Thumping back to her seat, Emesea said, “So the storms closed. We’ll have to sail around.”
If The Paragon had ever had a chance to slip between the essence tempests, the detour for the waterspout had stolen it.
Within the rolling sea, streams of silver fish coursed. Countless sardines surged and swarmed, boiling at the surface of the water. Flocks of birds dove after them, and their wings transformed underwater into fins. The birds swam. When beaks reached for the sardines, that section of the shoal solidified into a metallic wall.
“Emesea,” Hiresha said, “tell me the names of the fish. On the off chance I survive I wish to have learned something.”
“That sleek darling is a great platehead.”
Emesea would point out many other creatures on the voyage but few so massive. The magic defenses of the sardines proved no match for a giant with bony growths on its brow. Its finned tail blasted froth. The great platehead rammed the swarm, breaking off pieces and sucking them into its rocky jaws. The sardines caught alone were snatched up by the swimming birds.
Hiresha crouched in the boat, trying to look as untasty as possible. Above the mayhem of life and magic, the dream storm dyed the air green. It swayed and pulsed closer.
Emesea’s hands were lined with tendons. Her oars flicked into the water then rose again with streaming arcs of droplets. With every stroke, the boat jerked to a faster speed until they started overtaking waves.
When The Paragon had cleared the storm’s surf, Emesea bounded up to attend to the sail. Hiresha noticed blood on the oar handles.
The enchantress cut two strips out of the red dress with the obsidian knife. A squirt from the waterskin washed the fabric for a clean bandage.
“You’re relentless to a fault,” Hiresha said. She motioned Emesea to yield up a hand for treatment. The enchantress dabbed the wound then pulled a bandage tight. She knew it would pain Emesea, but the woman did not even blink. “Does eating fish from the sea make you so robust?”
“Ha! A little magic is enough to harden the cocks of nobles, but true strength comes from something else. You want to hear?”
“Actually, I’m losing interest.”
“Philosophy.” Emesea tapped her salt-crusted temples.
That’s certainly not the answer I expected.
“People dodder through their lives afraid they’ll hurt someone, probably themselves.” Emesea wrapped her bandaged hand around the enchantress’s neck and pulled her closer. “A warrior grabs life by the throat. She holds nothing back. You have to risk everything, or you risk more.”
“There’s truth in that nonsense.” Tethiel tilted his head as if unsure what he had just said. He sat on a bench in front of the mast, trying to grip an oar between both hands.
Hiresha tied off the second bandage. She said, “Then, Madam Warrior, don’t use your hands for the rest of today, and keep these clean.”
“Uh-huh,” Emesea said as she watched a school of rainbow mackerel go by. She dunked her hands in the bilge water, pulled out the fish net, and threw it overboard. The water lit with dazzling lights from the trapped fish.
The enchantress shook her head.
“Hiresha,” Tethiel said, lifting an oar, “I need you to tie these to my arms. We have a longer way to go to shore.”
“An impressive request.” Hiresha wrapped rope around an oar and his wrist. His face had a strange expression, in that it had one. Most often he wore a mask of indifference.
“I shouldn’t have eaten that fish. A Feaster’s appetite is best kept keen.” He could not seem to stop his face from shifting from a boyish smirk to teeth-clenched alarm.
Hiresha looped the rope around itself then frowned. “Emesea, would you check my knotting?”
“Whoa!” Emesea strained against the net. “Did I catch a dead-weight fish?”
Tethiel inhaled with a hiss. “It’s the—”
The rope tore out of Emesea’s hands. A bandage ripped. She spun around, whisking her sword up to the ready.
“—Murderfish.”
21
Ill Company
The sky gripped the mast, tipping the boat. Emesea leaped. Her swing was a sweep of obsidian.
The green shimmer of the dream storm reached forward and smacked the sword from the warrior’s hand. The weapon spun into a wave then began to sink.
The warrior yanked her knife from her belt and dove into the sea.
Who jumps into the kraken-infested waters with only a knife? Hiresha could not help but think it. How is that a possibility?
