Princess at Sea

by Dawn Cook

  He turned to me, shaking his head. “You really care for her, don’t you? Why? She’s a piece in your game. You’ve only known her for three months.”

  “She’s my sister,” I said, affronted.

  His face went unreadable behind his beard in the dark. “Only by law. You shouldn’t care for her. Someone will use it against you.”

  “You?” I asked belligerently.

  He nodded, his dark eyes expressionless. “If I can. If I need to.”

  “Chull bait,” I swore mildly, not having the impetus to dredge up anything more. “You are chull bait, Captain.”

  The soft sound of water lapping the edges of the raft seemed loud as he turned away. “Players don’t have family. You should remember that you have no ties of blood to her.”

  “Yesterday you said they bought me a name, and I should use it.”

  He cocked his head so the light of the moon fell on him. “Don’t confuse ties of law with ties of blood. She isn’t really your sister.”

  “Kavenlow is like a father to me,” I said, taking offense.

  “That’s his failing, and it’s going to bring an end to his game someday.”

  “It makes him stronger,” I asserted.

  “Being moved by emotions is dangerous,” he said, his voice mixing with the silky wave tops. “It leads you to take risky chances, ignore possibilities and deny uncomfortable realities.”

  I pulled my fingers from between the rope and the water cask, tucking a strand of lank hair behind my ear. “I disagree. It emboldens your spirit and keeps your mind open to possibilities that you might not consider. You’re lacking, Captain, and you don’t even know it.”

  He grunted and shifted his foot so that his bare heel touched the water. I couldn’t help but feel we were connected somehow through the water. Immediately, I pulled my fingers out and dried them on my grimy dress. A manta ray jumped nearby, and remembering having seen them in my dream, I vowed to do nothing that would make him tie me up. But it had been stormy in my dream, and after seeing the sun go down in a faultless sky, I was fairly confident we would get nothing but clear weather for days.

  Jeck pulled his foot out of the water. It was very slow and casual, but I could tell the rays were making him nervous.

  “They eat shrimp and small clams,” I said, dangling my hand back in the water to prove I wasn’t afraid. I felt restless, and the dark water seemed to help.

  “It’s said they jump out of the water to capsize small boats,” he said wryly.

  Landlubber, I thought, shrugging. “Only if you have shrimp with you.”

  He was looking at my submerged hand. Smug, I took it out and replaced it with my foot, sinking it almost to my knee. I had done it only to bother him, but it felt so good, I decided to keep it there, even when a ray bumped my calf with its rough and smooth skin.

  “And how would they know if there’re shrimp in the boat unless they sank it first?” he asked, clearly uncomfortable.

  A second ray jumped, bigger and closer, and the water thrown up from its clumsy reentry sent splatters of seawater across the raft. “That one knows. He’ll tell the rest.”

  Jeck made a scoffing noise. “Bring your feet in, Princess. There are things in the water that want to eat you.”

  So of course, I left it there, enjoying the slow current brush against me with the softness of silk. I felt odd and disconnected from the late hour and the unreal look of the moonlight. The chill from the water was soothing. It was closer to sunrise than sunset. “Don’t call me that,” I whispered, feeling the rise of quiet anticipation in me. The sail was flat. It should be full. I’d never beat them to the capital. Not going this slow.

  “Faster,” I breathed, pulling my foot from the water and lurching to a stand. The raft hardly moved, heavy and low in the water. The sluggish numbness of my leg and arm had eased, and though I was still stiff, and my stamina was nowhere near where it should be, I could function without pain if I was careful.

  I stood with one hand on the mast for balance, sending my dripping bare foot up and down to test my limits. There was a definite improvement, but even so, I was concerned. The venom was still in me. I could feel it, hanging right below my awareness, silent and still. It wasn’t leaving my body as it ought to, almost as if it was renewing itself. As if by fixing in my tissues, I had unintentionally given it a home and a way to make more of itself, much like the punta did.

  Tension pulled through me, and my grip on the mast tightened. If that was true, I’d never be able to reduce my residual levels no matter how long I shunned using the poison. Kavenlow. What would I tell him?

