Ariadel's frustration radiated out at him even without a telepathic link, and her mouth was twisted with disgust. “She's a rogue,” she muttered, aghast. “That magic is raw and untrained! She should be remanded to the Nistrans!”
“The Sea Kingdoms do not answer to land authority,” Vidarian said quietly, turning his head to make sure none of the crew had heard her. “Not even the priestesshoods.”
His words only enflamed her ire, but she caught his pointed glances and kept it silent.
As they closed on Ruby and the dark-haired girl Vidarian took to be her windreader, Vidarian noted with a sinking feeling the familiar dried-blood color of the sea witch inside the glass bowl. The girl bowed herself away without a word, arms wrapped protectively around glass, water, and octopus.
“I see you keep to the old rites,” Vidarian said, not quite keeping the weary resignation out of his voice.
Ruby snorted, still looking out over the waves, her first acknowledgment of their arrival. “You know full well a wise captain keeps the rites of her crew, and no more. Galon called for the sea witch after the attempt on your life.” She turned, then, and leapt down onto the deck, her boots thudding hollowly on the damp wood. In liquid coils the sea energy wrapped itself back into her body and disappeared, and with it, their unnatural speed dropped away.
Ariadel seethed beside him, and Vidarian spoke to stay ahead of her. “What's your decision, then?”
“I will call a Conclave. Not in a decade has there been an assassination attempt aboard this ship.” The tightness with which she emphasized ‘decade’ had Vidarian calculating backward. Rhiannon had been killed just over a decade ago. Surely she hadn't been assassinated? He searched Ruby's face for a hint of the answer, but she gave none.
“And turn us away from the Selturians, and my father? I must object,” Ariadel said, and Vidarian hoped Ruby hadn't noticed her clenched fists.
“I'm sorry, Priestess,” Ruby said, “but I'm quite resolved.”
“By Sea Kingdom law, you owe me the right of resolution by individual combat,” Ariadel said.
“Ariadel-“ Vidarian began, his head managing to swim and pound simultaneously, but Ruby took no notice.
“I would,” Ruby said, unruffled, “if landers were due the rights of sailors, which they are not.”
“I am the mate of one of your allies, and so due his rights.” Now Vidarian choked-wondering if Ariadel knew what she was claiming (the lander equivalent of marriage!), and then wondering if he wanted to know. The coughing fit that seized him brought blinding bouts of head pain with it.
Ruby, for her part, raised an eyebrow, smiling laconically at Vidarian's discomfort, and conceded with a genteel nod of her head. “Terms?”
“Staves.”
“Swords.”
Ariadel glared. “Magic.”
“Enough,” Vidarian managed, and their heads snapped toward him like unruly vipers. He glared back through a pounding head. “You both know full well you can't engage in public battle on these decks.” He turned to Ruby. “However you fought, it would come to magic, and she could burn down this ship-I've seen it.” And to Ariadel, “And even if you won without killing us all, you'd have an even bigger problem, because the crew would either kill you or declare you captain.”
Thwarted wrath emanated from each, either of which would have been intimidating alone. Only the pulsing of his head gave him impatience enough to hold his ground. Ruby was quicker on the uptake, visibly smoothing.
“He's correct, of course,” she said, all royal diplomacy again. “But I assume that you play Archtower?”
Ariadel stiffened, feeling for an insult. “Gevalle,” she said, not quite a question.
“The Velinese name,” Ruby agreed. It was a war game played with pieces of carved stone on a kind of grid. Vidarian had never once in their many games managed to defeat Ruby when they were children, a fact that she doubtless needled him with now. “I have a board in my quarters.”
“Very well,” Ariadel said. “One game.”
They crossed the ship in silence. There was no diplomatic way to search either woman for weapons before they entered Ruby's quarters together, more was the pity. Vidarian opened the door for them, expressing his disapproval with an abrupt wave of mock gentility, but Ariadel did not acknowledge it, and Ruby replied with an exaggerated curtsy that was no doubt perfect Alturian Imperial form.
After she stepped across the threshold, Ruby raised an eyebrow, then shut the door in his face. He squawked an objection, but Ruby's muffled reply was command-voiced: “You are dismissed, sir!”
He gritted his teeth, then regretted it as pain flashed in front of his eyes. And you are enjoying this far too much, he thought at the door.
I like her, came the foreign thought, its voice growing more familiar, and his vision swam. Knives of anxiety swept up his spine in successive cold chills, and he looked around wildly.
Who are you? he thought, reaching out with his mind. But the voice, if it did have a presence at all, danced outside his reach. For a moment, before it left entirely, he sensed a giddy amusement, as of a malevolent child who torments an animal. Sudden rage flooded through him, beating back the pounding in his head, and only the sound of Galon moving in the adjacent quarters reminded him to contain himself.
Was he going mad? Had the initial link to Ariadel, forged by the fire goddess, cracked open his mind like an oyster shell, and now other thoughts leaked in? Were such things even possible?
There was no sound from behind the captain's door, and so he retreated up the passageway and exited into the sunlight. The aftcastle was largely untended this hour of the morning, though men and women moved in the rigging, scurrying to answer the commands called out by the second mate from the wheel ahead. Vidarian climbed the narrow ladder and ascended the top deck to look out over the stern, the blue waves, and the wake left behind from their swift passage.
