Isle of Wysteria: Make Like a Tree and Leaf

by Aaron Yeager

  “Are you going to be okay?” Alder asked, bringing himself up on one elbow.

  “Yeah, I’ll be alright,” Mina grunted out through clenched teeth. Suddenly her lavender eyes popped open and she pressed her head and palms against the deck, sliding her head from side to side, her white fur picking up bits of lint and dirt.

  Mina’s tail began swishing suspiciously and she began crawling along the floor. Alder moved to ask her what she was doing, but she raised a hand to silence him. When she reached the portside corner of the room she slowed, then zeroed in on one particular spot. She sat up and pulled out her dagger. Flicking it with a finger, she coaxed the vibrations higher and higher until the blade was blurry to look at. She plunged the blade into the thick gray ironwood of the deck, passing down into it effortlessly like cutting a cake. She sliced a rectangular hole into the deck, and pulled back the freed piece of wood.

  “Those clever little oimosks,” Mina cursed, her voice suddenly deeper and sharper than Alder remembered. “They hid it in the crawlspace to mask it from me.” Mina plunged the vibrating dagger down and there was a gurgled shriek as the blade met something fleshy. Mina pulled out a slick, black skinned creature twitching limply on the humming blade.

  “We’ve been leeched,” she said.

  “Leeched?”

  “A tracking creature,” she nodded. The Reavers of Umor are probably circling in on us by now.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The Acid Seas

  It seemed to Athel that her eyes had only been closed for a moment, but she quickly realized that wasn’t the case when she opened them. She was lying in her bed, and the air seemed filled with medicinal scents. She sat up and felt a sharp pain in her arm and clutched her bandaged wrist. She could still feel the scalding touch of Odger’s seal on her skin.

  From her shelf near the porthole, Deutzia shimmered hastily, her small branches tapping against the glass that was letting in the gray light of approaching storms.

  “We’re in a battle?” Athel asked. There was a sound like thunder and the ship jerked to one side, nearly throwing Athel out of her bed. Deutzia grabbed a belt with one of her branches and clipped it across her pot, securing herself to the wall.

  “How long have I been out?” Athel asked, trying to gather her wits as she stood up and grabbed her armor and weapons. Deutzia hummed apologetically in return.

  “Four days? Why was I out for so long?”

  A few minutes later, after dressing herself and having a sharply heated argument with Deutzia about Alder being allowed to enter her room while she was unconscious, Athel pulled herself up onto the deck of the Dreadnaught. A strong quarter-stern wind blew her red-auburn hair across her face as she attempted to force it into a pony tail. Tiny droplets of rain stung her skin, and crew members ran about attempting to secure the barrels and crates.

  Athel checked the belt on her uniform to make sure it was charged and ran over to the stern of the ship where Captain Evere stood at the wheel.

  “Why haven’t we ascended above cloud level to get out of the storm?” Athel asked as she saluted.

  “Because there are four Guild Reavers up there waiting to seize us, Miss Athel. Only the Dragon’s Claw followed us down here.”

  Athel looked over the edge of the gunwale. Through the rain and fog she could make out the gray silhouette of their pursuer. She saw a wide squat vessel with one set of sails above and two below, offset at angles so that they created the points of a triangle. The ship’s silhouette was broken by hundreds of jagged works of iron protruding out along the hull at odd angles, like daggers of crystal, which gave off a dim glow of unnatural light in the mist.

  “Isn’t the Dragon’s Claw the ship that poisoned the wells at Newhaven Port?” Athel asked, remembering that ship's particularly notorious reputation.

  “Aye and they’ll show none of that mercy on us if they catch us. Captain Afeir is Jacques’ Nephew.”

  Athel watched as a green ball of energy built up above the deck of the Dragon's Claw, a fell voice distantly coaxing its growth.

  “Hit the deck!” Evere yelled, but Athel was too slow. The green sphere streaked toward them before she could blink. It passed right through her and sped away off into the distance. Athel felt sweat trickling down the nape of her neck, and the world around her grew cold. Her feet were rooted in place, and her mind flashed with images of torture and death. Never in her life had she been in a situation that was so completely out of her control, and she froze with uncertainty.

