Dangerous Magic

by Alix Rickloff

  The scream of the wind drowned out her reply. And then he was gone.

  Conover hunched against the binnacle, arms hooked around it to steady himself. His face red, he shouted over the rising wind. “You sure you don’t want to head for deeper water, Cap’n? We could lie by farther off the coast. Wait for the gale to blow itself out.”

  Rafe shook his head, his own voice hoarse from trying to make himself heard. “Triggs won’t stand the wait. He needs to get ashore now.”

  The ship pitched to starboard, water washing across the deck. Rafe clung to the mainsail shrouds.

  Conover’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a dirty bit o’ coast, this. It’ll be tetchy running the gap between the cliffs and the breakwater.”

  “But you’ve done it? You’ve piloted this harbor?”

  “Aye, Cap’n. I’ve done her in good weather and bad. I’ll see you safe if the good Lord allows.”

  “Hold her steady as you can,” Rafe answered. “If this wind changes, we’ll be driven off course and beneath that rock face with nowhere to go.”

  He glanced up at the fog-shrouded cliffs curving out, then back in, sheltering at their base the village of Kerrow. The strange looping bend of rock served as a breakwater, protecting Kerrow’s harbor from the worst of the Atlantic gales, but it also acted upon winds and tides in unpredictable and erratic ways. Winds dropped down off the headlands and curled into the bowl of coast, twisting and shirring as they sought release. The Cormorant fought against these shifting gusts as she lurched and shivered through the water, spindrift off the foaming waves making it almost impossible to see. He wiped a hand across his face, but it did little good.

  Lightning sliced the air, illuminating the crew working the lines and sails. The storm had caught them at the worst possible moment. Entering into the confining waters between the cliffs, there was little room to maneuver. Rafe set his jaw and tried to drown out the voice inside his head telling him he was mad to attempt this and madder to tease fate in such a way.

  With every breaking wave, jagged rocks appeared and disappeared, their tops awash with creamy-brown foam like a rabid dog’s jaws. The ship dropped into the trough of a wave, the water sweeping up over the Cormorant’s bulwarks, soaking him up to his ankles and washing a crewman off his feet.

  Reaching out to grab the man as he flailed for the railing, Rafe heard Gwenyth scream out from the top of the aft hatch. At the same moment the sizzling odor of sulfur burned his nose and a charge prickled along his skin. With a ripping screech that seemed to suck the air from his lungs, a flash of white, scalding light seared his eyes. A rolling thunderous boom threw him to the deck just as the mainmast exploded in a shower of sparks and flying timbers. Halyards, blocks, spars and tackle rained down on him as he crawled forward out of the deadly barrage. Sheets, some still in flame, dropped to the deck as the mast, now a blackened, splintered wreck, smoldered and sparked.

  Without the mainsail, the Cormorant wallowed and lost steerage-way. The wind jibed, causing the fore and aft sails to swing wildly, and in seconds the ship broached, meeting the surge of wind and wave broadside. Pitching over to lay on her beam ends, she lurched while her masts and rigging groaned with strain.

  “Attach a hawser from the lee quarter to the lee anchor!” Rafe shouted.

  The crew jumped to obey.

  “Drop the lee anchor!”

  The anchor rattled out with a clank of chain, while the cable pulled through to the stopper. The Cormorant stuttered and groaned as the waves washed across her. Rafe waited for the head of the ship to begin turning into the wind, but nothing happened.

  “The anchor’s dragging, Captain. She’s not digging into the bottom!”

  Rafe opened his mouth to reply as the ship ground onto the rocks with a vicious crunch of snapping wood.

  Chapter 36

  Each push of the waves tore new holes in the Cormorant’s hull planking. In calmer waters, she may have stood a chance, but in the boiling storm seas, Rafe could do nothing to save his ship.

  Despite the steady rain, the fire grew. It turned sails into sheets of flame and licked down rigging until it caught upon the tarred and painted wood of the ship itself.

  “Launch the boat!” he shouted over the wind.

  Four men released the lines and dropped the gig into the water, oarsmen scrambling to hold her steady beside the Cormorant’s hull. Eyes wide with fear, the men were near panic. The flames spread, and only a few of them knew how to swim.

