The Waiting King (2018 reissue)

by Deborah Hale

  Perhaps Maura resented the smuggler’s tone of contempt for the region that had been her home. Rath heard a sharp edge to her tone when she asked Gull, “Do the wharf guards not get suspicious when the small boats don’t come back at night?”

  Someone on the deck of the ship tossed down a rope, which Gull caught and tethered to their boat. “Never fear, wench, we make certain the same number return at night as sail in the morn and with a good catch, too. That’s all the Han care about. They never notice if each boat is missing a man or two.”

  Grudging admiration for the smugglers of Duskport began to grow in Rath. He knew the penalties for their trade were as gruesome as those for attempting to escape the mines.

  A rope ladder rolled down the hull of the ship. Gull scrambled up it with the hillcat still clinging around his neck. Motioning for Rath and Maura to follow, he called. “Welcome aboard the Phantom, inlanders—the most elusive vessel in the whole Sea of Twilight!”

  Rath scrambled up the ladder behind Maura and climbed onto the deck. There he found Captain Gull with his arm wrapped around her waist and his hip pressed tight against hers. With the speed of events since they had wakened, Rath hadn’t had enough time or light to fully appreciate the tantalizing way those breeches and that shirt clung to the sweet, womanly curves of Maura’s body.

  Gull glanced up at Rath with an impudent grin. “The wench is a mite unsteady on her feet. Common for inlanders.”

  “I’ll take her, then.” Rath struggled to hide his jealous temper. It would only amuse Gull and vex Maura. “You must have plenty of tasks to oversee before we sail.”

  “True, alas.” The smuggler lifted Maura’s hand and pressed a slow, provocative kiss upon it. “Otherwise I would be tempted to linger here all day with such comely company.”

  The hillcat on Gull’s shoulder gave a hiss that Rath was tempted to echo. When the creature swiped its paw toward Maura, she drew back and he was able to pull her into his arms without too obvious a tug-of-war.

  “Mind your ship, Gull,” he growled, “and I’ll mind my wife.”

  Gull’s dark brows shot up as he mouthed the word wife. Then he strode away calling orders about hauling anchor, hoisting sails and other sea-going cant that meant nothing to Rath.

  He eased Maura out of the way as Gull’s crew swarmed over the deck of the Phantom and up the rigging of the large, three-cornered sails. Meanwhile, the small fleet of fishing boats that had borne them from shore dispersed. A stray breeze caught the sails and the ship began to move.

  “Did you mean what you said to Gull?” asked Maura. “Or were you just trying to make him leave me alone?”

  That sounded like a worthwhile reason for saying... whatever it was he’d said.

  “You don’t even remember, do you?” She shook her head. “I suppose that answers my question.”

  “You mean about being my wife?” A flash of heat kindled in Rath’s cheeks. “Your pardon if I got ahead of myself, but you are... at least you’re meant to be. You will, won’t you?”

  She had to, didn’t she, if he was the Waiting King and she the Destined Queen? That was the one part of all this that made the rest almost bearable.

  “Of course I will.” Maura leaned into his embrace. “Once we reach the Islands, I think we should have a proper wedding with one of the wizards to bless our union. Perhaps even the Oracle of Margyle.”

  At that moment, the Phantom broke through the last tatters of fog. It surged out into a vivid, sparkling world of blue, white and gold. The majesty of it took Rath’s breath for a moment.

  No wonder Captain Gull and the others risked their lives to ply this trade. Rath sensed it was not only for riches, but for the tang of adventure they smelled on the sea air. He could almost feel it stirring his blood.

  He closed his eyes and inhaled deep, invigorating breaths.

  Awhile later, a young crewman approached them. “Captain says he’ll show you around the ship if you care to see.”

  Rath was more than eager. The only watercraft he’d ever used were small rafts like the one he and Maura had used to cross the Windle. He wanted to know where and how the Phantom had been built, how Gull and his crew navigated the vast, open stretches of water and made the vessel take them where they wanted to go.

