Where Sandover smelled of burnt cake, this man smelled like fire. Like the scent of his tobacco had invaded every pore of his skin, a spiced, sappy aroma with a musky undertone wholly foreign to Jaime’s oversensitive nose. In the brown fugue of the hold, Robb seemed almost a part of the ship, a carven beam that had learned to walk and talk, his blunt features speaking of the ancient tree he would have been. So far he had saved Jaime twice from Sandover’s cruelty, and once from his malignant breed of kindness in the form of that poor lad Leody. Yet by every other measure he was Sandover’s servant.
“Does he know you can do that?” Jaime asked as Robb let the miniature whirlwind subside, the swirling motes disappearing as they settled on his palm.
“He knows a little.”
“Will you help me get above?”
“Why?”
“I’ll wear myself out getting past these boxes.”
“No, why do you want to go up there?”
“I know it puts me nearer to him but I’m going stir-crazy. Might be nice to get some air.”
Standing at his full height, Robb’s bushy hair touched the beams. He gazed at Jaime, his nostrils flared, his eyes shadowed beneath his hard brow. “As you like,” he grumbled. “But stick close.”
To see the sky was like greeting a friend. Sandover wasn’t about, so Jaime stood at the rail and let the air wash over him, drying the sour sweat from his back, ruffling his hair which had grown out from his customary crop into an unbecoming cap of reddish-brown straw. But he was alive, and no longer so acutely alone.
Robb was speaking with the ship’s cook. Jaime started tacking along the rail towards them, his stomach griping with the first genuine pangs of hunger since collapsing. As the deck tilted sharply he halted, unsure of his legs. The wind was changing course, the spars creaking as the sails billowed against them. A pair of swabs started up the sheets to trim the canvas.
The sky’s blue was thickening, moisture massing on the forward horizon. Robb came to meet him. “You feel it too?”
Jaime paused as a soft thrumming impulse passed over them, a sound that wasn’t wholly there. “What on earth was that?”
“Maybe a storm’s coming.”
“I need to see more of the sky.” He followed the flick of Robb’s eyes upward to the top, a miserly platform built halfway up the main mast. “How do I get up there?”
Robb frowned. “You’ll blow away.”
“Then tie a rope around my waist. If there’s a storm we ought to know.”
Robb relented, though as Jaime climbed higher up the shrouds he began to wish he hadn’t insisted, for the wind was ferocious, snatching and shoving at him. At first he merely clung to the mast on reaching the top, but as the ship began climbing a wave he got to his feet, fingers knotted in the ropes. As the ship slid down the back of the wave he saw the storm. Not saw, felt, for it had yet to breech the horizon. But everything spoke of it: the massing clouds, the sucking wind, the dampness of the air as the clouds drew water.
Another ineffable tremor shuddered across the heaving sea. Yet on they sailed, their pace undiminished even with the sails trimmed. Sandover was driving them onward unnaturally. Directly into the storm.
Jaime slithered down in more haste than he’d climbed. “We’re sailing into disaster,” he told Robb, who was waiting on the deck with Captain Warner. “Is Sandover propelling the ship?”
“He must have kept your spell alive,” Robb rumbled.
“He needs to stop. Or we need to turn aside.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you, Mr. Skye,” Warner said. “There’s some mickle oddness in the air a’day.” A glum-faced man of middling age with wiry grey sideburns and a persistent stoop, Captain Warner seemed better suited to piloting a canal barge than navigating oceans. He had however an impressive bellow and had all hands on deck in seconds.
As the crew leapt to ready the ship for the weather, Sandover emerged from his cabin below the fo’c’sle. Dressed in a sickly shade of yellow, he yawned hugely, then noticed the hubbub. “What are you doing?” he cried, grabbing at the nearest sailor. “I told you full sail!”
“Captain says—”
“Blast the captain!” Sandover hissed. “You’ll do as I say! Full sail ahead.”
“We’ll be dashed to pieces,” Warner barked from above him. “That’s no ordinary storm.”
“Yes, but he’s no ordinary man,” Sandover replied as he started up the ladder. “Are you, Mr. Skye?”
“You want me to stop that?” The storm had cleared the horizon and now bore down upon them, a vast wall of bruised purple clouds, the rain a seething grey curtain hanging below. The choppy waves were growing, crashing against the hull, the spray hanging in the air like sour mist. A world of water, and Jaime was one little man, with the barest inkling of how to use his power.
“Not stop,” Sandover said with a mirthless smile as he approached them. “Deter. Push a little off its course so that we needn’t abandon ours. Surely your immense capabilities can render us this small service.”
