The Raven

by Ann Fisher

  Dani braced her hands on the rail and said aloud what they were both thinking, “It’s unnatural.”

  “It’s a storm.” Lorel struggled to keep her voice even. “They all look bad when they’re coming up.”

  “Well, you’re a real sailor now, aren’t you?”

  Lorel shot her an irritated look. “I grew up on the water same as you.”

  “Your kinsmen might have been seafolk, but you turned your back on the great mother to dance across the island. The only reason you’re here now is because of the Ghadrians. It’s no wonder the goddess is pissed.” Dani sighed. “It’s a shame we have to go down with you though. Maybe she’ll send a whale to pluck you off the deck like Sorah. Have you heard that tale?”

  Sorah’s was a story meant to scare disobedient children. The telltale twinkle in Dani’s eye took some of the bite from the insult. Black-haired and sharp-tongued, with skin only a shade lighter than the freckles across her nose, Dani had grown up aboard the Raven. She considered the ship hers no matter what her mother might have to say about it. Stasa, the ship’s cook, liked to say that Dani’s father was a selkie who’d come to Cinn as a man while she was shipwrecked on a small island in the Tigent. Cinn didn’t deny the story. Whether there was any truth to it or not, Dani had no fear of the sea, or storms, or any creature that lived in the deep.

  “I’m not worried about being swallowed by a whale,” Lorel said, refusing to be baited. “I’m worried about the storm. Do we head on or not?”

  Dani stared at the ominous wall cloud until they were close enough to see the flat sheets of rain angling down to meet the water. “Natural or not, it’s coming on too fast for us to outrun, and there’s nowhere to put in safely along this stretch.”

  “So we ride it out.”

  The demented girl grinned. “We ride it out.”

  “Go fetch Kenna for me,” Lorel said. She wanted the Keeper’s opinion on the storm. They’d need every spell of protection strengthened before the wind hit.

  Dani touched two fingers to her forehead. “Captain.”

  Dani was getting better. This time there was only the slightest sneer in her voice when she said the word ‘captain’. Lorel watched the slender young woman stride across the deck shouting orders that were instantly obeyed. It was a strange crew that Cinn had put together over the years. Most of the sailors were female save for the three men who’d been accepted aboard because they were wed to one of the crew. And Dev, of course, though he wasn’t here now.

  It was a young crew, too. None of them were old enough to be at sea. Or perhaps they only seemed young because Lorel had grown old. She felt very old at the moment with the knowledge that the safety of the crew depended upon her sound judgment.

  The empire called them pirates—called anyone who wasn’t sailing a registered trading ship a pirate. They weren’t pirates. They’d never stolen anything other than Serat’s pilfered heartstones. They were simply trying to make a living selling island goods to the mainland. But as that undercut the tax and bribe paying guild merchants, the empire considered them thieves.

  Running afoul of the empire was a very real danger and one more reason why she needed to find another line of work. She would fight to the death rather than let her young female crew fall into the hands of the empire, and where would that leave Conri? She couldn’t go on like this, taking these kinds of risks, but nor did she want her son to grow up in a world controlled by the empire.

  As young as the crew members were, they’d been sailing together for years and knew their jobs well. Dani had only to shout her intention and they moved to make it happen, as coordinated as any dance troupe Lorel had ever worked with. Assured that everyone was doing their part, Lorel looked back at the storm. She swore. Miles closer already.

  Unnatural.

  A shiver chased down her spine. The wind tugged at her linen shirt and then plastered it flat to her body. A strand of hair whipped across her face. She swiped it aside, tucking it beneath the scarf.

  “Captain.”

  Lorel turned to face Kenna, a sense of foreboding filling her. The ship’s Keeper was normally placid to a fault. Lorel had seen her face tempests and heal wounds that Lorel had flinched from even looking at too closely. But now Kenna’s dark eyes were wide with fear. The wrinkles on her forehead were pronounced, making her look older than her fifty years. One look at Kenna, and Lorel knew what she was going to say.

