Princess at Sea

by Dawn Cook

  His hands dropped from my shoulders, falling to take mine in his. “Hush,” he admonished, seeing the ruin of my hands. “It’s part of the game. We’ll get them back. One game lost doesn’t mean the end of play. And if the danger brings the two of them together, which I imagine it has, then we have come out well.”

  “No,” I said, forcing myself to meet his eyes. They dropped immediately, and my throat closed. “I’m sorry,” I all but squeaked. “I can’t be your apprentice anymore.”

  A sob escaped me, and I held my breath lest any more follow it. My head pounded. I wanted to stay his student so badly, I would have lied to keep the position. But I couldn’t. Seeing him there with nothing but love in his eyes, I couldn’t lie to him. Not for anything.

  As he stood in a frozen surprise, I sank into a pew, my head falling forward to rest upon the back of the seat ahead of me. My life was over. There was nothing left.

  I heard him take a slow breath. Leather and wood creaked as he sat beside me. I pulled myself straight as he took my hands in his, turning them over to look at my palms. “You learned to use your hands,” he said. “Tess. I’m sorry. Captain Jeck said it would happen whether you wanted it to or not. I am so proud of you—”

  “Yes, but . . .” I interrupted, my chest clenching with an unbearable weight.

  “Did he let you think you had to be his apprentice if he taught you?” he questioned, a hard anger slipping into his quiet voice. His blue-gray eyes were narrowed when I brought my head up, my gaze swimming from unshed tears. “I bought his instruction for you in this matter. You don’t owe him anything.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, the pounding in my head making my eyes ache.

  He placed my palms together as if in prayer, his surrounding mine. “You willingly want to be his apprentice? Are you leaving my instruction for his? Tess—”

  His voice was low and even, and I heard the hurt in it. “No!” I exclaimed, pained and distressed. “Kavenlow, please.”

  He pulled my hand up and gave it a squeeze. “Duncan,” he said softly, his soft gaze full of regret and understanding. “You want to leave the game to be with Duncan. I understand. I told you that you could. The choice was always yours.”

  “Stop!” I cried, overwrought with guilt, the thick walls soaking up my outburst. It would be so easy to lie to him, and say that was it, but I couldn’t. “I don’t want to leave with Duncan. I want to be a player. I want to stay your apprentice. But I can’t, Kavenlow. I can’t!”

  He waited while I took a shuddering breath, then another. “I lost my tolerance to venom,” I whispered, unable to say it louder lest it break my soul to hear it. “It’s gone. One dart will kill me. I can’t be a player with that kind of risk. Jeck knows. He’ll use it against you when he can.” I looked up, not knowing what I would find.

  Bewilderment shone from my teacher. “Did Captain Jeck—” he stammered. “Did he elevate your residual levels of toxin when he taught you to use your hands?” He turned to look behind us at the chapel door. “We will wait until the levels drop.”

  “They aren’t going to drop,” I whispered. “It wasn’t Jeck. Please, Kavenlow. Listen. I’m trying to tell you.”

  His breath was fast and impatient as he turned so we were almost facing each other in the narrow space between the pews. My heart seemed to beat in my ears, and I didn’t understand why the wind in my head was silent and still when I was so upset, but I was glad it was.

  “The pirates tried to kill me by trapping me in a pit with a punta,” I said. My face twisted at the awful memory of it: the fear, the thought that I was going to die, the melding of our thoughts, and the pain of his existence when I taught that great cat of death.

  “Tess!” Kavenlow whispered, horrified.

  I couldn’t look at him, but I was fairly sure the warm drops of tears falling upon our hands were from me. “I tried to charm him,” I said, keeping my voice low so I could force the words past the lump in my throat. “I thought that if I charmed him and showed the pirates that he wouldn’t hurt me, that they would let me out of the pit.” I glanced up at the new fear in his eyes. “I almost did,” I said. “But they frightened him, and he broke from me, then he bit me. He was so frightened. All he wanted was to be out.”

