Snake Heart

by Lindsay Buroker

  “Before I knew it, my guards were gone, and I was being slung over a burly Turgonian shoulder.” This time, Arayevo quirked her eyebrows at Dak.

  Yanko much preferred it when all of her facial expressions were directed at him, at least her whimsical and cute ones.

  “How did you go from being on a burly shoulder to being inside a Kyattese underwater boat?” Yanko asked.

  “We came looking for you,” Arayevo said while Dak continued to move them around coral masses. “Dak knew about the waterfall, and we got there just ahead of the main group of pirates. But there were already a couple of them scouting around the cave entrance, and we couldn’t get close. Dak was about to turn Turgonian on them, so we could come in and look for you, but we could see all the lanterns coming up the river and knew the rest of the pirates would be there any minute.”

  “Turn Turgonian?” Yanko asked mildly.

  “The way he did at the beach, yes. It involves fists, a sword, and a lot of grunting.”

  Dak gave her a flat look. “Only the pirates grunted.”

  “As your fists and sword struck them, yes. There was crying too.”

  “Sounds lovely,” Lakeo said.

  “I thought so,” Arayevo said.

  Yanko wondered how he had ended up with such bloodthirsty women in his life. He started to smile, but then he remembered his mother and the sound of those gunshots as he’d been led away.

  “We’re almost out of the coral,” Dak said. “We’re staying more than ten feet below the surface. I’m keeping the light at the minimum for navigation, but if we get close to one of the ships, they may see us. Yanko, can you see if—”

  “Just a moment.” Yanko closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, hoping he had the range to sense where the ships were—and if any pursuers were coming.

  As before, when he had tried this from within the water, the incredible amount of life below the waves almost overwhelmed him. Crab, fish, worms, clams, and jellyfish were all active, hiding and feeding in the coral maze. He tried to block out the small life and to look for the ships full of people. This time, he did not sense any krakens that he could ally with if the pirates found the underwater boat. He wouldn’t want to do that again, regardless. The utter destruction the last time had unnerved him. He’d just wanted to make Sun Dragon leave him alone; he hadn’t wanted to destroy an entire ship full of people. He knew Sun Dragon had survived, but he did not know if others had.

  “The three ships are still there, but they’re anchored,” Yanko said slowly, analyzing the situation. The third ship was at the edge of his range, but it felt much different from the others. He was tempted to ask Dak to veer closer, but if there were more mages on board, that could be a bad idea. The underwater boat could be sensed, even if nobody saw the light. “We’re coming up to the left of them. I guess that’s south. It’s hard to keep track of direction down here. More rowboats are out in the lagoon, but not all of them. I can’t sense that far, but I’d guess Pey Lu is still hunting for the lodestone. Uhm, I think the boats in the lagoon are searching for us.”

  Yanko opened his eyes. Dak was staring at him. It reminded Yanko of the look Dak had given him when he had first donned his mother’s robe and said Yanko looked like someone he should kill.

  “I was just going to ask you to use the periscope.” Dak pointed to a contraption that hung from the ceiling behind Yanko’s seat. It looked like it could be pulled down.

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe we can sneak close later if we turn off the lights,” Arayevo suggested. “After the pirates are back and most of them have gone to sleep—the mages, especially—we could sidle up to their ship, board them, and search for whatever treasure they found and took. And for our belongings.” She touched her hip where a sword usually hung. “That would be an exciting adventure.” Her eyes gleamed as she shared the idea.

  Yanko thought it would be a deadly adventure, not an exciting one. “I bet Pey Lu will keep one of the mages awake for the night watch. Even if she doesn’t, it would be hard to board under the noses of the regular crew, especially right after we’ve escaped. They’ll be alert.”

  “We sneaked past them before,” Arayevo said. “When it was clear we wouldn’t have time to search the cave and look for you, Dak had us get into the Kyattese boat. We took it underwater to hide, then went down the river and out to sea without being bothered, even though the pirates were all over the place.”

