“What was that ship you recognized? Out on the harbor's edge?”
“It's called the Viere d'Inar,” he said, knowing the name itself would mean nothing to her.
“Is that Velinese?”
“Yes,” he said, impressed. “It means ‘the crown of the sea.'”
“Rather ostentatious.”
“It comes by the name honestly.”
Ariadel squinted at him. “What aren't you wanting to say?”
Vidarian drew in a deep breath and held it, then exhaled fast. “It's a Sea Kingdom ship. A close ally of my family's.”
“Then we should speak with the captain!”
“It might not be so simple.” Gods, this was tortuous. But better, he decided finally, to have it all out at once. “Her name is Roana. Years ago, her mother and my parents thought that she and I should marry to cement a business alliance.”
Ariadel blinked. “Oh.”
Vidarian soldiered on. “She's the West Sea Queen now, after her mother.” Ariadel's eyes widened even as he felt a pang at the words-Rhiannon had died when they were teenagers in some sort of duel. “Once she became the Sea Queen so young, a business alliance became far beneath her station.”
“Isn't it dangerous for her to be here?”
“Probably. But the Sea Kingdoms are peculiar. If she were to show weakness, a fear of a particular port, no matter how reasonable, she could be challenged and even overthrown.”
Ariadel looked out over the water, to the far side of the harbor and the Viere. It was a large ship-half again larger than the Quest, truly a queen of the waves. Strong and formidable, even in the Outwater. He saw Ariadel making these calculations, eyeing the other ships in the harbor, turning at last to face him again. “I think we should ask her. I don't think we have a choice.”
“We can't afford to linger in the city,” he said, “but I can at least look around in the shipyard. Could be there are other friends here.”
“We have little to bargain with,” she reminded him, and he nodded. “This could be fortune.”
“Or more ill luck,” he agreed glumly, ire still tickling the back of his eyes whenever he caught sight of the Quest, so close and yet impossibly out of reach.
The shipyard of Val Harlon was run by an old ship's carpenter known to the Rulorats-he'd even repaired the Quest a time or two. Stimson Allanmark seemed to have been crushed by the weight of the sun over his years, and had handled so much tar it now marked a permanent dappling on his hands and forearms. His beard, knotted with sea air, gave him a perpetually put-upon expression that made it difficult to tell when he was being friendly.
“Vidarian, my boy,” he greeted them, first bowing to Ariadel with polite correctness (and no more), then reaching to shake Vidarian's hand. “Nistra's gift to see you again. I wondered where you were, with the Quest anchored aught. Never seen you apart.”
“Strange times, my friend,” Vidarian said, and Stimson's thick eyebrows knit with agreement.
“Strange indeed,” he agreed, voice husky with seriousness. “Scuttlebutt is you've had some trouble with the fire priestesses. Beggin’ your pardon, my lady,” he gave another proper nod to Ariadel, though with an eyebrow inched in curiosity at Vidarian.
“There is a disagreement,” Vidarian agreed. With the knife ships blocking in his own, there was little point in arguing.
“You Rulorats and your mucking about.” Stimson chuffed. “I hope you can resolve it before you get an Imperial inquisitor's attention.”
“I'm working to address it presently,” he said. “But at the moment, what we need is a ship and an exit-outside the temple's sight.”
Stimson grunted, then turned and waved a gnarled and tar-stained paw for them to follow. “We should discuss this in my office.”
“You have an office?” The words escaped Vidarian before he could stop them, and Stimson turned back for just a moment, giving him a look that asked if it were entirely necessary for him to be quite so thick. Vidarian cleared his throat and motioned Ariadel to follow.
The yardmaster's “office” was the belly of a permanently drydocked galleon, a retired Imperial war-queen. Stimson led them through a heavy salvaged door that had been fit into a massive patched fissure in the hull. He hauled the door open, and before Vidarian's eyes could adjust, the yardmaster's voice carried a smile with his greeting: “Well, here's one might be able to help.”
The shadow of the familiar leather cap over inimitable riot of red curls came into view first, and Vidarian braced himself as he crossed the threshold.
For a moment it was like seeing a ghost. The bold figure perched on a supply barrel-white swordsman's shirt and black leather vest, longsword and main gauche at hips, black linen trousers disappearing into embroidered leather boots-was direct out of his childhood. Roana, from the mantle of red curls to her sardonic, challenging smile, was the spitting image of her mother as Vidarian had known her, sun-gilt and utterly unstoppable. The tattoos that curled around her neck and hands, indeed most visible patches of skin, were different ones, but they were in the same places.
“Queen Roana, I take it,” Ariadel glided in front of Vidarian, all smoky diplomacy. “I am Priestess Ariadel Windhammer. Vidarian has told me much about you.”
“Call me Ruby.” She winked aggressively as she stood to greet them, and Vidarian saw his life becoming more difficult.