  “We should be all right,” Evere called up as he came back to his feet and took the wheel. “They’re not fast enough to catch us. If they try to turn to give us a broadside, we’ll slip out of range before they can get off a shot.”

  “Unless they have chaser guns,” Mina cautioned as she ran up and secured one of the backstay lines which had begun to come loose.

  There was a flash of smoke from the bow of the Dragon’s Claw. Suddenly, the wood to Athel’s left came apart in an explosion of slivers and shards. The world flipped end over end until she came to a hard stop against a water barrel, looking up at the gray sky.

  “Right, unless they have chaser guns,” Evere responded. “Hands, man the chains! New heading seven degrees port of center. Miss Athel, get me some wind-seekers.”

  The crew called out “Aye,” but Athel could only roll herself over and watch detachedly. Her ears were still ringing from the shock, and she felt a trickle of blood rolling down her ankle. She had fought people before, but this was completely different. The ships were huge, like giants, and the power and noise of the cannons shook the world around her. Surrounded on all sides by gray skies, with nothing but the ocean far below, she realized how completely alone they were in their small ship, and her body began trembling. She couldn’t find words for the sensation. It wasn’t a feeling, but a void. A numbness of thought that seemed to slow everything around her, as if her rational mind had been stripped away from her body and only observed from a distance.

  Ryin and Hanner manned the cranks of the chains that rotated the sails above and below the ship and began turning them. Another ball of iron flew this time crossing above the deck of the ship and shearing through the starboard forestay of the mizzenmast; the ropes flapping impotently in the wind as the mast leaned slightly to one side.

  A moment later Athel heard the thunderous crack of the cannon shot, and her body collapsed to the deck. Her knees came up to her chin and she wrapped her arms around them tightly. A small voice in the back of her mind screamed for her to get up and join the others, but her body would not move. She closed her eyes in shame. Despite all her years of training, at the first sign of a real battle she had frozen. She could feel the disappointment in her mother’s eyes.

  A hatch opened up on the forecastle and Pops came up in his slow, calm manner. With wind howling and cannons thundering, he pulled up his bucket and began wetting his mop to swab the deck.

  “Pops, we’re in a bit of a squall here,” Mina called out, “I think it’d be best if we left that until later.”

  Pops smiled warmly at Mina and nodded, then slowly began gathering up his things to return below deck. Another cannonball whizzed past the Dreadnaught, burning a hole through the lower mainmast. As it flew away it began glowing brightly with fiery sigils, then curved upward above them and streaked back down toward them.

  “They’ve got an Ironmaster,” Mina called out as the projectile crashed through the side of the top foremast. The wood made a terrible creaking noise then shattered above them under its own weight. Mina and Spirea dove for cover as the great beam of wood splintered and crashed down onto the deck, snapping rigging and tearing sails all around them.

  “Mister Ryin,” Evere called out as he fought against the ship’s wheel, “you’re from Ferrus, can’t you block the spell?”

  “Are you kidding? That’s a master-level spell,” Ryin screamed out as he pulled himself free from the fallen rigging. “I flunked out when I was still an initiate.”
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  Distantly the ensorcelled cannonball curved around, a red hot dot among the gray clouds, before rushing back toward them at frightening speed.

  “To squat with your fancy schools,” Hanner called out as he yanked out a canister round and replaced it with a solid shot. Grabbing their cannon with both hands, he ran over and placed himself directly in the path of the incoming cannonball.

  “Hanner, it’s not a musket,” Alder corrected as he pulled Spirea out from beneath a broken Spar.

  As if sensing his intentions, the glowing cannonball began weaving from side to side as it approached, but Hanner stood resolute in the face of it.

  “You stupid Guild-rats,” Hanner bellowed as he snapped his fingers and lit the fuse, “Don’t you know that all this fighting is bad for my baby!”

