by Sarina Dorie
“Yep.” Derrick stared into his plate of food, not touching it. His hair was cut shorter, cleaned up from the hack job he’d given himself for Baba Nata’s payment. His blue beard was still in place, making him look like a stranger. In a way, it was easier to look at him that way.
“He’s a bright lad. He’s always been an asset to our ship with his wind affinity, the big bag of hot air.” Captain Ermington winked when he said it, to show he was joking. “I can see why Prince Elric took such an interest in him and personally placed him aboard.”
I choked on the braised vegetable. “Elric placed you on board?”
Derrick pushed my water toward me. “His Highness was charitable enough to offer me a post.”
“Did Elric—Prince Elric—know what you had in mind when he saw you at the wedding?” I tried to sound curious, not to let annoyance leak into my tone.
The captain shrugged. “Never can tell with those Fae. Probably recognized the uniform at the wedding as one from the Silver Court’s fleet, though I did my best to enhance the old jacket to give it a more . . . retired appearance, in case anyone should spot me.”
One of the officers made a remark about the peg leg to the man sitting next to him.
“Another one of this boy’s brilliant ideas.” Captain Ermington nudged Derrick again. “Apparently we can’t be pirates without eyepatches and peg legs. Such romantic notions Morties think up!”
I moved the mutton around on my plate, not hungry but not wanting to look impolite and refuse it. “What happened to the real minister? My friend told me he died.”
“We paid him to take the day off,” Derrick said. “No one hurt him.”
“Couldn’t believe my ears when Commander Winslow relayed the news.” Captain Ermington waved his fork toward Derrick. “Didn’t think a minster would succumb to bribery. Your maid of honor must have thought it providence to find me outside his cottage—not knowing I had been waiting for her to show up.” He held himself taller, imitating himself in a rugged voice. “Said I, ‘I searched high and low for someone to confess my sins to. No other minister or priest be around. Then I find one, and what do you know? He up and dies.’
“That lady complained about needing someone to marry her friend, telling me I’d best get in line behind her because any minister she found, she’d get him first.”
That sounded like Vega.
“So I said, ‘Nay, you get behind me, lass. You don’t need a minister. Any old sea captain or airship captain will do for a legal marriage.’ And that’s true. She found me a place to dock our ship out of sight. As far as it was on the other side of the woods, it was on the school property. We were inside the majority of the wards.”
It hadn’t been luck that Vega had found a replacement. They’d planned it.
“You conned her.” I felt indignant for her.
“Just so. A fine shenanigan if I do say so myself.” The old man smiled, looking quite satisfied. “Can’t have made it this far without a few tricks up my sleeve now and again.”
The men around him laughed.
I still didn’t understand how they had gotten that close to the school. Khaba’s alarms should have gone off that intruders were there if any outsider approached the wedding. Unless he had been in on it.
“That’s how you got onto school grounds?” I asked. “You got Khaba to allow you through our wards?”
“Don’t know who he is. The young lady was fully capable of getting us through without no one else’s help. She gave me safe passage through the wards to the wedding. Had she been a bit less busy fussing over flowers and chastising people bringing in food, she might have noticed that I untied the threads of those wards and loosened them up enough that my men would be able to undo the rest. Only, I hadn’t accounted on how damned long it would take them.”
One of the men waved a forkful of mutton at the captain. “You say you loosened the wards, but it was still difficult to unravel. Even with Chewy One and Chewy Two, our experts on wards, we couldn’t make a hole large enough close to the actual wedding.”
One of the officers leaned toward me. “The Chewys are our resident sasquatches. Loverboy over here nicknamed them after some Morty film.” He jerked a thumb in Derrick’s direction.
Chewy for Chewbacca. Knowing Derrick’s love of Star Wars I wasn’t surprised.
“Our commander is a real comedian.” A female officer on the far end of the table shouted to be heard. “On April Fool’s Day, Winslow covered up the ship’s name and wrote Millennium Falcon over it, waiting to see how long before the captain noticed.”
“Only took me three days,” the captain said.
I was glad Derrick had made friends and was doing well. People appreciated his eccentric humor and must have respected him enough to go along with his foolhardy plan to play pirate and commandeer the ship for a few days. What worried me was the consequences of these actions. He’d been impulsive and reckless. In his rush to do good, he’d done a whole lot of bad.
I didn’t know who else might have been injured or killed. The journey to return to the school was going to be torment as I obsessed over the safety of my friends and students. For all I knew, the Raven Court had taken over the entire school while I’d been gone, and I’d be returning to a trap.
“Don’t you think there’s going to be an investigation by the Fae king, and you’re going to get into trouble?” I asked.
“Of course. That’s why we have the story about pirates appropriating the ship.” Captain Ermington sawed through his braised vegetables. “Anyone who blabs my favorite commander of all time was that pirate will have to answer to me.”
“Wasn’t like we were doing anything better,” a young man with saber-toothed incisors said. “The area we patrol is for Morties accidentally wandering into the Unseen Realm to ensure they don’t bring in any cell phones or electronics more than it is for the Raven Court. We hardly see anyone try to cross over.”
