Arvin’s eyes narrowed. He smelled nothing but clean sea air, wet canvas and hemp, and the tang of freshly cut pine drifting over the water from the dockyards, where dozens of naval vessels were being constructed to counter the threat from neighboring Chondath. Arvin said nothing, even though the yuan-ti’s remark was designed to goad him. He was the only human aboard this ship who was not a slave; the sailors who toiled above, calling to one another as they furled the sails, all had an S brand on their left cheek. The yuan-ti obviously couldn’t resist an opportunity to remind the one free human about his place in the world.
Arvin smiled. Enjoy it while you can, he thought. Here in the Barony of Sespech, it’s the humans who run things.
Foremost among those humans was Baron Thuragar Foesmasher, the man who had wrested control of Sespech away from its former baron—a Chondathan lackey—nine years ago. The barony was now fully independent, a rising star among the states that lined the Vilhon Reach. It was a place where a man with the right skills and talent could go far.
Arvin, with his psionic talents, was just such a man. And this trip was going to give him the opportunity to prove himself to no less a person than the baron himself.
Six days ago, the baron’s daughter Glisena, a headstrong young woman of eighteen years, had gone missing from the palace at Ormpetarr. The baron’s spellcasters had been unable to find her; their clerical magic had failed to reveal even a hint of where she might have gone. With each passing day the baron’s fears had increased. There had been no ransom demand, no boastful threats from his political enemies. Glisena had just… vanished.
Desperate, Baron Foesmasher had turned to his yuan-ti allies. Lady Dediana’s militia, he knew, included a tracker said to be the best in all of the Vilhon Reach, a man with an extremely rare form of magic. Perhaps this “mind magic” could succeed where the other spellcasters had failed.
That tracker was Tanju, the psion who was Arvin’s mentor.
Lady Dediana, however, was loath to loan Tanju to Baron Foesmasher. There was pressing business within Hlondeth for him to attend to, and he couldn’t be spared. Yet a failure to respond to Baron Foesmasher’s plea might fray the alliance that had recently been woven between the two states.
Tanju had proposed the solution. In recent months, he told Lady Dediana, he’d taken on an “apprentice,” one with a quick mind and immense natural talent. This apprentice, he assured her, could do the job. Delighted at being presented with a solution that would swallow two birds in a single gulp, as the old expression went, Lady Dediana had readily agreed. And so, early yesterday morning, Arvin had set sail for Sespech.
If all went well, he’d never have to return to Hlondeth. Tanju had agreed that, when the job was done—assuming the baron approved—Arvin could remain in Sespech. From time to time, Tanju might contact him and ask for information on the barony, but otherwise, Arvin would be his own master.
Staying on in Sespech suited Arvin just fine. After months of constantly looking over his shoulder, wondering if Zelia was going to suddenly appear, he could at last relax. He felt more at ease already than he had since last summer, when the yuan-ti psion had tried to take over his body with a mind seed. Arvin had narrowly defeated her by planting a false memory of his own death in her mind. In order to maintain that deception, he’d had to remain in hiding since that time. It hadn’t been easy.
A light snow began to fall. The yuan-ti beside him hissed once more, tasted a snowflake with a flicker of his tongue, and slithered back to the passengers’ quarters. Arvin watched him go, wondering what urgent business had stirred the yuan-ti out of his winter torpor and sent him south across the Reach. This winter was colder than any Arvin could remember, and yet the yuan-ti were more energetic than ever. They seemed… restless.
As the ship drew closer to the spot where it was to unload its cargo of wine, sailors scrambled down to the deck where Arvin waited and stood ready with heaving lines. The gap between the ship and the pier narrowed and the sailors whirled the lines—each weighted at the end by a large “monkey fist” knot—above their heads. At the captain’s order they let fly, and the lines, looking like white streamers, arced toward the pier. They were caught by dock workers, who hauled them in rapidly hand over hand, drawing toward them the thicker ropes to which the heaving lines were tied, then looping these over bollards on the pier. The sailors, meanwhile, scrambled to the ship’s two capstans and grasped the wooden arms. The ship jerked abruptly to a halt as the mooring lines pulled tight then gradually, as the capstans were turned with rumbling squeals, was drawn closer to the pier.