  Gwenyth stumbled forward. She clutched at Rafe’s coat, eyes wide with dread and horror. “It’s the dream.”

  Rafe hauled her along to the entry port. “Get in the boat.”

  He pushed her toward Tom, but Gwenyth clutched tight to his heavy watch coat and would not let him go.

  “Go! I’ll be right behind you!” he shouted over the roar of the storm.

  Her eyes glowed hot with defiance. “I won’t leave without you. Don’t you see? This is how it happens. This is the end foretold to me.”

  The crew climbed hand over hand down the Jacob’s ladders to the boat.

  “Captain?” Tom said. “There’s no time left!”

  Flames crackled and spit. They licked ever closer to the magazine where the Cormorant’s gunpowder and shot were stored. If they reached it, she’d go up like a Roman candle. Rafe looked from Gwenyth’s face to the wreck of his ship and back again. He felt her naked fear, the terror of a dream from which she could not wake. If abandoning the Cormorant would break the grip this prophecy of death held over her, he’d indulge her. There was little more he could do aboard anyway.

  “Go, Tom. I’ll hand Miss Killigrew down to you. I’m right behind.”

  Gwenyth’s grip relaxed, and she gave a shaky smile. Tom scurried down the ladder and looking back, held out his arms to catch Gwenyth. She dropped into the crowded boat, awash with every wave.

  Rafe put his leg over the railing and set his weight upon the first set of holds when Gwenyth’s frantic shout stopped him.

  “God in heaven, he’s not here! Mr. Triggs is still aboard!”

  “I told Penellin to check below—told him as how old Triggs was needing help to get topside,” shouted a seaman.

  Penellin piped up in his defense. “You never told me nothing like that.”

  Rafe reached up to hoist himself back onto the deck, brows drawn in exasperation. “I bloody don’t care who left him.”

  “Rafe! Don’t,” Gwenyth cried.

  He looked down at her. He wanted to crush her against him one last time, feel the heat of her lips, smell the wild sweet fragrance of her skin.

  “I’m sorry,” he called out.

  It was all he could think to say.

  She nodded, and he read everything he wanted to tell her in her eyes. In her silent acceptance, she was letting him know that despite the risk, she knew he could do nothing less.

  As he pulled himself back onto the Cormorant’s deck, the ship groaned like a wounded animal. She heaved and listed to port, sending Rafe scrambling to hold on to the sloping deck. Black smoke rose from her stern where the collapsed mainmast had fallen, and the fire’s roar sounded even above the storm. He slid across the leaning deck, swiping the rain from his face, even as smoke smarted and stung his eyes.

  Fallen spars and lines blocked the closer forward hatch. He pulled at the timbers and tore at the tangle of rigging enough to thread his body through the opening. The bottom of the ladder disappeared beneath a foot of water. It rippled and curled across the floor with more spilling in from a gurgling breach in the starboard hull. He glanced forward to the magazine. So far, his luck was holding. The flames had been confined above decks.

  He slogged his way through the forward hold and into the crew berth. The hammock ropes squeaked as Triggs swung with the motion of the ship. One arm hung free, dragging limp fingers across the surface of the water. Despite the noise around him, the eerie stillness of the room prickled the hair at the back of Rafe’s neck. He knew before he crossed to the ha
mmock that there was nothing more he could do for Triggs. He’d risked the Cormorant, but it had been for naught.

  Heavy smoke caught in his throat. He gagged and coughed, shoving a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. The fires must be spreading. He was running out of time. He needed to get out and join the others in the gig.

  The ship pitched to port and then plunged back, and a low rumble split the air. Rafe was thrown to the floor as the lugger heaved farther over on her starboard side. Broken and taking on water as she was, she’d sink like a stone if she lost her purchase on the rocks. They were all that kept her afloat. Which would deal the final blow—fire or water? Rafe didn’t know.

  Pulling himself up, he cast one last look at his shipmate and friend. Rafe grasped Triggs’s hanging arm and, drawing it up, laid it across his chest. Taking the other, he crossed Triggs’s hands over his heart.

  “Goodbye, Captain,” he murmured. “‘From rocks and sands and every ill, may God preserve you.’”

