She took a deep breath. "Get me a small piece of coal and a little bit of dry sand."

  "Sand? Chandra, we're at sea!"

  "Ask the cook," came Aaron's quiet voice from the door. "He banks his coals with sand."

  "Aaron, that's brilliant!" Darvish turned the full force of his smile on the younger man, then pushed past him and ran for the bow.

  "It is very clever," Chandra agreed.

  "I notice details," Aaron muttered, trying to get his traitorous heart to start beating again after being caught in the vise of Darvish's smile. When he felt the heat had faded from his face, he pushed back his sunhood and came into the cabin. "Can you make a distance viewer?"

  "Of course I can, I'm . . ." She stopped and wilted a little under Aaron's gaze. He didn't accuse, he didn't even look like he didn't believe her; he just looked. "I think I can," she amended with a sigh. "It should work."

  "Is it dangerous?"

  She opened her mouth to say no, then closed it again. Magic worked through well defined rules to focus power into something entirely new which-and realistically she had to admit there was a slight chance things could go wrong- , might not hold it. "There's a possibility of danger. ..."

  "Then why do it?"

  This time there was only one answer. She could say "to help the ship" or "because Darvish asked me to' but she didn't think Aaron would believe either. "To prove that I can."

  Aaron grinned. Chandra returned it. Just for a moment they understood each other perfectly.

  "All right, I got the coal and I got the sand and the cook thinks I'm out of my mind," Darvish rushed back into the cabin and his excitement made the tiny room seem smaller still. "Anything else?"

  Chandra took the dish of sand and the pieces of coal and placed them carefully in the center of the stool. "I need a tube; it has to be fairly stiff, but it can't be metal. ..." '

  "Why not? The mate talked about a brass tube."

  "If I mark on a brass tube with charcoal, the symbols will rub right off and as soon as they're gone, so's the spell. I need something hollow that charcoal will stick to that's about this long." She held her hands about six inches apart,

  "I had thought of the perfect item," Darvish waggled his eyebrows rakishly, "but it turned out to be too big."

  "And she'd have to remove it," Aaron put in dryly from the bunk, where he'd tucked himself to get out of the way. "You wouldn't like that much."

  "What. . . ?" Chandra looked from one to the other. "Oh." She scowled up at the prince, who winked. "Is that all you ever think abou . . . no, it isn't! Give me that!" She pulled the wineskin down off his shoulder and shook it.

  "Hey!"

  "Never mind!" She shoved it back into his hands. "Finish it!"

  A little bemused but willing to oblige, Darvish did as he was told.

  "Now cut the neck off, here," she drew a line on the leather just below the thickened spout with her thumbnail, "and here." A second line was drawn just above the bell.

  A few moments later Chandra peered through the narrow end of the flared tube and said, "Now get out."

  "Get out?"

  She put her hand in the small of Darvish's back and pushed, waving Aaron up from the bunk and out the door in the same motion. "I need to be alone to work. You're too much of a distraction."

  Darvish beamed back over his shoulder at her. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me." Then he followed Aaron out onto the deck. As she pulled the door closed, she heard him say, "My sword, your brains, and her talent . . . that wizard with The Stone doesn't stand a chance."

  It could have been the wine talking, it probably was the wine talking, but it was nice to hear anyway.

  "It's a what?" The mate looked suspiciously at the piece of wineskin dwarfed by Darvish's hand.

  "A distance viewer." Darvish held it out to him again, his thumb and forefinger carefully in the places that Chandra had indicated.

  "It's a chunk of One abandoned wineskin with black marks on it."

  "Yes it is," Darvish agreed. "But it's also a distance viewer.

  The mate snorted and spat, his opinion obviously clear.

  "I thought you wanted a closer look at those ships?"

  "Aye."

  "This will give it to you. You saw me look through it, it won't hurt you."

  "Ain't afraid of it."

  "Then take it. I've seen the ships, but I don't know what I'm seeing." At his most charming, Darvish could persuade a frog to sing.

  "Just try it. What have you got to lose? Hold it here and look through the narrow end."

  The mate grunted and, obviously humoring the other man, placed his fingers by Darvish's and lifted the cylindrical bit of leather, still smelling strongly of fermented grape, to his eye.

  "Nine Above and One Below," he breathed. Through the flaring end of the wineskin he could see the ships they'd watched through most of the morning only now, instead of a vague silhouette impossible to identify, he saw two masts, the sails down but not secured, a hull narrower and higher than the merchant ship, an anchor rope running taut down into the sea. The second ship could have been cast from an identical mold. "Nine Above, they're navy!"

  He spun away from the rail and bounded for the stern-castle, waving the distance viewer over his head like a very small and grubby flag. "Captain! Captain!"