  “Shall we?” he asked Maura. She didn’t look quite as anxious as he for a tour of the vessel. In fact, she looked pale and a little... green.

  But she nodded, just the same. “Perhaps it will help me keep my mind off my belly. It feels like everything inside me is sloshing around and trying to get back out.”

  “Don’t fret,” said the young crewman who’d been sent to fetch them. “I had that when I first sailed. It comes back now and then when the sea is rough. Here.” He rummaged in his trouser pocket and pulled out a tight-packed little brick a disgusting greenish-brown in color.

  Rath made a face when he caught a whiff of it, for it stank of salt and fish. “What is that?”

  “Dried sea grass,” said the lad. “Once you get used to the flavor, it’s a treat to chew. Calms a sick belly better than anything else I’ve ever tried.”

  “Thank you.” Maura took it from him and broke off a small pinch. Then with a dubious look, she shoved it between her back teeth and began to chew.

  She grimaced at the taste but did not spit it out or hang over the deck railing retching up her breakfast. After a few moments, she even managed a wan smile. “Perhaps this stuff is like cheeseweed—the smell is a sign of its potency. I believe I feel a little better already.”

  She kept up a valiant appearance of interest while Captain Gull showed them over his ship.

  Rath did not need to pretend. “Amazing that you were able to build a craft this size without any metal at all!”

  Gull shrugged. “The sea is not kind to iron. Wooden pegs swell in the wet and hold better than nails that will rust away. The Phantom was built in a shipyard on Galene. Some of their trees produce wood that is almost as hard as metal. And some bits have been treated with strengthening spells.”

  He ran his hand down the middle mast in a proud caress such as a father might bestow on a beloved child he was praising.

  “Why do your sails run the length of the ship and not its width?” asked Rath. “Would they not catch the wind better that way?”

  Gull grinned. “When the wind is blowing in your favor, that is true, inlander. The Han rig their sails as you describe. That is why their fleet must sail only at certain times of the year. Like now, to take advantage of the Midsummer Blast.”

  “Midsummer...?

  “... Blast.” Gull shook his head. “You are sadly ignorant of the sea. The Blast is a fast, cool wind that whips down the coast this time of year. The Han ride it with their big waddling tubs full of ore. Slow as oxen, they are, and just as stubborn to steer. But the wind is more fickle than a beautiful woman with many suitors. When we set our sails, we become masters of the wind, not slaves to it. If the wind blew against them, we could dance rings around anything in the Hanish fleet!”

  Picturing it made Rath grin. “That sounds like fine sport! Do you often harry them?”

  “Do I look like a fool, inlander?” Gull held up his hands and wriggled his eight fingers. “I am fond of the ones of these I have left and mean to keep them. My handsome head, too, for that matter and a few other bits I will not mention in the presence of your queasy lady.”

  “But if you could dance rings around them?”

  “Around the galleys, aye. But the Han are no fools—they do not send their precious ore back to their homeland unprotected. The fleet is escorted by fighting ships that would soon crush a greater threat than my pretty Phantom. They’re sleek and narrow, fast as demons when the wind is behind them. And if they catch a wooden craft like this one, they have a sharp iron prow that could slice through our hull like a blade through pudding.”

  The smuggler’s warning put Rath in mind of the hounds the Han used to terrorize the people of Embria—fast, sharp and vicious.
>
  By the time Gull finished showing Rath and Maura around the vessel, the wind had risen and the clouds had massed on the eastern horizon, dark and threatening.

  Gull sniffed the air. “Smells like a storm. Most often they come out of the west, but now and then the Blast will send one down the coast. It will get us to the Vestan Islands all the faster. I only hope it does not push us up the tail of the Ore Fleet.”

  Before Rath could reply, Maura spoke. “Did you not say the Han sail faster when the wind is behind them? The storm should push them farther ahead of us.”

  “Aye, wench!” Gull gave her a hearty slap on the back. “So you did mind what I was saying. We’ll make a sea-goer of you yet!”