  “Do they often follow rafts like this?” Jeck asked, jerking me from my uncomfortable thoughts. “The rays,” he prompted, seeing my confusion.

  He hadn’t moved, still sitting by the edge of the raft with his head bowed. Moonlight had turned his black hair to silver. Letting my foot touch the planking, I shook my head. “No.” From my higher vantage point, I watched them escort us. They seemed to be waiting for something as they flew under the raft from side to side, seldom more than a foot below the surface. Their dark shadows looked like the waves come to life, flowing like a current.

  A restless feeling rose in me like a mist: an impending something. I needed to be going faster. I gazed toward the unseen mainland, fidgeting.

  “From Yellow Tail we can purchase horses,” I said, but I knew from his slumped posture that he wasn’t listening. “If the wind would pick up, we could make better time by water to the coast. They have a stable at Sharp Bend, too. They’ll remember us and give us horses. We might reach the capital before the pirates—if the wind would pick up.” I was babbling. The restiveness in me wouldn’t let me keep my mouth shut. I had to be moving.

  “The wind isn’t going to strengthen,” Jeck said to his ugly feet. The canvas slapped the mast and ropes as a slow swell rolled under us. “Sit down before you tip us over. Your master will take care of them.” His head rose to show his eyes were pinched and worried. “We’re out of this game,” he said, the sound of confession in his voice.

  “I’m not.” I wanted him to be quiet so I could think. Wind. All we needed was wind. It irritated me to be dependent upon something so fickle.

  I scanned the black horizon. The sun had gone down in pinks and blues. No wind likely tomorrow, either. I’d be stuck on this raft with Jeck for days. By the time I got off, there would be nothing I could do but mourn my sister. If I got off.

  “Wind,” I whispered, closing my eyes. I would give anything for it.

  A distant splash pulled my eyes open. Bubbles showed where a huge ray had touched the surface. Three more swam just below. I put my second hand atop the mast and stood before the slack sail, feeling the lack of movement all the way to my feet. The mast was like a dead thing under my palm. Even a tree had movement.

  “Wind,” I breathed, a sudden thought striking through me. The punta had called a gust of wind to confuse his escape. I had felt it: the surge of power through our shared thoughts. “I can do that,” I said softly.

  “What?” It was flat and emotionless, just like Jeck pretended to be. He lied to himself if he claimed honor and the game moved him alone. He had loved once. That he hid all emotion now proved it.

  “I can call the wind,” I said.

  He pulled his head up at that, and I shifted from foot to foot, feeling the rough boards upon the bottoms of my feet. A thrill of anticipation struck through me, seeming to set my fingers and toes to tingle.

  A snort escaped him. “You can’t call the wind. This isn’t a child’s bedside story. You’re stuck here until time and the tide bring us in. Accept it. Think beyond it.”

  My lips pursed. “I am a guttersnipe who is slated to secretly rule a kingdom. I can kill with a touch, thanks to you. I can walk through a crowded room unnoticed and can call my horse to me upon command. My entire life is a child’s bedside story. Don’t tell me I can’t call the wind.”

  I didn’t know why I was trying to
convince him. It wasn’t as if he could forbid me from trying. “I saw how the punta called the wind,” I said, and he turned away in scorn. “I was trying to charm him so he wouldn’t bite me,” I admitted, and Jeck swung his head back to me. “It almost worked, and it hurt both of us when he bit me. He called the wind to hide his escape when I told him how to get out of that pit. I saw how he did it. I can do it, too.” A shiver raced through me, the night air cool through the tattered dress that I had washed in seawater and dried hanging from a palm frond on an empty beach while Jeck built his raft. I would tell no one that the punta had turned the tables and charmed me.

  Jeck’s eyes were black in the dim light. “You told him how to get out of the pit?” he questioned, and when I said nothing, he raised a placating hand. “Fine. Call the wind.”

  It was patronizing and all but dripped scorn. Suddenly unsure, I shifted from foot to foot. The stars were few and small, and Jeck’s silhouette was sharp against the lowering moon as we rode the slow swells. “Well?” he mocked, and my jaw clenched.

  “Stop watching me,” I demanded.

