the beach.
She turned that way, determined to fetch back her jacket without another lapse into
silliness.
       But before she had gone half the distance, something else caught her eye in the
surf. Not a horse, but a dark clot of rags that at first she mistook for flotsam. Then
the crest of a wave rolled it over, and she saw a man. He was floundering to keep his
face above water, and only a hairsbreadth from drowning.
       Fear and memory drove her. She spun and plunged into the sea. Cousin Juard
had been lost to the waves, ripped from the decks of her uncle’s boat during the
fury of a storm. As the racking, retching coughs of the man who struggled reached
her, she wondered if Juard had died as miserably, his body bent into spasms as the
cold salt water stung his lungs.
       Then the swirl of a comber cascaded over her boot-tops and foamed up
around her chest, and her gasping shudder killed thought. The castaway born along
by the tide tumbled under, and the weight of him slammed her in the knees.
       She dropped, clutching at a shoulder whose shirt was all tatters, and skin
underneath that was ice. As the rough sands scoured under her shins, she hooked
his elbow, and braced against the drag of the ebb.
     Her head broke water. Through a plastering of hair, Sabin huffed what she
hoped was encouragement. “This way. The beach.”
       His struggles were clumsy. She labored to raise him, distracted by a chink of
metal: iron, she saw in the flash of bared moonlight. He was fettered in rusted chains,
the skin of both wrists torn raw from their chafing.
      “Mother of mercy,” she blasphemed. He had found his knees, an old man,
white-haired and wasted of body. His head dangled with fatigue. She said, “Nobody
could swim pulled down by all this chain!”
       “Didn’t,” he husked; he had no breath to speak. He thrashed in attempt to
rise, and fell again as the water hit and dashed in fountains around his chin.
        She gripped him under his flaccid arms and dragged mightily. Despite her best
effort, his head dipped under the flood. He swallowed a mouthful, gagging on salt,
while she grunted in tearful frustration. The wave sucked back. He dragged his face
free of its deadly, clinging currents with the dregs of his failing strength. His feet
seemed fastened to the shoaling sands as if they were moored in place.
      Belatedly suspicious, Sabin kept tugging. “Your ankles. Are they in irons
also?”
         He made a sound between a laugh, a sob, and a cough. “Always.”
        His floundering efforts managed to coordinate for a moment with hers.
Together they stumbled a few yards shoreward, harried on by flooding water. Again
the wave ebbed, and he sank and bumped against the sand. Panting, Sabin locked
her fingers in his shirt. She held him braced against the hungry drag of the sea,
desperate, while her heart raced drumrolls with the surf. Something was not quite
right, she thought, her stressed mind sluggish to reason. The incoming tide carried
no flotsam, not a stick or a plank that a shipwrecked man might have used to float
his way ashore. “You never swam,” she accused again, as he regained the surface
and sputtered.
       Weak as he was, her sharpness stung him. He raised his chin, and eyes that
were piercingly clear met hers, lit by the uncertain moonlight. “I didn’t.” His voice
held a roughness like harpstrings slackened out of tune. “I begged help from the
seaborne spirits that can be called to take the shape of horses. They answered and
drew me to land, but they could not see me safe. To lead one even once from the
water dooms it to mortal life ashore.”
       The interval between waves seemed drawn out, an unnatural interruption of
rhythm like a breath too long held suspended. Even disallowing for chains, his
weight was too much for a girl; but it was a spasm of recognition like fear that
locked Sabin’s limbs and tongue—until those cut-crystal eyes looked down. As if
released from bewitchment, she blurted, “Who are you?”
       She thought the wind took her words. Or that they were lost in the grinding
thunder of the sea as she scrabbled the last yards to dry sand. But when, safe at last,
he collapsed in bruised exhaustion, he answered. “I am a wayfinder, and the son of a
way-finder.” His cracked tone broke to a whisper. “And I was a slave for more time
than I care to remember.” He spoke nonsense, she determined, and said so. He was
a madman and no doubt a convict who had fled in the shallows to hide his tracks
from dogs. A denial she did not understand closed her eyes and her heart against the
logic that argued for him: that the road ran high above the cliffs, and those few paths
that turned shoreward were much too steep for a captive to negotiate in chains. Had
he come that way, he should have fallen, and broken his legs or his neck. Through
teeth that chattered, Sabin waited. Yet the refugee stayed silent. She poked him in the
ribs with her toe and found he had succumbed at last to the beating the sea had given
him; either he slept or had dropped unconscious. The wind bit at wet flesh, made
cruel by driven spray. The tide rose still, and the sand where he lay would very soon
be submerged. Forced by necessity, Sabin arose. The jacket she had left on the dory
would have to serve the old man as a blanket until Uncle Ciondo could be fetched
from his bed.
       Sabin awakened to sunlight. Afraid of her uncle’s gruff scolding, she shot
straight, too fast. The blood left her head. Dizziness held her still and blinking, and
she realized: Uncle Ciondo was shouting. His voice drifted up through the trapdoor
to the ladder, though he probably stood in the kitchen by the stove, shaking a fist as
he ranted.
      “A condemned man, what else could he be! Or why should anyone have
chained him? Those fetters were not closed with locks. They were riveted. We
cannot shelter such a man, Kala.”
       The castaway, Sabin remembered. She pushed out of bed, and tripped in her
haste over the wet smock she had discarded without hanging last night. From the
clothes chest she grabbed her only spare, and followed with the woolen britches
every fisher’s lad wore to sea. She left her boots. Even if they were not drenched
and salt-stiff, they would make too much noise and draw notice.
       Masked by the murmur of her aunt’s voice, declaiming, Sabin set bare feet on
the ladder. At the bottom, the door to Juard’s room lay cracked open, beyond the
stairwell, which tunneled the bellow of her uncle’s protest. “Kala, that’s daft and you
know it! He could be dangerous, a murderer. I say we send him inland in the fish
wagon and leave his fate to the King’s bailiff.”