  “Actually, we were bothered,” Dak said. “When I had the periscope up to watch the pirates, thinking the shadows out in the pool would hide us, a woman looked right at it and launched a mental attack at me. She might have just been probing to see who I was, but it was an aggressive probe.” Dak touched his temple with a grimace. “That’s when I decided we would wait out at sea.”

  “Really?” Arayevo asked. “I didn’t feel anything.”

  “You weren’t manning the controls.”

  “You didn’t show any signs that you were being attacked. I could have...” Arayevo spread her fingers. She sounded truly distressed.

  “Dak can rebuff some mage’s mental intrusions,” Yanko said.

  This time, Lakeo was the one to ask, “Really?” She added, “I didn’t think Turgonians even acknowledged that magic exists. Wouldn’t take that special training?”

  Dak appeared to be quite engrossed in navigating them past the last of the coral. He did not respond.

  “Much like piloting an underwater boat, I imagine,” Yanko murmured.

  Actually, he assumed that learning to repel mental attacks, as a mage hunter was trained to do, would take years. As complicated as the controls around Dak appeared, they probably wouldn’t take as long to master. Still, neither skill sounded like something a typical Turgonian soldier—even an officer—would be taught.

  “I’m taking us close enough to the surface to have a look.” Dak glanced at Yanko, then nudged a lever a couple of inches.

  Before, when they had descended, air had been let out. Now, Yanko had the sense of air being pushed into tanks built into the hull of the craft and of water draining out.

  Dak left his seat, his head ducked and his knees bent so he would not hit the low ceiling. The underwater boats might have originally been designed by the Turgonians, but this one must have been built with the shorter Kyattese people in mind. Dak dropped to one knee when he activated the periscope, pulling down the viewing apparatus as a tube extended from the hull above them.

  Now that they were close to the surface, the waves affected them more, and the craft bobbed about in the open sea. It was strange how quiet the water was deeper down. Yanko hadn’t expected that.

  “See anything interesting, Dak?” Arayevo asked. “Such as an opportunity for us to sneak aboard Yanko’s mother’s ship?”

  Yanko gawked at her. “Why would you want to go aboard her ship? She would be the one most likely to sense us. It sounds like she attacked Dak. Or at least probed him aggressively.” Based on what he had seen with the soul construct, Yanko thought she could have killed Dak if she had been trying to, mage-hunter training or not.

  “Wouldn’t she be the one most likely to keep pirate treasure in her cabin?” Arayevo asked, that adventurous gleam in her eyes again.

  Yanko frowned at her, remembering how she had once shown interest in meeting Pey Lu—and wanting to join her. Arayevo might be older than he was, but sometimes, she seemed like the naive one. Or maybe she wasn’t naive and just didn’t care how vile pirates were. That disturbed him even more than the idea of her sailing around with smugglers. He didn’t want to believe that someone with such a warm smile and a love for living could be indifferent to the pain—and deaths—of others.

  “You don’t want to meet her,” Yanko said firmly, hoping reality would squash the romantic notion she’d always had of his mother. “She was the one responsible for killing all the people in that village. She ordered them interrogated, then hanged them when they didn’t give her the answers she wanted.”

&
nbsp; The gleam in Arayevo’s eyes dulled, replaced by hesitation. Still, she looked like she wanted to protest. “How do you know she—”

  “Maybe they did give her the answers she wanted,” Dak interrupted, his face pressed to the periscope viewer, his tone grim.

  “What do you see?” Yanko asked.

  “The rest of the rowboats are leaving the lagoon. She’s standing in one that’s piled high with loot. She has something small in her hands. It’s hard to tell without magnification, but it looks like a small chest.”

  Yanko slumped in his chair. “A small chest such as might be used to hold a seven-hundred-year-old artifact?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does she have the chest of coins her grubby minions stole from me too?” Lakeo grumbled.

  Normally, Yanko would have felt disgruntled that she was more worried about some coins than about an artifact which could save their people and usher in a new period of prosperity, but he felt too numb. The night had left him exhausted. He would have found the idea of sneaking about Sun Dragon’s ship less daunting than Arayevo’s suggestion of boarding Pey Lu’s craft. He would never forget the tortoise’s vision or the feeling of the raw power she’d called upon to destroy the soul construct.