  Maura shook her head, chewing the seagrass harder as she clutched the little block of it in her hand. “I think not.”

  The storm broke just as night began to fall. Rath took Maura below, where they huddled in dark, mute misery on a narrow shelf that folded down from the inside of the hull.

  Time slowed to a crawl, until it seemed that day would never come again, and they would be trapped forever in the bowels of the pitching ship, deafened by the howl of the wind and the crash of the waves. The Phantom’s hull shuddered with every flex of the sea’s formidable strength. Soon Rath lost count of how many times they slipped between the jaws of death, only to slide out again before its sharp teeth gnashed. Each time left his heart pounding fit to burst, his belly churning, and a fine dew of sweat prickling on his brow.

  The weight of his own helplessness and uselessness ground down his courage. If only there had been something he could do! He heard the muted thunder of footfall on the deck above his head with longing. Even if it had meant treading closer to the slippery edge of disaster, at least being up there with duties to perform would have given him some tiny illusion of control.

  The knowledge that he would be worse than useless up on deck kept him below. And the conviction that Maura needed him.

  “There, there, aira.” He held her head as her belly gave another violent heave and she spewed what little she’d eaten into the hold of the Phantom. “You’ll feel better once you get it all out.”

  He didn’t have enough experience of the sea to be certain of that. But right now, he’d say any daft thing if it might ease her. He wished their places could have been reversed. He would rather endure this himself than watch her suffer. No doubt she’d have tended him better, all deft and gentle and reassuring—unlike his rough, awkward efforts on her behalf.

  She subsided against him, gasping for breath. “I’m sorry, Rath... should have listened to you and gone home to Windleford. What good will we do anybody... dying out here on the ocean?”

  “Hush, now. We’re not going to die!” Had he ever spoke words he believed less? “Mind what you told me about believing in our destiny? Why, you were dead, or near as. Yet you came back to me.”

  Somehow, his faltering effort to convince Maura began to have a true effect upon him—as if someone had thrown him a rope to cling to in this storm-tossed night. He did not know where the other end might be anchored. But as the night wore on, a feeling of certainty grew in him that it must be somewhere firm and true.

  At last Maura fell into an exhausted doze, a blessing for which Rath muttered a garbled but grateful word of thanks that somehow lulled him to sleep when the storm was at its worst.

  He woke some time later, astonished to find Maura and himself alive. For a while he sat holding her, savoring the simple luxuries of quiet and calm, and the soft light of dawn streaming through the open hatch. A powerful sense of belief took hold of him, as it had in the mines and on midsummer night in the Secret Glade. Though he knew it would not last, he welcomed it just the same.

  A while later, Maura stirred, stretched and opened her eyes.

  “It’s so quiet,” she whispered. “Are we in the afterworld?”

  Rath chuckled and dropped a kiss on the crown of her head. “Your ears might make you think so, aira, but your eyes and nose will soon tell you the truth.”

  He grimaced at the reek of bile that had been spewed in the hold last night—not all hers by any means. “Shall we go up on deck and get a breath of fresh air?”

  She gave a weary nod then leaned against him as he helped her aloft. There they found the crew making repairs to the ship and going about their other duties in a mute daze. Most looked as if they had not yet recovered their wits from a hard blow to the head.

  Only Gull had a relaxed, well-rested appearance, though Rath doubted he had left the deck all night. His clothes and his hair still looked a bit damp, though the cat lolling around his neck seemed dry enough. Rath wondered how it had weathered the storm.

  Gull perched on a raised platform near the front of the ship that was girded by a waist-high railing. He scanned the horizon through a long tube that might have been carved from very pale wood, or perhaps ivory. Rath guessed what he was looking for.

  “Any sign of the Ore Fleet?” he called to the captain.

  “Not a glimpse, inlander.” Gull lowered the tube from his eye and leaned back against the platform railing. “I reckon it is too much to hope that the storm might have blown them east into the warding waters around the Vestan Islands. They were likely long past the Islands before it hit.”

