The creak of the back door, the ringing of the fireplace tools on the hearth, the scraping of the kitchen chairs on the wood floor—these familiar sounds crept through the drug-induced fog that enveloped Gabriella’s brain. She could smell the hickory wood rafters, the bitterroot tea, the cinnamon her mother used for baking. Her senses told Gabriella she was home. She was, but something was wrong. Doors slammed. The bed creaked with Dameon’s rocking, and he counted primes under his breath.
Accusatory voices came from the next room. Her mother’s. Her father’s.
“How could you attack our own people?”
“How could you allow them to give him over to the Servior? Don’t you know what he was?”
“No, it’s not true!”
Then her parents were silent. The rocking under her bed stopped. So had Dameon’s counting. Gabriella knew her brother was standing in the doorway staring at their parents.
“Dameon, you should be in bed,” her mother said.
“No wait, listen to the boy,” her father said.
Then her brother’s voice began to drone on, relaying their story in his own matter-of-fact way. Emotionless, factual, and most importantly, true. Dameon, who was incapable of lying, was telling the story of their quest.
Gabriella was helpless to leave her bed as Dameon’s voice continued. She could not even open her eyes. The sleeping potion had been strong. She listened to Dameon’s voice as he methodically told their story. Then he spoke more quickly, which meant he was excited, as excited as Dameon could be. But Gabriella was unable to concentrate on the words. Her eyelids fluttered, feeling like leaden curtains. Her body was limp and unresponsive. Then Dameon stopped.
How much time had passed? How much had he been able to explain?
Gabriella heard her father’s voice. She did not hear her mother, but she knew she was there.
Trying to concentrate was too much for her, and Gabriella drifted again, aboard the Elawn, floating in the night sky. No, she thought, the Elawn is gone. But she saw Ghede smiling, the halyard in his hand, his foot on the gunwale, the stars hanging about him. Behind him stood a second figure, Brigitte, blue, benevolent, beautiful.
Gabriella felt her mother’s touch and heard her weeping beside her bed.
“I’m so sorry,” her mother repeated. “I’m so sorry.”
Then she was gone. Gabriella tried to focus, in hopes she would not drift back into unconsciousness. Hours slipped past, and the room grew colder. Gabriella heard the bedroom door open. Through her haze, she knew Dameon’s steps. He climbed the ladder to her bunk. She could imagine him looking at her, staring intently, his rocking and nervous ticks fewer now that he was in a familiar environment.
But she also could sense his concern, sympathy, love. That had been the gift the wyvern’s mage fire had given her. If Gabriella could have reached out to him, she would have, but her arms were limp. As if he read her thoughts clearly, he touched her hand. It was a brief, perfunctory touch, and he quickly withdrew and descended the ladder, but it spoke volumes to her now. She would have wept if she could have. Instead she slept.
When Gabriella next woke, her limbs were heavy, but she could move them. She sat up slowly, still dizzy from the drugged drink. She steadied herself by holding onto the rafter above her head. She knew the ladder would be difficult to negotiate, but she managed to climb from her bunk by taking a single step at a time, gripping the sides of the ladder so tightly her knuckles turned white. She faltered on the second to last rung and dropped down to the floor with a thud.
Dameon, sound asleep in his bottom bunk, did not stir. He had certainly slept through worse recently. Gabriella staggered to the bedroom door. Her father, wrapped in his thick outer coat, sat before the hearth in the main room. He had let the fire burn low into a pile of red and yellow embers. Lost in thought, he stared at the glowing ashes. Gabriella was surprised to see that his sword was buckled around his waist.
“Hello, pumpkin.” He turned to look at her, his soft brown eyes sad.
“Pa.”
He dropped his head into his hands and sighed. “Can you ever forgive us?”
“For what?” Which betrayal would her parents own, for she counted many.
“Dameon told us everything. We couldn’t believe him at first, but he is our son. For all the difficulties with him, we know he does not lie.” Her father rubbed his forehead, causing his skin to wrinkle and furrow. “What a journey,” he said half to Gabriella, half to the darkness that enveloped them.
Gabriella nodded. Her parents had never apologized to her before. It was unexpected and she felt uncomfortable.
“Did Dameon tell you about his gift?” she said.
“What gift?”
“Dameon is different, we all know, but he is different in amazing ways, too. Father, he is a genius at arithmetic.”
She went on to explain the calculations he had performed in the maze, the patterns he had seen on the number table, and how he could count hundreds of coins at a glance.
“He said nothing about that.” Her father ran his hands through his gray-flecked hair.
