Rising Tide (29 page)

“Foul beast,” Mornis exclaimed, drawing back fast enough to make even the magic candle gutter for an instant.

Jherek started forward, his knife already in hand. “Leave him alone,” Sabyna said.

Torn by what was going on, feeling guilty for even being a part of it, he glanced back at her. The boy’s screams continued unabated. “This isn’t right. He’s going to be more scared than ever.”

She looked at him and didn’t flinch from the accusation in his eyes or the whimpers the boy had been reduced to. “This way he’ll live,” she said. “We all will. Can’t you feel the currents changing?”

Now that she’d mentioned it, Jherek did feel it, and he knew what it meant. “It’s getting colder,” he said. “We’re sinking again.”

“Aye,” she said. “If we’d waited for the boy to get calm enough on his own….”

“She’s right,” Mornis said. “I don’t like that thing either, but it’s saved us some time.” He took a deep breath and disappeared under the water until only a faint glow from the magic candle was visible.

The boy fell silent suddenly, then lurched free of the sconce and waded into the water after Mornis.

As the light left the cabin, Jherek looked at the ship’s mage. Her face remained calm, but there were unshed tears in her eyes.

“It was the only way,” she told him in a shaky voice.

“Skeins will keep him safe enough till we reach the surface. The raggamoffyn is controlling his body now.”

“Aye,” Jherek replied. “You did what you could.”

“You don’t think I should have done this.”

“Lady,” Jherek said, “I only know what I should do. I wouldn’t dare to presume to tell another what to do.”

“You’re so young,” she said. “How’d you get to be so judgmental?”

“I’m not.”

“You are,” she said. “Maybe you don’t realize it yet. You’re going to have a hard, narrow path ahead of you.” Without another word, she dived beneath the rising water that claimed the interior of the cabin.

Jherek followed her, feeling the whole cog slide deeper into the ocean. He felt confused about her, about what she’d said. He didn’t know what he was going to do about that, or why he felt he had to do anything at all.

XXI

The boy sat inside Mornis’s cabin less than an hour later, wrapped tightly in a blanket now instead of the raggamoffyn. He ate warmed-over chowder greedily from a beaten metal bowl, pausing only to chew the chunks offish.

“Do you know who the pirates were that attacked your ship?” Captain Tynnel asked.

The boy shook his head, still chewing. “No, sir.”

One of the few Breezerunner’s captain had allowed into the room, Jherek stood near the doorway, watching the boy. Wyls was educated and mannered, the son of a merchant who’d hired the cog as transport. He’d had a good life ahead of him, the young sailor reflected. Now all that had been lost, unless there was family he could get home to.

Wyls stared into the chowder bowl. “They came out of nowhere and attacked our ship,” he said. “The captain tried to run, but they had a faster ship. My father locked me in the cabin before they got on our ship, but I heard the fighting.” His breath seized up in his throat.

“Easy, lad,” Tynnel said, dropping a hand to the boy’s head. “You just take your time. I only need to know a few more things, then you can sup till you’ve a full belly and cover up in those blankets.”

The boy nodded and continued holding the bowl in both hands. After a moment, he asked in a broken voice, “What else do you need to know?”

“When did the pirates attack the ship?”

“It was early, soon after morningfeast. I remember because I’d only been out on deck a short time before my father locked me away.”

“When did they break the ship up?”

“After the fighting stopped and they looted the cargo hold. I remember hearing the winch creaking. I unlocked the door and lay under the bed. When the room was searched, they were hurrying so much they didn’t find me. I locked the door again after they left.”

“Then they broke the ship?” Tynnel asked.

“Yes. I was looking out the window when they sailed their ship over ours.” Wyls looked up at the captain and asked, “Will you help me find my father?”

“Aye, we’ll search, lad. Maybe they were put off in a lifeboat.”

The boy nodded.

Even though he knew why Tynnel had said what he did, it sickened Jherek to hear the lie. If the boy’s father yet lived, he’d have demanded sanctuary for his son as well. Jherek left the cabin, satisfied the boy was going to be taken care of.

Back on the main deck, he stopped at the railing and breathed deeply. He still carried a chill from swimming even though he’d changed clothes. Glancing at the prow, he spotted Sabyna sitting there alone. She was swaddled in a heavy woolen blanket.