  He gathered his grief and headed back the way he came. In the forward hold, the water had risen calf-high on his boots, and a flickering glow met his eye. Flames pierced the decking, licking at the beams overhead. He could barely see the bulkhead separating off the powder magazine, but he knew it would take only one spark to set off the entire stock.

  Peering up the hatchway ladder, his heart fluttered with a quiver of alarm. The slender opening was gone, crushed beneath the new weight of shifted spars when the ship heeled over. He pushed his fist and then his shoulder against the hatch cover, but nothing budged. He glanced over at the flames. Closer and closer they crept toward the Cormorant’s stores of powder. Once more he tried, panic and the full weight of his body behind the effort. The hatch cover eased open enough to let in the filmy gray storm light. Heartened by the progress, he shoved his shoulder against it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Sweat poured off of him, and he gasped and retched on the smoke, but each battering freed the hatch little by little until with a final shove and curse, it gave way.

  Rain stung his face, but he lifted his burning eyes to it. Taking quick, shallow breaths to clear his lungs, he climbed back out onto the deck. The swivel gun glowed red, and flame ate its way down the foresail shrouds and parts of the jib like a voracious beast.

  The ship pitched suddenly to port; her stern rising up off the reef before being slung back down onto the rocks with a tremendous jarring that rattled Rafe’s teeth in his head. She heeled over, and Rafe slid down the rain-slick deck, fetching up with a crash against the starboard bulwark. The collision knocked the breath from his lungs and sent a shooting pain up his right arm. Rising, he clutched his elbow. At the angle the ship lay, he’d have to scramble back up the burning deck to reach the ladder down to the gig. Or he could shimmy his way past the worst of the fire to the bow and signal the oarsmen to row close enough for him to jump clear and be picked up. The ship plunged again, and Rafe raced for the bow. He’d be damned if he’d climb back up the deck only to be flung down at the next rolling heave.

  He pushed off from the railing, taking two shaky steps forward before the decking buckled beneath his feet. He heard a roar like the broadside from a ship of the line, and the Cormorant from the bow to the main hatch exploded in a fireball that sent him spinning into the sea.

  Chapter 37

  Twenty…thirty…Rafe tore at his watch coat and kicked off his boots, his lungs burning for air. Forty…forty-five…With a final savage twist, he was free of the heavy clothing and able to swim his way back toward the surface. Breaking through, he gasped, swallowing almost as much water as air with each cresting wave. Treading water, he sought out the gig. But the impact had tossed him upon the far side of the ship, away from an easy rescue by the crew. It may be that they hadn’t even seen him fall, but thought him still aboard or killed in the explosion.

  Flames shot skyward from the ship’s deck and licked down the hull, devouring everything in their path. Heat blasted the side of his face.

  He set into a powerful stroke that should pull him out from beneath the wreckage and around the rocks toward safety. But no matter how hard he struggled, the inrushing tide and the currents swirling around the reefs pushed him closer to the Cormorant, not farther away.

  The sea sucked the warmth from his body, chilling his limbs, numbing his responses. A line snaked past him, then another. He twitched with each brush of the submerged rigging, and pushed himself to try once more for the fallen mainmast, now a blackened stump where the fire had consumed it. Against the current, he made little headway, and each stroke left him more fatigued.

  As he reached for a line just beyond his fingertips, his feet tangled in the sheets lying below the surface. A wave broke on him. Blind, he flailed for the broken masthead. His frozen fingers wouldn’t respond. He sank. Kicking once, he reached the surface, but the lines and sheets tangled round his waist and with a crash heard above the storm, the ship broke free to slide into the sea. The lines grew taut. Breath squeezed from his lungs as the ropes tightened around him. He gathered what air he could and descended.

  Gwenyth stood on the shore, hands clasped beneath her chin and a heavy woolen blanket draped over her shoulders, watching the bobbing lanterns of the last two flat-bottomed workboats as they plied the area around the wreckage.

  Rescue had arrived almost before the ship had exploded in a fiery shower of flame; Jago’s skiff the first one to bump alongside them as he and four others fought the waves with their oars to keep them steady in the surf. He remained at the site now, even though the rest of the crew had long since retired to the taproom of Pilchard’s tavern at the harbor’s edge to warm themselves with a fire and a pint or two.