  “Is it truly stealing if you found the coins yourself just five minutes earlier?” Arayevo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “They probably cleaned out everything in the cave.” Dak sighed. “It’s too bad I didn’t know which rowboat she would use. I could have placed an explosive on the side of that one too.” He looked at Yanko, as if it was his fault that his mother didn’t have a special boat of her own.

  “If we’re captured again, I’ll be sure to suggest she have a flagship rowboat made and reserved for her use.”

  “Is there any attack this boat can throw at her now?” Arayevo patted a control panel.

  Dak shook his head. “This craft has mugra, but they couldn’t get through the reef.”

  “Mugra?” Yanko asked.

  “I don’t think there’s a Nurian word for them. A large arrow-shaped cannonball, with an explosive charge in the head.”

  “Explosives? In a Kyattese research vessel?”

  “As the original designer of these vessels discovered, sometimes weapons are needed to convince the sea creatures not to molest you.”

  Yanko thought of the kraken and how Dak had once said they liked to wrap their limbs around underwater boats.

  “I don’t suppose there’s a sea creature nearby that we could convince to molest Snake Heart’s boat?” Lakeo asked.

  Arayevo brightened. “Yes, Yanko, is there? Then we could swoop in and snatch up the treasure that falls to the bottom when the boat is destroyed.”

  Lakeo smacked a fist into her palm. “Dak could put the fishbowl back on and go out and pick it up off the bottom while the pirates are still trying to figure out what happened.”

  “Fishbowl?” Dak asked.

  “I already checked,” Yanko said. “There aren’t any big sea creatures around. I don’t think they like the shallow water here. This isn’t like the Kyattese port where it gets deep very quickly once you leave the beaches.”

  “It’s deeper out here beyond the reef, isn’t it?” Arayevo waved at the porthole, to the dark water surrounding them. There was no longer any sign of the bottom.

  Yanko shrugged. “Sorry, I didn’t sense anything. I’ll keep watch, but we may have to come up with some other way to get the lodestone from her.”

  Besides, his mother could probably drive away a kraken that dared attack her ship. Yanko did not want to admit to defeat, but he couldn’t imagine how they could get past numerous mages, including the infamous Snake Heart.

  Chapter 10

  “They’re making ready to sail,” Dak said from the periscope, his voice waking Yanko from his spot on the deck, sitting against the hull.

  He had been dozing off and on, trying to come up with a plan in his waking moments, but mostly having nightmares about his mother shooting people. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but his clothes had mostly dried. It had to be well after midnight and moving on toward dawn. Dak had been watching the ships, but they had remained active, with too many people roaming the decks, making preparations to sail, to consider sneaking aboard.

  Arayevo, who had taken the seat Yanko had been occupying earlier, slapped her hand against her thigh. “It’s night time. Why wouldn’t they stay here and sleep before heading back out to sea? Relax. Enjoy their spoils...”

  “There are a lot of people looking for those spoils,” Yanko said. “I also wouldn’t wait around for an underwater boat to sneak up and dispense a band of people who wanted my lodestone.”

  Arayevo made a sour face at him. “You’re the one who needs this lodestone, and you’re just lying there and napping. Aren’t you on a quest to save our people? And regain your family’s honor?”

  Yanko frowned at her. “I haven’t given up. I’m just considering my options.”

  “Is that hard to do while snoring?”

  “No.”

  Arayevo pointed a finger at his nose. “If that was Sun Dragon up there, you’d be pacing and planning a way to get onto his ship and steal the stone. Instead, you’re sitting here sulking because it’s your mother, and you’ve already given up because you think she’s some supreme goddess that nobody can hurt. Well, she has to sleep sometime, Yanko. She’s still human. I think you just don’t want to deal with her. Lakeo said she didn’t hurt you or threaten you, that she just planned to take you back to her ship.”

