“Zenia?” Jev called.
He’d risen to his knees and squinted through the rain at her. Zenia picked her way to him as quickly as she could. This beach was far different from the smooth sandy shorelines back home. Jagged barnacle-coated rocks stuck up everywhere like daggers. She dropped something she’d forgotten she was holding and almost laughed. The book on animal life. She would make sure to look up hydras later.
“Are you all right?” Jev asked as she drew closer.
He’d climbed to his feet, and he still gripped his sword, but he was wobbly, and blood dripped down the side of his face from the top of his head.
She didn’t know if the dragon tear had been able to protect him or anyone else from the wave. The ship looked like it had taken the full brunt of being smashed against the beach.
“Yes, I’m sorry.” Zenia reached him and hugged him as she peered toward the wreck and others stirring on the beach. She hoped to spot Rhi and the rest of their team.
“You’re sorry for being all right?” Jev hugged her back, pressing his head to the side of hers.
“For…” Zenia hesitated, reluctant to admit that hurling the ship up on the beach had been her idea. Technically, she’d only hoped to get it into water too shallow for the hydra, but she realized from how close to shore it was swimming that such a goal might not have been possible. Still, she should have contemplated the potential consequences more fully before asking the dragon tear to send them to shore. “I wrecked the ship,” she admitted quietly.
He grunted. “Judging by all the holes I saw that thing rip into the hull, the ship was wrecked before the wave came. It was well on its way to sinking.”
The keening floated across the water to them again. Jev shifted to look at the hydra, though he didn’t let go of Zenia.
“I cut off one of its heads, and it grew back,” he said. “I vaguely remember that from the legends, but I thought it was just that, a legend. A myth. I knew actual hydras existed, or had at some point, but I figured accounts of their abilities had been embellished in the generations since they’d been more common.”
“It’s a creature with innate magic,” Zenia said, though she only knew that because she sensed it through her dragon tear. “Like a dragon or a unicorn or even an elf.”
“It doesn’t seem fair that humans don’t have any innate magic, does it?”
“Would you like to be able to grow back a head if yours was cut off?”
“It would be handy.” Jev squinted at the hydra. “One does wonder what brought it to the surface to impede our progress. Was it just looking for an ironclad to snack on?”
“I was wondering that myself,” Zenia said. “Are you thinking that someone with magic convinced it to come attack us?”
He hesitated. “I hadn’t been thinking that, but I did think it suspicious that a creature I’d thought long extinct popped up as if it were the local guard dog.”
“It’s possible it is. I’ll see if there’s an entry on hydras in here.” She held up the book.
Jev looked dubiously at it, perhaps because water was dripping from the corner.
“Once it dries,” she added.
“Zyndar Dharrow?” came a call from the ship. The captain.
Jev sighed and released Zenia. She glimpsed the bloody side of his face again as he turned toward the remains of the steamer.
“You’re bleeding a lot.” She reached toward the side of his head but didn’t touch him, afraid she would brush his wound and hurt him.
“I suspect many of us are.” He touched her back and headed toward the wreck.
Zenia followed and was relieved to spot Rhi standing over one of the twins. The bald one, Borti. He appeared to be unconscious. Hopefully not worse than unconscious. His brother appeared among the trees, picking a route toward them. Had people been flung all the way into the forest?
“Trouble,” Jev murmured.
As they came around the wreck, Zenia saw what he meant. Captain Yug stood between the beached steamer and a harbor she’d barely glimpsed earlier. They had wrecked just up the beach from the breakwater protecting the natural alcove, and several figures were walking toward Yug, muskets, swords, and clubs in hand. The group consisted of a mix of towering yellow-skinned orcs with tusks, blue-skinned trolls in kilts, and a hulking human who looked like he had some blood of both of those races in his veins.
Any magic? she silently asked her dragon tear.
If firearms and blades were all they had to worry about, at least from this group, her gem ought to be able to protect them. Through the rain and the darkening gloom, Zenia could see dozens of structures built in cleared areas along the harbor beach. Was this Tika, the city they’d intended to reach? Or some other village along the way? She had expected something larger and more populated.
