After a while she set the box aside and began to fiddle with other items—the ropes of the boat, the canvas of the sheet propelling her along with the wind, and the circular object she checked often to ensure it still lined up the way her mother showed her.
Her mother…why had she not also climbed aboard the boat? Surely it could’ve stayed afloat in the water with just her mother’s slight weight added. Was it in allegiance to Effie, to try to help the girl? Deliverance pondered this option, letting it sift through her mind like a colander sifting beans, and finally discarded it. Her mother seemed fairly indifferent to Effie, even though she and Deliverance were friends of a sort. Her attachment to Effie was no more than a passing interest in her daughter’s friend. So why sacrifice herself to the villagers who were sure to chance upon her eventually?
The sun crept steadily into the sky as Deliverance tinkered with the boat. She found the boat had a sort of tail with a handle, which she could manipulate to cast the boat slightly in either direction. It would come in handy if the little circle object stopped lining up just so.
Sometime around midday it became apparent shade would be a necessity to hide from the God of Horizon’s fierce overhead glare. She fashioned a sort of tent from the sacks stored on the boat and extra twine, not daring to fiddle with the large canvas sheet propelling her forward just yet. As she tucked herself away from the burning rays, she pondered this Lord…Doctor Asher? What sort of man was both a lord and a doctor? She had no concept of what doctors were, really, except for the tales told of the Outside. From what she understood they were healers, something like Cat. But they could not possibly use magic to heal, so Deliverance was not sure what use they would be beyond the brewing of teas and mixing of poultices. She was vaguely aware that a lord in some of the Outside was considered a sort of nobility. How and where that fit into the world, she had no idea.
As she pondered the Outside, she was struck with a sudden fear. The men in the village, whose job it was to relay information from the Outside, often told stories of marauders and pirates. They were evil, hungry men who stole from the weaker, raping and pillaging. More than once as a girl, Deliverance had wondered if it was just a scare tactic to keep anyone from wandering too close to the beach. It was an idle threat to her, as she and her mother spent many a night conducting rituals on their own beach to the Hunter God and the God of Horizons. Her tacit ignoring of the men’s tales now struck her as perhaps unsound. What if pirates were real? What if they were abroad on the very same waters she was now cast adrift? The thought left her queasy, and the unrelenting sun did not help.
She wondered how long she would remain drifting until she made landfall. And when she did, how would she go about finding this Lord Asher? Oxdale University…that must be some sort of place. It sounded like a place of learning of some kind but she had never heard of it in the tales of the Outside related by the men. They were often too fascinated with the wars of this kingdom and that, marriages and exotic women, and only expounded upon that which grabbed their fancy. It was only when they were deep in their tankards that the women could pull other information from them, but by then the related details were shoddy at best, in slurred curses and misremembered statements.
Deliverance yearned for Effie’s counsel. If anyone could remember such a place as Oxdale being mentioned, it would be her. She would be able to coax all the needed details from the men about Lord Asher and this place where Deliverance was supposed to find him. But Effie was back in Nar, most likely about to be sentenced to labors…possibly alongside her mother for aiding in her escape. She was branded now like Effie. Even though Deliverance felt a certainty in her that she was not like Effie in her apparent sexual affinity for women, she did not find she minded being labeled alongside her friend. If the villagers were so ignorant as to paste a label across the bosom of her friend, then she too would wear it proudly. Who cared what they thought, the ignorant, lousy lot of them? They were only trying to supplant Effie because she held a dangerous amount of sway over too many of the men.
But Deliverance knew Effie would not use her power for anything other than the good of her friends and her fellow women. She was not a conniving person, nor ill intentioned. She often brought meals to those in need, helped new mothers with their housework with naught in return. This woman deserved no condemnation. The indignity of it singed Deliverance’s mind with fury. Now her mother, too, was implicated in the whole mess.
With a growl, she flopped back on the pile of grain sacks and cast an arm over her eyes to block the sun. Her mother was an exacting woman. She would not have told Deliverance to find this Lord Asher person if she did not know he could aid her situation. There was nothing left for Deliverance to do but to find him and beseech him for help.
God’s teeth! What did she know of the Outside? For all she knew they did not even speak her language, Anglish. She pondered this thought, chewing on her salty, chapping lips. No, they must at least some speak Anglish because the bird messages received by the Bird Master could be read by him and the other men. It was not likely the men all knew some strange tongue and kept it from the women. Otherwise Effie would have tickled it out of one of them by now. Even her mother occasionally received the rare messenger bird in the form of a Magpie, the oily black with a dollop of cream. Although she tried to conceal the fact she got messages, Deliverance doubted her mother could conceal knowing an entirely separate language.
No, there would be someone who could understand her…if she ever saw someone. As the sun slid across the sky, Deliverance was beginning to question whether or not she would find a person, pirate or not, Anglish speaker or no, ever again. She was the smallest kernel of corn bobbing in this vast pot with no other soul in sight.