       Sabin’s uncle was not hard-hearted, but only a sailor, and the sea rewards no
man for sentiment. Ciondo would care very little if the rescued man could hear the
rough anger in his voice. But as a girl not born to a fisher’s trade, Sabin flinched.
She tiptoed down the hall and slipped through the opened door, a ghost with mousy,
tangled hair and a sailcloth smock flocked at the cuffs with the rusty blood of gutted
cod.
       The man the sea had cast up was asleep. Chain lay on him still, looped at
wrists and ankles with spare line that tied him spread-eagled to the bedposts. Ciondo
had taken no chances, but had secured the refugee with the same half hitches he
might use to hold a dory against a squall. Still, the undyed wool of the blankets hung
half kicked off, as if the prisoner had thrashed in nightmares. His rags were gone.
Daylight through the opened shutters exposed a history of abuse, from the salt-galled
sores left by shackles to a mapwork of dry, welted scars. He was not old after all,
Sabin saw, but starved like a mongrel dog. His skin was sun-cured to teak and
creases, and his hair bleached lusterless white. He looked as weatherworn as the
fishing tackle on the sloop’s decks, beaten by years of hard use.
        Aunt Kala’s voice filtered through the doorway, raised to unusual sharpness.
“Ciondo, I’ll be sending no man on to the bailiff before he finds his wits and tells his
name! Nor will any needy stranger leave our roof hungry, the more shame to you for
witless fears! As if anybody so starved could cause harm while bound up in metal
chains! Now, be off! Go down to the beach with the rest, and leave me in peace to
stir the soup.”
      A grumbling followed, and a scrape of boots on the brick. Few could stand
up to Kala when she was angry, and since Juard’s death, none dared. She was apt to
weep when distressed, and if anyone saw her, she would throw cooking pots at them
with an aim that could flatten a pigeon.
        Cautious in the quiet after the door slammed, Sabin crept to the window. The
sun threw slanting bars of yellow through gently tossing pines. Yet if the vicious,
tearing winds had quieted, the sea mirrored no such calm. Beyond the spit off the
point, the breakers still reared on the reefs, booming down in tall geysers of spray.
The surge rushed on untamed, through the harbor gates where the round-bottomed
boats rolled at anchor, an ominous sign. Sabin bit her lip. She squinted against the
scintillant brightness of reflections and saw wreckage scattered amid the foam: the
sundered masts and planking of ships gutted wholesale by the reefs.
       No one had shaken her awake at dawn because today the twine would not be
cast out for fish. When the wrecks littered the beach, men plied their nets to glean a
storm’s harvest from the waves. Custom barred girls and women from such labor,
lest the nets bring up dead bodies, and the sight of drowned flesh sour the luck of
their sons, born and unborn, and curse them to the horror that had befallen cousin
Juard, to be taken alive by the sea.
       The man on the bed had escaped that fate, just barely. He had come in on a
ship that was now ripped to fragments, Sabin knew for a surety. He had not swam;
not in chains. And horses did not run in the sea. Unwilling to risk misfortune by
looking too closely at the waves, or what tossed and surfaced in the whitening
tumble of foam, Sabin spun away from the window. She shivered in the sun that fell
on her back, and shivered again as she saw that the man on the bed had awakened.
He studied her, his eyes like fine flawed crystal broken to a razor’s edge.
     “You do not trust me,” he said in his rusty whisper. He flexed one wrist, and
immediately grimaced in pain.
      “My uncle thinks you’re a murderer.”
       He ground out a bitter, silent laugh. “Oh, but I am, though my hand has never
taken life.”
     She frowned, a plain-spoken girl who dreamed, but had always hated riddles.
“What is a wayfinder?”
       Riddles came back in answer, as he regarded the beams of the ceiling. “One
who hears the sea. One who can read the earth. One who can travel and never be
lost.”
      “I don’t understand.” She stepped back, and sat on the clothes chest that had
once held the shirt she was wearing, when it had been Juard’s, and she had spent
days spinning thread for her father’s loom. Now her hands had grown horny and
tough, and fine wool would catch on the callus. But the incessant lapses of attention
had not left her; she forgot to mind sheet lines as readily as she had faltered at
spindle and wheel. She curled her knees up and clasped her hands to bury that
recognition. “Anyone can be lost.”
      He stirred in the faintest impatience, jerked back by the cut of his chains.
“Inland to the east, there is a road, a very dusty road with stone markers that winds
through a forest. Beyond lie farmlands, and three villages, and lastly a trader’s town.
Beyond brick walls are wide sands, called by the desert people who live there
Dei’eh’vikia.” His head tipped sideways toward Sabin. His eyes now were darkened
as gray sapphires, and he considered her as though she should be awed.
       She was not. “You could have spoken to someone who passed that way,” she
accused. “Perhaps you lived there yourself.” But she knew as she spoke that he did
not. His vessel had broken on the reef, and never sought harbor in these isles. Few
ships did, for the rocks gave hostile greeting to mariners from afar.
       He looked at her in sadness or maybe pain, as if he had offered riches to the
village halfwit who had use for no coin at all. He kept staring until she twisted her
fingers together, embarrassed as if caught at a lie. For all his foreign accent, he had
pronounced the place-name as crisply as the nomads who made the desert their
home. Townsmen and traders slurred over the vowels and called it Daaviki, in
contempt for the troublesome native speech.
          He perceived that she knew this. He saw also that stubbornness kept her
silent.
       He looked at her still, his gaze heavylidded, almost glazed as a drunk’s. The
angle of his neck must have pulled at his shoulders and wrists, but he shed any sign
of discomfort as he said, “Sabin, outside this room, there is a passage covered with
braided rugs. It leads to a stairway that winds around itself twice. Downstairs, to the
right of the kitchen lies a door that leads to a springhouse. Purple flowers grow by
the path, and seven steps to the left lead to the sea cliff where there is a little slate
ledge. You like to sit there on sunny mornings, in what you call your chair seat. But
the people who inhabited these coasts before yours used the site as a shrine.” His
grainy voice was almost gentle as he finished. “They left carvings. You have seen
them, when you scratched at the moss.”
