Jaina need only blink to feel as if she were standing in Thunderbluff again, flush with victory and the optimism that often came with it. After all, they had just managed to rescue Baine Bloodhoof from the dungeons below Orgrimmar, a nigh impossible feat. And yet they had done it. Thrall had not shared her optimism, wary of her desire for a temporary alliance.
What’s different this time?
We are.
“People change,” Jaina said heatedly. She rolled her shoulders back, proud of that change, proud of who she had become, and who she believed him to be.
Anduin considered her words but withdrew further into the corner, holding out his hands to the brazier as if her words had somehow chilled him. The thick curtain of his yellow hair swung before his face, concealing his expression. “People do change, but I trust Alleria and Turalyon, despite what misfortunes have befallen them. Stormwind would not exist without them, they are woven into the very fabric of our kingdom’s tales.”
There would be no swaying him; that much had become clear. She turned to go, leaving him with one last murmured plea. “Clarity and time are the final editors of that story, Anduin, I would know.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Atal’gral
“What do you think of her? The Bold Arva! Say it with me: The Bold Arva. Has a certain ring, doesn’t it?” Flynn Fairwind cackled, slapping the mainmast vigorously as he turned his chest to the wind and breathed deep, a serene, almost religious glow about his face. “Christened her myself. The old name was—to be frank—rubbish. The Prowse. Can you believe it? I mean, I’m sorry. Pardon me? The Prowse?”
Mathias Shaw stared straight ahead, convinced that if he said nothing at all and ignored the sailor like a basilisk desperate for a glance then Fairwind would be forced to cease his blathering.
He was wrong.
“What even is a prowse? Blimey. Sounds like something you pick out of your teeth. No, it’s much better this way. Can you believe I won her in a dice game? Who would be stupid enough to wager this gorgeous girl?”
“You,” Mathias said without thinking it through. Well, in for a copper, in for a gold. “And you would be soused.”
“Yes. Yes! Absoluuuutely hammered! Ha!” Fairwind dissolved into further ridiculous laughter, doubling over as he gallivanted up and down the deck. “Well, well, well. You know me well, Shaw? Do a bit of digging before we came aboard? What does the dossier on me say, by the way? Devilishly handsome? Irresistible in every conceivable way? Crack sailor? Deadly with a blunderbuss?”
The significantly less glamorous answers would have to wait. Ca-crack. A fork of lightning, white as alabaster, split the horizon. A moment later, waves rocked the Bold Arva so hard, Flynn wrapped an arm and a leg around the mast to stay upright. Sailors began their calls. Whistles blew. Clouds the color of slate gathered thick and threatening just a few miles from the bow. Shaw tumbled to the railing, an old break in his shin screwing up tight enough to squeal. They were in for one hell of a storm.
“We should have another day,” Shaw spat between gritted teeth.
“Survival weather!” Fairwind was sober enough to shout. “Grigsby to the helm! Keep speed, my lads and ladies, aim for the flats! Rig out the storm sails and watch the decks, nobody overboard on my watch!”
Mathias didn’t dare relinquish his grip on the rail. He had seen his share of storms while posted in Kul Tiras, and they had taught him that only the cautious and wary survived. Light, but he despised sailing. Give him a good old solid office tucked away behind a false bookcase, a roaring fire and plenty of desk space the only true creature comforts a spymaster required. His stomach churned, his jaw clacked, his entire body protesting the sudden lurch of the ship as a particularly nasty wave broke against the bow.
“Tides be kind, I hope they’re quick enough.” Fairwind slid to the railing beside him, his lately acquired parrot pet struggling to flap to his shoulder, tossed hither and yon by the oncoming storm. “Honestly, this is very, very bad. If the storm sail isn’t up soon then we’re all well and truly f—”
A wave knocked the words out of Fairwind’s mouth, and both men found themselves shocked across the ship, Fairwind landing against the opposite railing with a pained grunt while Mathias had far less luck, his fingernails scratching along boards as slick as ice before he bypassed the railing and slid right off the edge of the ship, nothing but churning water beneath him. He watched a gnome holding a sail line soar overhead, mouth open in a scream, the sound of it drowned out by the thunder of twenty-foot waves.
