Stemming the Tide

by Rosie Scott

  I laughed, impressed by her good humor despite her upset state. We took a break from drinking to help Kali and Jayce to their room so they could rest and recover. Afterward, Koby and I took the seats the two women left, and Hassan gave Koby his ale without taking a sip to order something else now that Kali couldn't mock him for it. After the others saw the various negative reactions to the Alderi brew, the only remaining crew member who agreed to try it was Hilly.

  “I'm gonna drink it,” Hilly informed us, shifting her weight on her stool until it wobbled. Her thick boots kicked through the air in front of her seat like a child's; she was far too short to settle them on a rung. “If it's such a pain to drink it's gotta be good for ya,” she explained. “Maybe all that burnin' means it's sloughin' off yer insides. Clearin' yer body of toxins, like.”

  “Most people need their insides,” I commented with a smirk between swigs. “I wouldn't consider organs toxins.”

  “Ya know what I meant,” Hilly scoffed.

  “Do I, love?” I teased. “I can never understand a word you're saying with that accent. I imagine drinking this ale will make it worse and you ever more endearing.”

  “I don't know what it is about ya insultin' me that heats my loins,” Hilly muttered loudly like a complaint.

  “Me neither, but that's why I do it,” I replied, wiggling my eyebrows at her.

  Hilly needed no more encouragement. With a determined expression, she held her mug with both stubby hands and started drinking. Though she lowered the drink a few times to take a breath, she finished every drop. Her big eyes went glassy with the onset of inebriation. While staring at the bar like it moved, she blurted, “Yer right, Captain Ham-some. I need my organs but I ain't gonna have none in the morm-in'.”

  Koby and I snickered like juveniles. Vallen chuckled, ran a hand through his hair, and said, “Well, at least she finished it.”

  Hilly poked at her mug until it slid away from her a few inches at a time. She asked, “Cam I sleep here?” Without waiting for an answer, she clunked her head on the bar.

  “Watch her,” Koby said to Hassan. Considering Hilly's short stature, we didn't want her falling off her stool.

  With most of the arguing, jokes, and goading over, the noise level of the tavern fell considerably. Our group occupied every spot at the bar, so other customers drank at the tables scattered throughout the floor. Their ongoing conversations mixed and dulled into background noise. Oftentimes in similar situations, I eavesdropped on gossip and discussions just because my superior hearing meant I could. But now that we were in Jeremoth's tavern for the first time in years, my mind wandered, lost in nostalgia.

  I thought of Aysel, trying ale for the first time, and overdosing on rempka the night Koby and I had our big argument. Remembering all these things made me realize just how far we'd come. Aysel had once told me I was full of potential and motivation. If there were an after-life, perhaps she knew of my travels, successes, and tribulations. If she did, I hoped I made her proud.

  Thinking of those I'd lost led me to feel immense gratitude for those I had left. Jeremoth's tavern was full of life, and many of its occupants were my friends and supporters. All the partying in the world couldn't make me forget the very real danger of the battles ahead. I would forever treasure times like these when everyone was jovial and safe, even if I didn't always voice it.

  I turned and clapped a hand on Koby's upper arm just long enough to elicit his surprised look. “I'm glad you're here,” I said simply. After awkwardly clearing my throat, I buried my face in my mug to drink.

  Koby smiled. Perhaps he, too, was lost in nostalgia. “Me, too, Cal,” he replied.

  Vallen glanced over after hearing our short exchange. “You two picked one hell of a tavern. Somehow I've missed coming here during all my stops in Silvi. I'm glad I got to try Alderi ale, even if I hated it.”

  “Jayce won't be so happy in the morning,” Jaecar commented.

  Vallen laughed and picked up his mug. “No. That might be good for us, though.” He took a drink of his favored weaker ale. “What's your plan after we dash Cale's dreams in the Forks?”

  “Take our new vessel to Killick,” I replied. “Trade. We're lucky all our men haven't left us yet.”

  “We're taken care of, Calder,” Jaecar said, leaning past Vallen to show me the sincerity in his eyes.