       Sabin jumped up with her mouth opened like a fish’s. He had been carried
into this house, unconscious. Ciondo had brought him through the front door.
Someone might have mentioned her name in his hearing, but there was no way he
could have seen the springhouse, or have known of her fondness for that ledge. Her
aunt and uncle did not know, nor her own mother and father.
      “I am a wayfinder,” he said simply, as if that sealed a truth that she realized,
shivering, could not be other than magic. Her need to escape that room, and that
compelling, mesmerizing gaze came out in a rush of speech. “I have to go, now.”
      The Wayfinder let his head fall back on the pillow. At a word from him, she
would have fled; she waited, tautly poised on one foot. But he made no sound. He
closed his eyes, and curiosity welled over her fear and held her rooted. “Still there?”
he murmured after a while.
      “Maybe.” Sabin put her foot down, but quietly.
      He did not open his eyes. “You have a piece of the gift yourself, you know,
Sabin.”
      She quivered again, as much from anger. “What gift!”
       His hands were not relaxed now, but bunched into white-knuckled fists. One
of his sores had begun to bleed from the pressure; he was trying her uncle’s knots,
and finding them dishearteningly firm. “You came to the beach at my call.”
       She stamped her foot, as much to drive off uneasiness. “You called nothing! I
forgot my jacket. That was all.”
       “No.” His hands gave up their fretting. “You have given your jacket as the
reason. But it was my call that caused you to forget it in the first place. When I
asked the spirits for their help, you heard also. That was the true cause of the
forgetfulness that drew you outside in the night.”
      “I’ve been scolded for carelessness all my life,” she protested, “and my jacket
was forgotten at twilight!”
      “And so at that hour I called.” He was smiling.
      She wanted to curse him, for that. He seemed so smug. Like Juard had been
when he teased her; and that remembrance called up tears. Sabin whirled violently
toward the doorway and collided headlong with her aunt.
      “Sabin! Merciful god, you’ve spilled the soup.” Kala raised the wooden tray
to keep it beyond reach of calamity, and her plump face dimpled into a frown.
“What are you doing here anyway? A sick man has no need for prying girls.”
      “Talk to him,” Sabin snapped back. “He’s the one who pries.”
      “Awake, is he?” Kala stiffened primly. She glanced toward the bed and
stopped cold, her chins sagging beneath her opened mouth, and the tray forgotten in
her hands. For a moment she seemed to breathe smoke as she inhaled rising steam
from the soup bowl.
        Then she exploded. “My fool of a husband! Rope ties! The cruelty and the
shame of it.” She stepped sideways, banged her tray down on the clothes chest, and
in a fit of total distraction, failed to bemoan the slopped soup. “Sabin, run out and
fetch our mallet and chisel.” She added to the stranger on the bed, “We’ll have you
free in just minutes.”
       For an instant, the Wayfinder’s cut-crystal eyes seemed to mirror all of the
earth. “Your good man thinks I’m a murderer.”
       “My good man is a fool who thinks in circles like a sand crab.” Kala noticed
that Sabin still lingered in the doorway. “Girl, must you always be idling about
waiting for speech from the wind? Get along! Hammer and chisel, and quickly.”
      Kala had matters well in hand before the last fetter was struck. “You’re taking
up no space that’s needed,” she insisted with determined steadiness. “Juard’s bed is
yours, he’s dead and at rest in the sea, and if you care to lend a hand at the chores,
we could use the help, truly. Sabin belongs home with her family.”
       She ended with a strike of the mallet. As the last rivet sheared away, and
rusted metal fell open and clanged in a heap on the floor, the Wayfinder raised his
freed wrists. He rubbed at torn skin, then looked up at Kala, who stood over him
gripping the tools with both fists braced on broad hips. In profile, Sabin saw the
stranger give her aunt that same, heavy-lidded gaze that had earlier caused her the
shivers.
      “He’s not lost, your Juard,” the broken voice announced softly.
       Kala went white. She dropped the tools with a clatter and clapped her palms
behind her back to distract bad luck, and avert the misfortune of hearing false
words. “Do not spin me lies! Respect our loss. Ill comes of wishing drowned men
back from death, for they hear. They rise in sorrow and walk the sea bed without
rest for all of eternity.”
      The Wayfinder cocked up his eyebrows in sad self-mockery. “I never lie. And
no such lost spirits walk the sea, nor ever have.” At Kala’s shocked stiffness, he
thumped his marred fist on the mattress in frustration. “Your boy is not dead, only
washed up on a beach, as I was.”
       Aunt Kala turned her back, which was as near to an insult as anyone ever got
from her. The Wayfinder glared fiercely, his ice-gray eyes lit to burning. Then his jaw
hardened until the muscles jumped and his speech scraped out of his throat. “Your
son fetched up on the Barraken Rock, to the west. At this moment, he is gutting a
fish with a knife he chipped from a mussel shell.”
     “My son is dead!” Kala snapped back. “Now say no more, or when Ciondo
comes back, you will go trussed in the wagon to the bailiffs. I’ll hear your word.”
      The Wayfinder sighed, as though sucked down in a chasm of weariness.
“Woman, you’ll get no word from me, but neither will you hear any, either, if that is
your desire.”
       “It is.” Kala stamped out through the doorway without looking back. “Sabin,”
she yelled from the threshold at the head of the stairwell. “You’ll see that yon man
eats his soup, and bring down the tray when he’s finished.”
     But Kala’s bidding was impossible to carry out, Sabin found. On the bed, the
Wayfinder had closed his eyes and fallen deeply asleep.
      The house stayed quiet for the rest of the morning, with Kala beating quilts
with a ferocity that outlasted the dust. At noon Uncle Ciondo returned from the
beach, swathed in dripping oilskins, his boots caked to the ankles with damp sand.