  “You were bitten?” The wonder in his voice brought my gaze to his, and he ran his attention over me as if looking for it. “You survived a punta bite?” he asked. “My God, Tess. Where? How long ago? And you walked from Yellow Tail?”

  I touched my shoulder, and his gaze sharpened in understanding for why my dress was being held together with cord and string as well as why it was rimmed with the brown stains of blood that the seawater couldn’t remove. He reached out, hesitating until he saw the permission in my eyes, then unlaced the temporary fix with his trembling fingers.

  “Jeck saved my life,” I said, staring at the red triangle in the stained-glass window. I was numb and empty, having told my worst fear to Kavenlow. There were no decisions now that were left for me to make. I had only today to live for.

  “He was there?” Kavenlow said, his fingers gentle as he undid the knots. “He was there and didn’t stop them?”

  “He wasn’t there,” I breathed, not caring when Kavenlow caught his breath in dismay when my shoulder came to light in the dusky gray of the sanctuary. I wondered what was different that Kavenlow could unfold my dress to bare my shoulder, and I couldn’t let Jeck watch me do it on my own. “Jeck was on the Sandpiper trying to find us,” I whispered.

  Kavenlow was silent. I tensed when his fingers traced lightly beside the scars, evaluating how much they had healed. “Tess,” he said softly, gathering the ends of my dress back together and settling back. “How could he have healed you if he was on the Sandpiper?”

  “Through a dream.” Of its own accord, my hand rose to cover my bite to hide it again. “I was dying from the venom, but it threw me into a prophetic dream.”

  “Are you sure?” he asked, his brow worried and pinched.

  I nodded, remembering being tied to the mast of Jeck’s raft, the emotions of anger and frustration riding high in me. “One came true already.”

  “There was more than one?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, remembering. “One wasn’t a dream, though. I was Jeck, on the Sandpiper. And I pointed the way to the island through him. It was real, because he dosed himself on venom to try to maintain the link we had, and we landed together in the same dream.”

  “You shared the same vision?” Kavenlow went white behind his graying beard.

  I ran my fingers over the grooves in the pew ahead of me, feeling the sharp smoothness of the lines. “It was the venom,” I explained, though he had probably figured it out for himself. “And it wasn’t like the first dream. He was as aware as I was. After I told him I’d been bitten, he tried to heal it.” I felt myself blush, hoping it was too dark to see. “Of course we ruined any chance of seeing the future correctly,” I said, trying for a flippant air. “But it worked. When I woke up, I was alive.” My gaze went distant, remembering it.

  Jeck had saved my life. For what? It was over except for what came now day by day. My hand dropped from my shoulder to lie still in my lap.

  Kavenlow watched me with wide, worried eyes. “It looks well healed. How long ago was it?”

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said softly, not caring, then realizing he did, I thought for a moment. The moon was almost full now. It had been a waxing quarter when I had gazed at it from the bottom of the pit. “Five days ago?” I said, surprised. It seemed like forever.

  “It looks two weeks old,” he said, and I nodded.

  “If the last dream is anywhere accurate, I’ll live long enough to have Jeck take me prisoner in the woods again,” I said, telling myself I didn’t care. “Shouldn’t be too much longer, by the age of the scar. It almost matches that in the dream.” My voice rose up high at the end, and I made fists of my hands. My right hand ached, but I clenched it as hard as I could, fighting the tears
.

  “Tess . . .” Kavenlow soothed, putting a fatherly arm across my shoulders and pulling me close. “Don’t cry. Those dreams can’t be believed.”

  “I’m not upset about the fool dream!” I said around a hiccuping sob. “I can’t be a player anymore.” I started to cry, hating myself for it.

  “Listen to me,” he said firmly. “We don’t even know what your tolerance is. It might not be so bad.”

  “It was a punta bite!” I cried in frustration. “I should have died. I have so much venom in me that I almost killed Jeck in a flash of annoyance. I can’t control it, Kavenlow!” I exclaimed, coming out with the worst of it. “It’s fighting me. It’s too much. And it’s not going away. The venom fixed itself into my healing tissues. It spills out into me when I get angry.”