  "What's that all about?" Chandra wondered, jolted out of her fit of the sulks by the mate's strange behavior. Darvish had insisted he present the viewer to the mate;

  "Please, let me. You're a wizard, you have other skills. "

  "You think if I gave it to him he wouldn't take it. "

  Darvish looked down at the mutilated wineskin. "Well, yes."

  He hadn't exactly said she was tactless, but he'd implied it. It hadn't helped her mood to realize he was probably right.

  Darvish raised a questioning brow at Aaron, but the thief only shrugged. "I have no idea," the prince admitted. "But before we go and find out, let me see your hand."

  "My hand?"

  "Your palm, let me see it." He smiled down at her. "Aaron isn't the only one who notices things, you know. You've been holding your left hand like it hurts you since you came out of the cabin."

  "It's nothing."

  "Let me see."

  The tone said, let me help, and it was the kind of voice her father had used when she was young and had hurt herself, a voice he'd used before her mother had died and he'd. . . . But Darvish was weak, nothing like the strong man her father had been then, much more like the man he'd become.

  "Hand wounds are the most difficult to tend yourself," Darvish said reasonably. "You're going to need both hands if we're to get The Stone."

  He had a point. Chandra turned her palm up and held it out.

  An angry red circle, both like and unlike a burn, cut across the mound of her thumb and curved around the base of her fingers.

  "Aaron? Do we have any salve left?"

  Aaron, who'd stood quietly in the background through the testing of the distance viewer, nodded and said, "A little." He slipped off to get it.

  "What happened?" Darvish asked, gently flexing the fingers. The bones of Chandra's hands were so tiny and delicate they reminded him of bird bones and her wrist slid with room to spare through a circle of his fingers.

  Chandra shrugged. "I had to block the open end to set the spell. I guess," she added ruefully, "I shouldn't have used my hand."

  "I guess not," Darvish agreed solemnly, unsure of her reaction if he laughed.

  They stood awkwardly for a moment almost but not quite holding hands.

  His hands are warm. And rough, not like a courtier's hands at all. And they were so large, Chandra realized, that he could probably completely enclose her fist in his. Why doesn't he say something ?

  Darvish couldn't think of anything to say. All the glib and clever phrases he used at court didn't apply to someone who'd become a friend; although it was a strange and tentative sort of friendship, really more like comrades-in-arms. He'd never had one of those before either, well, not before Aaron and he wasn't likely to end up holding Aaron's hand. Not if Aaron had anything to say about it.

  "Dar." They both jumped and shot Aaron looks so identically relieved that he had to hide a grin. He held out the squat clay pot.

  "There's a little left in the bottom."

  "Right." Darvish shoved Chandra's hand in Aaron's direction. "You do it, I'm going to see what the captain has decided. We seem to have changed course." He smiled strangely down at the wizard, spun on his bare heel and almost trotted off.

  "What was that all about?" Chandra wondered, the lines smoothing out of her forehead as the salve soothed the pain out of her hand.

  "I think he likes you," Aaron told her, his voice expressionless, his heart strangely heavy.

  Chandra remembered a number of the things the crowd had shouted as the dowry procession had made its way to the palace. "I can't see why," she sniffed.

  A moment later they followed Darvish to the sterncastle where a great sweep oar had been untied and the two steersmen had turned the Gryphon to the very edge of the wind. The captain still peered through the distance viewer, his legs braced against the roll of the deck and his gaze locked on the navy ships. When he lowered his arm, he stood quiet for a moment longer, then nodded once at Chandra and said, "My compliments, Most Wise." It was the first time anyone on board had used the honorific. "You have saved us from a great disaster."

  Behind him, sunlight gleamed on gold teeth. The mate beamed as though it were all his idea.

  "You have my thanks, Most Wise," he continued. "For the losses you have saved us, your passage price will be refunded. Now, about this viewer. ..." His eyes glittered. "Will it work for anyone?"

  "Yes, of course," she answered, tossing her head. "The spell is in the tube, but it will only last as long as the symbols on the outside do, so be careful. Why?"

  "If you had a brass tube and proper etching tools?"

  Chandra shrugged, she was getting a little tired of explaining. "Then it would last a lot longer. Not forever, but longer. Now," she crossed her arms and frowned, daring him to cut her off again, "why are you running away from navy ships?"

  The captain's expression froze and the glitter grew harder. Behind him, gold teeth disappeared. The mate flexed his massive arms and waited for orders.

  Aaron and Darvish stepped up to stand beside her and Darvish, who had been trying to think of a tactful way to ask the same question, muttered, "You do like to live dangerously, don't you?"

  The silence grew.

  The two steersmen, the captain, and the mate. Not completely impossible odds if it comes to it, Darvish thought.

  There was an almost imperceptible change in the captain's expression and Aaron knew the balance had tipped. As he didn't know which way, he kicked out the fulcrum. "They're smugglers," he said. "There's four bags of ground kerric nut in with the spices."