The God of Horizons built his empire and tore it down three times as Deliverance swayed along in her little rind in the great salty water-desert. She conserved her food and water the best she could but was soon desperate for moisture. Her tongue gathered the vestiges of dew in the morning from the canvases, hungrily sucking the fresh water from the grimy tarps. Her lips became swollen and craggy and her skin ached with the rays of the sun, sloughing off even though she hid from its gaze under the tarps during the day, pulling the sleeves of her homespun linen, divided skirt shift as far down as she could to cover herself. She prayed for rain even though she was afraid too much would fill her rind and cause it to drop to the bottom of the sea.
In her feverish state, she began to hallucinate. Images of her stony cottage home, emerging from the side of the mountain danced across her crusted eyelids. She daydreamed about her time running through the forests on her and her mother’s side of the isle. There she felt as agile as a cat, as stealthy as a fox, flashing through the trees. Her days were spent in a feral freedom only granted to, aside from her mother, who shared her taste for stretching her limbs amongst the limbs of the trees. Deliverance would run, and jump, and climb, and swing until her heart could veritably leap out of her chest. She would careen through the brush, feeling the winds sweep through her locks just to taste the feeling of almost-flight. Pining for those moments, for the solitude of her forest, the manes of her wooly ponies, and the arms of her mother, Deliverance tossed and turned.
As she slipped further into a feverish state of dehydration and hunger, the curious box continued to blink.
***
Deliverance startled awake at a
huge whooshing sound. Her rind-boat plummeted as did her gut, and she felt the spray of salt water across her prone face as a large shadow enveloped her boat. She was too feeble, she found, to sit up, and the shadow soon vanished. Had she had another fever dream? She thought perhaps her mind was playing tricks on her again. She had seen both Effie and her mother earlier, riding ponies across the waves as easily as if they were cantering on the grassy fields outside the villages. But the images blinked away if she tried to focus her bleary eyes too closely on them. She remembered once as a child babbling about a dark-haired man in a fever-dream before her mother’s healing potions and a flick of her green fire cooled the fire of infection burning in her. These mirages had the same ethereal feel. Perhaps she was also imagining the whooshing sound. She shut her eyes and was beginning to drift back into the corners of her mind again when a smaller shadow encompassed her face.
Squinting, she looked up to see the outline of a man against the backdrop of the sun high in the afternoon sky. She must have been passed out firmly, for she never felt his boots drop onto her small boat nor the boat bob to compensate for his added weight. She groaned and tried to move but found her limbs uncooperative.
“Jesus Christ! You look like something out of a renaissance festival!” A deep, masculine voice with an odd lilt became paired with the shadow outline in the sun. She tried to reply but all that came was the rasping of her windpipe.
“Right…sorry it took so long to find you. We weren’t expecting a distress call, Cat…oh. No. You are certainly not Cat. You are far too young. Bloody hell. What is going on? Christ, you’re in no state to answer. Let’s get you fixed up then, up you go.” The musical voice spouted nonsense at Deliverance and the shadow man changed angles so she got her first view of the owner of the odd voice. He seemed to be pawing at her, lifting her limp form. How strange, she thought.
A pair of deep brown eyes assessed her from a square, chiseled face of a man of perhaps late twenties to early thirties. A messy spray of black hair jutted out from his head like the spikey tufts of down pulled from a cattail. Before Deliverance went unconscious completely, her last thought was, pirates are really quite handsome.
CHAPTER 6
Deliverance
The sands sifting in her brain slowly abated, their ringing and raining slowing as she regained awareness. She allowed the pins and needles to trickle out of her fingers before flexing them slightly. As her thumbs brushed the fabric of her bed, Deliverance became all too aware that this was not her bed at all. The linen was much too fine, almost alienly so. With a rushing gasp, her eyes flew open and she struggled to sit.
“Hey there. Easy does it,” came the familiar voice again. The pirate materialized out of the shadows.
Deliverance was in some sort of cabin, but the swaying let her know they were still very much out at sea. A curious torch lit the room with more light than a fire normally would shed, but still left the corners of the cabin shrouded in darkness. She pushed herself up to lean with her back against the wall and regarded her captor. The nearness of him caused a wallop of panic in her heart, which she hoped was not betrayed in her face.
He edged closer, hands outstretched in supplication as if to show he rendered no threat. Deliverance tested her voice but found it stolen by the salt and the sea.
“Here, have a glass of water,” the pirate offered, filling a clear, glass vessel with liquid from a delicate urn perched upon a wooden stand. Deliverance accepted the drink without touching the man’s hands, her own trembling slightly. She noticed he had curious designs in ink crawling up his forearm, revealed by his lifted sleeve as he stretched to hand her the glass. Very pirate-like indeed, Deliverance thought. Well, pirates were notorious for having information. Perhaps this scoundrel would know of Lord Asher. Deliverance drank thirstily, coughing at first as her throat accepted the moisture anew.