  Maura sighed. “I wish we’d reached the Islands before it hit.”

  “We have a saying where I come from, wench.” Gull climbed down the short ladder from his perch with a jaunty step. “‘The worst wind is better than none at all.’ This one blew us toward our destination all the faster. By my reckoning, we might make Margyle before nightfall.”

  “The sooner the better,” Maura muttered under her breath.

  After the tempest of the night, the day passed quietly. Late in the morning, Rath and Maura watched in fascination as a herd of sea beasts called nieda swam past the ship, lunging up into the air with surprising grace for their size. Now and then two of the larger ones would butt each other with their great, curled horns that put Rath in mind of Hitherland wild goats.

  Through the warm hours after midday, Rath and Maura curled up in a quiet, shaded corner of the deck and let the motion of the ship and the soothing music of the waves lull them to sleep.

  Later, the sound of a voice calling down from high on one of the masts startled Rath awake. Though he didn’t understand the words, the tone warned him it was not good news. The sudden, urgent rush of the crew confirmed it.

  Maura stirred too, as several men ran by in different directions. “I wonder what’s wrong.”

  Rath had a good guess, but he did not want to alarm her.

  Then the young crewman who had given Maura the seagrass dashed up to them. “Captain says you’re to go below and stay out of the way. We’ve spotted ships coming up fast behind us—the Ore Fleet, Captain says.”

  The boy spat on the deck. “Slag the scum! If they catch up, grab something heavy and jump overboard with it. I’d rather be food for the fish than let the Han get hold of me!”

  Rath could not concur with the lad’s dire advice, he realized as he hoisted Maura up from the deck. More than once, when faced with the choice between death and capture, he had not hesitated to choose death. Now, when he looked within himself and found a fragile bud of belief taking root, he knew death was no longer an honorable choice for him.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WOULD IT NEVER end? Maura wondered as Rath helped her up from the deck. Would the two of them never know more than a stolen moment’s peace before they were plunged once again into turmoil and peril?

  Her belly no longer pitched and heaved as it had last night. Instead, a deep hollow seemed to gape inside her as she stared at the ominous dark shapes growing larger behind them. It was not as though she’d never faced the Han before. She had been running from them, hiding from them, and fighting them in one way or another ever since that fateful day the messenger bird arrived for Langbard. Yet none of those encounters had shaken her in quite the way this one did.

>   Out on this vast water with nothing between the sea and the sky, there was no place to hide—nowhere to run. And the number of enemies was far greater than the few she and Rath had so far confronted on their travels. Only at the Beastmount Mine had they encountered anything like this. Then, they’d had time to plan surprise attacks.

  This time, the surprise was on them.

  Around her and Rath, the crew scrambled, adjusting sails and performing other tasks, the purposes of which she did not understand. The air seethed with an undercurrent of alarm, ready to erupt into outright panic at any moment. It felt contagious and Maura feared she might be the first to catch it.

  “Come.” Rath tugged on her arm. “Let’s get you somewhere safe. Then I will see if I can do anything to help.”

  Maura braced her feet on the wooden decking. “You heard the boy. If the Han capture this ship, nowhere will be safe. I would rather stay with you and do what I can to make sure that does not happen.”

  For a moment, Rath looked ready to argue.

  She did not give him the chance. “We must trust in the Giver and in our destiny. They have never let us down yet, no matter how bleak things looked. I cannot believe they led us all the way to the Secret Glade only to abandon us so soon.”

  Her words worked—on herself at least. A strange, potent energy swelled to fill the void of doubt within her. All the challenges she and Rath had overcome to get here flooded through her memory, magnifying that power. Looking back, it almost seemed those obstacles had been contrived to increase in difficulty and risk. Each time testing them harder, calling forth greater wit, strength, courage and faith. Preparing them to meet the next trial—to seize the next opportunity.

  As she spoke, Maura could see every blow of Rath’s inner battle between doubt and trust reflected on his rugged features. Hard as all this had been for him to accept, he had never let her down, either. Nor did he, now.