The Dragon Round by Stephen S. Power Page B

, he thinks. She does.
    â€œOne,” Jeryon says, “here’s what stands between us and Hanosh. The nearest land is Eryn Point at the mouth of Joslin Bay, eighty nautical miles away. Hanosh is twenty beyond that. If we had oars, half a barrel of water, and the stamina of guilded rowers, we could make the trip in three days and see my mates tucked into their gibbets in four. Instead, we have the Tallan River.”
    â€œWhat’s that?” she says.
    He looks as if she’d asked, What’s air? “It’s a current. The current. How can you live in Hanosh and—”
    â€œI’m not Hanoshi,” Everlyn says. “I’m Aydeni.”
    â€œI know,” he says. “It’s the fault of you Aydeni that we’re here in the first place.”
    She nearly stands. The dinghy rocks severely. She doesn’t care. “I’m here because I wouldn’t have a hand in your death.”
    â€œYou’re here,” Jeryon says, “because Ayden wouldn’t sell us its store of shield. At any price.”
    â€œI wouldn’t have a hand in Hanoshi deaths either,” she says. “Your Trust didn’t come to me. I went to them. I said I could help.”
    â€œThey trusted you?” he says.
    Ayden, deep in the mountains west of Hanosh, has been the city’s chief rival in the Six Cities Trading League since it was allowed to join. Their admission ended a ruinous war and ushered in four decades of mutual prosperity, but for the last several years they’ve been taking baby steps toward another conflict. There’s not enough money to go around. Pirates who’ve plundered Hanoshi ships are rumored to have been Aydeni privateers. Bandits who’ve attacked Hanoshi caravans are suspected of being backed by Ayden. Not that Hanosh doesn’t have its own agents in Ayden to steal their trade secrets. Not that they aren’t rumored to have attacked Aydeni traders too. Denying Hanosh the golden shield it needed to fight the flox was the first adult step, even if Ayden claims they only took it because two years ago Hanosh gouged them on the price of grain after a drought doomed their crops.
    â€œOf course they didn’t trust me,” Everlyn says. “They thought I was a saboteur, maybe a venomist. But my patients, the shipowners’ wives, they vouched for me.”
    Owners aren’t easily swayed, and their wives don’t sway lightly: Where’s the profit? Jeryon figures her advocates still consider it fashionable to have an Aydeni apothecary, just as some still wear boots and plain smocks instead of returning to sandals and embroidered chitons and mantles. To get her on the Comber would signal their power.
    â€œWhich brings us back to the Tallan River,” he says. “An actual agent probably would have been briefed on it.” He lays his arms over the gunwales. “The sea is shaped like the bow of a boat pointing north. That—” he points to the starboard oarlock, “is Chorem. And this—” he points to the larboard oarlock, “is Yness. Eryn Point is a couple hands forward, where the center thwart would go. Everything aft of the oarlocks is ocean: trackless, empty ocean. Now—”
    As he scoots forward, Everlyn tucks her knees tighter.
    Jeryon puts his left foot on the bottom beneath the starboardoarlock. “The current is fifty miles wide,” he says, “a bit wider than my sandal in boat scale. It leaves the ocean here, runs up my left leg, around my back, and down my right leg into the sea here.” He plants his right foot under the larboard oarlock. “And we are here.” He puts his finger on the bottom between his knees, amidships, and too close to his crotch, in Everlyn’s opinion. “Do you see our problem?”
    The poth had hated her loremasters. When she was twelve her father discovered that she was running away from them to tramp through the woods with a