The Paragon capsized, and the touch of the sea electrocuted Hiresha with fear. Her skin crawled and burned, knowing that any second an unseen tentacle could constrict her. Scarce little I can do about it. Awake.
“My heart.” Tethiel stood atop the boat, the half above water. He held a length of oar to her.
She gripped it. He pulled, and she clambered to the top of The Paragon. Their combined weight tilted the boat. Tethiel and the enchantress gripped the side until their craft was righted.
Emesea was swimming after her sword. Ducking under a wave, she reached towards its shaft. The weapon scooted away as if towed by an unexpected current.
The Paragon now held a tide-pool of water, complete with a few of the rainbow mackerel. Hiresha waded in, leaned back. She bobbed with her eyes closed, and water stung her nose with salt. She descended her mental stairway toward sleep. Sea foam cascaded down the steps. It did not stop her.
Inside the dream laboratory, Intuition was hiding behind the operations table. She said, “Oh, we wish we had a fox to hug. Wait, no! We wouldn’t want Mister Black Whiskers trapped with us.”
The enchantress channeled the water from the boat then regarded a mirror. Now she could see the Murderfish’s arms. Its skin shifted from the greyish blue of the sea to the blue-white of the sky, with pigments even mimicking the shapes of birds flapping in the distance.
“Its camouflage is perfect and perfectly dreadful,” Hiresha said.
She guessed the only parts of the Murderfish visible to her waking eye would be the stray fishhooks stuck in its skin, blurry lines on its hide that could have been scars, and perhaps its eyes.
Hiresha held a garnet pin between her fingers. She had Attracted it from the boat planks. “The difficulty is,” she said, “I can think of no enchantment that would do more than anger the Murderfish.”
“Have the pin turn flesh to poison.” The Jeweled Feaster appeared in her mirror standing atop the beached carcass of a kraken, a black sword half buried in its flesh. “Then give it to Tethiel and shove him over. When the Murderfish eats him, it’ll die.”
“First of all, no,” Hiresha said. “Second, this garnet could not hold an enchantment of that complexity.”
Hiresha settled on an enchantment of desiccation. It would kill a man. It might scar a kraken.
Soon as she awoke, fear returned with a reek. The scent was a noxious fume of seaweed, an eye-smarting of salt, and a burial in fish. To breathe it was to choke.
Mackerel flopped in the bottom of the boat. Hiresha squatted and saw the warrior swimming once again to her sword. Emesea’s arm snapped out of the water to grasp it. Her fingers touched the haft.
The weapon plunged from her grasp.
Hiresha struggled to draw in breath to call out. “The Murderfish is pulling it away.”
“She’s a trickster, ain’t she? Wish I could see how long her legs are. And how shapely. Ha!” Emesea peered down as she treaded water. She dropped below the surface, either from a fast dive or a tentacle pulling her under.
“My heart, open the sail.” Tethiel was heaving back on the oars. “Let’s leave Eme and her sea monster.”
“The sail won’t help us.” Hiresha knelt in the back of the boat. The rope that led to the net in the water was taut. Hiresha touched it, felt the quivering tension. “We’re being held.”
Hiresha started to turn to find a way to cut the rope when she saw it. A mouth hung above the water, a wide bla
ck slit in the blueness. Its size resembled a shark’s grin lunging for her. Except it had no teeth, only a glistening emptiness. And it was attached to no body she could see.
The horizontal void widened. Only then did Hiresha realize. It’s a pupil. She was staring eye to eye with the Murderfish.
She had never seen such an inhuman eye. It strained belief that it could even belong to something living. Hiresha felt the sea itself watched her. She felt judged. Malice flooded over her.
The enchantress flung her garnet. The pin flashed as it turned end over end.
Let it hit. Let the Murderfish be blinded. Hiresha had spotted but a single eye.
The pin arced toward the pupil. The garnet dropped below. It landed in a wave and made not even the ripple.
“Confound!” Hiresha had misjudged the distance. The eye was further than she had thought. And bigger.
The black bar of the eye had shifted downward to regard the pin. It gazed back up at the enchantress. Then it disappeared in a splash.
