Fortune's Fool - Mercedes Lackey [18]
Finally, there were gulls in the sky, bits of greenery on the waves, and they knew they were nearing some kind of land.
Then they saw it.
Journey’s end, but the mere beginning for Katya; though Sharptooth would be a part of this for a bit longer. First, Katya had to find the right part of what was really a very large island.
For that, they needed to listen to the seabirds.
At their first landfall, the birds were acting perfectly normally. Nothing much to complain of, it seemed, other than that someone was always stealing food. And there was the usual gull chorus: “Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!” They turned their faces southward along the coastline and plunged on, pausing long enough to give the hungry orca a meal of good mullet.
The second time, half a day later, was equally fruitless. It was a full moon, though, so they elected to cover more leagues in the search.
But the third time—as sunrise flooded the sky with light, and the seabirds rose to meet it.
“Death! Death! Death!” cried one.
“Despair! Despair!” cried a second.
Katya turned to look at the round, bright eye of her companion. “I think we have found the right place,”
Chapter 4
Sharptooth had left, after giving the unusual pledge that if she needed him, she must summon him through the Sperm Whales or the Orca pods. She stepped out of the water and shook herself off, waiting while her body shivered in the shock of change, her lungs took in the first gasping breath of air, and she felt things subtly shift inside her.
Then, she spread her arms wide, spun out a thread of magic, and sent it questing after The Tradition. Not that The Tradition was anything like an entity, except…
Except that sometimes it acted as if it was.
Well, no matter. She knew when her magic touched it, and she promptly insinuated her will into it, cajoling. I need to fit in here, she told it; if there was one thing that The Tradition “liked,” it was for everything and everyone to follow down its favored and predetermined paths. This was a land full of small black-haired people who looked a certain way. She didn’t look that way, and wanted to. She sensed its interest, then its power. Quickly, before it could elect to do something annoying, and seized on that image of fitting in, and decided to make her fit in as a beggar, she needed to take control when the power was there.
I need to fit in here, she told it.
And the moment when it decided that it needed to help her do that, she invoked exactly how she wanted to fit in. As a high-ranking noblewoman—with whatever was the most beautiful clothing that was available!
Because, after all, it was no fun being a peasant.
She had her eyes closed in order to concentrate; the magic was thick, very thick around here. No wonder the seabirds were crying doom; whatever was happening was powerful and The Tradition had taken note quite strongly.
But she was a bit taken aback when it suddenly felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric all at once.
Legs muffled, arms enveloped, head bowed forward—her eyes flew open and she looked down at herself in shock.
It not only felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric—it looked that way, too.
She must have been wearing six layers of clothing.
In form, the main article she was enveloped in was a heavily embroidered blue silk robe, but the rectangular, lined sleeves swept down to and along the sand, the robe itself trailed along behind her by the length of her arm, and it was bound around her by a broad, stiff, embroidered silk sash with an elaborate bow or knot that she could feel at the small of her back. Beneath this robe was another; beneath that still another—there must have been six or seven of these robes, each carefully