Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [133]
“It’s not for her,” he’d said at last. “But for her father. If there’s anything you can tell Lowan Vigeles about his daughter’s fate …? You know that pain.”
She took up her cards. Age had crept into the seeress’s hands, but it had not robbed them of their grace. She fanned the cards before Molin.
“Choose three.”
He’d reached, hesitated, then dropped his hand on the cloth-covered table. “It’s not me who asks.” The cards were tricky, like gods. Sometimes they revealed fates unconnected to the querant’s question, fates a man might not want to know.
Illyra loosened her grasp; a single card fell facedown on the table. She straightened the rest and set them aside. When Molin would not touch that card either, she sighed and turned it over herself.
The painted scene was a study in grays, greens, and the pale, terrified face of a man drowning in sight of the shore.
“Six of Ships,” Illyra announced. Molin had seen many of her cards over the years, but he’d not seen that one before and did not know its name or guess its meaning until she whispered: “Undertow.”
Long before, when a very young Chenaya had first come to her uncle, seeking an explanation of her uncanny knack for winning, Molin had done some scrying of his own. He’d had the power then, when some said it was Vashanka, not Savankala, who ruled in paradise; perhaps he’d had it still. He knew what the card revealed without Illyra’s help.
The was a catch to the gift Savankala had bestowed upon Chenaya. Had there ever been a god’s gift that didn’t have a catch as sharp and deadly as a serpent’s fang? The Daughter of the Sun was vulnerable to water, to drowning.
“She’s gone? Drowned in the ocean?” he’d asked, unable to maintain silence.
“There are worse deaths in water than drowning,” Illyra replied, as cryptic as she was honest.
Molin, who could be as cryptic and honest as any seer when the need arose, had trekked out to Land’s End and told Lowan Vigeles that his daughter had crossed water and was not likely to return in his lifetime. Rather than take what Molin offered, Vigeles promptly sank all his money in a ship and sailed off in search of her.
That autumn, the seas off Sanctuary boiled with storms that leveled stone houses and wrecked every boat in Sanctuary’s harbor. Lowan Vigeles’s ship was last seen racing the black winds off Inception Island, and the ship Molin had sent to the Bandaran Isles never made it home to port. With the loss of its captain and navigator, the Isles themselves were lost, along with the Beysib Empire. Like Chenaya, Illyra’s son had crossed water, never to return in his parents’ lifetime.
Undertow, indeed—
“Grandfather?” Bec asked. His eyes were squeezed shut, and there were tears dribbling down his cheeks. “Grandfather, are you awake?”
Eyelids parted suddenly. Bec found himself nailed by the old man’s black, birdlike eyes. He defended himself with a mug of steaming fragrant water.
“Here—I made tea. Are you well, Grandfather? You were—you were—” Bec couldn’t bring himself to put words to what he’d seen.
“Well enough, boy, considering what I’ve seen. Settle yourself beside me here. I’ll tell you a story—”
“Wait! I’ll get the inks and parchment.”
Grandfather caught Bec’s sleeve before he got away. “No need. This isn’t a story others need to hear, it’s just for you.”
“What’s it about?”
“Call it the ‘Women of Sanctuary.’”
Chapter Twelve
The bazaar wasn’t one of Cauvin’s haunts. Its walls—broad-based, tapering, dirt-filled relics of Sanctuary’s earliest years—had withstood the worst that gods and man could hurl at them. They didn’t require a stonemason’s constant attention, unlike the froggin’ royal and Imperial walls that crumbled whenever wind or rain touched them. The bazaar’s residents in their wooden homes, many of them built on the hulks of foundered ships and wagons, weren’t