Before Mathias could make the steep fall into the sea below, Fairwind managed to clamp a hand around his wrist and began to pull, but his chest slamming into the side of the hull left him breathless and seeing stars. Mathias collected himself, scrambling with his free hand for some purchase on the seams in the hull while Fairwind braced a foot on either side in the gap in the railing, heaving and sweating, cursing as he at last found the leverage to hoist Mathias back aboard.
“Below deck!” Fairwind shouted. “Now! You don’t have the sea legs for this, and I’m entirely too drunk. See? Nobody overboard on my watch.”
It was an undignified retreat to the stairs. The threat of another wave meant that crawling on all fours was the safest option. Mathias sprang to his feet the moment they reached the relative safety of the sheltered corridor leading below deck. Water washed across the boards at his feet, spilling down into the stairwell, though there seemed to be no signs yet of flooding.
When Mathias had traveled down the stairs a ways, Fairwind grabbed a passing sailor. To Mathias it seemed like chaos, yet every man and woman aboard went about their job diligently, even if it appeared as if they were all running in random directions.
“The flats…” Fairwind shook the sailor by his coat.
“The mist is thick, but Nailor up the crow’s nest spotted a gap. We’re bringing her around and threading it, then we should have a safe stretch heading north.”
It was a screamed conversation, but both men kept their calm.
“And Melli?”
The sailor grinned and nodded, sodden from head to foot. “Never seen speed like that in me life, captain.”
He was referring to Melli Spalding, one of the finest tidesages in Kul Tiras, transferred urgently from the Proudmoore fleet. At first she didn’t seem to fit in well with the crew, keeping to herself, a head taller than the average sailor aboard. But then Grigsby had produced a flute one night and Melli had come out of her shell, beguiling them all with a run of shanties so beautiful it left almost everyone in tears. Her voice rang out as crisp and haunting as a gust whistling off the Waning Glacier.
“Are we to survive this?” Mathias demanded, ducking out of the cramped stairwell and into the marginally taller corridor. He flattened himself against the wall to let a sailor pass. Fairwind jogged down the stairs to meet him, following as Mathias shouldered open the captain’s cabin, the view from the windows nauseating as the ship crested a wave and barreled back down.
“No, no, it’s all fine, Shaw. Completely fine. We live for storms like this, keeps us all on our toes.” Fairwind gave a barking laugh then wiped the saltwater out of his ginger mustache. “Hard to find a crew this fit. Melli and Nailor will bring us through, you’ll see.” Predictably, he crossed to the well-stocked liquor cabinet in the corner, carefully fishing out a bottle while the ship tossed like an enraged shardhorn.
“Just something to settle the gut,” Fairwind assured him, tossing back a healthy gulp from the bottle.
“I’m sure,” Mathias sighed. “We should have had more time.”
Smacking his lips, Fairwind kept the bottle, ambling over to the windows and watching the furious crash of the waves. It made Mathias sick to even glance at it.
“Maybe your source lied.”
“Maybe.” Mathias rubbed at his stubbled chin. “Or maybe this is just the opening
act, and the real show hasn’t even begun.”
“I…hadn’t considered that.” Fairwind clutched the bottle. “Well, if your source was right then this is indeed just a taste. The seas were meant to be impassable, yes? And ta-da! We have passed!”
His final word was punctuated with a crack and then an ominous scattering of shrieks and voices, finished with a desperate pounding on the door.
“I may have spoken too soon.”
“Enter!” Mathias roared.
The sailor they had passed going below deck skidded into the cabin, his clothes just as wet but also somehow singed.
“Fire!?” Fairwind slammed down the bottle and rushed to the sailor. He was a short lad, hardly more than twenty, with a pockmarked face and small but quick-moving blue eyes. “Fire, Swailes? How can there be fire?”