  My face burned when he laughed and turned away, bending his knees and resettling himself on his useless raft. “Call the wind,” he muttered.

  I stiffened. “Kavenlow would believe me.”

  “Kavenlow is a dreamer. See what he dreamed up with you?”

  It was very close to an insult—not like Jeck at all—and I wondered if he was worried that I could actually do it or if he might be jealous of Kavenlow’s love for me. The punta could do it; I could do it. I had to do it. For my sister. For Kavenlow’s game that I’d fouled up yet again with my inexperience and naïveté.

  Hand upon the mast to steady myself, I snuck a glance at Jeck. He sat as if he weren’t there, his eyes on the horizon, his mind on other things. Taking a steadying breath, I closed my eyes, willing my magic to fill me.

  The vertigo came quickly, as if it had been waiting. Fingers tingling, I tightened my grip on the mast and shifted my feet. My heart pounded, sending a second, higher surge of venom into me. It was as if the last four days of the toxin working its way out of me hadn’t happened. I was simmering with it still. Blinking profusely to ward off the dizziness, I snuck a glance at Jeck to be sure he wasn’t watching, then closed my eyes again. I could do this.

  The blackness of the night was replaced by the blackness of my mind. Thick and potent, I felt the force in me rise, waiting for direction. My heart pounded and my knees grew watery at the strength of it. I’d never had so much magic in me. The punta bite had shifted my balance far beyond safe levels. But it was easier to bear now that I wasn’t so weak. Or maybe I was just getting used to it. Kavenlow, I thought in shame. What am I going to tell him?

  The surging power tugged at me, and my heart leapt into my throat when it all but slipped my grip. My shoulder started to throb, and my right leg and arm went numb. My breath became shaky, and I worked to even it out before Jeck heard. With a shock, I realized I had fallen into a pattern of three breaths and a pause, just like the punta’s. It seemed to help with the vertigo, and so I kept to it, trying to be unobtrusive as Jeck sat four feet away from me and sulked that his fine new raft was useless without wind.

  As my blood hummed with the potential in me, my mind returned to the pit and the punta. The big cat had called from the upper sky a fast-moving blast of air, channeling it with his will to a path it wouldn’t take on its own. I needed far more than a whirl-a-wind. I had to call a veritable storm to reach the coast quick enough to do any good, and storms were born not in the upper reaches of the sky but the deep ocean.

  Softly, carefully, I sent out a questing thought, skimming it above the slow wave tops the texture of black silk, past the warm current that kept my kingdom free from the worst of winter’s cold, past the rising and falling mountains of waves. I sent my thoughts past the curve of the earth to the deep ocean, where the rays don’t go, out to where the wind gathers power from the waves, which steal it from the moon and the tides born from the spinning of the earth and sun.

  I shivered as the warmth of noon enveloped me, coming from within. The glitter of the sun on bright wave tops sparkled behind my closed eyelids, burning my vision though the sun was down. I heard the lonely cry of the albatross. Here, I thought. Here is where devil storms are made. But around me was nothing but soft whispers of wind. There was no storm to control.

  You are mine, I whispered to the soft zephyr of wind coming from a sun-heated wave top. Wake. You will come to me.

  My soul found and tentatively gathered a stillpoint of heat. The gust rose and flitted from me, and I snatched it with my will, trying to hold it, trying to bring it to awareness. Wake.

  The gust rounded on me, turning into a breeze in its anger to escape me. I expanded my reach, soothing it. How dare I? it seemed to question when I surrounded it with my strength, claiming it as my own.

  My pulse leapt, and it grew, taking power from the waves under it and the hot sky above. The breeze rose to become a wind, tearing the tops of the glittering waves and pushing them away in its sullen temper. I felt myself stagger when venom spilled into my veins, strengthening my will. Renewed, I fastened upon the wind, demanding obedience. You are mine, I thought. You’re mine until I free you. Do what I say, and I’ll free you.

  It roared at me, whipping about and thundering its defiance. It pressed the waves flat for an instant, then pulled them high. Violent and wild, it tore at my thoughts, screaming at me as it tried to shred my will to break free. It grew to a murderous size, roaring up into the blue sky, falling back to smash into my thoughts.