Watching the rushing water, he was aware as he had never before been of the tremendous energy that surged around the ship. It seemed such a small and inconsequential thing, this creation of wood and tar and sail, to have the audacity to brave the ocean. Down, down went the water, deeper than his ability to perceive with eye or Sense. Not for the first time in his life, but for the first time in a great many years, he was in awe of Nistra, lady of the waters.
One little element, a voice whispered, who plays with her little ship toys, and loves that you love her. You're too good for her, too.
The chill seized him again, and he forced himself not to turn, knowing he would find no one. But this time, he wasn't alone in hearing it: around the ship, the waves crept higher, and the ocean sang dissonance to his senses, and anger. Inside his mind, the voice laughed, again with the strange edge that lifted the hairs on the back of his neck-but it mercifully retreated, and the waves calmed again.
Two hours later, Ariadel and Ruby emerged from the aftcastle, and to the sinking of his stomach, both looked entirely too satisfied for his well-being. Vidarian had no desire to witness a pirate Conclave, even though it might be, as Ruby claimed, the safest place in the sea.
Ruby walked to capstan and placed one booted foot upon it, calling out to the crew. “We remain on course,” she said, and a chorus of “Aye, Captain” answered from the deck.
Ariadel's victory was short-lived. She might have won a game of Archtower, but now there was Maladar's Horn to contend with. Vidarian had passed around the horn twice, and only twice. The Quest was shallow-drafted enough to manage the great winding Karlis River, if ever he had need to access the eastern sea, now that the Imperial locks were in operation. Most ships used it to bypass the horn if they could, and the reasons why were looming on the horizon: anvil-headed clouds, dark as a betrayer's heart, and a cold wind that drove them toward the knife-reefed coast.
A good speed would carry them around the arm of the perpetual storm. From the wheel, Ruby was calling out the trimming of the mainsail, and the Viere made crisp progress through waters just beginning to turn dark. As Vidarian and Ariadel watched the sunset-stained water from the bow, the wind fell out from under them. After a rattle of rigging settling back against the poles, all was silent, save the distant boom of thunder that echoed across the wave-plain from dim flashes in the bellies of the thunderheads.
The Viere continued to make slow progress through the waves, tacking against a nonexistent wind. Ariadel looked askance at Vidarian. “A silence before the storm,” he said. “You'd better go below. Make sure everything-and I mean everything-is tied down securely.” She nodded, then moved toward him. He wrapped his arms around her tightly for a moment, chin resting on her hair, and then she turned for the forecastle, moving quickly while the deck was still steady.
As she crossed, she exchanged nods with Ruby, who advanced toward the bow, having turned the wheel over to Galon. He still had not figured out what had so securely settled their feud.
She lifted a brass telescope and looked out at the distant storm, answering his unasked question. “We'll go in with the storm jib as far as we can,” Ruby said, all levity for once gone from her demeanor. “I may require your assistance, at the worst.” She gestured down at the water, and a chill stole over Vidarian as he took her meaning. It was one thing to play at magicking a handful of riverwater, and quite another to attempt taming a storm. Ruby seized his shoulder and smiled. “Just follow my lead.”
He managed half a smile. “Aye, Captain.”
The wind picked them up then, cold and ominous. The sails snapped taut against their trim restraint, and the ship lurched forward into newly agitated waves. “Reef main and hoist storm jib!” Ruby shouted, turning away from the bow and striding for the wheel. “All hands check harness to jackline! Look sharp!”
Men and women scrambled for their posts. From the bow, Vidarian tested the security of the jackline anchored there and extending back to the stern. A series of metal hooks guided the line over the forecastle, and he checked each as well as he moved down the deck. Below on the gundeck, three young sailors were moving to secure and check the cannon, and Vidarian joined them in hauling and tying rope. Above, rain began to drum the deck.
The thunder was echoing closer as they sailed into the reach of the storm, and the ship pitched to steeper and steeper angles, testing the cannon-lines. Wind lifted the rigging, howling through the sails, and at last on one great pitch to port, the sea broke over the rails, coursing over the spar deck in a rush that sank his stomach before cascading down the ladders and onto their heads.
Vidarian had worked his way to midships at this point, and stood with the ladders and capstan just before him to stern. Ruby's voice came down from overhead: “Heave to! Get me in front of that-!” Vidarian had not heard that word in over a decade: a particularly creative bedroom maneuver unmentionable in polite company.
Despite the pitching of the ship, the cannon were secure, and none too soon with the full wrath of the storm upon them. Vidarian looked with dread at the dripping ladder, then took courage between his teeth and mounted up it.
Abovedeck the world was in chaos. The thunderheads bore down on them from above, blackening the sky. Lanterns had been lit across the ship, bolstering the thin light from beyond the storm at the horizons, where, somewhere, the moon still shone. Vidarian staggered under the assault of rain and wind to fix his harness to the swinging jackline.
The ship tilted down a swell nose-first at a speed and angle that gripped Vidarian's stomach with vertigo. He took hold of his lifeline with both hands as his boots lifted off the deck-only for a split second, but the crash as they bottomed out, the long bowsprit ahead knifing through saltwater, knocked hardened sailors to the deck across the entire ship. The sea came pouring over the gunwales, drenching the decks and everyone on them.