There was no love, no tenderness in that kiss. It was a gesture of male contempt, brutal and full of hate. Yet for one strange moment then her sharp teeth had met in his lower lip and his mouth was full of blood and she was laughing.
“You barbarian swine,” she whispered. “Now my brand is on you.”
He stood looking at her. Then he reached out and caught her by the shoulders and the chair went over with a crash.
“Go ahead,” she said, “If it pleases you.”
He wanted to break her between his two hands. He wanted…
He thrust her from him and went out and he had not passed the door since.
Now he fingered the new scar on his lip and watched her come onto the deck with Boghaz. She stood very straight in her jeweled hauberk but the lines around her mouth were deeper and her eyes, for all their bitter pride, were somber.
He did not go to her. She was left alone with her guard, and Carse could glance at her covertly. It was easy to guess what was in her mind. She was thinking how it felt to stand on the deck of her own ship, a prisoner. She was thinking that the brooding coast ahead was the end of all her voyaging. She was thinking that she was going to die.
The cry came down from the masthead—“ Khondor!”
Carse saw at first only a great craggy rock that towered high above the surf, a sort of blunt cape between two fiords. Then, from that seemingly barren and uninhabitable place, Sky Folk came flying until the air throbbed with the beating of their wings. Swimmers came also, like a swarm of little comets that left trails of fire in the sea. And from the fiord mouths came longships, smaller than the galley, swift as hornets, with shields along their sides.