“Fees,” the big human said in an accented voice.
“What?” Yug looked to his sides where two of his crewmen had taken up positions, openly holding their pistols and cutlasses.
Jev picked up his pace, and Zenia struggled to keep up.
“You dock in our town, you have to pay the fees.” The speaker looked blandly over the wreck.
“This hardly qualifies as docking,” Yug said.
“You are on our beach,” the troll said, curling his lip. “You have not asked permission. You will pay the fee.”
“Might want to pay for bruncosars too,” the human added.
“For what?” Yug asked. He had to be an experienced traveler, but Zenia got the impression he’d avoided this continent and didn’t know what to make of this welcome.
“Bruncosars.” The human looked at his comrades. “Mercenaries?”
“Protectors,” the troll said, then spat. “A wreck is free to salvage, and people will be out as soon as the rain lets up.”
“Salvage!” Yug clenched a fist. “This is Ki—”
Jev had reached the group, and he lunged to clasp Yug’s arm before the captain revealed that this was Targyon’s ship.
“How much is the fee?” Jev asked.
The human tapped a finger to his chin. “You’re taking up three berths, so three times the norm. Forty-five silver pieces. A night.”
Yug rocked back on his heels. “Berth? This barren rocky beach?”
“We can give you twenty-five a night,” Jev said, “and once we see if our wares have survived the trip, we may be able to trade with your people and earn more coin. Is it true that you all enjoy a good curry?”
Zenia almost laughed at the abrupt shift in topic, but the orc’s bushy eyebrows rose.
“Twenty-five a night. One week paid in advance.” The human held out his hand.
Yug glared.
“I’ll get it,” Jev said. “If I can find my stateroom. And it still exists.”
Zenia walked back toward the wreck with him, though she wanted to find first-aid supplies for his head rather than his coin purse.
As it became apparent its meal had escaped, the hydra lowered its heads and slowly swam into deeper water. Zenia paused, letting Jev clamber up onto the wreck with its deck tilted almost sideways, and opened her book. With the pages so soggy, she had to be careful turning them, but she did find a section on hydras. The picture on the entry showed a lake with a four-headed hydra out in the middle of it.
“Great,” she murmured, “they can be fresh-water creatures too.”
She hoped they didn’t have to cross any large rivers to get to the dragon. But just in case, she skimmed through the entry to where a bold label read: How to kill a hydra.
A single word was under the heading. Fire.
A sense of curiosity came from her dragon tear, followed by a triumphant feeling. An image came to mind of a dragon soaring over the ocean and swooping down to breathe fire at a hydra. The hydra wilted under the assault and disappeared beneath the surface.
Zenia suspected most living things—plant, animal, or sea life—would wilt under a dragon’s assault. But could that kind of fire power come through her ge
m? She tried to ask by envisioning a stream of flames flowing out of it. She’d flung fire before at trolls and other enemies, but they had not possessed the magic of the hydra.
The gem’s triumphant feeling faded and was replaced by one of uncertainty. Maybe, it seemed to share. And maybe not.
Jev hopped off the wreck, landing beside her. “Are you communing with your dragon tear or keeping watch in case the hydra comes back?”
Zenia realized she’d been staring out to sea and shook her head. “The book mentioned hydras and that fire was the way to destroy them.”
“Oh? I thought you had to cut off their heads.” Jev touched his own head and winced. “But I’ll admit that didn’t work out well for me. The head I sawed off grew back.”
“The dragon showed me a vision of her swooping down from the sky and breathing fire and defeating a hydra.”
“That’ll be handy as soon as we have a dragon with dragon fire on our side. In the meantime, I suggest we avoid hydras.”
“Don’t we have to sail back to Kor?”
