“Eleria’s very quick, Rabbit,” Longbow told the small Maag, “and you should probably know that sometimes she can make you do things that you’d prefer not to do. I’d still be back in the forest if Zelana hadn’t brought Eleria with her when she sought me out. I had ‘no’ halfway out until Zelana turned Eleria loose on me. I swallowed ‘no’ not long after that.”
Eleria stuck her tongue out at Longbow, but then she laughed. “You have to be careful around this one, Bunny,” she cautioned. “He watches all the time, and he sees things that others are trying to hide. I guess everybody has things they want to hide, but they don’t have much luck when they try to hide them from Longbow.”
“I’ve noticed,” Rabbit said dryly. “I’ve been pretending to be stupid since I was just a boy, and it’s always worked before, but he saw through me before I’d turned around twice.” He paused, and one of his eyebrows went up slightly. “As long as it’s come up anyway, maybe you ought to know that Longbow and I aren’t fooled a bit by your little game of silly. You grin and giggle a lot, but Longbow and I both know that you’re as hard as iron underneath. You always get what you want.”
“Why, Bunny,” Eleria said in mock chagrin, “what a thing to say. I’m shocked at you. Shocked.”
“We’re not going to spread this around, though, are we?” Rabbit said to both of them. “All three of us have peculiarities that other people here on the Seagull don’t really need to know about, do they?”
“If they can’t see this for themselves, they probably wouldn’t believe us if we told them,” Longbow agreed.
“There’s somebody coming,” Eleria warned in a soft whisper.
“What’s the name of this place where you grew up, Rabbit?” Longbow asked, speaking a bit louder.
“The folks over there in Maag all calls it Weros,” Rabbit replied, lapsing back into his usual slovenly speech pattern, “and they’re all just jumping up and down to go there and have theirselves a real bang-up good time. A real Maag’ll go a long ways to have hisself a good time.” He glanced casually over his shoulder at a seaman who was busy tying off a rope. Then the sailor turned and went back toward the mainmast. Rabbit lowered his voice. “If I’m reading the position of the stars right, we should sail into the harbor of Weros on the day after tomorrow—which doesn’t seem possible, since we were a lot farther from home than Sorgan and the rest of the crew seemed to realize.”
“I wouldn’t spread that around, Bunny,” Eleria told him. “It isn’t really necessary for them to know how far it is from Maag to Dhrall, and the Beloved doesn’t really want them to find out. She needs an army, and the people she wants might not want to go that far away from home.”
“How did we get there so fast?” Rabbit demanded.
“The Beloved can make things happen when she wants them to happen, Bunny,” Eleria replied. “Do you really want to know exactly how she does that?”
That seemed to jerk Rabbit up short. He swallowed hard. “Ah . . .” he faltered, “no, I don’t think so.”
“Isn’t he nice?” Eleria said to Longbow. Then she squirmed down from the big Dhrall’s lap and approached the small Maag. “Kiss-kiss, Bunny,” she said.
“What?” Rabbit sounded very confused.
“It’s one of her habits,” Longbow told him. “It’s not too painful, and it makes her happy, so we all put up with it.”
“Shush, Longbow,” Eleria said. Then she wrapped her arms about Rabbit’s neck and kissed him soundly. “You really ought to take a bath, Bunny,” she told him, wrinkling her nose.
“I washed off no more than a month ago,” he protested.
“It’s time to do it again, Bunny. Soon. Please.”
The weather turned sour, and it was blustery and rainy for the next two days as the Seagull doggedly pushed her way west. Longbow was accustomed to rain, since the northwest coast of the Land of Dhrall was the native home of rain. The Maag sailors seemed dispirited by the weather, though, and the mood on board the Seagull was gloomy until the coast of Maag, hazy and indistinct in the steady drizzle, appeared on the western horizon.
The Maag town of Weros stood at the head of a narrow inlet, and the Seagull’s oarsmen took their places without the usual grumbling, despite the weather. Coming home after a long time seemed to brighten things for sailors.
Weros was a sizeable town, though the houses all seemed jammed tightly together, almost as if the inhabitants were afraid to be alone. The muddy streets wandered about aimlessly, strongly suggesting that the people who lived there had made it up as they’d gone along. Most of the buildings were constructed of squared-off logs, and they appeared to be more substantial than the lodges of Old-Bear’s tribe back in Dhrall. Iron tools, it seemed, made better houses. A pall of smoke drifted out from the town, obscuring the nearby fields. Long piers extended from the water’s edge, and there were many Maag longships tied to the piers or anchored some distance out in the harbor.
As the Seagull approached the town, an eddy in the wind carried a rancid smell out across the water. Longbow’s nostrils were very acute because he was a hunter, and he hoped that they wouldn’t have to stay in Weros for very long.
The sailors dropped heavy iron anchors off both ends of the Seagull, and Eleria came looking for Longbow. “The Beloved asked me to find you,” she told him. “Hook-Big wants to tell us how he intends to use gold to persuade other Maag ship captains that it might be nice to visit the land of Dhrall. The Maags all seem to find square lumps of gold very pretty, and they’ll do almost anything to get their hands on as many of them as their ships can carry.”
“Owning things seems very important to the Maags, doesn’t it?” Longbow observed.
“That makes things easy for us, though, doesn’t it? They’ll do what we want them to do so that they can own gold, but we end up owning them instead. Let’s go see what Hook-Big has to say.” Eleria held out her arms to him. “You can carry me, if you’d like.”
“Of course,” Longbow said, taking her up in his arms, although he knew that it was part of her game and that it played an important part in persuading people to do what she wanted them to do. Zelana commanded, but Eleria charmed. The intent and results were usually the same, but Eleria’s approach was more pleasant, and usually more effective.