Pillars of Six

by St Clare, Kelly

  Pillars of Six

  Kelly St. Clare

  Contents

  Exosian Realm

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Thank You For Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About Kelly St. Clare

  Also By Kelly St. Clare

  Fantasy of Frost

  Bonus Chapter

  Pillars of Six

  by Kelly St. Clare

  Copyright © 2018 Kelly St. Clare

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, media, and incidents are either products of the authors’ imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Edited by Melissa Scott and Robin Schroffel

  Cover illustration and design by Amalia Chitulescu Digital Art

  Map Art © 2018 by Laura Diehl, www.LDiehl.com

  All rights reserved.

  The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.

  Exosian Realm

  Life is never stagnant for those who continually grow.

  One

  Ebba sat across the bay, watching as her fathers readied Felicity for sailing. It was early morning, but she hadn’t slept.

  Her fathers had argued all night as she lay wide awake in her hut. Eventually, she got sick of listening and walked around the inlet of their hidden Zol sanctuary to sit in silence.

  Tears dripped onto her knees, and Sally, her companion through the night, made a sad whirring sound, hugging her face. “Why does he have to leave, Sal?” she asked, sniffing hard.

  Sally hugged her harder. Slightly too hard, if the honest truth be told. The wind sprite was fiercely strong. Her strength didn’t really make sense with her being so tiny, but she also glowed, so the why behind her super strength had been thrown into the pile labeled magic, along with all the other strange things Ebba had encountered.

  Somewhere in the midst of all those strange encounters, their crew made a promise to Cosmo. And a promise was a promise. That was why the pirates of Felicity didn’t make them very often.

  They’d offered to drop Cosmo at Kentro, so he could make his way back to the mainland. Yesterday, the Exosian took them up on the offer.

  Cosmo leaving didn’t feel right; he belonged here. “Sal, am I only thinkin’ o’ myself?” Ebba asked. Sally knew Cosmo’s father was King Montcroix. Ebba had to tell someone after the truth was revealed, or her guts would’ve burst out.

  “I just think he’ll be happier here,” Ebba continued. “King Montcroix be evil, everyone is knowin’ that. He won’t help Cosmo, but I can help Cosmo get used to havin’ one arm. I just need more time.”

  Sally pulled back and shrugged. The glowing wind sprite flew over to her bottle of brandy and took a swig. The magical creature had started on grog, but recently moved to stronger stuff. Sally lowered the bottle and shrugged again, pouting her lips.

  Ebba screwed up her face, trying to decipher the message. There was a bit of a language barrier between them. Which was why Ebba had told her the truth about Cosmo.

  “Mistress Fairisles,” someone called softly.

  She jumped but recognizing Cosmo’s voice, remained staring across the turquoise inlet at Felicity.

  “We’ll be leaving soon. Your fathers sent me to get you.”

  She didn’t budge. “I ain’t goin’. Tell them I’ll wait here. The voyage be foolish. Malice is after the purgium and the dynami. Ye’re puttin’ everyone in danger.” Ebba latched on to Locks’ argument from the night before.

  Truthfully, Ebba didn’t even really care about the healing and power cylinders falling into the hands of Malice’s crew, but she did care about losing her innards in a forced exchange.

  Cosmo neared her, hovering a few paces away. “If it wasn’t so important to me, I wouldn’t ask. You know I wouldn’t.”

  “Aye, well I thought I knew ye, Prince Caspian, but I didn’t. So how do I know what ye would and wouldn’t do?”

  Sally took another swig of brandy, eyes darting between them.

  He scratched his jaw, saying quietly, “I deserved that.”

  The mainlander had changed since losing his arm.

  He didn’t ask so many questions anymore. He went off by himself for long walks around Zol, the cliff-bordered inlet that was their secret sanctuary. Some days, he just slept, and sometimes a whole three days passed without him looking at her with that intense look he used to always hold in his amber eyes.

  She missed her friend, even if he was a prince friend.

  Ebba didn’t know what the rules on being friends with a prince were. She’d been raised by pirates and lived with pirates. Despite being of tribal descent, Ebba might still be a pirate herself. She didn’t know what to do with his royal confession. On one hand, she had to be nice to him because he’d lost an arm. On the other hand, he’d lied to their crew about being the son of their enemy, King Montcroix—hunter of pirates and sovereign of the navy that patrolled the Caspian Sea.

  Ebba supposed their crew probably would’ve marooned Cosmo if he’d admitted it from the start.

  The result of all this thinking—which was far more thinking than she liked to do, as a rule—was that she still didn’t know what to do with the information. So, she’d kept calling him Cosmo and decided to pretend he wasn’t the prince of Exosia and that half of the ocean wasn’t renamed at his birth. Her fathers would kill him if they found out, and Ebba couldn’t trust herself to keep saying Cosmo if she started thinking of him as Caspian in her skull.