“L-lightning, captain, a-and—”
“Never mind!” Pushing him aside, the captain stumbled out into the corridor, and Mathias chased after him, curious to know just how a ship in the midst of a cataclysmic storm could also catch on fire. Lightning, obviously, but surely the waves would take care of any flames?
Above deck, they found fires spreading from the charred mainmast to the barrels piled below it. They had come through the rain and the waves, leaving the ship damp but vulnerable. Mathias himself knew how much gunpowder and pitch waited aboard to ignite and blow them sky high.
“Well, the fire was a surprise,” Fairwind admitted, tucking a curled forefinger under his chin.
Mathias might have warned him of the oncoming footsteps but didn’t, dodging as the woman batted Fairwind aside like a sack of feathers. Melli Spalding slid across the foam-slicked decks, back to them as she dropped her head, raised her arms, and with her curious tidesage magic brought water streaming up the sides of the hull before it cascaded gently across the deck. One by one the fires went out, cheers erupting from the sailors as the Bold Arva slowed, sailing smoothly out of the black-and-blue squall behind them.
“Well done, Melli! Well done!”
Mathias didn’t feel in the mood for celebration. He surveyed the damaged mast, the burned sails and smoking provisions, as well as the thickening storm growing like a cancer across the sound. They had passed into Zandalari waters, and he couldn’t help but think that the storm had been specifically summoned to keep them out. Who possessed magic like that? And where would they find them?
“Sir! Message for you, sir! Er, I mean, a shark…A thing for you, sir!” Swailes again, this time wet, singed, and carrying a wind-up shark, gnome technology fit for passing covert messages even at sea. Much trickier to spot than a carrier pigeon.
“Is it always like this with you?” Fairwind chuckled, watching Mathias crack open the shark, revealing a bundle of tiny rolled notes.
“These are fraught times,” Mathias muttered. “I don’t cease being spymaster simply because I’m on a boat.”
He trusted the seafaring sorts to see to the damaged parts of the ship, retreating back below deck to see what his spies had uncovered abroad. This was not the business one conducted in front of prying eyes, and while Anduin assured him that the entire crew had been carefully vetted, Mathias knew the operation had been put together hastily, not allowing much time for lengthy observation of the crew.
“Bit paranoid, are we?”
Fairwind had followed him and not subtly, banging into every door and wall available with his drunken weaving. He was going to use up all the usable air if he kept sighing so much, so Mathias simply charged ahead into the cabin, desperate for a relatively stable chair and a long think.
Taking the seat far, far away from the liquor cabinet, Mathias seated himself comfortably, tucked beneath the painted portrait of a one-eyed, four-toothed goblin. Bold Arva herself, the ship’s namesake, one of Flynn Fairwind’s goblin first mates, killed—allegedly—in a tragic harpooning accident.
Mathias listened to the return of the familiar mundane noise of the ship sailing at a relaxed pace, gulls crying outside the windows and the waves forming an almost hypnotizing rhythm that one had to lean into or risk seasickness. Unrolling his messages, Mathias found that Fairwind was not put off. No indeed, the pirate made himself comfortable, leaning back in a chair until the edge tapped the windowpane, his boots kicked up casually on the table.
“That from your girlfriend?”
Mathias snorted. “Hardly. Intelligence reports from my agents within the Horde.”
“Oooh, very spicy!” Fairwind giggled, nursing his beloved bottle again. Finally putting down the booze, Fairwind cleared his throat, reading the room. “Very paranoid.”
He regarded the pirate dryly above the first unrolled message. “Just because we signed an armistice with the Horde doesn’t mean we aren’t watching them. Only a fool mistakes peacetime for complacency.”
“So, then, what’s new with the Horde? Any betrayals a-brewin’?”
Mathias skimmed the messages quickly. They were written in a code illegible to anyone not trained in his specific style of shorthand. Efficient and cautious. He hadn’t been able to successfully embed enough agents to cover every single member of the new Horde Council, but had trusted them to choose their targets once they reached Orgrimmar.