The bull bellow of his voice carried up through the second-storied window where
Sabin kept vigil with the invalid. “Kala! Where is that man?”
       The thwack of the broom against fabric faltered. “Where else would he be,
but in bed? The shame on you, Ciondo, for leaving him trussed like the felon he
certainly isn’t.” Smack! went the broom at the quilts.
        When only the cottage door hammered closed in reply, Sabin gripped her
knees with sweaty hands. She all but cowered as her uncle’s angry tread ascended
the stairs; bits of grit and shell scattered from his boots and fell pattering against the
baseboards as he hurried the length of the hall. The next instant his hulking shoulders
filled the bedroom doorway, and his sailor’s squint fixed on the empty shackles that
lay where they had fallen on the floor.
      “Fool woman,” he growled in reference to his wife. He raised hands scraped
raw from his labors with net and sea, and swiped salt-drenched hair from his
temples. Then he noticed Sabin. “Out, imp.”
      Her chin jerked up to indicate the man on the bed. “I found him.”
      “So you did.” Ciondo’s grimness did not ease as he strode closer, but he did
not send her away. Sabin watched as he, too, met the uncanny gaze of the stranger
who had wakened again at the noise. The sword-edged clarity of that stare arrested
her uncle also, for he stopped, his hands clenched at his sides. “Do you know that
all morning we have been dragging in bits of burst ships? Not just one, but a fleet of
them.”
      The Wayfinder said a touch tartly, “Karbaschi warships.”
      “So you know them.” Ciondo sighed. “At least you admit it.” His annoyance
stayed at odds with his gesture as he noticed his boots, and the sand left tracked in
wet clumps. Hopeful as a miscreant mongrel, he bent and scuffed the mess beneath
the bed where Kala might not notice. He dusted his fingers, ham-pink and swollen
from salt water, on the already gritty patches of his oilskins. “You were a criminal?
Their prisoner perhaps?”
      The Wayfinder’s Up curled in a spasm of distaste. “Worse than that.”
        Ciondo straightened. “You’d better tell me. Everything. Our people fear such
fleets, for where they go, they bring ruin.”
       The man propped up by the pillows seemed brown and wasted as
stormwrack cast up and dried on the beach. In a whisper napped like spoiled velvet,
he said, “I was their Wayfinder. Kept bound in chains to the flagship’s mast, to
guide them on their raids. When I refused to see the way for their murdering, or led
them in circles at sea, they made sure that I suffered. But by the grace of your
kindness, no more.”
       Uncle Ciondo’s square face looked vacant with astonishment. “You!” He
took a breath. “You? One of the in’am shealdi, the ones who are never lost? I don’t
believe it.”
       “Then don’t.” The Wayfinder closed his eyes. His lashes were dark at the
roots, and bleached white at the tips from too much sun. “Your wife named me liar
also.”
      “Storm and tide! She’ll fling any manner of insult at a man, if she thinks it will
help make him listen.” Ciondo shifted stance in disgust. “And I did not say you
spoke falsehood, but only that I can’t believe you.”
      At this, the Wayfinder’s eyes flicked open. Though he tensed no muscle,
Sabin felt warning charge his presence that swept the room like cold wind. “Is it
proof you want? You shall have it. Leave me blindfolded on any of your fishing
sloops, and give me the tiller, and I will set you an accurate course for the spit called
the Barraken Rock.”
      “A wager?” Ciondo covered uneasiness with a cough. Thoughtfully, he
added, “The trial would have to be at night, or the sun on your face might guide
you.”
       “Be it night, or in storm, I care very little,” the Wayfinder challenged. “But if I
win, I’d have your promise: not a word of my gift shall go beyond this village. Your
King, if he found me, would send me back as a bribe to plead for an exemption from
tribute. Greedy traders anywhere would sell the secret of my survival. The Karbasch
make unforgiving masters. If they learned I still lived, a warrior fleet would sail to
collect me, and killing and looting would follow. If your people have no riches to
adorn Karbaschi honor, your noses would burn, and your daughters know the
miseries of slavery.”
      Ciondo went pale, even to the end of his nose that seasons of winds had
buffed red. He stepped back from the edge of the mattress and sat without care for
soggy oilskins on the cushion by the windowseat. “If you are in’am shealdi, then
you steered those ships afoul of the currents. Was it you who set your Karbasch
overlords on our reef to drown and then took your chance in the sea?”
       The Wayfinder denied nothing, but regarded his wrists as if the weals dug by
fetters could plead his testimony for him. A tight-drawn interval followed, broken at
last by the rattle of pots in the kitchen; Kala had relented enough to oversee the noon
meal. Her industry spoiled the quiet, and forced the Wayfinder to raise his burred
voice to be heard.
      “Men travel the land, but they do not hear it. They sail the waters, yet they do
not know the sea. The Karbaschi warships carve paths of destruction, and the
peoples they conquer grieve for slain husbands and sons. But where the Karbasch
stay to settle, they bring cruelties more lasting than death to the flesh. The lands they
rule will wither in time, because they are a race who take and give nothing back.
Their habit of pillage has deafened them, until they plow up forests for fields and
raise towns without asking leave. The rituals mouthed by their priests are empty of
truth, and without care for the still, small needs of the earth.” Here, the invalid lifted
his wasted, leathery shoulders in a shrug. “In’am shealdi are actually guardians. We
nurture the spirits that the Karbasch run over roughshod, because they love only the
desires of humanity. It is such spirits that show me the way. If I call, they answer,
though the Karbasch ruled my body as a man might course a hunting dog. The
guidance given to me in trust was forced to ill-use, and inevitably brought the earth
sorrow. The day came when I could not endure its pain, or my own, any longer.”
       The Wayfinder sounded wistful as he finished. “I expected to die in the sea.
Since I did not, I should like very much to stay. To live simply, and make use of my
talent very little. I wish for nothing beyond your leave to guide your village sloops
back to anchorage each night for the rest of my life.”