“Of course not, it is too ordinary to him to mention. We’ve always known he was good with numbers, but it goes so much further than that.” She was overcome with pride for her brother, the child everyone thought was good for nothing.
Her father wiped his eyes. “Gabriella, I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”
“Pa, I know you tried to help Adamantus.” Gabriella said the elk’s name now, certain that Dameon had already told her parents. Her father gestured to his sword.
“I tried to go down there again to free him, but there are too many of them.”
“Father, the Servior could have killed you!”
“I had to. I have so much to make up for.”
“Pa, I’m not angry. I know you tried.”
He shook his head. “No, there is something else.”
He reached under his coat to an inner pocket of his tunic, then removed something. He opened his hand. It was Gabriella’s whistle, broken in two.
Her hand went to her breast, where she felt her own whistle. Could there have been two? She pulled hers out, the intact whistle gleaming on her palm.
“Pa, where did you get it?”
“I knew Omanuju as a boy, remember? I knew Adamantus, too. He has a deep voice like thunder in the hills, doesn’t he?”
All Gabriella could do was nod.
“I remember hearing him speak when I was a small, small boy. I stumbled upon him and Omanuju in the forest. I could move very quietly through the forest back then.” He smiled at the memory.
He held up the two pieces of his whistle in his calloused fingers. “Omanuju gave me this whistle. Told me I must keep the secret, but if I were ever in danger I was to blow it. I never did. I was called off to sea as a deck boy shortly after. I found that I did not think of him and the elk as much. It was as if a spell had been broken. Maybe it was. I began to think the elk had just been a dream, a childhood fancy, my own imagination run amok. Or some trick of ventriloquism on the part of Omanuju. I had been very young after all. I never spoke of Adamantus to anyone.” Her father sighed.
“Decades later I saw Omanuju, and I avoided him. I was afraid to ask him, afraid to find out that I had been fooled or, worse, afraid that it had been real. The whistle broke many years ago, but I always kept it close.” He balled his fists around the whistle pieces and hung his head. “What wonders have I squandered?”
Gabriella put her hand on her father’s shoulder. She had never seen him so vulnerable. She felt unmoored, as if she were the parent as she comforted her father.
“Your mother feels terrible. I feel terrible. That is why I went down to the docks.”
It occurred to Gabriella that it was still dark outside. The tide would not change until around dawn.
“Are the Servior still there?”
“Yes.”
Gabriella turned to run into her room. A figure sleeping on a straw mat in the corner caught her eye. It was too small to be her mother. As Gabriella bent down close, she recognized the soft brown hair and the freckled cheeks. Her voice caught in her throat. “Eloise?”
“Aye,” her father said. “I found her outside waiting by the gate, long after everyone else had left. She’s been here nearly every day asking if you have come back. She did not get to see you while you were awake, and it was too late for her to walk home alone, so I let her sleep here.”
Emotions tumbled about within Gabriella: love, surprise, gratitude, and guilt. She had not even thought of asking Eloise to come with her on the journey. Now Gabriella wished she had at least considered it. She never realized how much she had meant to the girl with the withered arm.
I have more friends than I ever realized.
But she had little time to waste. In her room, Gabriella rifled through her drawers to find the darkest clothes she could. She tore off her outer garments. She slipped into black trousers and a blue tunic her mother had bought her for the winter festivals. She returned to the room, pulling one of her mother’s black cloaks about her. Like the tunic, it was expensive, but she knew that tonight she could make exception. The cloak was short and would not slow her as she ran.
“I will come along. I don’t want you in harm’s way.” Her father stood and grabbed his coat from the back of his chair.
“No, I must do this alone.” Before he could protest, Gabriella said, “It is not that I do not want your help. It is just that I plan to sneak aboard on the mooring lines, through the gunwale.” She looked at his wide shoulders and broad chest. “You are a bit large for that.”
“Aye.” He was frustrated, but Gabriella saw no other way. She had everything she needed. She opened the door, then stopped. She was home now. She had just refused her father’s help, yet it was still his house. She turned back to him.
“What are you looking at me for?” he said. “You are no girl any longer. You don’t need your father’s permission.”
She ran back to his arms. “Papa Bear, I’ve been trying to be a big lass like you’ve told me all this time.”
She felt her father’s chest heave as he laughed or sobbed or both. “Lass, my foot. You are a young woman now. It has just taken your parents some time to realize it. Hopefully you will be wiser than we. Now go . . . dawn is not far.”
Gabriella burst out of the door and fled down the road. The stars were still bright, but a feeling in the air told her morning was not long in coming. Animals were beginning to stir in their pens. A rooster called out at the false dawn. A donkey brayed.