Jev looked at the wreck. “Sailing—or steaming—is the only way back, yes, but I have no idea if this ship will ever be seaworthy again, especially since I don’t see a shipyard in that harbor. And who knows if we could afford to buy materials for repair here?” He shook the purse in his hand and grimaced. “I should have asked Lornysh for more curry.”
Zenia looked out toward the gray water, the rain still hammering down on the waves. The hydra had disappeared, but if some practitioner of magic had called it up to harass them, they might very well have to deal with it again.
5
Jev shivered, wondering if his clothing would ever dry. The air itself wasn’t that cold, but thanks to the rain, he was still soaked and waterlogged from his earlier dunk in the ocean. He shifted from a walk to a jog as he made his thirtieth lap around the wreck.
The storm had lessened after nightfall, but rain still plastered his hair to his head, burning the gouge in his scalp that he hadn’t let anyone treat yet. The ship had a healer, but she was going around to the more seriously injured first, and Jev agreed with the sentiment. He’d chosen to take the first watch, along with Cutter and six crewmen, because the weather wasn’t keeping curious denizens of whatever little town this was from wandering down the beach to eye the wreck.
Jev had paid the harbormaster—or whatever that group of thugs called itself—but he and Yug had decided to reject the offer of mercenaries to protect the wreck. They had enough people that they could do that themselves, even once Zenia’s party headed off into the jungle. Jev was less certain they had enough people or the resources to repair the ship, and he worried about the return trip.
“This rain makes it colder than an ice nymph’s left testicle,” Cutter grumbled, stomping his boots as Jev finished his lap and rejoined him.
“I didn’t know nymphs had testicles. Aren’t they all female?”
“How would that work? They’d have gone extinct a long time ago without males and females.”
Jev shrugged and glanced toward the tree line. Most of the crew was hunkered inside the wreck, finding what shelter they could, given the holes torn in the hull and the fang punctures in the ceilings. Not that the ceilings were overhead now, with the decks tilted so dramatically sideways. A few people had taken tarps and made shelters in the trees.
Zenia had spearheaded that, and he saw a campfire burning up there now. Jev suspected her magic had helped her make their shelter more hospitable than it otherwise would have been. The jungle was as soggy as everything else, with rivulets dripping down from the fronds overhead.
“You want me to come on this quest with you?” Cutter asked. “Or stay here with Dodger to work on the ship?”
“Dodger? Is that the engineer?”
“Yes. He’s got a dragon tear with a smith’s anvil carved in it and reckons he can fix the steamer if the natives don’t harass him overmuch. And if he can salvage enough metal. It’s a foregone conclusion there’s not much around here.”
“That’s the most promising thing I’ve heard all day.” Jev had known the healer had a dragon tear, but he hadn’t known the ship’s engineer did. A little magic would help a great deal in making repairs possible.
“Getting the ship off the beach and back into the water will be a challenge, but we don’t need to worry about it until later,” Cutter said. “It’ll likely take some weeks to get this repaired. How long do you think Zenia’s expedition will take?”
“I don’t know. If Tarks and Hun survive their night in town,” Jev said, naming two crewmen who’d decided to spend the coin for a room at an inn, “I might go in with Zenia in the morning and see if we can gather information from the locals.”
“Information such as where Zenia’s dragon is located?”
“It would be convenient if someone could tell us.”
“Maybe she should wait for us to fix the ship, so she could use her dragon tear to lift it back into the water. I’ve seen her lift things with it, so I reckon it might raise the ship.”
“I don’t think she’ll want to delay,” Jev said. “Especially if you think it’ll be weeks. We could finish her quest and make it back before the repairs are done, and she could lift it then.”
“If it still has its powers then.”
Jev looked sharply at his friend, though he couldn’t see Cutter’s face in the dark.
“Why wouldn’t it?” he asked.
“If you free the dragon, it might unlink itself from the gem.”
“You think that’s likely?” Jev knew nothing about the dragon, except that it gave Zenia nightmares, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about it parting ways from her.