The sea rose and sagged as the kraken moved beneath. Hiresha’s insides squirmed.
Tethiel choked off a gasp. “Hiresha!”
The oars jerked vertical, hauling Tethiel above his seat. His arms stretched outward, roped to the oar butts. He was being held like a puppet in the hands of a cruel child. His legs pumped and twisted in agony.
Hiresha heard the rip of fabric. The Murderfish will tear his arms off.
She raced to one oar, reaching up to try to slip the rope from the end. The boat canted, and she fell against the wooden pole. The sea held it so tightly that it might as well have been imbedded in a castle’s foundations.
Tethiel made a throaty sound of pain, and he fell down as one oar was pulled away. Hiresha glanced up, expecting to see a dismembered arm or at least a bloody hand. The rope hung loose on the oar. Her knot had come undone, and she thanked the Fate Weaver for her poor tying skills.
He was dragged overboard. Hiresha flung herself after Tethiel and caught his bare foot. His arm extended, and the rope slipped off the end of the submerging oar.
“Ha!” Emesea shouted. Her hand had closed on her sword. “Wait. Feels squishy.”
The weapon lunged from the water to smack the warrior in the face. Then it disappeared into thin air. Emesea laughed and knifed the sky.
“Teach you to toy with me!”
The black blade vanished to the hilt, and Emesea was carried out of the sea. The warrior grappled and yanked on her knife. It opened a rent that sprayed a fluid, blue as paint. The liquid splattered into the sea and sank in jiggling globules.
It’s blood, Hiresha realized. ‘The spirit of the sea,’ indeed.
The warrior had stuck the kraken. There was no roar. The sea only churned.
Redness flared in the sky, a length of tentacle that flicked the warrior away. The arm of the Murderfish had turned crimson. It bled another spurt of blue before sliding out of sight beneath the waves.
Hiresha had pulled Tethiel back into the boat. She ran her hands over his arms.
“Nothing is broken,” she said.
“Only my dignity.”
A coat sleeve had torn off. Red satin covered his left arm, his right, black silk. His face was a healthy color, and he stood with none of the morning’s wobbliness. Eating the fish seemed to have cured him.
“She took our oars.” He pointed with a crooked finger toward the sea. “My heart, drop the sail.”
Before Hiresha could lay a hand on the rigging, The Paragon lurched backward. Its prow climbed into the air. The rope attached to the net creaked with tension.
“She’s dragging us.” Tethiel clutched his throat. “And what’s worse, I can’t seem to resist saying the obvious.”
The netting rope looped in ties around the mast. Hiresha tugged at the knots, but they were a fisherman’s labyrinth. Salt and algae crusted the hemp cord.
“Find a knife,” Hiresha said.
“I’ll find Emesea. Or was she drowned?”
Hiresha searched an oilskin sack tied down in the hull. She pushed aside a blue dress, found pouches carrying what felt much like ballast stones and little like anything thin and sharp.
The boat skewed, gaining speed and bouncing off the surface of the water in bursts of hissing froth. Hiresha rolled into the prow, clinging to a bench. The spinning force threatened to fling her overboard, and she worried that would be better than whatever came next.
The Paragon lifted from the sea. It whirled through the air. The rope that held them was screaming.
Let it break, Hiresha thought. Let one cord of fate spin in our favor.
Tethiel wrapped his arms around the mast. His legs swung to the front of the boat, and by intention or not, his feet pressed Hiresha down into the hull. She had started to slide out.
The sky careened by from blue to pink. We might be thrown into the dream storm. Hiresha felt her heart and guts pressing upward into her throat.
She could not tell which of their voices rose in a shriek.
Something slapped the side of the boat. Hiresha saw brown fingers clenching, their tips white from pressure. A woman with a blue-serpent tattoo flipped herself aboard, knife still in hand.
Hiresha had never been so happy to see a wicked shard of black glass. “The rope!”
In the time it took the enchantress to cry out, the warrior had already rolled to the taut cord and lifted her knife.
“Wait,” Hiresha said, “the dream storm.”
The razor edge touched the rope. Half the cord disappeared, frayed strands drifting from the torn end.