  “Sailing with you is better than basking in unemployment here,” Hassan added with agreement. “I mean, I'm not gonna turn down the notion of making gold, of course, but most of the places we've been for the past year don't deal in it, anyway.”

  “Yeah, well...” Koby trailed off, running a periwinkle finger around the rim of his mug. “We need reserves. As in, Calder and me. Any of you could leave at anytime and we'd be forced to run our voyages on a fraction of our profits. One of the detriments of equal shares.”

  “Nobody's planning on leaving,” Hassan pointed out.

  “Maybe not now, but minds change.” Koby nodded toward the stairs leading to the upstairs rooms where Kali and Jayce stayed. “Kali might decide to stay here when we set sail again. She and Jayce have been happy together for nearly a year and she's not getting any younger.”

  Hassan's eyes widened with bafflement. “What are you saying? That somebody like Kali will want to settle?”

  “She's human, Hassan,” Koby reasoned, “and she's turning thirty-nine within the moon. She's already middle-aged. She might decide to retire from sailing and take up work with the hunting parties of Tenesea to be close to Jayce.”

  “There's too much she wants to do overseas yet,” Hassan argued. The idea of losing his greatest friend clearly upset him, as did the reminder that Kali's race would naturally kill her far before any of us. “Kali still wants to hunt down Yasir in Nahara since we're already fighting slavers.” He grimaced, cursed under his breath, and admitted, “And she wanted to wait for the opportune time to ask you two about that, so now I feel like shit for blurting it.”

  Yasir. It took me a moment to remember the name because I'd only heard it once. Yasir Saab was the slave owner in T'ahal responsible for the coliseum deaths of Kali's mother and first love. I frowned as I drank more ale, wondering why Kali hadn't yet brought up the subject with us.

  “I'm not saying that Kali wants to leave us yet,” Koby said calmly. “I just have to consider the possibility. This crew will not look the same way forever. We'll continue losing people to death and career changes. You're the one who first taught us that.”

  “I know,” Hassan admitted, deep in thought. “Just...if Kali's thinking about it, she's said nothing to me.”

  Vallen intervened, “I don't mean to stir the pot, but I've overheard my sister trying to convince Kali of that very thing.”

  “What, staying here?” Hassan asked for clarification.

  “Yeah. Jayce is in deep.” Vallen raised his hand to summon Jeremoth for a refill.

  “You don't like Kali?” Hassan questioned, sensing Vallen's unease.

  “I like Kali a lot. Spunky, crude, easy to look at, treats Jayce right.” He shrugged. “But she's in a relationship with my sister. That never ends well. Give it another year or two. Even if Kali stays in the wildlands, she'll be joining your crew again after the inevitable fallout.”

  Hassan said nothing, but Vallen's take on the situation seemed to make him feel better.

  “Regardless, we need the gold, so we need to take a voyage to Killick,” Koby repeated from earlier. “Rik—our partner there—probably thinks we're dead at this point. Assuming he's still holding our cargo, we need to trade and build our gold reserves to prepare for the next shipwreck.”

  Vallen chortled. “I love how wrecking your vessels has already become so common you're planning for it.”

  Koby huffed with amusement. “It certainly keeps happening when we don't plan for it, so I decided we should be prepared.”

  “It's a good plan,” Vallen agreed. “So...you're forgetting about the orc, then?”

  “Vruyk? No,” I
answered immediately. “We just need time to recoup our losses and think of a way to take him and his whole pirate gang down.”

  “One ship at a time,” Jaecar suggested with a small laugh. “Give us a century and we'll handle it.”

  “Didn't Jeremoth say earlier that a bunch of mercenaries were bribed by a pirate copycat?” Vallen asked. “Seems to me that unemployment is so bad in Silvi mercenaries are jumping at the first sign of work even if it sacrifices their morals. Make a name for yourself and form a solid plan, and you might inspire people here to join you in the fight just so they finally have a chance to change things.”

  “But nobody knows my name and I'm awful at planning,” I jested dryly.

  Vallen chortled and slapped me once on the back. “Let's get to changing that, then. After we ruin Cale's day, I'll be more than willing to give you guys all the credit to help you out. Everybody loves ferris, right? If everyone knows your crew as the saviors of ferris, they will love you.”