  “It’s a magicked storm for certain?” Lorel asked.

  “It has to be a sorcerer.” Kenna shivered and crossed her arms hugging them to her body. The temperature was still dropping. “There isn’t enough aether in the air today for a mage to have managed it. That power was harvested, it had to be.”

  Janek…

  Lorel’s heart gave a painful thump.

  No. There weren’t many sorcerers left in the empire, but that didn’t mean the one heading toward them in a maelstrom of lightning and black clouds was her long lost lover. She certainly couldn’t sit here waiting around to find out.

  “Will you be able to shield us?”

  Kenna hesitated for a moment before nodding. “So long as you can get us out of the direct path of the storm. It’s well enough contained for now, though I can’t imagine even a sorcerer will be able to hold onto that beast for long.”

  Lorel turned from the railing. Out of the path of the storm. She could do that. Later, she’d wonder about the sorcerer who’d called the storm and why he’d done so. If she was still alive to wonder about anything at all.

  “We’re not going to make it,” Caden said, squinting against the driving rain.

  They’d made it out of Ghadria without trouble, and Janek had foolishly thought they were safe. He snorted. Safe! As if there was any such thing. Within a day, they’d caught sight of the ships in their wake, coming on fast and armed to the teeth. All of the captain’s evasions had done little but buy them time. With no clear destination in mind—after all who would shelter them from the empire?—they’d decided to make a run for the straits.

  He didn’t know where they’d go from there. There were few inhabited lands beyond the straits, all of them as wild and savage as Erys. And while Erys wouldn’t be a bad place to seek shelter from the empire, Janek didn’t really want to bring trouble there.

  With the way the storm was expanding, he might never have to make a decision on where to put in. He’d set the storm miles behind them, at the center of the Order’s fleet. He’d intended to smash the enemy ships and use the wind to propel them forward, but weather magic was tricky. The trouble came when the mages aboard the pursuing ships defended themselves by creating a protective barrier around the fleet. That changed the scope of the storm, expanding it outward.

  It was all Janek could do to keep them ahead of the worst of it. He had no idea how long the mages could hold out. It would be humiliating if the storm destroyed Jamie’s ship while the emperor’s fleet sailed out untouched. Not that Janek would survive long enough to suffer the sting of that humiliation.

  A wave slopped over the side, slapping his legs and soaking his breeches to the thigh. Beside him, Caden cursed.

  “We’ll make it,” Janek said through gritted teeth.

  “The storm is as likely to kill us as—”

  “I said we’d make it. You need to get below.”

  Caden’s eyes glittered with determination. “I’ve as much right to stare fate in the eye as any other man.”

  Stare fate in the eye… Janek shook his head. Even after everything Caden had been through, the child still clung to the most ridiculously romantic notions. Janek couldn’t remember ever being that young.

  “I won’t be any safer below deck,” Caden said, setting his jaw.

  That was true enough. If the storm hit them, the Madalie would sink as easily as any other ship. “Hold on to something then.”

  Turning his attention from Caden, Janek cast his vision into the nexus. It was strange to use the sight at sea. He’d grown up in Castil, a barr
en and arid land, at the very edge of a desert. His home was surrounded by scrub grass and stunted trees. It was located only a league or so from the Karaeli border where he’d spent most of his adult life fighting in the Wraith Wars. There was very little aether in the desert because there was very little life to produce it, which is why mages hadn’t been sent to fight there. They would have depleted the aether stored in their crystals and glyphs during the first battle and would have had to return home to replenish their supplies. The necromancers of the Karaeli got around the lack of aether by having the strongest among them capture death energy and anchor it into corpses, which they then animated, armed, and sent off to fight. The dead served not only as the Karaeli’s soldiers but also as receptacles that the necromancers could draw power from as needed. The Temple called the practice an abomination and Janek had always been inclined to agree. But it was an effective abomination that had kept the empire from defeating the smaller ore-rich nation.