  I sobbed as Kavenlow pulled me closer and held me as he used to when I fell from a horse. “Shhhh,” he soothed. “It’s never as bad as you believe. Slow down. Take a step back. We’ll go carefully until we know just what happened. Your tolerances will fall.”

  “They aren’t,” I said around my sobs. “It’s replenishing itself. Jeck accidentally fixed the venom into my wound as it healed. It’s there, replenishing itself just as it does in a punta. Even if I never taste toxin again, my residual levels won’t ever drop. I’ll never be rid of it. Never.” The tears flowed freely now, and I let them fall. I had wanted to be a player. I abandoned a life with love in it to have it, and now . . .

  He held me as I cried, knowing that the tears weren’t just for Contessa and Duncan, knowing they weren’t for the days of hunger and uncertainty I had endured, or the pain and fear of my death. They were for saying good-bye to what I had been promised, to what I had pointed my entire life toward.

  Though Kavenlow had meant to be reassuring, I knew that I could never be a player. My life with him was over. He would take another as his apprentice to succeed him in the game. There was no choice to be made. It was done.

  Twenty-one

  I pushed the food around on my dinner plate, the muted conversation between Jeck and Kavenlow all but unheard and uncomprehended as I sat in the small private dining room between the kitchen and the large banquet hall and pretended to eat. It had been designed as a staging area to prepare food for large gatherings, but those gatherings had been so far and few between that my parents had turned it into a casual dining hall. Tapestries decorated the stone walls, and torches lit the windowless room. My eyes lingered on the brightly lit fireplace where I had hid from Jeck a bare half a season ago, and I went more melancholy still.

  In the few hours that I had been back in the palace, I had been brushed, combed, washed, dressed, primped, and fussed over until I all but shouted at Heather to leave me alone. I loved her dearly, but her unending prattle had seemed to incite the wind in my head instead of soothe it as Jeck’s voice did, until it was as if the two of them were carrying on a rapid, excited gossip that neither of them were listening to.

  Having been at my limit, I had told her in a very soft voice to please close her mouth and not open it again. She had pressed her lips together and not said another word, but my scalp still hurt from her yanks as she put my brown curls into my usual topknot.

  There were no darts in it; Kavenlow had ransacked my room while I was bathing and removed every drop of toxin, even the small vial I had thought he hadn’t known about tucked in the hole within the foot of my bedpost. It had left an aching hurt, as if he mistrusted me. In silent protest, I had fastened my second-best bullwhip around my waist—disguised under a filmy scarf of silk—and tucked my throwing knives away in various places. But I didn’t need them. I could kill anyone but Jeck with a touch.

  My gaze dropped to my hands, seeing them trembling slightly. They looked no different—browner and thinner than they used to be, the nails trimmed to nothing from Heather’s trying to even them out—but they could kill a man more surely than darts. My stomach clenched, and I pushed my plate away to set my napkin aside.

  Kavenlow met my eyes across the narrow table, his brow raised and his fork paused halfway to his mouth as he continued to talk to Jeck. Sighing, I replaced my napkin on my lap and pulled my plate closer, pretending to eat so he could properly finish his meal. Normally we didn’t adhere to political niceties when in a setting as informal as this, but Jeck was here, and apparently Kavenlow wanted to follow the royal axiom that everyone is done when the ranking royal is. I didn’t question why. Kavenlow had his own reasons for everything he did. It might be as simple as him wanting to force a few more bites down my throat, but I was betting it was to remind Jeck I was the ranking person here. Me, the useless apprentice.

  The masculine murmurs of talk between bites of food had slowly calmed the voice of the wind in my ear until its buzzing and chortling vanished. Basking in the blessed silence, I closed my eyes and put my elbows on the table, ignoring Kavenlow’s harrumph to remove them. My fork was dangling from my fingers so he could eat if he wanted. It didn’t seem right to be dining on honey-soaked veal when my sister was choking down cold biscuits and muddy water.

  Captain Rylan and Mr. Smitty had left long before sunset, the former confident and mistaken, the latter frightened and wise. With me safe and Jeck available to help effect a rescue, Kavenlow had agreed to pay the ransom. I think he was planning to use the carrot of money to get closer to them. The pirates would be stupid to not suspect something, and though overconfident, Captain Rylan wasn’t stupid.