      Secure in the belief she was forgotten where she sat on the clothes chest, only
Sabin caught the half glance he flicked in her direction. As if his cracked voice
informed her, she knew: because of her he begged sanctuary—because of the gift he
claimed she shared; and not least, for the sake of Juard, who was dead, who had to
be dead, else magic and spirits were real and horses ran wild in the sea.
      If in truth such beauty existed, she would never shed the distraction of
dreams, but helplessly become consumed by them until the small inattentions that
cursed her grew monstrous and took over her life.
        Spooked by strangeness that threatened to draw her like some hapless moth
to a flame, Sabin sprang to her feet and fled. Out and through the hall she pounded,
and on down the stair beyond. Kala called out as she passed through the kitchen, to
say the noon meal was waiting. But the girl did not stop until she had left the house,
and raced at reckless speed down the cliff path to the place she called her chair seat.
       There she spent the afternoon, while the Wayfinder slept. She did not return
for supper, though Kala called from the back door to say that their guest had risen
for the meal. By that Sabin understood that her uncle had accepted the Wayfinder at
his word; an outsider who spoke false might stay because he was ill and had need,
but he would not be invited to table. One supposed that Kala and the stranger had
settled their hostilities by not speaking.
       At nightfall, when most folk gathered at the tavern, the beachhead glittered
with torches. Word had passed round of a wager, and every boy with the sea in his
blood turned out to ask Ciondo’s leave to man the sloop, never mind that the craft
was handy and needed little crew. The commotion as boasts were made and shouted
down, and lots were finally drawn to keep the choice fair, enabled Sabin to sneak
past and hide under the nets in the dory. Certain she had not been seen, she peered
out cautiously and saw the tight knot of men stepping back. They left the Wayfinder
standing alone with black cloth muffling his head. He turned unerringly toward the
tender that was Ciondo’s. If his steps were unsteady due to weakness, the line he
walked was straight. He crossed and found the thwart without fumbling, and spoke
so no others could hear. “Your good aunt does not know where we sail. I never
mentioned to your uncle that I know your cousin Juard to be alive. Before we arrive
at the Barraken Rock, I give you the burden of telling him.”
       “Aunt Kala would curse you for putting your lies in my mouth,” Sabin
accused from under damp nets, the reek of which suddenly made her dizzy. She was
trembling again, and that made her angry, for he sensed her fear, she was certain.
She could feel those pale eyes burning even through their veiling of cloth as he said,
“But you are not Kala. You are the child of a weaver, and your fears are not ruled by
the sea.”
       “They are when I sit in a boat!” she snapped back, more like her aunt than
herself.
       He laughed in his broken, rasping way, and because there was no malice in
him, she wanted to hit him or scream. Instead she shrank into a tight huddle. Light
and voices intruded, and the boat lifted, jostling, to be launched. As the keel
smacked the water, and blown spray trickled through her cocoon of nets, she tasted
warm salt with the cold. Tears: she was crying. The man seemed so certain that
poor, lost Juard still breathed.
       Sabin felt the rampaging buck of the surf toss the dory over a swell. The
alternative terrified, that her cousin had rightly drowned, and that this stranger who
lured the people laughing to their boats to follow his blindfolded quest was a
sorcerer who could swim in iron chains. They might rescue Juard, or else join him,
leaving more bereaved families to weep and to curse at the sea.
      Sabin rubbed the stinging cheek her uncle had smacked when he found her,
and smacked again when she told what the Wayfinder had said of her lost cousin.
While the wind shifted fitfully, slapping sails and stays in contrary gusts, and
moonlight silvered the wavelets, she braced against the windward rail, away from the
men by the binnacle. Their talk grew ever more sullen as Juard’s fate was uneasily
discussed, and shoreline and lights shrank astern.
       “Nothing lives on the Barraken Rock but fishing birds that drink seawater!”
cried Tebald over the wear of patched canvas. Young, and a friend of Juard’s, his
jutted chin and narrowed eyes were wasted.
      Blind behind swaths of black rag, the Wayfinder stood serene before
aggression, his thin hands draped on the tiller as if the wood underneath were alive.
      Darru argued further. “Without a fresh spring, a castaway would perish.”
      “It has rained twice in the past week,” the stranger rebuked. “Oilskins can be
rigged to trap water, and the seabirds are plentiful enough to snare.” Ciondo’s spare
smock flapped off his shoulders like an ill-fitting sail, the cuffs tied back to keep
from troubling his sores. The linen bindings covering his wrists emphasized
prominent bones; a man so gaunt should not have been able to stand up, far less
command the muscle to mind the helm. But Sabin could see from where she stood
that the sloop held flawless course. The wake carved an arrow’s track astern.
       Ciondo glowered and said nothing, but his hand strayed often to the rigging
knife at his belt.
         “We should put about and sail back,” Tebald said.
         Darru was more adamant. “We should let you swim back, stranger, for your
lies.”
       The Wayfinder answered in the absent way of a man whose thoughts are
interrupted. “If I prove wrong, you may kill me.”
       At this came a good deal of footshifting, and one or two gestures to ward ill
luck. No one voiced the obvious, that they could kill him only if malfortune went
elsewhere and they lived to make good such a threat.
       The night wore on, and the stars turned. The wind settled to a steady
northeast, brisk and coldly clear. Moonset threw darkness on the water, and the land
invisible astern. Once, Darru repeated the suggestion that the wager be abandoned,
that the sloop seek return by the stars. He spoke to Ciondo by the mainmast pinrail,
but was answered in gruff-voiced challenge by the Wayfinder aft at the helm.
“Would you take such a chance, just to keep Juard’s doom a clear certainty?”
       Darru spun in vicious anger, jerked back by Ciondo’s braced hand. “Don’t
provoke him! He is in’am shealdi, or how else does he steer without sight? Find
faith in the straight course he sails, or else give the decency of holding your tongue
until you have true cause to doubt.”