  I held firm, demanding that it find me. With the strength of the punta coursing through me, I had it. It was mine. It couldn’t escape. The power of the spinning earth and rising sun was mine. Not until it did my will would I let it go.

  And it swirled into a sly obedience, settling into my thoughts with false platitudes of submission. Flattening out the waves, it raced to find me. Like a child with a lie, I could see its intent. It was going to kill me.

  I gasped, snapping back to myself and finding my hand atop the mast. Jeck was standing before me, his coat open and his pant legs rolled back down. I didn’t remember him getting up. “Tess?” he questioned, his wide shoulders hunched and his brown eyes concerned.

  A zephyr sent a curl to dance about my face. A chill took me at the thought of what I had woken. “I found the wind,” I whispered, knowing the zephyr was a vanguard of the storm I had called. It would follow the zephyr to me to fall upon us like lions.

  “You what?”

  “I found the wind.” The mast under my hand started to hum. My face tightened in alarm, and seeing it, Jeck bent his head to mine in worry. The force running in the mast doubled, and my grip upon it seemed to go numb. A breeze shifted my hair, and the slack sail tugged at its ropes and went still.

  “God help me,” I whispered, looking up at the stars against the fluttering sail. “Listen.” I put a hand higher atop the mast. The faint fear in me hesitated when the breeze whispered in my ear. It was coming. I could hear the zephyr that the storm had left in my mind—it would be the trail the storm would follow to find me.

  A ray broke the surface in a soft splash. My eyes rose from the trail of bubbles to Jeck’s. “It’s coming.” The feeling of satisfaction tightened about my heart, pulled by the strengthening wind billowing the sail to a soft fullness. I had to get higher. I had to be among it. Eyes on the sky, I gripped the mast and tried to stand atop the water casks.

  “Tess!” Jeck took hold of my left arm and jerked me back down. “What are you doing?”

  I stumbled, catching my balance easily. “Can’t you feel it?” I said, elated. I had captured the wind. It couldn’t hurt me. I was stronger than it.

  “Feel what?” He stared at me as if I had gone insane, but the coming wind had set my soul to resonate like a wire, making my blood hum in time with the waves under my feet.

  He was still gripping my wrist, and I tried to
tug free, failing. “The wind,” I said, having to think about the words before I said them. “Listen.” I threw my head to the sky. “It’s coming!”

  His lips parted, and his eyes grew wider. “Tess? Are you all right?”

  “Yes . . .” It was a soft hiss. It was coming. It pushed upon the water, and the waves tried to take its strength, but they couldn’t stop it. It was coming!

  My bangs fluttered about my eyes, and I closed them, smiling. “Let me go,” I whispered, and his hand dropped.

  A slow thrum lifted through me as I touched the mast, echoing between my palms and my feet, setting my soul to ring with the pulse of heaven and earth. The ocean was resounding with the waves building a hundred miles out, but here the water was still flat. The rays could feel it. They fed on the emotion, and I fed on theirs. My grip tightened on the mast. I had to be higher.

  “Tess!”

  Jeck yanked me backwards, and I would have fallen had he not caught me.

  “Let go,” I threatened softly, turning to find him holding my arm again.

  “You can’t climb the mast,” he said, his eyes angry. “You’ll break it.”

  “But it’s coming.” I twisted my arms until he let go. “I have to get higher.”

  “What’s coming?”

  “My wind.”

  His face went expressionless, glancing at the wind pushing against the water as if it was a bad thing, not good. “Oh God, Tess. You called the wind.”

  The sail snapped firm against the ropes. My head came up, and I tasted the air. The glory of its power swept me as the first strength touched my skin. In my mind, the sound of whispering grew, the zephyr in me drawing it home. A strong gust hit us, streaming my hair back and pulling the ropes until they creaked. The raft shuddered, and Jeck fell to a half crouch, swearing under his breath.

  I couldn’t help it. I sprang for the mast. I had to be in it. I had to be among it. I had called it, and it was mine!

  “Tess!” A hand gripped my dress and pulled me down. A low wave sloshed over the raft, making a cool current over my feet that went colder.