  The desert was a magical wasteland, and Janek had expected the ocean to be much the same way. The first time he’d sailed as a twenty-year-old man accompanying Asil to the capital, he’d been amazed by how much life was beneath the surface of the water.

  There were the creatures he’d expected to find—the fish and dolphins and great lumbering whales—but there were also creatures too small for him to identify. Multitudes of them, tumbling in the rolling water like the night sky spun into motion. It was dizzying, overwhelming, and even now when he expected it, it still took him several minutes to get his bearings.

  He located the men—Jamie’s crew and the Order’s soldiers. The bright flecks of spirit light belonging to the mages. The mages had come prepared with the tools of their trade—crystals brimful of energy ready for them to draw from, spells bound up in glyph-marked stones that would explode into flame with a triggering thought or word.

  The barrier around the ship reminded him of a necromancer’s summoning circle, but it was subtly different. For one thing it was larger than any he’d ever seen. For another, the person who’d called it was standing on the inside of the bubble, not on the outside. And, of course, no one from the Order would dabble in necromancy. Even if a mage figured out how to capture and bind a spirit, to do so would render them Forsworn. Neither the Temple nor the Order would ever sanction such a thing.

  The barrier was a puzzle. Invisible in the physical world, in the nexus it appeared as a great web of energy, intricate and softly glowing with yellow light. It was more like chain mail than a solid shield, but so tightly woven it blocked out most of the wind. A master’s work, for certain. Janek very much doubted that whoever had created that spell was aboard any of the ships behind him. The Order protected the most skilled of their mages by sealing them within the Magisterium. Because of the nature of magework, a master spellweaver could bind a spell to a crystal or stone and send the physical receptacle out into the world with anyone capable of triggering it.

  The intricacy of the barrier spell was impressive. The power source was a mystery. He knew of no substance capable of holding enough energy to power such a thing, especially when it must not only power the barrier, but also somehow allow the ships to move forward without the benefit of the wind it blocked.

  Not that it mattered except as a curiosity.

  He couldn’t get to the receptacle without getting through the barrier and eliminating the barrier was his true goal.

  He needed more energy, but there was no ready source. He didn’t want to hurt anyone from Jamie’s crew, and the Order’s servants were protected. Most of the larger animals in the area had fled the tempest. There was the churning of the tiny creatures in the water, but he still hadn’t figured out a way to harvest energy from them. They must be alive, but lacking any understanding of their physiology, it was impossible for him to attempt a mass slaughter.

  He waited while men shouted around him, working sail and rope, struggling to regain control of the heaving ship. When a man from a trailing ship in the Order’s fleet fell overboard, Janek watched as his spirit burst free of the man’s flesh. The spirit disappeared instantly, sucked through the nexus to the other side, leaving behind a flaming ball of chaotic energy. He automatically grabbed for the energy, but was blocked by the barrier of the protective spell surrounding the ships. He waited for it to come to him, watching impatiently as it slowly unraveled. He’d lose some of it. It was always best to take the energy while it was still knotted into the physical form it had once held. Once it began to unravel, it was more difficult to gather.

  He grunted in shock when that slowly dissipating energy reached the edge of the barrier and stopped, pooling along the edges. A small amount of energy seeped through, but not enough to be of much use to him. The rest was absorbed into the netted strands of energy that formed the barrier, strengthening it.

  Damn. Damn!

  He poured what little power he had left into the wind. The Madalie pulled slightly ahead, and Janek was able to correct their course. It wasn’t enough. Controlling a ship of this size in bad weather required an enormous amount of power and he simply didn’t have anything left. What he needed was…there.

  A few of the Madalie’s deckhands had been hauling on rope to take in sail. The sudden gust of wind pulled it from their hands. The man in front cursed as he lost both his balance and his grip on the rope. The sailor behind him stumbled when the tail end of the rope whipped through his hands. He tripped over a broken piece of railing and tumbled into the churning sea. There was no saving him. Even if they weren’t being chased, the sea was too wild to attempt a rescue.