  “I hope you’ll reconsider, Mistress Fairisles.” Cosmo finally broke the silence again. “I’d like to spend as much time with you as possible before we dock at Kentro.”

  Guilt stirred her insides. The trip to Kentro was eight days with a good wind. If she was honest with herself, the thought of taking a small trip out of this inlet was appealing. Deep down, she wanted to see as much of Cosmo as she could, too.

  “Why are ye leavin’?” she asked, silently adding me on the end.

  He heard it anyway. Cosmo sucked in a breath. “You think I’m leaving you?” He closed the gap and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. His hold was light, but warmth seeped into her skin. After what they’d been through on Pleo, the action felt natural.

  “It’s because of you that I don’t wish to leave,” he said. “What made you think that?”

  She shrugged.

  “Is it the . . . situation with your fathers?”

  ‘Situation’ was a polite way of saying her fathers had lied to her for nearly eighteen years about their merciless pasts and her origins. “Aye, I be supposin’ so. Things’ve been strange-like since that all happened. I don’t want to forget and pretend it away this time. I ain’t even sure I could. Everythin’ feels off-kilter.”

  Ebba scowled at the water
lapping gently onto the white sand shore.

  Caspian nodded. “If it helps, I know your fathers are struggling too. I caught Barrels reading a book yesterday with the title, How to Raise a Child at Sea.”

  She scrunched her nose, and pushed back her black dreadlocks. “Why do they need that? They already raised me.”

  A smile softened his face. Russet curls framed his high forehead and square jaw, and in that moment, a hint of boyishness entered the quirk of his lips, and a familiar light sparked in his amber eyes. Ebba’s heart squeezed. She didn’t know how to make him like he used to be—alive, interested, and passionate. Peg-leg said trying was pointless and that Cosmo was changed now, but that he’d get better in time. Ebba didn’t like the thought of Cosmo changing if that change was for the worse. Though maybe not altering was impossible with everything he’d gone through.

  What she’d put him through.

  Ebba was the one who’d held the purgium over the black taint spreading to his heart. The purgium had demanded a sacrifice. Cosmo didn’t have an arm, and it was her fault. Her fault he so rarely smiled anymore.

  He watched her, the quirk on his lips fading. “I believe, Mistress Fairisles, it’s because you’ve never given your fathers trouble before.”

  “I hid a wind sprite in the hold because I wanted a pet.”

  “Yes, but that’s normal. Kind of. Well, if the pet was a kitten and not an alcoholic. Your fathers’ struggle has more to do with what happened on Pleo. I guess the same struggle as yours: how do you move forward from here?”

  “Aye, ye’re likely right.” Caspian was soft and pretty distant of late, but he had a whole bunch of mangoes in his skull-basket. Ebba did want to move forward.

  From her first memories, life had been just her and her six fathers. Seven pirates sailing the navy-free part of the Caspian Sea in their ship, Felicity. She’d assumed one of them was her real father, but asking which one had always seemed pointless because Ebba loved them all the same.

  The issue wasn’t just that they’d lied to her about who they’d been, and who she was. The issue was that Ebba had always been a pirate. She’d thought that she’d always be a pirate—that she’d die a pirate. Now, her place on Felicity didn’t seem as secure. The sense that everything before the revelation was a pretty lie kept nagging at her.

  Ebba was born to the tribe, but raised as a pirate. What did that make her?

  She certainly hadn’t belonged with the Pai Marie. They were wise and all, but they had a warped idea of how to survive. Things weren’t simple any longer. That wouldn’t bother Ebba so much if she could handle it in the normal way, by pretending. And the inability to pretend made her feel even less like a pirate because a pirate wasn’t supposed to care about the why.

  Ebba sighed heavily, realizing her anger at Cosmo for leaving was really not about the prince at all. When it came to the prince, all she felt was sadness that he’d soon be gone and that she’d lose her only friend. And sadness that he was still hurting in his heart after losing his arm.

  Cosmo had changed. The pirates of Felicity had changed. Seemed like they’d both need to deal with that.

  “Tell me why ye’re leavin’, Caspi— Cosmopian? I mean, Cosmo,” she blurted.

  “Exactly what I said, Mistress Fairisles. I have things I need to fix. Life as a pirate, illuminating as it has proven to be, has also been fraught with danger, and I worry that if I do not see my father now, I may not get a chance.” He let his right arm fall, staring vacantly at the limb.

  “I also mean to inform my father of Malice’s presence in these waters. Pockmark attacked a navy ship, and I must seek retribution for the crew and their families.” He paused. “I hope to make the seas safe for your crew once again. Pockmark will hound Felicity until the purgium and dynami are in his hands.”

  She turned to look at him for the first time. “Why would ye be doin’ that?”

  He smiled at her. “When your crew took me in after Neos, I was saved from a terrible fate, Mistress Fairisles. I am certain the Malice crew would have recognized me. Jagger certainly did. And then there are the dangers your crew recently went through to save me from my tainted wound. I would have been a slave to darkness if not for your actions.”