It was too cold for the thin shirt she wore and such a thin cloak, but it was not long before she was panting hot. Her strides were long and purposeful. She imagined she should be tired, but she was not. She passed houses, each still dark, even as she neared the town. Normally fishermen might be stirring, but after the previous night, no one must have gone to bed early.
She passed Chief Salinger’s house, and resentment swelled within her. His house was the last before she reached town. Her footsteps rang out in the narrow cobblestone streets. She paused at the square. The torches had been removed. It was empty and dark as it ought to have been just before dawn. The shadowy hulk of the Elawn was collapsed in the opposite corner. She could tell the trunks of treasure had been removed. She wondered where, but she did not care. Even the whereabouts of Garmr’s eyes was unknown to her—she had changed clothes without checking her pockets. This troubled her little. Adamantus was worth more to her than mountains of gems, not only because what Omanuju had said about him but because he was her friend. All that mattered was setting him free.
She glimpsed a movement in the shadows near the wreck. Salinger’s men guarded the Elawn, but from the way they were seated on the cobblestones, their backs to the ruined hull of the airship, it appeared they were trying to catch a few winks.
It was the same time of night, near morning that she, too, had been caught unawares when the mother wyvern had struck the Elawn. Now it was her turn. She decided not to cross the square, especially since more attentive guards might be about. She took side streets to bring her to the harbor’s edge. The shadows of waterfront buildings provided cover for her all the way to the wharfs. Two of Salinger’s men stood at attention barring entrance to the dock where larger ships were moored. Were they there to keep people off the dock or to keep the Servior from coming ashore again?
The Servior’s three-sail carrack sat in the water beyond the ships of Harkness. The other docks were unguarded. Gabriella crept from the shadow of one building to the next, then darted onto the nearest dock.
She realized that it would be too difficult to move quietly on the wooden piers with her boots on. She yanked them off and ran barefoot down the dock’s length. This pier and the other older ones had been built close together—too close to accommodate the larger ships the fishermen now used. The charm of the old docks was that at one point two were close enough together to jump from one to the other if ships were moored between them.
Two ships were. Gabriella leapt the gunwales of the first ship, then the second. She had learned the trick from playing hide-and-seek with other children, when the other children had still played with her, before Dameon made her a pariah. The next dock over was for the largest ships. She could just make out the sinister shape of the Servior vessel, the carrack’s three masts looming against the sky. She would have to swim the rest of the way.
She slipped off the dock into the dark water, careful not to splash. The water was frigid, but the urgency of her task kept her fatigue and discomfort at bay. She studied the pilings that supported the piers. Shiny dampness was above the highest waves, which told her the tide was moving out. There was little time. She swam across the channel stroking under the water. It would take her a bit longer but was quieter, with less splashing,
Any Servior who were on deck would expect an intruder to come from the direction of land, so she headed for the sea-end of the dock. She swam beneath the dock, trying not to think about the filth that normally floated about in the harbor during the day. The water lapping against ships and pilings made noise enough to cover the sound of her strokes. She passed the long hull of the Servior’s ship. Had she been better prepared, she thought, she could have sabotaged the sailing vessel and rendered it unseaworthy.
But she was left with only her present plan. She climbed up the anchor chain of a nearby fishing boat, and crouching, ran across its deck to the dock.
Despite her attempts to be quiet, Gabriella made more noise than she liked. Hauling herself up onto the fishing boat left her panting, her arms quivering from her efforts. Entering the Servior’s ship would require more subtlety, more stealth. Her body shivered with cold, or nerves, as she hid behind a few barrels stacked on the dock. The guards still paced at the entrance of the pier. They were too far away now to hear her.
The deck of the Servior’s ship looked empty, but Gabriella knew there would at least be a watchman sleeping before the gangway. She ran, keeping out of sight as she dodged behind barrels and the pier’s mooring posts. The carrack was tied to the next post. She slipped behind it. Now so close, the reality of what she was about to do made her head spin. She massaged her arms and took the thick rope in her hands. She would not give herself time to contemplate things. She threw herself over.
Hand over hand, foot over foot, just as she had learned from sailors. She was not as smooth as she hoped, but she reached the railing of the carrack and stopped, swaying on the rope. Footsteps passed above her head on the deck: a Servior guard. She held her breath and hoped she was close enough that the ship blocked her from view. She was aware of the water dripping off her and plunking down into the harbor below. The sound was enough to make the guard stop.