“I can’t possibly—”
The smile died. “You will, Mr. Skye, or I’ll strap you to the mast and let the storm have you.”
“It’s having us either way if we don’t change our heading,” Warner said. As he started for the ladder Sandover made a careless gesture over his shoulder. Warner slumped, clutching his chest, trembling as his face turned a violent shade of red.
“Your opinions are not of interest, Captain,” Sandover said, his dreadful eyes on Jaime. “I said full sail.” He snapped his fingers and Warner staggered forward, leaning his hands on his knees as he gasped for breath. “Well?”
“Aye, Mr. Sandover,” Warner wheezed.
“As for our Mr. Skye,” Sandover said with another false smile that made Jaime take a good step back. “I tried to be nice. I offered you the very best of everything. And you refuse me. Why, when this could be so much easier if you did as I asked?”
“I can’t do it.”
“Yes, but I can.”
“You leave him alone,” Robb said, stepping in front of Jaime as the mage advanced, a vile hunger in his glassy eyes.
“Interfere again, Mr. Robb, and I shall burn out your tongue.”
“Let me speak to him.”
“If you dare counsel mutiny—”
“This ain’t the Bounty and you’re not bloody Captain Bligh. Just let me have a word.” Before Sandover argued further, Robb steered Jaime to the prow. Here the dip and rise of the waves was violently apparent, the spray stinging his face and soaking his thin shirt.
“You know he’ll torture you,” Robb said in a low rumble that matched the oncoming thunder.
“I know.”
“The sooner we get across, the sooner you can be free of him.”
“I’ll never be free of him.”
“We will. I promise.”
“If we live.”
“That’ll have to be your department. I haven’t much muster this far from land.”
“I can’t speak to the wind.”
“Not even if that wind’s full of water? And what’s the worst that could happen?” he went on as Jaime merely stared at the hell-storm. “You give it a go and get nowhere.”
“The worst is that all of us die.”
“So you’ve got nothing to lose, am I right?”
“Not entirely.” But what else could he do? He wanted so much to believe Robb. To believe in himself as well. Sandover’s confidence meant nothing, for the man was clear out of his mind.
Jaime had met many people in similar states of derangement over his many sanatorium stays. Men poisoned by megalomania, driven by unspeakable demons, terrorizing all who fell into their sphere. There seemed little to be done for most aside from sedate them and keep them from hurting others.
Yet he had thought the same of himself for most of his life, believing that his strange fits, his elevated senses were proof not of an innate ability to command the forces of nature but a special kind of mania. That these powers he had only just begun to understand were a delusion or at best a lie. None of those unfortunates in the wards had had Sandover’s powers.
Himself, however…
The worst was that nothing happened at all. The worst was that Sandover killed them today, not through malice but through a lack of seamanship. Jaime had craved oblivion often enough that he’d blunted his fear of it. All who were born would someday die, and most had no say in the how or the when. Jaime would die on his feet, fighting to save his life. Not just him but the sailors, the captain, the cook. Cary Robb, who had saved him. Sandover, so that Jaime might bring him to justice. Yet the storm was so huge it might have been a god. An ancient god of the netherworld, all-consuming, all-destroying, indifferent to all but the most fervent prayers.
Spare us
Spare us, we poor, unguarded, helpless human lives
Spare us and we’ll leave you be, leave the ocean to you
Oh sky, oh rain, oh endless, endless sea
Please spare us…
Clinging to the rail, he thought it again and again, as Sandover’s will drove them onward, the waves nearly cresting over the prow in the mad pitch of the ship. The mountainous storm wall was rotating, the wind catastrophic, and all Jaime had was his will, a tiny flame against an apocalypse. As the deck tipped alarmingly he fell to his knees, his hands slipping on the soaked wood rail. Much longer and he’d be washed away by the next heavy wave. He could not despair, for the sake of their lives, but the storm was beyond him.
Spare us…
Something fell on his shoulder. Something heavy and warm and solid, the warmth flowing into Jaime like pure water into a dry river. He opened his eyes and saw the storm anew. The currents, the torsion, the shape of the winds, as if sketched in skeleton, diagrammed: a patent for a new style of hurricane. Unwilling to look away he touched his cheek to the hand on his shoulder, smelled the arid warmth of Robb’s skin, his the heat warming Jaime’s heart.
Spare us…
Digging his fingernails into the wood Jaime shoved himself to his feet. Robb kept hold of him, his other hand braced on the rail, his body shielding Jaime from Sandover. “Don’t give up,” Robb hollered over the bludgeoning wind. “Or we’re all for the deep.”
Spare us…