“Queen Ruby.” Ariadel was unfazed. “Mr. Allanmark suggested you might be able to assist us with passage from Val Harlon.”
Ruby's widening smile, all faux-innocence and teeth, was aimed at Ariadel but intended for Vidarian. “But Priestess, the harbor just happens to be full of temple knife-ships. Surely one would bear you hence at far gentler expense?”
Her feint scored; Ariadel colored.
Vidarian stepped forward to join Ariadel, deliberately placing himself with inappropriate closeness. “We're looking for passage to the Selturians. The temple is not especially well disposed toward us, nor we them, at the moment. A simple misunderstanding surely soon corrected.”
“Surely,” Ruby repeated, still smiling at Ariadel. “And until then, you're a renegade fire priestess. Fascinating.” No seafarer sympathized with a follower of Sharli, as a general rule, but Ruby was far too canny a captain herself to let herself be won over by a religious vendetta. “And a liability.”
Flashbacks of his original deal with Endera disoriented him for half a moment, but he didn't hesitate to use exactly what had turned that conversation, hoping the tiny chime of guilt in his conscience wouldn't percolate into his voice. “I am owed a pair of sun rubies by a high priestess,” Vidarian said, and Ruby's eyes darkened with surprise and greed. “When our disagreement is resolved, they are contract-bound to deliver. I assume you'd have a natural interest.”
Ruby covered her avarice adroitly, but not before Vidarian could make it out, and she conceded his point with a genteel wave of her hand. “For the pair-”
“For one,” Vidarian interrupted.
Ruby laughed and extended her hand. “For you, Vidarian-of course. One sun ruby, passage for two to the Selturian Islands. My ship, as it happens, stands ready to depart.” Not without trepidation, Vidarian shook the proffered hand, altogether too aware of his situation. Whereas he had demanded collateral from Endera, Roana knew that her resources were too powerful and vast to even think of worrying whether Vidarian would repay his debt. With a gallant sweep, she released her hand and spun in theatrical invitation toward the back of Allanmark's “office.” Vidarian and Ariadel squinted, and just barely made out the upper edge of a concealed door further masked by a wall of stacked crates.
While they calculated where it must go-down into the earth, below the harbor-Ruby laughed again, a sound like a pennant snapping in the wind.
“You thought we'd come in through the front door?”
The tunnel that wound from Allanmark's door down beneath the pier was highly illegal, and therefore spared the inconvenience of safety inspections. Twice in their journey out of the city they took side tunnels that detoured around muddy cave-ins, and by the time they emerged, Vidarian and Ariadel found their hands covered with silty muck from the cave wall. Ruby, of course, was spotless.
From this promontory over the north side of the harbor, a precarious stairway of small granite slabs marked a track down to the water, where one of the Viere's shallow prams waited to ferry them aboard. Vidarian thought he recognized the old sailor who saluted them aboard the craft and wordlessly launched it, but couldn't summon a name. To buy time and forestall awkwardness, he turned to point out to Ariadel the gallant ship that grew larger with their approach, a shadow rising out of the sunset-stained harbor waters.
To know the Viere d'Inar was to know love and envy and terror all at once, a storm of rapture that clenched the heart of any seafarer who knew boot from tail. She was a spectacular frigate-built brigantine, tall sails like the arched wings of a gull fit to split the sky, sleek and truly unreasonably fast for a ship her age and tonnage. And she was a city-thirty-two guns and over a hundred and fifty souls, if he remembered right. The emperor might boast larger ships in tamer eastern seas, but here in the west with its wild ocean and labyrinth reefs, the Viere was queen of all she surveyed. There would never be any ship for Vidarian save his Empress, but only a fool would doubt the Viere's primacy.
As the pram drew closer, two sailors high above manned the davits, dropping its hook lines in unison with powerful strokes on the winch. Their sailor shipped his oars just in time to fasten the hooks, and they rose into the air, all with the swift efficiency of a machine. Ruby affected a stern expression appropriate for a captain surveying her sailors, but the glint in her eye betrayed her pleasure at this small demonstration of the Viere's superior performance.
Vidarian was close enough to Ariadel to feel her rapidly indrawn breath as they ascended the rail, bringing the full bustle and scurry of the ship into view. With night coming on, cabin boys trotted briskly across the deck to light rows of ship's lanterns. Even this mundane task was elevated on the Viere-the boys (and one girl) used antique glow-poles dating back before the Sea Wars. Vidarian had only ever seen one in operation, and here Ruby had four. The ball of fire-magicked glass at the end of the elaborately worked iron rod would ignite a wick but nothing else-not even flesh or powder.
As they stepped onto the deck, a burly man wearing the knots of a first mate strode purposefully toward them. He wore little ornament, likely needing only his vast size to intimidate; the deep lines etched into his face were hereditary rather than marks of age.