“I’ve been thinking about it, based on what you told me the elf princess said and on what I know about dragon tears. I think this particular dragon might have gotten itself captured and in trouble somehow—I’m still not sure who would have had the power to imprison a dragon—and maybe found that dragon tear out there in the world and decided to link to it. It might have been able to sense that someone had just taken it out of a vault and intended to start using it. Maybe the magic of the gem even called to it. Either way, it might have figured it could talk the new wielder of the gem into helping it and that this might be its way to escape. Which is just what’s happening. Once the dragon is freed, why would it want to keep helping some human?”
“Didn’t you say that when dragon tears were carved into animal shapes, the magic created a link automatically? It didn’t sound like the animals could break the link.”
“A dragon isn’t just some animal. I’m certain this one could break the link if it wanted. The dragon tear magic might find another dragon to link with, a hibernating one that wasn’t aware of it and that wouldn’t be so amenable to assisting Zenia.”
Jev squeezed water from the hem of his shirt, hoping that Cutter’s speculations wouldn’t come to pass. He wouldn’t want to face another hydra without the help of Zenia’s dragon tear.
“I can take your watch shift, Zyndar,” a crewman said, walking toward them in the dark. “The captain said you shouldn’t have to be out here in the rain.”
“I don’t melt in the rain any more than other people do.” Jev didn’t want any special treatment. He’d already felt strange being given the opulent stateroom that had clearly been meant for the king when he traveled. Even if he had shared it with Cutter.
“You’ve been out here for hours, Zyndar. You’ve done your shift.”
Jev looked toward the campfire, admitting that he did want to check on Zenia. “All right. Thank you.”
“Anyone coming to take my shift?” Cutter asked dryly.
“Soon, Master Dwarf. The engineer is requesting your assistance.”
“As he should.” Cutter sniffed. Or maybe that was a sneeze.
Jev smiled, knowing Cutter would enjoy helping with repairs. But he didn’t want to leave his friend behind for this expedition. If some strange magical trap held that dragon, Cu
tter was the most likely one to know how to break it.
“I’ll be up there if anyone needs me.” Jev waved toward the campfire.
“I’ll tell the healer,” Cutter said. “I saw your noggin bleeding like a volcano before it got dark.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I didn’t pass out.”
“The night is young.”
Jev smiled, though it turned to a grimace as he picked his way up the beach, the sharp, barnacled rocks making it difficult to maneuver in the dark.
“Halt,” came Rhi’s voice from under a tree. “What intruder dares enter our camp?”
“A soggy one with a bloody head.” Jev assumed Rhi recognized him since that had been a cheerful call rather than a threat.
“Is that supposed to make us want you in here?”
“Over here, Jev.” Zenia sat on a log under a tarp strung between a few trees. The campfire burned cheerfully in front of her. She patted the log next to her.
A couple of people wrapped in blankets also occupied the mossy ground under the tarp. It didn’t look dry. The tarp kept some of the rain from hitting the earth, but the ground had been soaked when they arrived.
As Jev unbuckled his sword scabbard so he could comfortably sit on the log next to Zenia, one of the blanket-wrapped forms started snoring.
“Is that Borti?” Jev wrapped an arm around Zenia’s shoulders.
“Horti. His muteness doesn’t extend to his nostrils, I’ve learned.”
“Huh.” Jev realized Zenia was dry and withdrew his arm. He didn’t want to get her wet again. “How’d you manage to get dry?” He waved at the rain running off the edges of the tarp and spattering the log.
“Magic.” She smiled and laid a hand on his arm. A trickle of warmth flowed from her fingers—or maybe from her dragon tear and to her fingers.
“My clothing isn’t about to be incinerated, is it?” He remembered her dragon tear doing that to one of the zyndari castle gossips.
“Probably not, but don’t make any sudden movements.”
Jev thought she was joking, but he stayed still as the strange warmth flowed up his arm and wrapped around his entire body. The hairs on the back of his neck rose, and he wasn’t sure if it was from having magic applied to him or simply a response to the pleasing heat.
Dragon Tear (Agents of the Crown Book 5) Page 6