       “Grief for your son has turned your head,” Darru muttered, shrugging himself
free. But he could not argue that lacking clear stars or a compass, no ordinary man
could keep a heading hour after hour without mistake.
      Night waned. Sabin slept through the dawn curled against a bight of rope. She
dreamed of waves and white horses, and the rolling thunder of troubled seas until
Tebald’s shout awakened her. “The Barraken Rock! Dead off our bow, do you
see!”
      She opened her eyes to a dazzle of sunlight, and the soured smell of seaweed
beached and dried. “Juard,” she whispered.
      No one noticed. Ciondo stood as a man frozen in place by the foremast stay;
the more volatile Darru gave back laughter and cried to his fellow crewman, “Where
were you an hour ago when the spit rose out of the sea?”
       “Sleeping,” Tebald confessed. His awed glance encompassed the scarecrow
figure who guided the tiller with a feather touch, and whose eyesight was yet swathed
in cloth. The mouth that showed underneath seemed turned up in detached
amusement. Tebald leaned down and ruffled Sabin’s hair as he passed, his
discomfort masked by a shrug.
     Peevish and oddly unrefreshed, she tried a kick that missed at his ankle.
“Don’t do that. I’m not a little girl anymore.”
       Tebald ignored her as if she were a bothersome younger sister. To Ciondo he
said, “The wager’s won, I’d say. Your in’am shealdi should take off his blindfold.
It’s probably making him sweat.”
       “I said so,” Ciondo admitted. With one hand fastened to the head stay, he
kept his eyes trained on the rock that jutted like a spindle from the sea. “Tell him
again if you want.”
       But with the arcane powers of the helmsman now proven, no one seemed
anxious to speak. Sun glared like molten brass off the wet shine of the deck, and the
sheet lines creaked under their burden of sail. The pitiless isolation of the sea seemed
to amplify the wind and the mingled cries of seabirds that squabbled and flew above
the rock. The deeper shout that was human seemed to rend the day’s peace like a
mortal blow to the heart.
      On that gale-carved, desolate spit, splashing in sea-water to the knees, a
raggedy figure ran, dancing and gyrating to a paean of reborn hope.
      “It’s Juard!” Darru gasped. He glanced nervously back at the Wayfinder,
ashamed for his unkind threats. Tebald at his side held his breath in wordless shock,
and Ciondo just buried his face in his hands and let the tears spill through his fingers.
      It was Sabin who moved to free sheetlines when the Wayfinder threw up the
helm. While Tebald and Darru roused belatedly to set the anchor, the girl un-lashed
an empty bait barrel. She stood it on end by the sternpost, climbed up, and as the
Wayfinder bent his head to receive her touch, she picked out the knots of his
blindfold. The cloth fell away. Hair bleached like bone tumbled free in the breeze,
and she confronted a face set level with hers that had been battered into pallor by
exhaustion. The eyes no longer burned, but seemed wide and drugged as a
dreamer’s. Almost, she could plumb their depths, and sense the echoes of the spirits
whose guidance had led without charts.
        “You could hear them yourself, were you taught,” the Wayfinder murmured in
his grainy bass. Yet before those eyes could brighten and tempt her irrevocably to
sacrifice the reality she understood, she retreated to a braced stance behind the
barrel.
       “The moment Juard can sail with his father, I’ll be sent back home. Whether
or not there are horses in the sea, I shan’t be getting lost behind a loom.” Her bare
feet made no sound as she whirled and bounded off to help Ciondo, who was
struggling in feverish eagerness to launch the tender by himself.
       The sloop was met on her return by men with streaming torches. Juard’s
reappearance from the lost brought cries of joy and disbelief. Kala was fetched from
her bed for a tearful reunion with the son miraculously restored to her. For Juard was
alive; starved thin, his hair matted in tangles so thick they could only be shorn, and
his skin marred everywhere with festering scratches that needed immediate care. The
greedy sea had been forced to give back its plunder, and the news swept like fire
through the village.
       A crowd gathered. Children in nightshirts gamboled on the fringes, while their
parents jabbered in amazement. The Wayfinder, whose feat had engineered the
commotion, stood aloof, his weight braced against the stempost of a dry dory, as if
he needed help to stand up. From farther back in the shadows, outside the ring of
torchlight, Sabin watched him. She listened, as he did, to the noise and the
happiness, and she alone saw him shiver and stiffen and suddenly stride into the
press with his light eyes hardened to purpose.
        He set a hand marked as Juard’s on Ciondo’s arm, and said, “No, I forbid
this,” to the fisherman who had been boasting the loudest. “You will not be repeating
this tale to any traders, nor be offering my service to outsiders. This is my bargain
for Juard’s life.”
      Silence fell with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Surf and the snap of flame
remained, and a ring of stupefied faces unfamiliarly edged with hostility. “Which of
us made any such bargain?” shouted someone from the sidelines.
       The Wayfinder’s peaked brows rose. “Ciondo is my witness, and here is my
warning. For yourselves, you may ask of me as you will. The guiding and ward of
your fleet I shall do as I can; but let none beyond this village ever know that I am
in’am shealdi. Say nothing, or sorrow will come of it.”
       Finished speaking, or perhaps too weary to stay standing, the Wayfinder
strode out of the pack. He left all the village muttering and wondering as he moved in
slow steps toward the path. On the chill sands outside the torchlight, Sabin watched
him vanish in the darkness under the pines. She did not follow; nor did she feel
moved to join the villagers. The waking dream had touched her. Curiosity no longer
drove her to discuss the stranger Kala sheltered.
       “Was he a felon, to want such secrecy?” one good-wife muttered from the
sidelines.
      Ciondo replied in indignation. “Does it matter?” Then good sense prevailed
over argument, and Kala scolded the gawkers roundly for keeping poor Juard from
his bed.