Uncomfortable with how things had been left between them after the encounter over the raggamoffyn, Jherek went to the ship’s galley and got two bowls of chowder from the cook. A pot was generally kept going for the men taking the night shift.

He carried the bowls of chowder to the prow. “I thought maybe you’d like some soup,” he said quietly, extending one of the bowls.

She looked up at him, then took it graciously. “Thank you.” She put the bowl in her lap, gray tendrils wafting around her as Breezerunner sailed in ever-widening circles in the attempt to find other survivors of the pirate attack.

“May I join you, lady?” he asked, feeling uncomfortable and afraid that she’d tell him no.

“You’d want to sit with me after what I did to that boy?”

“Aye.”

She shook her head. “Then sit.”

He did, folding his legs. The wind had a chill bite to it now. He ate the chowder in the silence that stretched between them.

“Are you cold?” she asked, setting her bowl aside.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re shivering.”

“Only a little.”

“Here,” Sabyna said, stretching the blanket out, offering him part of it.

Hesitantly, Jherek took the blanket and wrapped himself in it. Immediately, he became overly conscious of her body heat saturating the blanket, and of the way she smelled of lilacs in spite of the swim.

“Is the boy all right?” she asked.

“He’s eating, and from the look of him, he’ll be sleeping soon. He told the captain that Skeins scared him, but he understands why it had to be done.”

“Good.” Sabyna pushed wet hair from her brow. “He’ll start to feel the real pain in the next couple of days, when he realizes he’s survived and his father hasn’t.”

Jherek knew that was true, and that there was nothing he could do to spare the boy that pain. Living hurt was a fact he’d learned early, and one that had stayed with him the longest. “What will Tynnel do with him?”

“The best he can,” Sabyna answered. “He’ll post for the boy’s family and leave him with a temple in Athkatla when we reach the port for care. He’ll check on him, but that boy could well end up being an orphan. It happens. This is a hard world.”

“Aye.” Jherek hunkered in the blanket for a time, wishing he felt more like sleeping. He felt drawn to the woman. In the three days aboard ship, he’d watched her and liked what he saw. Rescuing the boy the way she had, though, had shown him some of the differences that lay between them. He wished it would have made him like her less. The attraction, however, remained.

“I heard the boy tell Tynnel that pirates took the ship,” Sabyna said.

Jherek nodded.

“Pirates killed my brother,” she went on in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, “but I told you that, didn’t I? My father was ship’s mage on Glass Princess back then.”

The ship’s name struck a chord in Jherek’s memory. Something moved restlessly in his mind and he instinctively shied away from it. Anything that far back couldn’t be good.

“We were attacked by Falkane’s ship, Bunyip.”

Jherek’s heart skipped a beat.

“I remember it well,” Sabyna continued. “My mother and I had just put away the remains of morningfeast, and a fog swelled up from the south as it sometimes will during this time of year. Only on that day, Bunyip was following it in. We ran a race for a time, our sails filled with the wind.”

Jherek remembered the ship then, and the chase. He’d been five, clinging to the ship’s rigging as his father had commanded. It was his job to put out any fires that might start on the deck when the boarding began. Merchant ships who knew they were going to be taken often retaliated by trying their hardest to make taking them dangerous to the pirates. He always stayed near the wet sand barrels that he used to put out any fire arrows that struck Bunyip. The pirate vessel’s namesake, a creature of the seas half seal, half shark, was known for the characteristic roar it unleashed before it took its prey. Falkane had ordered a specially made klaxon created to make the same roar, only much louder. Jherek remembered it ringing in his ears that day.

“In the end,” Sabyna went on, “Bunyip closed on us. The boarding crew was more merciful in those days than they are now.”

“I know,” Jherek said hoarsely.

“Falkane ordered the captain and most of the crew killed. It was butchery, but he spared my father and a few other men, my other two brothers who were still yet children themselves. He also spared my mother and the women on the ship.”

Images flickered through Jherek’s mind of that day, more details available than he’d ever been able to remember in the past. He’d clung to the railing, scared and crying as he always did when he saw the vicious bloodletting that happened on a ship Bunyip had grappled onto.