  "But kerric nut kills!" Chandra exclaimed.

  "In large enough doses," Aaron agreed.

  "Well, I'm glad we've got that settled." Darvish spread empty hands and grinned his patently irresistible grin. "We'd prefer to stay clear of the Ytaili navy ourselves."

  The captain glared at Aaron. Aaron stared steadily back. Although it was difficult to tell for certain, down in the depths of the captain's beard, one corner of his mouth may have twitched in a rueful acknowledgment. "I bet you would," was all he said.

  "Captain, Sir!"

  "What is it, Ensign?"

  The ensign leaned as far over the edge of the fighting top as she dared. "They've changed course, Sir."

  The captain of the Sea Hawk turned and, shading his eyes, peered in the direction of their quarry. The ship, facing them dead on all morning, now angled about forty-five degrees to port, paralleling the coast rather than heading straight for it.

  "Sink the Nine," he swore. "Most Wise!"

  Both wizards looked up at the bellow.

  "Is that soul-link still on board?"

  The Wizard of the Fourth closed her eyes for a moment in concentration. "It is," she sighed. She had come only because the king had ordered it. Ships made her sick.

  "Then the waiting is over." The captain rubbed his hands in anticipation. Pretend you're in trouble, let them get in close, then take them. He hated that sort of order. The Sea Hawk was meant to swoop down into battle, not sit like the cheese in a trap.

  "So there's honor amongst thieves after all," Chandra observed, picking at a sliver of wood.

  "Not at all," came the answer from the shadowed depths of Aaron's sunhood.

  "Then why ..."

  "Are we alive?" Aaron finished. "The captain figures he can use us." It had been a calculated risk mentioning the smuggling. "He could have easily decided if we weren't for him we were against him," he explained. "Now he knows whose side we're on."

  "They're raising their sails," Darvish called out, running up fully armed. "They're coming after us."

  "We need a wind," the mate added, right behind him. "The captain wants to see you, Most Wise."

  The captain wanted a wind. "One in my sails, one that they'll have to tack across to reach us. Can you give me such a wind?"

  Chandra pulled at the end of her braid and thought about it. Gentle breezes to cool a garden or a sleeping room, she'd called many times. A wind was a difference in intensity not form, easier in that than the distance viewer. She tossed her braid behind her shoulder.

  "Of course I can."

  "What do you need?"

  "Another piece of coal, a dagger," she held her hands apart, "with a blade about this long, a ribbon," the distance between her hands lengthened, "about this long and," she looked down at her feet, "a circle of the deck off limits to everyone but me."

  "They have a wizard." The Wizard of the Seventh held his face into the freshening wind and sniffed. "This wind is power called."

  "Well, turn it," commanded the Sea Hawk's captain.

  "They have a wizard," Chandra gasped. "They're trying to turn the wind."

  "Can they do it?" Darvish asked, taking a long pull on the wineskin that dangled from his sword hand.

  "I don't know." Her brow furrowed and the ribbon, beginning to tangle, flew straight and true once more.

  The Gryphon surged forward; the sail belled taut.

  "I thought I ordered you to turn that wind."

  "It isn't as easy as all that," the wizard panted. "Their

  wizard is very powerful and responds to everything I do by

  pulling in yet more power."

  "I don't care what you have to do," the captain roared.

  He had never failed in a commission for his king and he had no intention of starting now. "Stop that ship!"

  The wind rose and above the Gryphon the sky grew black.

  "It's too much," the captain screamed over the protests of his ship. "The mast is about to come down. Stop it!"

  "I can't!" Chandra's hair, free of the braid, whipped around her. "There's too much power!"

  "Why are you stopping?" The captain glared down at the Wizard of the Seventh. "I thought your god controlled the winds."

  "Storms," corrected the exhausted wizard from the deck. He raised a shaky arm and pointed over the captain's shoulder. "And it's in His hands now."

  Chandra's ribbon tied itself in a knot.

  The storm broke.

  The Gryphon bucked and wallowed as frantic figures crawled over her, lowering her sail, securing lines and hatches.

  "Get below!" The mate dragged Chandra to her feet and thrust her at Darvish. "The last thing we need now is landers on deck!"

  "I can walk!" Chandra protested with what little energy she had remaining.

  Darvish ignored her and lurched toward their cabin. He grabbed at a line as the ship rolled and a wave sucked at his feet, then dove through the door that Aaron had wrestled open. Shoving Chandra onto the bunk, he lunged back at the door and, adding his strength to Aaron's, dragged it closed.

  Inside the tiny room, it was like being in a drum as the wind and waves beat at the ship, trying to drive her down. Strained timbers shrieked and moaned. They couldn't talk. They could barely think.