“Manda!” Ediki clambered from the boat, but in his haste the boat tipped and sloshed, and he splashed up to the woman, laughing, and she grabbed him and hugged him fiercely as she wept.
“Brother. Brother. I thought you were lost to us.”
Elafi gestured to Stronghand to climb out of the canoe; together, they pulled the boat up onto the shore and stowed it where it could not be seen. There were a half dozen crude boats hidden among the reeds. He took his standard and his spear and followed the young man up to the camp where Ediki was now greeting every person from the eldest to the youngest.
This was a camp of fugitives, about a score, half of them children. The sturdiest shelter consisted of a lean-to built of sticks covered by a roof woven of reeds, their clothing was little more than grass skirts and cloaks, cunningly braided together, and they had only one cooking pot among them as well as baskets and sharpened sticks fashioned into spears or fishing forks. Yet there was plenty of food: plucked ducks and coots, skinned voles and hares, gutted perch, roach, and pickerel as well as a bounty of slippery eels, and blossoms and young leaves from the spring flowering.
A lad approached them, bearing a bronze cup.
“Will you drink, Honored One?” he asked boldly.
Stronghand regarded the cup gravely. The liquid steaming within did not smell at all appetizing. Ediki hurried back with his sister beside him.
“My kinfolk offer you guest rights,” he said. “I pray you, my lord. Drink.”
He let his grin flash, knowing that they tested him. He took the cup from the youth and raised it.
“I come alone to offer an alliance to you,” he said, and drank half. The brew went down easier than he had imagined, laced with an aftertaste that puckered his tongue so sharply he almost laughed in surprise. Instead, he held out what was left.
Ediki’s sister stepped forward. “I am Manda, grandmother of this clan. I give you welcome. I dreamed of you, dragon-man.”
She was not lean and muscled like a warrior; she was stocky, even plump, despite the obvious hardships she and her clan had suffered, and she had the same coarse black hair—cut short—as Ediki had, although hers had less gray in it. She looked like an ordinary woman in all ways, if one only looked on the surface. But in her stance he saw authority and in the way the others deferred to her, holding back until she had spoken, he saw leadership. She was a honed spear forged in a time of trouble. She had weight, and heft, and her surety was like the sharpened edge of a killing blade.
“I have dreams,” she continued, by way of explanation. “I dreamed a man was coming who wasn’t a man, and he sailed in on a ship that wasn’t a ship but a dragon born of wood. The goddess told me that this man who wasn’t a man would bring my brother back to me, although he was lost to us long years ago. The goddess told me that I might offer him the cup held between allies.” She took the bronze cup from him and drank the rest, wincing at its bite, almost grinning, as he had.
She whistled between strong teeth. The waiting boy took the cup from her and retreated, leaving her to speak with Stronghand alone. Even Ediki walked back into the clutter of the camp. Several of his kinfolk clung to him, still amazed by his existence, but no one spoke; they only watched as the negotiations began.
“What do you want, stranger?”
“I want your help to track down the queen of Alba and kill her, and to destroy the power of her tree sorcerers. When that is done, I will rule Alba and reward those who aided me.”
The sun rose. Light shone on the waters. A flight of geese flew low overhead, honking so loudly that Manda waited until they had passed before she resumed speaking.
“Their power you can never destroy. Their magic is very strong. It defeated us, my people’s claims to this land long ago, my clan and I not so many moons ago. The queen and her army drove us off the holy island where we have lived as caretakers back into the dawn of time. My mam was caretaker there. The right to the land and honor of the guardianship came from her mam before her and hers before her, back into oldest times. There’s enough land to grow a small crop of grain and keep a big flock of sheep and a gaggle of geese. That’s all gone. You see how they drove us off.”
She indicated the makeshift camp, the crude shelters, the open campfires, the ragged children. They had not escaped with much. But they did not seem hungry and desperate.
“You come with an army,” she said. “Will you attack them?”
“Should I?” he asked.
“Overland? No. You will all die in the fens.”
“What if we sail in from the sea?”