They flew. The boat spiraled. Air tore at Hiresha’s hair. A wig of black tresses bounded overboard. The sky blinked between pink, blue, and green.
22
Essence of the Wild
The Paragon hit the water and skipped. On the next dip, every leak in the boat geysered. The boat bounced off the surface once more before settling into the sea.
The world continued to revolve in Hiresha’s eyes. At least the sky stayed blue.
Emesea climbed to her feet first. She was the first to teeter and fall.
The mast had cracked and now leaned to the right. Ropes wrapped around its base kept it from toppling.
Emesea wriggled upright and adjusted the rigging. The sail rolled open at a slant. The wind filled it.
“Still good!” The warrior gave the mast a smack. She curled back her spine and unleashed a bellow of laughter. “Ha ho! That was better than making love to a king atop his banquet table.”
“How can you possibly….” Hiresha propped herself up on an arm. “How is it that a human with some signs of sentience can enjoy this?”
“I’m not afraid of the afterlife’s trials. And if I die here, then the Lord of the Feast dies with me.”
“I have no such consolation. You….” Tethiel gripped his scalp as if trying to extract some insight. His fingers dug into short-cropped hair of grey. Where his ears should have been, two ridges of scar tissue told of past tortures. “I’m so lost I can’t even find my words. A pox on that fish. A pox on this blue wasteland.”
“The sea is a garden,” the warrior said. “It only looks barren if you never open your eyes underwater.”
The truth of that surprised Hiresha. Still, she had no desire to expose her eyes to fish sewage. She squinted up at the sun then back to the expanse of sea. “We should change direction. The Murderfish will expect us to continue west.”
“They don’t call her a murderer,” Emesea said.
The enchantress asked, “Who doesn’t?”
Emesea swept a hand over the sea. “They’re not all sea-cows, you know. Some fish are smart.”
Tethiel could not seem to stop himself from scratching his head and hiding at least one of his mangled ears with a hand. “How do you know a creature is intelligent?”
“The cruelty,” Hiresha said.
“The playfulness,” Emesea said. “And the kraken must’ve seen where we landed. Best to follow the wind and hope sh
e gets tired of being cut.”
“That plan seems dubious.” Hiresha nudged a dead mackerel with her foot. The fish head was red, and its scales shifted from yellow to green to blue toward its tail.
Without oars, they had fewer choices. Hiresha wished she could have been awake enough to realize that. A troubling thing when the most lucid person in the boat is a maniac.
Hiresha spent some minutes looking behind them, worrying that the Murderfish might follow. Deciding she gained nothing by watching for what defied seeing, she gathered up a length of the crumpled red dress. She asked to borrow Emesea’s knife.
The warrior gripped its ivory hilt. “What do you want to hurt?”
“A cut here and here.” Hiresha smoothed the dress over the boat’s side. “If the knife is sharp, I should hope the silk feels little pain.”
Emesea ended up shoving the enchantress aside and doing it herself. Hiresha then wrapped the kerchief over Tethiel’s head.
Rather than mentioning his ear stubs, she said, “We can’t have the Lord of the Feast sunburned.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, then said only, “Thank you, my heart.”
Hiresha knew then that Tethiel was far from himself, and the magic in the sea’s wildlife was a potent and dangerous thing. This concerned her because if they lived through the day they would need to eat something on this voyage. And I’d rather not lose my mind to my main course.
The Provost of Applied Enchantment would never have anticipated the need to fall asleep holding a dead fish and a jar of sea water. The enchantress of today felt it the most reasonable action she could take. She lay on her side, using the folded blue dress as a pillow. The boards of The Paragon still dug into her shoulder and hip, but it took more than discomfort, fright, or life-threatening wounds to keep Hiresha from her dreams.
In the laboratory, she dipped her hand into the jar. Salt formed around her fingers. The milky crystals scaled her hand.
Intuition sat on the top shelf, above baubles of a chisel and silver calipers. She gripped her stomach. “We never thought we’d be so long at sea with so many amazing, dreadful animals. We’re so excited we could be sick.”
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