  “Only a plan so ridiculously simple could work,” Jaecar agreed, clashing his mug against Vallen's in a toast.

  “Since we don't have a plan we'll steal yours,” Koby announced.

  “You must become your enemy to understand them,” Vallen reasoned with a twinkle in his eye.

  Fifteen

  After spending a night in Silvi and resupplying, we headed north. A wide river cut across the rainforest from north to south, delivering a flowing supply of water to the city before carrying the rest toward the Western Isles. Though the waterway split into arms that reached through the forest to nourish its superabundant ecosystem, travelers used its main segment as a guide to get to either side of the continent's pinched center below the Eteri border. The river was our constant companion as we traveled, keeping it on our right side.

  Vallen's suggestion of taking this route over splitting up in rowboats to cross a strip of neglected ocean cost us time but made travel convenient. The Silvi Rainforest sometimes grew hot, but its shadowed humidity made the conditions far better than traveling across the open ocean during the hottest season of the year. Koby and I sometimes forgot to apply our lotions because our skin retained most of its moisture from the natural habitat. We passed some of the areas we had traveled through after escaping slavery while searching for civilization, but everything looked so different now. No longer did we fear every breeze, plant, and ray of sunlight. This time when traveling through the forest, it felt familiar and like home.

  We ate better than ever, for many of the hunters from Tenesea hunted fowl and beast, and Jaecar's love of pole fishing introduced us to the delicacies of rare river fish. Koby found entertainment in testing his alchemy book knowledge by searching for and harvesting rainforest plants he'd only read about because they were rare near Silvi. It was during this time that Sage spent more time with Koby; the Celd revealed that he was an alchemy hobbyist due to his quest of finding a cure for his tumor in Celendar, but he knew little of plants outside the Cel Forest. Koby enthusiastically took to teaching Sage everything he knew. Unsurprisingly, Sage learned quickly.

  In mid-Red Moon, we reached the beginning of the river. The ocean stretched across the horizon in the west, but it slimmed into a narrow cove that ate its way northeast into the rainforest. The trip across the bay took a few days by rowboat, for we had to transport people and supplies utilizing only the three we brought with us from the paddy field lagoon. Next, we crossed the forested peninsula, coming to the final strip of ocean before our destination in the Forks. Though we hadn't seen signs of Cale's men yet, we were careful. From here on out, the rainforest could provide us no cover.

  The Forks were geographically unique to the rest of the wildlands. The odd shape of the main island inspired their name because it reached north with three prong-like arms that resembled a fork. Despite being closest to the rainforest, the Forks displayed a mixture of wetlands and rich dirt with outcroppings of rock as if inspired by Eteri's highlands to the north. The main island sat low to the water in the west where its marshes were soppy and well-fed by a spiderweb of rivers. It raised in elevation to the east in rolling hills; burly bushes and other low shrubbery cast shadows over bumpy but nutrient-rich soil.

  Under Jaecar's advice, we arrived on the Forks at night to cut down on the chances of being spotted by any pirate patrols. The main island was large and would take half a moon just to cross, but we expected the worst and assumed Cale was a step ahead of us on everything so we could be prepared. The walk inland was uphill and tiring, but assuming Cale's ferris operation was where Koby said it would be, we could scout the area and charge into battle from a higher vantage point.

  In early Dark Star, the crest of the midpoint of the Forks waited just before us. After leaving our equipment and most our people to wait below it, Koby, Jaecar, Hassan, Neliah, Cyrene, Vallen, and I went to the top of the final hill at nightfall to scout what awaited us on the other side. We'd still seen no signs of Cale's men; pessimistically, I wondered if we had traveled all this way to find nothing.

  Overcast starry skies did little to illuminate the descent to the wetlands before us, but it mattered not. Campfires and magic lamps lit up the marshes in splotches of glowing orange and cream. An overwhelming sense of vindication washed away all the worry that we were off track in our pursuit, for a budding ferris enterprise unveiled itself below.

