Amber and Blood - Margaret Weis [24]
Mina shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know. Wizards are stupid anyway, so it doesn’t matter. What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
“The tower is the middle of the sea, Mina,” Rhys said. “We don’t have a boat—”
“That’s right!” Nightshade struck in happily. “We’d love to visit your tower, Mina, but we can’t. No boat! Say, is anyone else hungry? I hear there’s an inn in Flotsam that makes a really good meat pie—”
“There’s a boat,” Mina interrupted. “Behind you.”
Nightshade looked over his shoulder. Sure enough, a small sailboat rested on its keel on the shore, not fifteen paces from where they were standing.
“Rhys, do something,” said Nightshade out of the corner of his mouth. “You and I both know there wasn’t a boat there a second ago. I don’t want to sail in a boat that didn’t used to be there …”
Mina began tugging Rhys excitedly toward the sail boat. Nightshade, sighing deeply, followed, dragging his feet.
“Do you even know how to sail this thing?” he asked. “I’ll bet you don’t.”
“I bet I do,” she answered smugly. “I learned at the Citadel.”
Nightshade sighed again. Mina climbed inside the boat and began to rummage around, sorting out a tangle of ropes and instructing Rhys on how to raise the sail. Nightshade stood beside the boat, his lower lip thrust out.
Mina regarded him thoughtfully for a moment. “You said you were hungry. Someone might have left food in the boat. I’ll look.” She felt about under one of the wooden plank seats and came up holding a large sack.
“I was right!” she announced, pleased. “See what I found.”
She reached into the sack and took out a meat pie, and handed it to Nightshade.
He did not touch it. It looked like a meat pie and it certainly smelled like a meat pie. Both his mouth and his stomach agreed this was definitely a meat pie, and Atta added her vote, as well. The dog eyed the pie and licked her chops.
“You said you were hungry,” Mina reminded him.
Still, Nightshade hesitated. “I don’t know …”
Atta took matters into her own hands—or rather into her mouth. A leap, a snap, a couple of gulps, and the meat pie was a grease smear on her nose.
“Hey!” cried Nightshade indignantly. “That was mine.”
Atta slurped her tongue over her nose and began to hungrily paw the sack. Rhys rescued the remainder of the pies and handed them out. Mina nibbled on hers and ended up feeding most of it to Atta. Nightshade ate his hungrily and, finding Rhys could not finish his, the kender ate it for him. He helped Rhys hoist the sail and, acting under Mina’s direction, pushed the boat out into the waves.
Mina took the tiller and steered the boat into the wind. The waves had calmed. A light breeze caught the sail, and the boat glided over the waves, heading out to sea. Atta crouched at the bottom, nosing the sack hopefully.
“For a god-baked pie, that wasn’t bad,” Nightshade remarked, falling down onto the seat beside Rhys when the sailboat took an unexpected lurch. “Maybe a little less onion and more garlic. Next I think I’ll ask her to cook up some beef steak with crispy potatoes—”
“We should be very careful not to ask for anything,” Rhys suggested.
Nightshade mulled this over.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. We might get it.” The kender shifted his gaze to the tower. “What do you know about Towers of High Sorcery?”
Rhys shook his head. “Not much, I am afraid.”
“Me neither. And I have to say I’m not really looking forward to the experience. Wizards don’t like kender for some reason. They might turn me into a frog.”
“Mistress Jenna liked you,” Rhys reminded him.
“That’s true. All she did was slap my hand.”
Nightshade caught hold of the gunwale as the boat gave another sudden lurch. They were sailing quite fast now, bounding over the waves, and the tower was coming nearer. It looked extremely dark. Not even the bright sunlight shining on the crystal walls seemed to be able to brighten it.
“I suppose most kender would give their topknots to visit a Tower of High Sorcery, but then I guess I’m not most kender,” Nightshade remarked.