  She sank to the shingle, exhaustion and foreboding weighing her down. Her face felt achy and hot; her eyes burned with unshed tears, but she couldn’t cry. The press of pain was still too great to allow such release. Guilt gnawed at her, tormented her. So many years the dreams had warned her and so many years she’d heeded them. But Rafe had tempted her to believe in a new dream, and she had cost him his life.

  She closed her eyes on the sight of the Cormorant’s burned-out hulk pushed up out of the water. Instead, she remembered the soft sure touch of Rafe’s hands upon her body and the sweet warmth of his kisses as they lay restless in the dark. The wind whipping past her seemed to carry his scent and whisper his name, only making the loss harder to bear.

  Thinking she’d spent just moments this way, she opened her eyes, surprised to see Jago’s skiff nearing the shallows, heavy with flotsam from the ship, and a body lain gently in the bow. He drew in his oars and jumped out as Gwenyth rucked her sodden skirts around her knees and raced toward him, the stones of the shingle biting deep into her feet. She reached the boat as Jago pulled it up onto the beach beyond the tide line. Rafe lay unmoving, his face upturned to the stinging rain.

  “You’ve found him!” she cried.

  But the stiff, hunched way Jago carried himself told her everything. He made no move to pull Rafe from the boat or aid him in any way as if haste were no longer needed. He reached out a restraining hand as Gwenyth prepared to step into the boat. “Steady on. Bound up in the fallen rigging, he was, wound tight as a fly in a spider’s trap. I cut him loose, but he’s not breathed once, though I pushed a pint or two of seawater from his lungs.”

  Gwenyth closed her ears to Jago’s words, but she shivered uncontrollably with more than cold. “No! I won’t believe it! It can’t end this way. I won’t let it end this way.”

  She leapt into the boat to kneel beside Rafe. His long tarpaulin watch coat gone and his shirt plastered to his chest, she desperately sought any signs of breathing. His dark hair lay matted against the pale marble of his forehead, and his hands lay relaxed across his stomach. She flinched at the sightless stare of his gaze.

  Clutching his shoulders, she fought the evidence of her eyes. “Rafe Fleming, I’ll not be letting you leave me so easy.”

  “Gwen
yth, lass…” Jago coaxed, his voice soft with regret. He put a comforting hand upon her arm. “Let him go. ’Tis a better place by far.”

  Gwenyth wrenched away. Rage and despair filled her heart. “’Tis a mighty good place here too. Where he has a lover and a child on the make.”

  Jago shook his head. “So you got your babe. I wondered on it.”

  Gwenyth ignored him. Pulling Rafe up, she wrapped her arms around him, willing life back into his body, but there was no reassuring beat of his heart beneath her ear.

  Sitting up, she did the last and only thing she could think of. She took his chin between her hands. Focusing her gaze on him, she allowed the power of the Sight to flow through her, to take hold of her. The storm’s howl and the lash of rain faded as the soft sea-wash color of his eyes expanded to fill her vision. Instead of burning her with its brilliance, his stare gave off no warmth, no spark of any kind. But she wouldn’t look away and break her last tenuous hold on him. She poured all her strength and powers into probing deeper, finding the wandering, lost soul within the man.

  “Damn you, Rafe, you can’t leave me here alone!”

  There. She felt it. A presence beyond the emptiness of death. A numbing cold like the frozen pain of an icicle pierced her heart. Her lungs burned with ice and then fire. She clenched her teeth on the horrible ache in every muscle as the paralyzing cold spread throughout her body, but never did she drop her gaze from Rafe’s. Her fingers bit into the flesh of his arms. Her breath came as short, shuddering gasps. The air around her seemed to grow thick with moisture as if she knelt within a cloud of heavy fog. It smelled of damp and salt and sour winds. She heard a rush of music like the creaking of spring ice across a river.

  Down she plunged, deeper and deeper, farther than she had ever dared before. Her lungs felt as if they would explode, and her heart beat wildly until it seemed as if it would leap from her chest. Warring against an exhausting desperation, her vision clouded, a black-green wash of seawater darkening to a pinprick of light, a point of hope she clung to with the last air in her body.