  The two pirates had left hours ago amid a bristle of guards, escorted back to their ship where they were now under the watch of young sentries, men too old to fish, and sly, clever street women well versed in using their wits and their powers of observation. We were just waiting now to hear when and where to take the ransom.

  A sigh shifted my shoulders, and I jumped when my fork slipped from my fingers and clattered onto my plate. “Sorry,” I said, frowning when Jeck and Kavenlow continued their conversation unabated. My frown deepened when I realized their talk had turned to me.

  Jeck pointed a fork at Kavenlow, looking comfortable and relaxed in his clean Misdev uniform as he sat across from my teacher with his hair washed, styled, and smelling of cedar. “You can’t even begin to speculate on her possible higher tolerance,” Jeck said as if I weren’t in the room. “It would be a great disservice to discount the possibility that it’s lower than you think. She was performing high-venom manipulations shortly after being bitten. The prophetic dreams alone used a great deal of toxin and would have washed much of the poison from her body immediately, giving her an apparent lower dose. And I can’t begin to guess how much venom was pulled from her to join our thoughts so closely that she was able to point the direction the pirates had taken them by shifting my arm.”

  Kavenlow hesitated, my gut tightening at the alarm in his eyes when he leaned over his plate to Jeck. “Possession?” he stammered. “As can be done with animals? She—”

  “No,” Jeck interrupted, and the knot of tension eased in me. Jeck took off his feathered hat, setting it down beside his wineglass, his fingers resting on the rim of black felt. “Her thoughts slipped into mine for an instant,” he said carefully, his eyes flicking from Kavenlow to me and back again. “I allowed her to move my arm. It wasn’t possession. I was always in control. I’m sure it was due to the high levels of free venom in her at the time.”

  I returned to the memory of our thoughts mingling when the pirates had taken the Sandpiper. The slight tightening of Jeck’s brow told me to keep quiet about it. It hadn’t been possession, either, but the fear Kavenlow had shown at even the suggestion kept my mouth shut.

  The tip of my teacher’s fork touched his plate. He was watching me, and I wondered if he had seen Jeck’s silent admonishment for me to be silent and my acceptance to take direction from him: a rival player, not my master, a man who would play upon my fears for his own gain. I was so foolish.

  “I’ve never heard of that possibility, even with the oldest players,” Kavenlow said, and I tried to
hide my guilt.

  Seeing me quiet in indecision, Jeck turned away and frowned. “The point is that she used so much venom so quickly after being bitten that she may have brought her levels down to a reasonable limit, even if they are replacing themselves. You don’t know unless you run a few trials. It would be remiss to waste the opportunity to explore what she can manage, to ignore the possibility to see what she is capable of, or to see what the retired players can do that they don’t tell us. But to remove her from the game entirely?” He pointed his fork at me though his avarice-filled eyes never left Kavenlow’s. “That is the move of a timid, foolish man.”

  My eyes went to Kavenlow at the insult. His suntanned brow furrowed, the only show of his anger. “I will not risk Tess’s life to find out what she can do,” he said tightly. “She’s a person, not a dog or a horse. She’s out of the game.” His blue eyes finally met mine, full of a pity that made me nervous. “Temporarily, Tess. Your residual levels will fall. I don’t understand why they haven’t started to drop already.”

  Jeck set his table knife down with an excessive amount of force. “I told you why. It’s fixed in her tissues and replenishing itself. Ignoring a fact because you don’t like it is going to get her killed.”

  “And speaking to me like that at my dinner table is going to get you incarcerated,” Kavenlow shot back, a lifetime of protocol keeping his voice soft and him unmoving in his chair, though his brow was tight with anger. “No player can renew venom.”

  Sighing in exasperation, Jeck settled back in his chair. “A punta can. I didn’t know fixing the venom in her tissues to slow down its release into her body would result in it finding a suitable home and allow it to reproduce itself. But if a punta can do it, why can’t a person?”