  “To torture me later, I’m sure. If she didn’t find the lodestone here.”

  “Maybe she wanted to talk to you and see what kind of person you turned into,” Arayevo said.

  Yanko turned his frown toward Dak. “Maybe you and your burly Turgonian shoulder shouldn’t have rescued her.” He waved at Arayevo, who glowered at him. Deservedly so.

  Yanko sighed.

  Dak looked down at him. “Is it true?”

  “That Pey Lu didn’t shoot me on sight? Yes, but that doesn’t mean she wants to get to know me. She didn’t say anything that suggested that. And I don’t want to get to know her, either. She’s a murdering criminal. She ruined our entire family’s reputation—everything. She doesn’t care about anyone. She wouldn’t have even known who I was if I hadn’t had her old robe in my pack.”

  A robe that the pirates now had, along with everything else that had been in his pack. Had they even bothered taking his and Lakeo’s belongings with them, or had they left them in the woods? Poor Senshoth. The mage had entrusted Yanko with his book, however misguidedly, thinking it would be taken to the court of the Great Chief, and now it was lying in a forgotten rainforest on an island whose inhabitants were all dead.

  Yanko scowled down at the deck. Arayevo was right. He couldn’t give up, just because his mother was involved. If anything, he should be more determined than ever to get the lodestone. Sun Dragon might belong to another faction back home, but at least he seemed to want to find the hidden continent to help Nuria. Who knew who Pey Lu planned to sell the artifact to?

  “Maybe if she caught you, it wouldn’t be as detrimental as if the pirates caught the rest of us.” Dak scratched his jaw thoughtfully.

  “So, you want to use me as bait, or throw me out as a diversion while you sneak aboard?” Yanko wasn’t certain that his mother would spare him, not at all.

  “Perhaps not,” Dak murmured distractedly. He had turned back to the periscope and was rotating it to look at something.

  Arayevo nudged Yanko with her foot. “Don’t you want to talk to her? Aren’t you curious about why she left? Maybe there was a reason. Maybe she’s not as ruthless as the stories say. Even if she is, maybe the reason why is understandable. She probably had to be twice the cold-hearted killer to earn respect as a female pirate.”

  “She didn’t have to be a pirate at all. That was her choice.”

  “Was it? You don’t know what happened when you
were a baby. Maybe your father wasn’t a good husband. The badger goddess knows he wasn’t a good father.”

  “Don’t say that.” Yanko might think it at times, but that was disrespectful enough without voicing the words. Besides, his father had always been good to Falcon. Yanko was the one who had been too different for him to understand.

  “It’s true. But your mother clearly had—has—a heart for adventure. Maybe she couldn’t stand staying in that dismal valley and raising babies for her whole life.”

  “Dismal valley? Aspen Hollow is beautiful. You can ski in the mountains, hike in the woods, fish in the lake, hunt in any direction, and see thousands of stars on a clear night.”

  “You never felt imprisoned by those mountains?” Arayevo grimaced, and Yanko remembered that her father had wanted to arrange a marriage for her. That had probably spurred at least some of her feelings of entrapment.

  “No.” Yanko had felt imprisoned by his duty, but not by his homeland.

  “Isn’t it funny how two people can look out on the same piece of land and see distinctly different things?”

  “Perhaps one of those people lacks sufficient imagination.”

  “Maybe, but which one of them is it?” She smirked at him.

  A very faint boom reached Yanko’s ears. “Was that a cannon?”

  “The Midnight Fleet has company,” Dak announced, his eye still glued to the periscope.

  “Any chance it’s Prince Zirabo with a fleet from home?” Yanko asked.

  “I can’t tell who it is. The sun hasn’t come up yet, so it’s still dark out there. There are at least three ships approaching, though. I believe one of Pey Lu’s ships fired the cannon.”

  “Warning them to stay away?”

  “Likely.”

  “Are they doing so?” Yanko asked.

  “It doesn’t look like it.” Dak did not remove his gaze from the periscope or offer anyone else a view.