Woman Who Loved the Moon Read Online Free

could not tell for whom he was speaking, Rhune or the guards. “I’m going for a swim.”
    Rhune put the staves back on the rack himself. He smelled his own stink. The sigh of the spray on the breakwater rocks seemed inviting. Finally he followed Shea’s footprints east. He scrubbed himself clean of the oil with sand, and ducked in and out of the surf a few times. The westering sun laid a red track over the surface of the bay. Rhune closed his eyes, wondering how much more Shea had to do before they could leave.
    He found himself listening, and laughed at himself. Shea was agile and silent in water as if he had been born in it. All he could hear was the hiss and moan of spray.
    Suddenly a green wave rose up and up like a wall, and Shea came sliding down the curl like a dolphin riding a wake.
    Beckoning, the Sealord said his name. Rhune rose from where he had been sitting. “Come walk,” said Shea. They walked, stitching a path of prints down the wet sand.
    Fear began to grow in Rhune: fear of the future. Finally he could no longer stand the silence. “Shea, I don’t want to go.”
    He felt Shea look at him. “Afraid?”
    “Yes! Not of Seramir.”
    “Of what?”
    Rhune clenched his fists. “Of myself, and what I might do.”
    “Go on.”
    Rhune looked at the bay. “I broke faith with you. I—you were right to name me traitor. Might it not happen again?”
    There. He had said it.
    “It might,” said Shea. He sounded very calm. “I think it will not. Besides, I broke a kind of faith with you.”
    “How?” Rhune said. It was not what he had expected Shea to say.
    “Do you not know?” said the wizard. Rhune shook his head, unsure of the Sealord’s meaning. “Strange. But you are still angry. Surely you must have wondered why, of everything the ocean took from you, the anger remains.”
    He sat on the sand. Rhune sat beside him. “I always had a temper,” he said. The clinging sand made him itch; he brushed it off, watching the shadows move and slide over Shea’s face.
    Shea said, “We built the fleet together, you and I, Rhune. It took ten years.”
    “Yes,” said Rhune. The rush of memories made his heart twitch with pain.
    Inexorably the quiet voice went on. “You loved that life— the life of the docks and the ships. You were the best fleetmaster this coast has ever seen.”
    Rhune bowed his head. “I thought I was.”
    “We only lost one ship. It was Waverunner, do you remember? She foundered in the fourth year, in the autumn gales. The other ships wore black sails for a month. All the hands were lost.”
    “I remember it.”
    “That was the first year I thought of giving up the fleet,” said Shea.
    Rhune jerked his head up. “You never spoke of it.”
    “I know. I should have. I blamed myself for those deaths.”
    “Could you have prevented them?” Rhune asked.
    Shea shook his head. “No. But it was my ship they sailed, my route they followed—my will that kept them in the water. For that I am responsible. Power over wealth, over lives—that is not always a good power to give to a sorcerer. It’s too easy for us to abuse it.”
    Rhune said, “You did not abuse it.”
    Shea sighed. He lifted a handful of sand from the beach, and let the grains slip through his fingers. “I think I did. Remember the day we sailed Windcatcher to Mantalo, to ride the waves?”
    Rhune smiled. “I remember.” He recalled the feel of the wave cresting under his thighs, and the great green hole it carved in the sea before it fell. He had ridden it down, without even a piece of wood to hold, with death a thunder in his ears, and Shea’s laughter ringing through his veins...
    “It was good,” Shea said. “Terrible, and beautiful, and you trusted me to keep you safe...”
    “Yes,” Rhune said.
    “Yet I could not—did not—spare a thought to keep you from Osher’s whispers and his greed. If you needed wealth, I should have given you wealth.”
    Rhune’s heart lurched. “ Given me wealth? I killed