“This is the most action our crew has ever seen and probably will see,” the female officer said.
“And as it ended up, we were performing our duties, protecting the realm in service to His Majesty and his kin,” one of the officers said. “We fought off those harpies.”
“We came to the aid of the Silver Court!”
“We stopped a fair maiden from making the mistake of her lifetime and marrying the wrong man!” The man seated next to Derrick said, elbowing him.
I shook my head at them, mortified they thought they had done something good. “You do realize Prince Elric gave his approval—his blessing for this wedding to take place.”
The officers turned to each other, muttering how daft I was, how I must have been mistaken, or that Elric surely would have approved of their interruption to my wedding. One crew member asked Derrick if he thought I was telling the truth. The captain eyed me warily, but he held his tongue.
Derrick avoided my gaze.
I could see Derrick had thought he was doing something noble and good. He hadn’t understood that I loved Felix Thatch, though perhaps he did now. I wasn’t certain if I had convinced him.
What was harder to forgive was the danger the crew had brought down on everyone. From their jovial expressions, I could see they had no idea what they’d done.
“Have you at all considered how the Raven Court was able to get onto school grounds in the first place?” I asked. “Our wards are specifically designed to keep Fae out. They’re supposed to keep everyone but the students, staff, and parents off school property.”
“The Raven Queen was out to curse you,” Derrick said quietly. “She found out you were getting married and showed up at the wedding specifically to attack you.”
“Yes, but how did she manage to get in?” I asked through clenched teeth. “Our wards have always been strong enough to keep her out. But on the day she most wanted to get in, a day she surely would have spies inspecting and prodding our defenses, she found a weakness. She got in because yo
u made a door for her.”
The captain set down his fork.
The smiles on the faces around me faded.
“You don’t know that,” an officer said. “She probably was there already.”
Derrick bit his lip. Surely having attended the school as a student and then working as security, he understood the way wards and protective spells worked.
“You allowed the Raven Court to get onto school grounds. You endangered staff and students. I saw them attack my friends and colleagues. I don’t even know if my mom made it out alive.” I choked on the words.
“But we did save you from marrying that dreadful man,” the female officer said cautiously. “Now you can be with the commander.”
“I can’t ever be with Derrick! The Raven Queen cursed him so I can’t touch him.” I stood. “It wasn’t easy to accept Derrick’s curse, but I moved on and found someone else. I was in love, about to be married to someone who I chose to marry. Nobody forced me.”
I lifted my skirt over the danger of getting caught on the bench and ungracefully extricated myself from my seat. I inclined my head to the captain. “Dinner was delightful, Captain. Your hospitality is generous and without fault. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I need you to take me home at the earliest opportunity available. If you’ll excuse me.”
I removed myself from the table, though my movements were impeded by skirt, which I hadn’t realized had gotten caught on the frame of the bench. I stumbled, the fabric tore, and the back of my mom’s vintage wedding dress shredded away, along with a little more of my dignity.
I seated myself at the bow of the ship, my legs dangling through the railing as I watched the countryside pass by below. We sailed just underneath the cloud cover, a spattering of stars twinkling through patches above. Wind rushed against my face, loosening strands of hair from my bun.
The crew left me alone after dinner. No one wanted to come near me, whether it was because I was Alouette Loraline’s daughter or because of the uncomfortable conversation during dinner. I ignored the sounds of people talking from the deck. Men sang as they worked, most of their words lost in the wind.
This entire mess was my fault. I should never have gone to Derrick in his dreams and confronted him.
If only Elric could have told me I’d been the reason for the cranes, not Derrick, a few days sooner. Or if Thatch or Khaba hadn’t kept it a secret from me. No wonder they hadn’t been overly concerned about Derrick showing up. How would anyone have ever suspected my attempt to tell Derrick to stay away was what would cause him to interfere with the wedding?
My good intentions were once again the reason people were dead.
I laced my arms through the rails and hugged them, wishing I were hugging another human being. Solitude with my thoughts unraveled my worries. I wanted to go home and see Felix Thatch, to make sure he was all right. I didn’t know who might have been killed or snatched by the Raven Queen.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Derrick sat down beside me.
A yard of space between us wasn’t enough distance. I didn’t want to be anywhere near him. He didn’t understand me anymore. He wasn’t the same Derrick I had once known.
I stared out into the darkness. I’d already said everything I had needed to share with him at dinner.
“Oh? Now you’re silent?” Derrick asked. “You could have chosen that a little sooner.”
I leaned my head against the railing. “I wasn’t trying to humiliate you in front of your crew.”
“Yep. Well, it doesn’t make it any less demeaning. I’m an ass, and now everyone knows it. There’s no way to downplay that. I’ve reaped what I sowed, right?”
I didn’t know what else to say. There was so much melancholy weighing on me, I didn’t know how it didn’t act as a thousand sandbags on the ship and sink us.
“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I said. “I didn’t mean to come across so ungrateful at dinner.” He had been trying to be helpful in his way.