  The incoming projectile became a streak of fire, moving so fast the eye could no longer follow it. Hanner’s cannon answered with a thunderous crack, and in an impressive display of marksmanship, the two balls of iron tore each other apart in the air just before the gunwale, sending red-hot bits of shrapnel in all directions.

  Hanner turned around, a wry grin on his large face as he held the cannon up triumphantly. His expression gave way to panic when he saw a small shard of iron protruding from his torso, just above his distended belly. He pulled out the shard and whimpered in concern for the unborn child inside of him.

  There was a gust of wind and the nose of the ship lurched up. There were now fewer sails on top of the ship than there were below, and the crew fought frantically to man the ropes and lower the bottom foresail and restore balance before the entire ship capsized.

  “With a mast down, we can’t outrun them anymore,” Evere called out. “We need to find a faster wind at a different altitude. Athel, where are those blasted wind-seekers?”

  Athel could hear his words, but they seemed distant and murky to her as she lay curled up in her little world. She felt she could die from the shame of it. A Forsythian princess, curled up like a little child, unable to move. If the other noble families could see her now, they would demand the abdication of her entire family. The small voice in her mind caught onto that thought. She had left that world behind, yet in the heat of battle, it was all she could think about.

  There raged around her a gale that she could not control, but at the center of that gale, she realized there was something she could control. She could die at any moment, but she could choose to be on her knees or on her feet when it happened.

  Please, Athel called out in her mind, I don’t want to live with this shame. I want to move, I want to act. I do not want to die a coward! Slowly at first, then with increasing speed, Athel unlocked her trembling fingers from behind her head then unrolled her legs. At first she crawled, an incredibly loud explosion of wood near her nearly tossing her over the side then she crouched, clutching the broken banister as she forced herself forward. With the strength of her entire will, she obliged her shaking hands to release her grip on the banister and tear open the lid on the seeker-chest. Grabbing a brittle stone, she crawled back over to the gunwale and looked over the edge. Far below her, she could see the raging seas through breaks in the fog. Illuminated by flashes of lighting, they churned and thrashed about with unholy vigor.

  Athel broke the stone in half and tossed it over the side. Each half burst into a ball of green light, one streaking straight down toward the seas, the other streaking upward into the clouds. By its color and the pattern of its strobe, a sailor could tell the wind’s direction and speed at different altitudes. Athel watched anxiously for the red double flash of a fast wind that might allow them to evade their attackers.

  As it fell, the wind-seeker flashed single blue, then triple yellow, then single green again. Sensing its approach, the sea below opened up like a great maw. The stone flashed triple red just as the seas snapped shut on it, and Athel’s eyes opened wide in apprehension.

  “Captain Evere,” she called out, loud enough to be heard over the wind, “seekers register a forty-knot wind at sea-level.”

  Despite their frantic pace, the entire crew paused when they heard her words. Mina turned around and looked at her husband, concern in her eyes as he considered the words.

  Another cannonball flew by the ship, passing wide of the port side, and Evere’s face turned resolute as he opened the cover on the brass call-pipe attached to the binnacle. “Mister Odger, we need you to drop the ship down to 0050 altitude, and be quick about it,” he ordered.

  There was a pause and then Odger’s squeaky voice came back. “How do I know you’re really the captain? What’s the password?”

  “Password? Curses and hexes, if this ship doesn’t start dropping I’ll come down there myself and run my saber across your throat.” There was a pause for a moment.

  “O-Okay, that’ll work.”

  The Dreadnaught moaned as it began to sink down through the fog, which grew thicker and darker as they descended toward sea level. When the crew felt the ship pitch up to hold its altitude, they could no longer see anything beyond the yardarms, but the sounds they heard were terrible. The wind was quick and howled across the deck coldly, flapping loose rigging and sail, and scraping against the skin of the crew. So close to the sea, they could hear its wild howling like a caged beast. It splashing and shrieking, beating against itself and calling out for their flesh. Athel forced herself to look over the side, and occasionally caught glimpses of watery arms reaching up out of thin patches in the fog, quick and desperate in their motions, like a starving man reaching for food. The streaks of red and black in the water swirled within the tendrils, boiling to the surface then submerging back down to deeper parts in patterns that reminded Athel of rolling fire.