  Yet he’d still lost an arm. Ebba startled, though. “Ye think that’s why Jagger hates ye? Because he recognized ye?” Jagger had hated Cosmo from the first time he’d seen him.

  Cosmo shrugged his right shoulder. “I imagine so. I’m son to the man who is renowned for hunting pirates. That’s ample enough reason for hatred. I thank the powers that be daily I fell into the hands of your crew and not theirs. It is a debt I can never fully repay, but I’m going to try.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m a prince, and I’m in a position to ensure justice is served. Malice cannot fight the entire navy,” Cosmo said, intensity returning to his amber eyes. “I won’t sit back and do nothing after seeing the things I have.”

  “I thought ye said yer friends wouldn’t be believin’ ye about the magic.”

  His jaw tightened. “No, I don’t expect they will. I don’t plan to tell them any of that. My father hates pirates; he’ll need no more excuse to engage in war with Malice after I tell him of what they did to his navy ship and his son.”

  In that order? Ebba shared a long look with Sally. The sprite shrugged and grimaced, drawing a circle in the sand with her toe.

  Nope, no idea what that meant.

  Ebba slid off the rock and tilted her head to look up at the prince. He smelled like sandalwood and shoe polish. “Do ye really need to do this, Cosmo? I wish ye would stay. I don’t know what I’ll do without ye.”

  He took her hand and laid a gentle kiss on the back of it. “What ye always do.” He mocked her with a smile that displayed his dimple again. “Barge through life in your vibrant and unique way.”

  “Even if I’m pretendin’ everything be okay?” she asked, blinking away the burning in her eyes.

  A wrinkle appeared between his brows. “Mistress Fairisles, I can see each of your fathers in you. You’ve picked up traits from them all. You also cope in the only way you know how. You certainly aren’t the only person here pretending.”

  She stared at him with wide eyes, not trusting herself to speak.

  “Everything will work out, Mistress Fairisles. You love your fathers, and they love you. You’ll reach an understanding simply because you each want to.” He kissed her hand again. On the same spot.

  Heat filled her cheeks. How long had they been holding hands? She pulled away, resisting the temptation to rub at the hot spot where his lips just were. Flustered, Ebba said, “We have a week until we reach Kentro, Caspian. There be no need for goodbyes just yet.”

  “No,” he agreed, adding, “but we will need to say goodbye.”

  She sniffed hard, leading the way back around the inlet to Felicity. “Aye, Cosmo. I know. And if ye need to do this for yerself, I’ll try not to fuss.”

  Ebba hoped she could stick to that when the time came to part ways.

  Two

  Ebba sat out on the tip of the bowsprit, holding on to the long wooden beam with her thighs, relishing the feel of the seawater spraying over her face. She let her head fall back, hearing the beads in her hair rattle. She had two dreadlocks filled with beads and another started. The bottom of her dreads tickled underneath her ribs, and Ebba lifted a hand to push her green bandana back into place over her hairline. Her yellowed tunic and slops were soaked from the spray, but the water dripped off her tight black-laced jerkin onto the tops of her thighs. A sheen covered her brown skin from her forehead to the tips of her bare and grubby toes.

  Ebba felt a true pull to the sea. Whatever she was now, that remained true.

  For as long as she could recall, a pirate life was the only life she’d considered. In the last few months, so many things had happened to weaken that truth her head was spinning. Was Ebba limiting herself by not exploring other facets of herself? The villagers on Neos were slaughtered by Ladon simply
because they never left their homes. What if they’d considered a new and different life? Were the limitations she’d created for herself the reason her sense of self shattered so easily on Pleo?

  Yet Ebba might be content to return to that single-minded focus, if not for the Earth Mother’s words. She’d said Ebba had a fracture in her soul that had to be fixed, or all would fail—whatever that meant. Ebba suspected the crack was due to not knowing who she was anymore. And probably because of how rocky things were with her fathers.

  Cosmo was right. She’d learned to pretend from her fathers, but now Ebba was so angry all the time pretending wasn’t working. She couldn’t go on this way, hurting her fathers and hurting herself in the process. There was only one place to start that she could think of. After Pleo, her fathers had made a promise to tell her everything about their lives prior to raising her.

  A promise was a promise, after all.

  The desire to ask had eluded her until now. She’d been too furious to listen, and too upset over Cosmo’s troubles. But the sea had given her courage. Maybe by listening to their stories, she’d be able to figure out a few things.

  The southern part of the Caspian Sea was surprisingly calm today. The black waters were renowned for large swells and chaotic winds, and seeing as there weren’t any islands beyond Zol, none of the other numerous pirate ships in the Free Seas, the area not monitored by navy men, ventured this far. Of all the places to drop Cosmo off, the westernmost island, Kentro, was the safest. Neos was overrun by Ladon and his snakes. To go to Maltu again was far too risky, though it was nearly as close to the mainland as Kentro.