The Fortress of Glass Read Online Free PDF Page A

disposition was a very stiff test.
    "Give us a song, captain!" called the stroke oar, a squat fellow with his wrists tattooed to look like he was wearing bracers.
    "Aye, give us The Ladies o' Shengy, Cap'n Chalcus!" agreed one of the rowers from the lower tier, sitting on deck now that the ship idled along with only the slow strokes of four oarsmen to keep her steady in the swell.
    The Heron had a crew of fifty rowers in two tiers, with a dozen officers and deck hands for the rigging when her mast was raised. She was a stubby vessel, neither as fast nor as powerful as the triremes that made up the bulk of the royal fleet let alone the quinqueremes which acted as flagships for the squadrons and fleet itself.
    For all that, the cutter was a warship. Her ram and the handiness of her short hull made her a dangerous opponent even to much larger vessels.
    Ilna's smile, never broad, took on a hint of warmth. A fishing skiff would be a dangerous opponent if Chalcus commanded it.
    "I will not sing such a thing and scandalize the fine ladies here with us," said Chalcus, but there was a cheery lilt in his voice. He bowed to the ten-year-old Lady Merota, seated on the stern rail like an urchin and not the heiress to the bos-Roriman fortune, then bowed lower yet to Ilna in the bow. "But I'll pass the time for you with The Brown Girl if there's a swig of wine-"
    The helmsman lifted the skin of wine hanging from the railing by him where the spray kissed it. He slapped it into Chalcus' hand though neither man looked at the other as they made the exchange.
    "-to wet my pipes," Chalcus concluded as he thumbed the carved wooden plug from the goatskin and drank deeply.
    He was a close-coupled man, not much taller than Ilna herself. Chalcus looked trim when dressed in court clothing; he was hard as mahogany statue when he stripped to a sailor's breechclout, as he did often enough even now that Garric had made him the Heron's captain.
    In a breechclout you saw the scars also. Several of the long-healed wounds should've been fatal. If one had been, Ilna would never have met him. It was hard to imagine what value she'd find in life at this moment were it not for Chalcus.
    "'The Brown Girl she has houses and lands...,'" Chalcus sang in his clear tenor. His eyes continued to smile at Ilna till she leaned around to look at the sky again while her fingers wove. "'Fair Tresian has none....'"
    Chalcus had sailed with the Lataaene pirates in southern waters. He didn't talk about those days or other days of the same sort he'd lived in the course of collecting the scars on his body. Ilna supposed Chalcus had as much on his conscience as she did on hers, though he carried the burden lightly as he did all things.
    "'The best advice I can give you, my son...,'" Chalcus sang, his voice shining like a sunlit brook, "'is to bring the Brown Girl home."
    Ilna didn't ask whether Chalcus was a good man or a bad one. He was her man, and that was enough.
    Something rippled and seethed behind the sky's curtain of thin clouds. Ilna's fingers worked, weaving contentment for people she didn't know through ages she couldn't guess. Her patterns would last for the life of the wool, and that could be very long indeed.
    Ilna'd always had a talent for yarns and fabric that went beyond mere skill. She could touch a swatch of cloth and know where the flax had grown or the sheep had gamboled; and she knew also what'd been in the heart of the one who wove it.
    By the time she was twelve everyone in the borough knew that Ilna os-Kenset wove fabrics softer and finer than anyone else around. Before she left Barca's Hamlet at eighteen, two years past, merchants came from Sandrakkan and even Ornifal to buy her subtly woven cloth.
    "'He dressed himself in scarlet red...,'" Chalcus sang. The Heron's crew, sailors as coarse as the hemp of the ship's rigging, listened to the lovely, lilting voice. Other men lined the near rail of The Shepherd of the Isles. "'He rode all o'er the