“My brother Dennin was sixteen, still a boy, but with a man’s growth. His magic could have been strong, but he denied it, called to the blade. Before my father could stop him, he challenged Falkane to a duel.” Sabyna shook her head. “It was no duel. It was an execution.”

Jherek didn’t remember that. At the time he’d been standing by the railing, sure even as a child that he could no longer endure the fear and the sheer evil that radiated from his father and the pirate crew. Men and women had been murdered-and worse-on Bunyip’s deck, and his father had made him witness most of the atrocities.

During the boarding then the two ships had gotten off tandem on a wave and knocked forcibly together. He’d fallen over the railing and into the ocean between the two ships. Though he was a good swimmer, he couldn’t overcome the undertow created by the ships and the sea. In the end, he’d given up, accepting death as a respite from the harsh and unloved life he’d been forced to live.

He remembered floating downward, looking up at the keels of the two ships over him, watching as the turquoise world around him slowly faded to black. On the brink of drowning, he’d heard the voice for the first time.

Live, that you may serve. Nothing more, but the voice had left him feeling enraptured, stronger.

A pair of dolphins had swam under him, nosing under his arms and swimming with him back to the surface. One of his father’s pirates had spotted him and leaped in to save him. Afterward, he’d been more hopeful for a time, but that had faded as the days of waiting for more direction had turned into months and years. Now with the way events had gone in Velen, Jherek felt it had only been to prolong the agony of his life.

“After he finished with the ship,” Sabyna went on, “Falkane burned it to the waterline. He gave my father Dennin’s body, as a token of respect he’d said, because my brother had died well.”

“I’m sorry,” Jherek said, the cold touching him again, but coming from inside this time. Still, his mind whirled. Perhaps Madame litaar’s divination was correct. It wasn’t just mere chance that had placed him on the same ship as a woman who’d been there at the time the dolphins had rescued him. Or was it? He wished that he was more certain.

Live, that you may serve.

But serve who?

“I’m not telling you this because of the boy,” Sabyna said. “I did what I had to down there even if it did frighten him more than he should have been, and we both have to live with that. Nor am I telling you this because I want you to understand how I feel about pirates. I’m telling you these things because I want you to know me.”

Jherek remained silent, knowing part of her talk was from the aftermath of the risk they’d taken. Talking at such times, Malorrie had assured him, was a natural thing, a way of putting things behind a person.

“If I could,” she continued, “I’d kill every pirate on every sea, on all of Toril, and stretch their bodies out for the gulls to feed on.”

The tattoo on the inside of Jherek’s arm seemed to catch fire. It marked him indelibly for her, made him a part of what she most hated. There was no denying his heritage, and his bloodline only made it worse.

“Tynners stand on pirates is the chief reason I signed on with Breezerunner? she said. “He’s got a reputation for taking the fight to pirates, and he keeps the extra men on board to handle any encounter with them that may come along.” She turned to him. “I’ve a harsh side to me, one that surprises a lot of people. Is that too much for you to handle?”

He hesitated, trying to figure it out for himself. His head rebelled from what she was saying, thinking that her logic was skewed. It was one thing to stand against an evil, but another to stalk it as much like a predator as the evil itself. In the end, he went with his heart.

“No, it’s not too much for me to handle.”

She looked at him, her eyes searching his. “Good, because I find myself liking you-maybe more than I should-and if I’m too honest for you too quickly, I can only offer my apologies.”

Her revelation shocked Jherek and he didn’t know what to say.

“Surprised?” she asked.

“Aye,” he croaked.

“Surprised that I’d be so forward?”

He shrugged.

“I live on a ship, as you have. It’s a small world. Things will pass you by if you don’t reach out for them. Do you understand?”

Jherek nodded, realizing that her talk was there to bolster her courage in revealing so much of herself.

“There’s not much time to get to know someone you feel-drawn to,” she continued. “I’ve learned that I have to deal with my feelings quickly to make sure of where I stand. I can’t afford distractions in my job, and I’ve found you’ve become very distracting. If I don’t deal with it now, I fear it’s only going to get worse. I don’t want that, but neither do I want to confuse you, and I know from other times that I’m capable of that. I’m trying to be fair to both of us. It would be easier if I felt you weren’t interested.”