61

Ash

Flaming oxkag, my head hurts. It’s the only thing I’m sure of. The other pieces won’t fit together, like how I got here, where here is, or why it’s f’qad’n cold and wet. My mind’s a sieve, holding nothing but dregs. Soon queasiness erupts up the back of my throat, bringing a vile taste in my mouth. My head pounds and my brow is beaded with sweat. Is there a bucket nearby? I fumble my hands and find them manacled behind my back. I can’t put pressure on the points that stop the seasickness. All I can do is rock back and forth, turning darker shades of green.

“Help?” I push my thoughts into the medallion but it’s like banging my head on a brick wall. There’s no way to orient, no horizon line to watch. Nowhere to rest my eyes in the darkness. The world has become an up and down slosh, my guts moving against the undulations of the sea and the pounding ice picks in my head. “What’s happening?” There’s no answer from the creaking ship (obviously a ship) and eventually, after throwing up bile, I doze with my chin slumped on my chest.

I don’t think I’m out for long, but it could have been hours. On second thought, it is hours judging by the way my hands and feet have swollen against the restraints. My fingers tingle, those I can feel. It’s going to hurt like stuggs when they cut me loose. Assuming they ever will.

The nausea’s compounded by the stifling air and the sideways rocking of the ship. Why are we moving from side to side?

“Anchored, I assume,” my ever-sensible inner voice informs me.

Do you know what happened?

“Not really. It’s very dark in here.”

How this inner part of me can be so blasé is inexplicable, but I find comfort in it just the same. Much-needed comfort!

I’m determined to stop this seasickness, so I can think. I wiggle my hands. The iron cuffs are strangulation tight, with one hand locked on top of the other. With a twist, I angle my wrist bone into the underside of the manacle and push until it hurts. It’s painful but no worse than anything else happening to me right now, and the pounding in my head abates enough for the question to rise again. How did this happen to me?

“You trusted someone you shouldn’t have.”

But I’m not sure that’s true. And then I remember Talus’s warning about danger in places I feel secure. Heat flares through me. Could she not have said it plain? “Watch out when you are in the Tangeen library.” That would have been much more helpful.

The anger clears my head more and I recall coming up the stairs, asking Lucia for a magnifying glass. Seeing Larseen? That was him, right? The next minute I felt a sharp pain and darkness. If something happened in between, I don’t know.

So here I am, in the hold of a ship, no idea where they are taking me. Back across the Black Dart Channel? North to Sierrak? I don’t think about that possibility. As the pressure point sends soothing relief through my body, I turn my mind to the shipboard sounds—creaking wood, clanging bells, shouts above me on the main deck. Shouts? I listen harder. It doesn’t take long to realize that this ship I’m on, and my captors, are Palrion, shouting, in my native tongue, cries of battle. Great. Now I’m going to drown with my own people who have what? Abducted me? I feel the weight of the medallion around my neck. Could Brogal know? I try to reach out to him again but it only makes my head hurt worse.

If he knows, what good would it do?

“No good at all.”

The sound of battle grows louder. Steel hits steel and the slice and cut of honed metal ringing through the air. This just keeps getting worse.

“Or does it?” my inner voice asks.

I don’t even try to answer that.

Has Kaylin come to save me? He would have been the first to notice my disappearance unless they have him, too. And Tyche? Are they here with me in the dark? “Kaylin?”

There’s no answer so maybe this is a rescue.

I listen for a recognizable word amongst the fighting, or any clue as to what’s going on. Mostly it’s grunts and shouts, but eventually I catch something that makes my heart sink. It’s the voice of a Sierrak rising above the cacophony on deck and what he says is easy enough for me to understand.

“Bring up the prisoner.”

“Prisoner, single?” my inner voice asks.

I caught that, too.

The hatch flies open, and a shaft of light hits my face. I feel the warmth but can’t see clearly. Am I blind? There are comments about the darkness, the mess, and the stink. I can’t agree with them more. Despite every intention to remain poised and indignant, tears well. Boots stomp toward me and I squint, making out the silhouettes of men. They have to release the manacles to free me, as the chains are linked to a metal ring in the deck. Sure enough, as soon as the binding around my wrists and ankles are loosened, blood rushes to my extremities, and with it the unbearable pain of a thousand pins and needles driving into flesh. I scream and lash out with everything I’ve got.

The men grab me with wide, calloused hands. One hoists me in the air and hangs me over his shoulder. I want to point out that he smells worse than I do by far but I’m in too much pain to manage a word. Tears stream and my nose leaks. The captor has his hand around my hip and struggles for a moment to push the length of my skirt away from his face. My favorite lavender dress is in ruins.

“I’d be more concerned about your favorite Self,” my inner voice says.

Believe me, that too.

My head hangs down to the Sierrak’s lower back, the position doing nothing for the nausea, and to prove it, I unintentionally spew into his boots. It doesn’t make me a new friend, I’m sure.

He throws me onto the deck as soon as we’re up the hatch. An argument ensues, the gist of which is who will carry me to the other ship and how they will bind me. The good news is, they aren’t going to kill me yet. The bad news? Sierraks have me now, and I know how they treat prisoners.

“I’m here. I won’t allow harm.”

Big words for a disembodied voice.

“Disembodied?” The deeper, sometimes helpful, sometimes disdainful part of me sounds hurt.

I’m sorry, but can I point out that the juxtaposition between us makes you a prisoner, too?

For a moment, I feel the lightness of laughter. It doesn’t last long. My head, aching still, is flat against the deck, a goose egg rising near my hairline. At least the deck is clean and smells of wood and pitch and faintly of fish, but there still is no clue as to what ship I’m on. I keep my head down, not wanting to attract attention, but the reprieve is short-lived. Another Sierrak, the loser of a coin toss, replaces my chains with heavier ones, as if I am going to fly away. He hoists me over his shoulder and carries me to the gangplank. While the ship rocks, the deck disappears and all I can see through new tears and snot is my captor’s boots, ballooning pants, a very narrow plank, and the choppy blue sea below. The pain in my head is now horrific and I don’t trust my vision, but something’s there, a fast-swimming shadow below.

A shark? A porpoise? It turns a somersault underwater and stares at me. A Mar? I have the feeling someone is shouting at me, asking me to do something, but the pressure in my head is too much. I can’t hear. “Find Kaylin,” I beg them, in case they are Mar. In case they can hear my thoughts, in case this isn’t a hallucination, but as they fade away, I think they were only a figment of my imagination.

My captor reaches the new ship and I’m passed onto others who thankfully tip me right side up. Now the blood rushes out of my head and my knees buckle. I fall to a heap until a new guard gathers me up, his hands gripping my biceps. As they take me to the hold and chain my ankle to a ring in the floorboards, an order is given—one simple word.

“Fire.”

Catapults cut loose and the boom-crack-snap splits my eardrums along with more orders shouted from a distance. Soon the motion changes from rocking to gliding and we are on our way to…where I have no idea. Before I pass out, again in the dark, I wonder briefly if there is any water, and why in all the vis spit’n gorm they took me, a non-savant without bone, phantom, or coin to barter with.