  Rivers spread through the western Forks like overflowing varicose veins, pumping the land full of water. Cale's men struggled to tame the difficult terrain into paddy fields. Pirates had used tools stolen from the raided paddies to build compact bunds and level the underwater fields between them. Rows of stolen ferris plants called attention to a select few completed paddies along the eastern edge of the marsh. Much to my surprise, a few small ramshackle buildings sat upon pilings and man-made raised sections of land, seeming to serve as lodges.

  “Where did they get the wood?” I questioned quietly. I felt a hand pat my side and found Hassan offering me his binoculars. I took them gratefully, and Cale's base was suddenly magnified.

  “North,” Hassan murmured, directing me.

  I swept the tool to the right, following his direction. The lowland marshes evolved into a swampy forest near the northern edge of the island. They had chopped a few of the twisted trees down; splintered stumps dotted shallow water nearby piles of lumber.

  The pirates had evidently used the wood for the new structures near the marsh, but construction was slow; there weren't enough domiciles for the amount of men. Tents spotted patches of drier grasses. Ruffians slept in bedrolls on wooden platforms surrounding buildings, vulnerable to the elements but lacking options. Two dozen men worked on preparing two fields for planting. All but two were Alderi. Watching from their places on crates and leaning against buildings were people of various races and sexes with weapons in hand, prepared to quell any rebellions. My suspicion that Cale took the paddy workers hostage was evidently true.

  “They have no ship,” Koby whispered.

  I frowned and swept my view over the magnified land. I couldn't see farther than the swamps in any direction. “What? How can you tell?”

  “There's no galleon. I can see the ocean from here.”

  I glanced over to see Koby using Neliah's binoculars. Combining them and his superior eyes, he could see extraordinarily far, particularly from our vantage point.

  “I mean, it's possible they dropped anchor farther out than I can see, but you would think they'd leave the ship as close to the base as they could.” Koby swept the binoculars across the horizon, checking every nook and cranny of the land.

  Hassan shook his head in confusion. “They couldn't have left. There are too many people here. A galleon like Cale's takes a great crew to run.”

  “Many people working at the paddies are Alderi,” Neliah began, “and I remember very few in Cale's crew. It seems we've found the missing paddy workers, Vallen.”

  “Thank the gods,” Vallen breathed with relief. “So they are alive.”

  “Yet
, not all of them seem to be here,” Neliah continued. “You've said the northern paddies supplied work for hundreds. We found a few dozen dead, and there are a few dozen visible here. Even if we are to assume they work in shifts and the others are in those buildings, there are still missing men.”

  “Missing ship, missing men,” I mused. “These are slavers we're talking about, guys. It's not hard to figure out where they went.”

  “It takes a great crew to sail that ship,” Hassan repeated with more urgency. “Where did they get the men to guard these fields if they needed them to take the ship?”

  His concern was valid. I chewed my lip as I scanned over the land, searching for answers that weren't forthcoming.

  “Fuck it,” Vallen blurted. “There are a lot of things about this that don't make sense, but those paddy workers down there need our help. Let's attack first and ask questions later.”

  “Looks like the ideal time to attack is soon,” Jaecar said. “Things are quiet and many of the pirates are sleeping. Let's catch them unaware.”

  “I won't argue with that,” Vallen agreed, slowly crawling backward from the crest of the hill so he could stand below it without being spotted. “Let's transform back a ways so they can't hear us coming. If Cale has more beastmen in his crew, they'll have less time to react and transform.”

  The night deepened as we retreated down the hill and transformed in the valley between two inclines. Cries of agony and the cracking of bones pierced the air just to bounce off the surrounding hillsides back to our ears. Those who weren't shapeshifters drifted naturally to the back of our group, allowing beastmen space without risking injury to our own. Sage was the only exception; as we advanced back up the last hillside before the wetlands looking like a pack of beasts only pretending to be civilized, the knight walked beside me, resting most of his greatsword's weight on his shoulder. Sage seemed unconcerned about being on the frontlines; after all, he was trained for it, and based on his exploits against the mother afanc he'd be one of the few warriors who could stand his own against hostile beastmen.