      A month passed, and seven days. Juard recovered his health and returned to
fishing on the sloop. The Wayfinder who had brought his recovery took a longer
time to mend. Kala pressed food and comforts on him constantly, until he
complained of her coddling. Unlike anybody else, she listened, and left him alone.
His white hair grew out its natural color, a golden, honey-brown, until Sabin sitting in
her chair seat on the cliff-side could no longer pick him out from the villagers who
manned the sloops. She saw him seldom, and spoke with him not at all. Winding the
skeins of wool and stringing the looms in her father’s craft shop in furious
concentration, she avoided walking the beach. Since the night she forgot her jacket,
she could not bear to watch the combers. She heard them, felt them, even indoors
with her ears filled with the clack of shuttle and loom—the thunder of what might be
hooves, and the tumble of white, upflung spray that pounded the beaches in
procession. She swept cut threads from the floor, and helped her mother bake, and
each night begged her sleep to show her silence.
      It did not. She misplaced socks and tools, and once, let the fire burn out. The
waking world came to seem as a dream, and herself, strangely separate, adrift. She
was scolded more often for stargazing, and seemed more than ever to care less.
       The Wayfinder laughed in the tavern at night, accepted, but with a reverence
that marked him apart. Two boats he saved from ruin when storms caused shoaling
off the reefs. Another smack was recovered with a damaged compass after squall
winds blew it astray. No one knowingly broke the Wayfinder’s faith, but his
presence loomed too large to shelter. Sabin understood this, her hands fallen idle
over wool she was meant to be spinning. She twisted the red-dyed fibers aimlessly,
knowing: there were traders who had heard of Juard’s loss, and who saw him back
among the men. They asked questions. Driven by balked curiosity, they pressured
and cajoled, and won themselves no satisfaction.
      The silence itself caused talk.
       Summer passed. The winds shifted and blew in cold from the northeast, and
the fleet changed quarter to follow the shoals of fish. The looms in the weaver’s
shop worked overtime to meet the demand for new blankets. Sabin crawled into bed
each evening too tired to blow out the lamp; and so it chanced that she wakened in
the deeps of night by the blood-dim glow of a spent wick. This time no forgotten
jacket needed recovery from shore. The restlessness that stirred her refused to be
denied.
      She arose, dressed in haste, and let herself out the back door. Lights still
burned in the tavern, and a few drunken voices inside argued over ways to cure
sharkskin. Sabin slipped past, down the lane toward her uncle’s cottage. Once there
she did not knock; every window was dark. Instead she went on down the cliff path.
Her shins brushed the stalks of purple flowers, dried now, and rattling with
seedheads in the change of season. Wind snatched her clothing and snapped at the
ends of her hair. A wild night, yet again, the kind that was wont to bring wrecks. She
completed the last, familiar steps to the chair seat, dreading what she might find.
       The horizon was clearly delineated under a waning half moon. Clouds
scudded past like dirty streamers, muddling the swells pewter and gray, and against
them, like pen strokes in charcoal, an advancing forest of black masts. Where
peaceful craft would have plied sails, this fleet cleaved against the wind, lashing up
coils of foam beneath the driving stroke of banked oars.
        War galleys, Sabin identified, though the Karbasch to her were just talk. The
Wayfinder’s secret was loose in the world, and his overlords returned now to claim
him. Poised to run and rouse the town, Sabin found she could not move. Her flesh
became riveted by a cry that had no sound, but ripped between the fabric of the air
itself to echo and ring through her inner mind.
       The vibration negated her scream of terrified surprise, and filled her unasked
with its essence: that of rage and sorrow and mystery, and a wounding edge of
betrayal.
       Dizzied almost to sickness, she clawed at the rocks for a handhold to ward
off a tumbling fall. The summons faded but did not leave silence. The grind of the
sea overwhelmed her ears with a mauling crescendo of sound. Cowering down in the
cleft of the chair seat, Sabin saw the sea roll back. It sucked in white arrows of
current off the tide flats until slate, shingle, and reef were laid bare. Fish flapped in
confused crescents across settled streamers of weed, and the scuttled, half-rotted
hull of a schooner turned turtle with a smack in the mud, Fishing boats settled on
their anchor chains, and townside, the bell in the harbormaster’s house began
steadily tolling alarm.
       Faintly, from the cottage behind, Sabin heard her uncle’s bellow of inquiry as
the clangor aroused him from bed. Juard, also, would be tossing off blankets, and
stumbling out with the rest.
       Sabin did not move. She, who had been born in a village of seafarers, and
should have been, would have been, one of them, could only stare with her joints
locked immobile. She alone did not flee in blind concern toward the beach path to
stave off the threat to the boats.
      Had she gone, it would not have mattered; the chair seat offered an
untrammeled view as the horses thundered in from the sea.
       They came on in a vast, white herd, manes tossing, and forehooves carving up
arcs of flying spray. The water swirled under their bellies and legs, and rushed in
black torrents behind uncountable upflung tails. Wave after wave, they surged in,
plowing up weeds and fish and muddy gouts of sea bottom, and milling the shells of
galleys and sloops into shreds and splinters as they passed. Spars of fishing smacks
entangled with snapped-off oars and the dragon-horned timbers of Karbaschi
shipwrights; the cries of warriors and oarsmen entangled in the flood mingled with
shouts from the villagers who saw their fleet and that of the raiders become smashed
to kindling at a stroke. The horses swept on in a boil of foam that boomed like a
god-wielded hammer against the shore. Spindrift sluiced across the cliffs. Ancient
pines shivered and cracked at the blow, and boulders broke off and tumbled.
      Drenched to her heels by cold water, Sabin cowered down, weeping for the
beauty of a thousand salt-white steeds that reared up and struck at the windy sky.
And with that release came understanding, at last, of what all along had been wrong:
her heart held no sorrow for the terrible, irreversible destruction that rendered her
whole village destitute.