Narsilla Keensight, codename Lancer, had chosen to focus her attention on Lor’themar Theron. Lancer, an old blood elf contact from the Uncrowned, had no loyalties to the Horde or Alliance, but only to gold, which Mathias provided her regularly. Her intelligence always proved worth the price. With a captive audience, Mathias read aloud the message, speeding along.
Lor’themar spends his days at study, though I often observe him gazing listlessly at nothing, then scribbling something in the margin of his book. Reading. Reading.
This was the way an agent marked down time when nothing of note occurred.
Another five days of reading. Still reading. No progress. At last I managed to access one of his tomes when he left to dine. It appears he is either composing poetry or notes of a more intimate nature. Beside a passage about holy energy he writes, “My dusk lily bends more each day toward the sun.”
Fairwind broke into laughter. “Dusk lily? Hm. I am…confused. Confused yet enchanted. Is there more?”
“Not about the flower, sadly. But she does describe an incident at the Horde Council meeting with the Zandalari queen. Something of real substance. An assassination attempt by a troll…So somebody within the Horde wishes harm against Queen Talanji.” Mathias set the message aside, pleased that he had managed to have eyes on the assassination.
“Could explain the storms,” Fairwind mused, running his finger idly in circles around the mouth of the liquor bottle.
“How so?”
“If someone wants the queen dead then maybe she put the whole continent on lockdown. Nobody out or in until they find the assassins.”
Mathias frowned. “That is…annoyingly reasonable.”
“Why, thank you.”
“This one is from a goblin contact, Krazzet the Bishop—”
Fairwind spat out half his swig of booze. “Krazzet? The Krazzet? I know Krazzet! Spooky little fellow liked to gamble in Freehold! Called himself the Bishop ’cos he would get three sheets and say, ‘Oh, lads, I’m a bit slopped’ but it just sounded like ‘I’m abrrshop!’ ”
Calmly, Mathias clacked his teeth together and forced himself not to kick the table out from under Fairwind’s feet. Problematically, the pirate was right. That exact fact existed in Kraz’s dossier.
“I miss that guy!” Fairwind went on. “Lost my old parrot Bongbong to him in a card game. Always wondered what happened to that bird…”
“Yes, well, Kraz thinks the assassination attempt really gummed things up for the Horde,” Mathias informed him, scanning the message and translating it. “The queen left in a huff. They’ve sent their own spies after her, a troll shaman called Zekha
n. Interesting. They must not be as solidly loyal to the Horde as we thought…”
“How did you get Krazzet to turn and snitch for you, if I may ask?” Fairwind smirked, derailing Mathias’s thought.
It had been so long ago, he struggled to recall. “Parrots. A weird amount of parrots.”
Shrugging, the pirate hugged the liquor to his chest. “He hasn’t changed a bit. Hang on, isn’t it a bit crass that they’ve sent a spy after that troll queen? She nearly died and now they don’t trust her? Maybe she’s in cahoots with Sylvanas, eh? That’s what we’re here to investigate, right? And if the Horde don’t trust her then maybe we’re all on to the same thing!”
He really didn’t have time to give an introductory espionage class, or time to point out that “we” weren’t on to anything, but Stormwind Intelligence was. But then again given their situation there was little to do but wait and strategize. “The Horde might not be our friends, but they’re not stupid. In my experience, a conspiracy is easy to spot once you know what to look for. They probably just sent a spy as a precaution. A smart one.”
There was a soft, nervous rapping at the door.
“Who wishes—”
“Yeah?”
Mathias glared at the pirate, but Fairwind was already grinning ear to ear, bouncing his boots gleefully on the table. The tidesage Melli poked her head in. Tall and sturdy, she had neatly braided her reddish brown hair in a crown across her head. Points of sunburn reddened her dark skin.
“Beg your pardon,” she murmured. “There’s another storm comin’ on. I wanted to talk to you about it, about this weather…It can’t be random, and this is no magic I know of. It’s like they know where we are, it’s like they sent these ragers just for us.”
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