Gabriella remained still, but her arms were beginning to burn from the strain of holding her weight. Her chest vibrated with the effort. Her face was hidden by the folds of her black clothes, but depending upon how close this guard was to the railing, he would see her bare, white feet on the rope.
The guard moved closer to the railing. Gabriella weighed her options. Should she drop into the water and swim under the ship? She took a deep breath, but she was rescued by someone yelling down the dock. The feet above her head shifted; the guard was distracted by a commotion at the dock entrance. He walked quickly to the gangway and disembarked. If he turned around, he would see Gabriella, but his attention was on the ruckus on shore. She took advantage of her opportunity and slipped up through the gunwale.
Onboard, she hid herself between two crates in the center of the deck. Voices from the pier drifted back to her, the sound carrying in the still night air. It was her father. She was sure of it, but his voice was slurred, as if he were drunk. Gabriella had never seen her father take a sip of ale in her life though. Now he was using words that would have earned her a slap. His exclamations and insults were aimed at Salinger’s men.
He was creating a diversion for her, she realized, sending him a silent thank you. She should have known he would not have simply stood by and waited passively for her return. She was glad he had not heeded her. The Servior guard did not return to his post, instead he walked down the dock for a better look at the commotion.
Gabriella could hear Salinger’s men trying to calm her father, asking him to sleep it off in the chief’s office—there was a small cell there for drunks. If they talked him into it—he was too big for them to force him—it would give her a few minutes more to ride through the square with Adamantus.
She felt a thick rope coiled beneath her. She wiped her feet on it so that the shimmer of her wet footprints would not be visible in the darkness. Crates of provisions crowding the deck provided her with cover. Cargo was kept towards the stern. She stole across the deck, counting more on speed than hiding. The stern was crowded with barrels and crates, but it was not hard to find the elk’s cage among them.
“Adamantus.”
The elk stirred in his cage. “Gabriella, why have you come? It’s dangerous.”
“I can’t let them take you. I’m getting you out. Where are the keys?”
“Sade has them, but the cage is not strong. I could break it, but the sound will draw the guard’s attention.”
“He is on the dock,” she whispered. “My father is pretending to be drunk. You have a sliver of time.”
“Then back away. I will break the bars.”
There was the sound of a sword being drawn out of its sheath.
“Do it and I will run through your little mistress here, Adamantus.”
Gabriella felt a sharp point in her back. Sade’s voice froze her. He said the elk’s name slowly, savoring each syllable. Gabriella knew she had just unwittingly made her betrayal of Adamantus complete.
“Move away from the cage,” Sade said.
She did so slowly. Sade’s white teeth flashed in the darkness as he grinned. He kept the point of his sword just at her abdomen, forcing Gabriella backwards until she was pressed against the railing of the ship.
“Up on top,” Sade said.
Gabriella climbed and balanced on the gunwale: a prisoner forced to walk the plank.
“If you harm her, Servior—” Adamantus hissed.
“How could I? She has served me well. She brought you right into my hands. Now she has confirmed for me just what you are.”
“Let him go,” Gabriella begged.
Sade shook his head. “You are just a little island barbarian, you know. You have such limited understanding of the world, its powers, its rivalries. No, the elk must die, but not until after we tease all his secrets out of him. Vondales.”
Vondales, the man with the scars and the tattooed scalp, the man she took for Sade’s brother, dropped down from the rigging above and landed silently on the deck. He had been there the whole time listening to her and Adamantus.
How could I have been such a fool? Gabriella tried to think fast.
Vondales’ hands were luminous. He was wearing sterling gauntlets with long blades fastened to the top. They flashed in the lamplight as he unraveled a whip from his belt. Its slack dropped down onto the planking with a heavy thud, the metal studs braided into it scraping the wood like cat claws.
“And the first secret we might start with,” Sade continued, “would be where you obtained that airship. We are not pleased when our masters’ work is turned against our purposes.”
Adamantus smashed against the bars. He had been right. The cage was poorly made. Gabriella could see gaps opening in the frame. Sade raised his voice.
“Still yourself, elk, or I will not spare the girl.” Sade turned back to her. “I’m letting you go, but your fate is worse than death, Gabriella. You know you betrayed your friend and be assured of this: he will die. He must die. It will not be quick. It will not be gentle.”
Adamantus smashed against the bars again, but they did not give. Vondales raised his arm backward, and the whip hissed through the air. Sade called for other guards as he thrust his sword forward between Gabriella’s breasts. Gabriella felt as if her breath was sucked out of her and she fell backwards. She slapped against the harbor’s surface, and the water closed over her.