       Lights flickered through the pines at her back, as angry men lit torches. Shouts
and curses carried on the wind, and the tolling bell fell silent, leaving the seethe of the
seas a scouring roar across the reef. Sabin pressed her knuckles to her face. The
Wayfinder was going to be blamed. This ruin was his doing, every man knew, and
when they found him, they would tear him in pieces.
       Pressed into her cranny by a weight of remorse she could not shed, Sabin saw
the wild horses swirl like a vortex and turn. Back, they plunged into the sea that had
spawned them, leaving churned sand and burst wood and snarled bits of rope. Amid
the roil of foam, a lone swell arose and broke; one mare spun away and parted from
her companions.
      Sabin saw her stop with lifted head, as if she listened to something far away.
She tossed her mane, shedding spray, then raised up one forehoof and stepped, not
into water, but most irrevocably, out onto wrack-strewn sand.
       Sabin cried out at that moment, as if some force of nature wrenched her, spirit
from flesh. Reflex overturned thought, and she was up and running inland at a pace
that left her breathless. Voices called out to her as she reached the lane, people she
knew, but she had no answer. The torchlight in the market did not slow her, nor the
press of enraged men who gathered to seek their revenge. Scraps of conversation
touched her ears and glanced away without impression—the in’am shealdi and his
vicious, unfair bargain—Juard’s life, in exchange for the livelihood of all the village.
Boats had been broken and sunk. Folk would starve. The Wayfinder would be made
to pay, made to burn; they would pack him off in chains to rot in the dungeons of
the King’s bailiff. A hangman was too good for him, someone yelled, his words torn
through with the sounds of a woman’s crying.
      Sabin stumbled and kept going, past the cedar shingles of the wool shop
where her mother stood on the door stoop. “Girl, where are you off to, there’s
salvage work to be done, and soup to be fixed for the men.”
      But the rebuke of her parent was meaningless, now, and had been for quite
some time.
       Deep darkness wrapped the hollow where the crossroads met the town and
the lane led inland through forest. Sabin went that way, her lungs burning, and her
eyes streaming tears. The terrible truth pursued her: she did not weep for loss. The
village was nothing to her, its hold inexorably diminished since the moment she left a
jacket on the beach.
       By the stone marker on the hill above the market, the Wayfinder waited, as she
knew he would. He sat astride a mare whose coat caught the moonlight like
sea-foam, and whose eyes held the darkness and mystery of water countless
fathoms deep. She tossed her head at Sabin’s arrival, as if chiding the girl for being
tardy, and her mane lifted like a veil of spindrift; subsided like falling spray.
      The Wayfinder regarded Sabin gravely, the burning in his eyes near to
scalding. “You heard my call,” he said. “The mare came, and you answered also.”
      Sabin found speech at last. “You knew I would.”
      He shook his head, his unbleached honey-colored hair veiling his
weather-beaten face. “I wasn’t sure. I hoped you might. Gifts such as yours are
needed sorely.”
       The white mare stamped, impatient. She blew a salty, gusty snort. New tears
welled in tracks down Sabin’s cheeks, and she reached out trembling fingers and
touched the shimmering white shoulder. It was icy as sea-water; magical and
terrifying and beautiful enough to bring madness. The words she struggled to shape
came out choked. “If the horse cannot return, then neither will I.”
       “You are both my responsibility,” the Wayfinder admitted. “And will be, to
the end of my days.” He extended his hand, no longer so thin, but disfigured still
with old scars. “You must know the Karbasch would have burned more than boats,
and slaughtered and raped did they land.”
      Sabin felt as if she had swallowed a stone. “You spared the whole village, and
they hate you.”
       He sighed, and the mare shifted under him, anxious to be away. “Oh my dear,
it could not be helped. What is a boat? Or a man? New trees will grow and be
fashioned into planks, and women will birth babies that age and grow senile and die.
But just as this mare can’t return to the waves, so an earth spirit that is maimed can
never heal. The Karbasch shed more than mortal blood. I could not allow myself to
be captured, however bitter the price.”
      “You could have died,” Sabin said, her gaze transfixed by the horse.
      And he saw it was not his exile, but the fate of the mare that she mourned. The
two of them, man and girl, were alike to the very core.
      A shout knifed the quiet, and torches shimmered through the trees. The mare
stamped again, and was restrained by a touch as the Wayfinder said in measured
calm, “I can still die. But you must know, the mare should be cared for. She is not
of mortal flesh. If I give myself up, hear warning. Your talents will blossom with
time. A horse such as this will draw notice, and the Karbasch will send another fleet.
Their craving for conquest is insatiable as the ocean is vast, and in’am shealdi to
guide them, most rare.”
       She made no move, and her rejection seemed to shatter his detachment. He
lifted his head as the noise of the mob came closer. The edgy, unaccountable
wariness that every offered kindness had not softened gentled very suddenly into
pity. “In’am shealdi,” he murmured in the grainy, musical voice that had
commanded the horse from the sea. “This mare left the water at my call, you are
right, but her sacrifice was never made for me.”
         Sabin looked up, stricken. “For my life?” she gasped, “or my gift?”
      “Both.” His eyes were not cold. Inside the serenity lent by power lay a human
being who could bleed. “If you treasure the beauty of the horses, heed this. We are
the only ones who know their kind. Others see no more than surf and foam. It is our
protection, Sabin, that keep this spirit-mare alive, our call that lends her substance.”
         The torches reached the crossroad, and light flared and arrowed between the
trees.
      “There he is!” someone shouted, and the note of the mob quickened like the
baying of hounds that sight game.
       To her dream-filled ears, the pursuers uttered no words, but made only a
cacophony of vicious noise. The roll of the sea held more meaning, and from this
time forward, always would.
       Sabin grasped the Wayfinder’s hand. Clinging as if to a lifeline, she let him
pull her up astride the mare. As the villagers burst into the clearing, they lost their
quarry in a half-glimpsed flash of white. The clearing resounded to what could have
been hoof beats, or the enduring thunder of a comber pounding the pebbles of the
shore.