When her thirst was slaked, she cupped the glass to her and tucked her legs, still clad in her salt encrusted divided skirts, beneath her on the soft bed. She regarded the pirate with a wary yet assessing gaze. He seemed amused by her perusal of his features. Now that she was in this situation, her fears had no purpose in her survival, and she must set them aside.
“Feeling better, are you?” he asked. She did not answer but merely nodded, waiting. Deliverance wondered how Effie would go about drawing the needed information out of the pirate, but then set aside the idea. While Effie did not necessarily have to use her sexual prowess to obtain information, the merest hint or suggestion from her was enough to cause men to fly to her aid. Deliverance did not have an ounce of that gift. She did not have the slightest clue as to how to begin to converse with this thief of the seas, much less turn the conversation to her advantage. Oh, how she missed Effie…and her mother for that matter.
“Yes, well, sorry about all that. It took us a while to navigate out here. We were not expecting a distress call. In fact, I’d be very curious to know how all this precipitated,” the pirate said, after pausing a moment. He reached over and pulled up a chair beside her bed so that he sat facing her, the construction of which was a curious mix of metals and wood.
“Did I call out in distress? How could you have possibly have heard me?” Deliverance asked curiously, letting the suspicion in her voice be plain.
“Did you…? Your beacon was on…and the state we found you in…well…” the pirate stammered, obviously not knowing what to make of her.
“Beacon?”
“Oh, dear Lord.”
“Lord…yes, that is the person I am seeking! Lord Asher. Do you know of him?” Deliverance asked, eagerly sitting forward.
The pirate stared at her, confounded. Perhaps there were limits to knowledge of pirates after all, Deliverance thought. This one seemed very strange. Perhaps touched in the head a bit despite his handsome face.
“Do I know Lord Asher? Bloody hell. You have absolutely no idea, do you?” the pirate exclaimed, looking at her in wonderment as if she were some sort of oddity.
“We are not acquainted, pirate. But it is him I seek.” Deliverance sniffed, annoyed at the man’s obtuseness.
“Pirate…? You think I am a pirate…” the pirate stated slowly, a large grin blooming across his attractive face. It made him seem almost wolfish in nature.
“Well…are you not?” Deliverance demanded, perturbed. To this the man, most curiously, burst into raucous laughter. When she did not join in, he attempted to smother his amusement, but scarcely succeeded.
“Of sorts…I am a sort of pirate, I suppose,” the sort-of-pirate admitted. “My name is Jack. Jack Quentin. At your service, madam.” He extended a hand from his inked arm. At least this was a mutual gesture Deliverance understood.
She took his hand in hers and was about to reply with her own name.
And then flames shot from the tips of her fingers.
***
“FADES!” She shrieked in alarm.
“CHRIST!” He yelped, ducking just in time to avoid singing the tops of his tufty hair.
“What is going on?!” she cried, as he reached for her hands to point them into the center of the room, obviously attempting to keep her from lighting the bed, and herself, aflame.
“Just relax!” he commanded, a firm grip on her hands—miraculously, because they mus
t’ve been white hot.
“Relax?! THERE ARE FLAMES SHOOTING FROM MY FINGERS! WOULD YOU RELAX?” Deliverance screeched. The pirate…Jack… shook her hard enough to make her teeth clatter up through her arms.
“Watch,” he commanded her again, and then slowly released one of her hands, leaving the remaining one firmly affixed to her flaming ones. With his free hand, he flicked his fingers nimbly in front of her face and the green light of magic sizzled into a burst of small, controlled yellow flame. Then with a snap, he extinguished the fire.
Impossible! Deliverance was dumbfounded. Apparently, she was surprised enough to loosen her focus so that the flames pouring from her own hands tempered slightly. With a breath, she managed to allow the fire to wink out completely.
“What…. what just happened?” she stammered unsteadily. Jack the Pirate’s one hand remained firmly atop her two, as if he were not entirely sure she would not attempt to burn his ship from bow to stern.
He did not reply right away. Instead, when he finally met her eyes, his were full of amazement. “So, it is true. Fascinating!” he exclaimed. And then, becoming more aware of himself, he removed his hand swiftly from hers.
“What in the Fades is true? Do you mind telling me exactly just what in the Gods’ teeth is going on here?” Deliverance demanded, her nerves worn to their absolute end. Had her name gift finally surfaced? It could not be so…Deliverance certainly was not code or a foreign tongue for Scorch-the-Pirate or Burn-down-Things. Her mother would have a care, as independent as she was, to not name her something so…volatile. So dangerous.
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