“I get it. I messed up.” He leaned his head on the rails now too, holding on as though they were bars of a prison cell. “I was so wrapped up in making sure nothing bad happened to you that I was blind to all the flaws in my plan. I was careless, and people got hurt. It’s one more reason I’m a danger to you. I start thinking about you, and I’m deaf to reason. All I can do is obsess over what I did to you . . . how I . . . killed you. I had to try to make things right between us.”
Hearing the raw wound in his voice made me wish I could hug him. It was fortunate he had placed enough distance between us to keep me from forgetting and touching him.
Derrick squeezed the bar. “I loved you and betrayed your trust. It haunts me. I wish I could have found another way, but I still don’t know what I would have done differently. That’s why I had to come. I didn’t want someone else to do the same thing to you.”
“Felix Thatch won’t.”
“Your ‘true’ love.” Disgust tainted his words.
For seven years I had thought Derrick had been my true love.
He snorted. “According to Baba Nata, he’d die for you.”
And I would die anyway. Baba Nata’s words hung in the air between us. I wished I could have pretended I’d never heard them. I wished I could have told myself she was a trickster and discounted what she’d said. But the fortune she’d told Missy had come true, whether it was her words that had set it in motion or Missy had been destined to die at a young age all along.
“I knew we couldn’t be together,” Derrick said. “But I thought it would be Prince Elric who you’d end up with.”
“He’s engaged to Vega. She’s pregnant with his child.”
“Vega Bloodmire? No way! That’s the least likely couple I’d ever imagine. Besides you and Thatch. For one thing, Miss Bloodmire likes tall men. Also last I heard, she had a thing for corpses.”
I laughed at that. “I haven’t heard Vega complain about Elric on either account.”
“Is he marrying her because he got her pregnant? I thought he wanted to marry you. Every time he spoke about you, his eyes lit up, and he looked like he was in love. And that was only two months ago.”
Poor Elric, pining over me still. Or maybe it was Vega I should have felt sorry for.
“They seem happy with each other,” I said, trying as much to convince him as myself.
“I thought you would be happy with him. Part of me was jealous, of course. How could I not be? My savior had earned the privilege of getting to see you, while I was doomed to pretend I didn’t know.” He sighed, his shoulders deflating farther.
“What do you mean? Your savior? Because he brought you here?”
“Prince Elric purchased me from the Raven Queen. He asked that she remove her signet of ownership from my person and release me from her service. Her mark is gone, but we both know freedom from the Raven Queen is a sham. I’m still under her control if my curse is released.”
He shifted and leaned against the railing, staring back at the ship rather than toward the scenery in front of us. “Prince Elric saved me from torture and madness, making me promise to never touch you again. He asked me not to see you or try to contact you, and I followed those orders.
“Probably because of my wind affinity, because I actually had aeronautical experience under my belt already when I’d worked for one of the queen’s bands of mercenaries, His Highness thought my skills would be best suited for an airship. He purchased me a post as a commissioned officer on one of the royal ships, giving me a chance for a better life than most Witchkin, even those on this vessel who had to work their way up the ranks from enlisted to officers. From what I hear, I’m not the first Witchkin he’s ever done this for.”
He waved a hand toward the helm where a shadowy figure manned the wheel. “Take Thomas Greely, for example, he was only nine years old when Prince Elric picked him up from a band of slavers illegally poaching Witchkin children out in the Morty Realm. They aren’t supposed to touch chi
ldren under age, especially if they haven’t done magic. But his parents used magic, not even knowing what they were. After the slavers drained his parents to death, they took him into their custody.
“I don’t know what His Highness did with the slavers when he caught them. Whether he killed them or reported them, he removed Greely from their hands. He rescued the ensign from a fate of death or draining, which meant Greely owed him a favor. He’s twenty-one now, and he’s worked enough years his debt has been paid off. He can transfer to a different ship if he chooses, though I doubt he will.”
“But isn’t what Elric did illegal too?” I asked. “He made Greely work for his court like a slave. Greely was a child who should have been in school. He could have gone to Womby’s.”
“Greely was never a slave. More like an indentured servant. I’m sure Greely could have deferred some of his service to Prince Elric after he’d come of age, but the problem was his age. The prince rescued him when he was nine. There aren’t any magic schools out there for a nine-year-old. He would have had to stay in the Morty Realm, not get caught using magic, and hopefully get adopted by a family who would be understanding.”
Derrick raked a hand through his blue hair. “He had to go somewhere. A cabin boy on a ship full of Witchkin isn’t a bad place to start. Especially for the Silver Court, where the kids are treated decently, and the ships are fairly free of discrimination.” Derrick spoke passionately, defending this alternative system of education as though he had never worked at a school.
He pounded his fist into his palm. “They learn valuable skills in magic. Their training comes in handy for the future, especially if they’re suited for the work. It provides them with a family and opportunities. At Womby’s, what did we actually do? We could only help the kids who were the right age. And if they couldn’t read, how were we supposed to teach them the skills they needed to survive after graduation? Not everyone is a Celestor good at higher magics, and not everyone is talented enough outside of their natural affinity to succeed in the real world. The Fae world. If kids don’t have another community to go to with a group large enough to sustain a variety of skills to offer protection, what can they do to survive after they graduate?”