  For several breathless minutes the crew of the Dreadnaught worked silently as their ship sailed quickly in the fast wind current. Evere quietly ordered loose cordage to be tied down to reduce the amount of noise. The ship’s compass ceased to work this close to the open sea, spinning so wildly that it caused the binnacle to shake. Occasionally the crew would catch glimpses of enemy sails or the shouts of coarse voices through the mist, but what rose to view would quickly disappear again.

  The wind direction changed quickly, and the Dreadnaught spun portside as her crew fought to reset the angle of the remaining sails. The ship lurched forward as it caught the wind again, and they moved through a light patch in the fog. The curtain of mist raised, and they saw the jagged iron-workings of the Dragon’s Claw sailing alongside starboard, so close that both crews could see the expression of shock on each other’s faces as they scrambled to ready the guns. The men of the Dragon’s Claw shouted out their battle cry, long and fierce, the roar of their deck guns adding to the crescendo. Balls of iron tore through the side of the Dreadnaught, breaking beams and splintering planks. An entire section of the forecastle collapsed in on itself, creating an ugly pit of jagged wood. The Dreadnaught answered back with its single cannon, poking a small hole in the side of the Dragon’s Claw, a paper cut compared to the pummeling they had received.

  Despite her overwhelming desire to stay in hiding, Athel forced herself to her feet and pushed aside the planks of broken wood that covered her. From her position near the bow, she could see the hands of the Dragon's Claw working to reload for another volley; their bosun whipping the men cruelly with cat-o’-nine-tails as they brought fresh charges of powder from the rear magazine rooms to the awaiting loaders.

  Hands on their top deck began throwing iron grapnels over to the Dreadnaught, catching the woodwork of the gunwale and pulling on the ropes, forcing the ships closer together. Sabers were being drawn and readied, and the crew of the Dragon’s Claw were already chanting “Give no quarter” in their foul voices again and again.

  Athel scampered along the ruined deck, the smoky trails of rifle rounds occasionally whizzing past her. She ran past flung grapnel hooks and members of her own crew as they returned fire and cut away as many of the grapnel lines as they could amid the chaos of battle.

 
A Dragon Claw pommel gun was fired by a pig-faced man in long robes, and a wave of red energy flew over the deck, tumbling Athel forward. Ears ringing, she brought herself to her feet, and felt the heat of fire. She turned around and saw that the sorcerous blast had set the Dreadnaught’s deck ablaze. Even over the thunderous crack of the cannons, Captain Evere’s cackling laughter could be heard as he fought the controls. He seemed to soak in the adrenaline and panic of battle as if it were a fine wine. Mina extended her hands and summoned an icy blast that began smothering the flames.

  Athel pulled out her pistol and checked the priming charge. Before her was the rearmost cannon on the Dragon’s gun deck. The two ships were so close now that she could see the spittle of the loaders leave their black mouths as they shouted curses and threats against her. They lit their fuse, and Athel found herself looking directly down the black barrel. She raised her weapon. It seemed comically small, her small pistol barrel pointing back at theirs. She pulled the trigger and fired. The small seed streaked across the gap between the two ships and, at Athel’s command, exploded into a growth of vines that wrapped themselves around the muzzle of the lit cannon and the surrounding beams. Athel clenched her fist and pulled right, and the vines obeyed, exerting their strength at their master’s command. For an agonizing moment the vines only trembled, then, reaching the required force, the Dragon Claw’s gun splintered free of its mounting and turned sideways, pointing directly astern at her own magazine room, which was armored against fire from outside the ship, but not from inside.

  The loaders of the gun looked over at Athel as their cannon fired, their dumfounded expressions swallowed up in the ball of flame that began in the rear powder magazine. The explosion shattered the rear of the vessel, setting her sails ablaze and throwing men and shrapnel in all directions.

  The Dreadnaught listed to its starboard side, and Athel heard a horrible shriek come from the ship, like the wail of a newborn. The seal on her wrist throbbed anew.