  The sailor died within seconds, and Janek absorbed his death energy with a triumphant cry. The man nearest him shot him a dark look, but Janek was beyond shame. He shouldn’t be glad of the man’s death. He knew he shouldn’t be, but he was, because it meant that everyone else on board the ship now stood a chance.

  Power filled him, dark and potent. Instead of pouring the death energy into the wind, he shaped it—all of it—into a deadly, glittering spear. It was the second bolt he’d tried. The first had lit the barrier up, enough so that even the ungifted had been able to see it, but it hadn’t been able to penetrate the magical shield. He aimed this bolt below the waterline. The barrier looked the same below water as above, but Janek thought it had to be more porous to allow enough water through to keep the ships afloat. The spell was truly a thing of beauty. He’d like to meet the mage who’d constructed it…if such a thing would have been possible without bloodshed.

  He let the bolt fly, held his breath until it reached the barrier and then shouted as it broke through the shield. The bolt struck the nearest ship, breaching its hull, and the barrier around it collapsed completely.

  Wind rushed in to tear at the Order’s fleet. The sailors were unprepared for the onslaught and immediately the ships began to spin and turn into one another. Sails shredded. The mast on the lead ship broke, fortuitously landing on the mage who seemed to be doing the brunt of the work to untangle the ships. The mast falling on the mage was plain dumb luck, which made Janek more suspicious than grateful. In all of his forty-two years, he’d never known the gods to smile upon him.

  Even from a distance and with the wind howling in his ears, he could hear screams rise from the deck as the black weather buffeted the ships unimpeded. Without the barrier to shield them, the Order’s fleet couldn’t hold together beneath the force of the storm. There was a grand splintering crack as the second mast went. The lead ship, the Pearl, began a slow, tilting turn. Dragging sail, the ship was dead in the water. The waves fought over it like wolves at a fresh kill.

  The other two ships were smaller and more maneuverable. Neither ship turned to attempt to help the Pearl. Janek swore under his breath.

  They were still coming on. He gathered up energy from the injured and dying sailors of the Order’s fleet as quickly as he was able. But the mages were well-trained. Already they were working to block him, to stabilize their ships and protect their crew. The bolt had complete
ly depleted him. He needed more energy and quickly.

  The amount of raw power needed to maintain a storm of this size was staggering. Riding a dragon—that’s what his master had called working with weather magic. It was the most dangerous magic to attempt to control.

  Pulling his sight from the nexus, he looked at the captain of the Madalie. Jamie was an old friend five years his junior. He was small and wiry, a dark-skinned Asaran sailor who’d spent most of his life at sea. Legs braced and arms crossed, Jamie scowled up at the creaking main mast and then turned his scowl on Janek. “I should have known better than to let you come aboard.”

  Janek grinned. “I just destroyed the Pearl, pride of the Order’s fleet. Next week they’ll be toasting me from here to Risis, and you too.”

  “No comfort if we’re not alive to hear it.”

  “If I let one of the other ships draw near, can you take it by physical means?”

  Jamie grimaced. “We’ve barely any cannon left. If it was just a physical fight, we might succeed.”

  But they still had the other mages to worry about and who knew what tricks they had up their sleeves. Janek nodded, and turned back to the problem at hand. The remaining ships were holding together remarkably well in the storm. They were newer than Jamie’s Madalie, constructed by the finest builders in the empire and bonded with magic. The Madalie had no advantage but what Janek could give her.

  While he was still considering his options, which were few, there was a commotion behind him. Jamie shouted something and one of his crewmen responded in a sharp voice. Whatever it was, Janek couldn’t spare the attention.

  His old master would have circled the spell back on itself to make the storm self-sustaining, but he wouldn’t do that. If he set it loose, the storm would be beyond anyone’s ability to control. It would continue to feed on the energies around it and might take years to naturally peter out. Spells like that had a tendency to change over time, gaining something like sentience. There were plenty of spell-born demons still roaming the desert from the Wraith Wars. Janek had never released a curse like that into the world, and he wasn’t about to start now.