by Ann Fisher
He’d gotten a look at their faces during the first attack, and he hadn’t recognized either of them. Neither had been assigned to the palace while he’d attended Asil. He thought it odd that Demir would entrust a pair of nameless mages from the outer provinces for this job. Janek hoped it meant trouble within the Order’s ranks, that Demir was running out of mages he could trust, that perhaps the more powerful mages had balked at the assignment. He hoped that Caden would live long enough to exploit that trouble.
After rounding the tip of the Shell, the Raven made for open sea. They had a large lead on the Charmoc, and it was another hour before the Order’s ship came into view again. They did little to extend their lead. Janek conserved his power. He’d created a light ward around the Raven, but otherwise he’d stepped aside while Kenna controlled the ship. He’d been absorbing aether from the moment Lorel removed the mage shackle, but he was not yet fully restored.
Something brushed against the shield. “They’re going to fire.”
Lorel winced, likely imagining the damage to the ship. “Remember—”
“Only let them hit the sails. I know. I won’t let a strike against the hull hit.”
“Preserve the masts too if you can.”
“I will.” He would very likely attempt to bring her the sun if she asked it of him.
When the attack came—a percussive blast of power directed at the ship—Janek was able to repel it easily. He sent it into the sea, channeling the energy back toward the ship pursuing them. The bolt arrowed into the water, creating a magnificent swell that nearly overset the Charmoc, driving the ship back a quarter mile at least. The next bolt, he merely deflected.
It went on like that for some time—Dani allowing the Charmoc to approach, Janek allowing the bolts to come increasingly closer to the ship and hopefully causing the mages to become overconfident.
Casting his senses into the nexus, Janek looked around him for potential sources of power. A flock of geese passed overhead and dolphins darted through the ship’s wake. Magic called to all sea life, but to dolphins in particular. He didn’t know why. The animals didn’t seem to use aether in any way that he’d ever been able to sense. There was a whale none too distant, but that wise creature was headed in the opposite direction.
Janek used the energies around him—the aether rising like mist from the roll of the ocean, the fear and anticipation of the crew. He hoped it would be enough to deflect the mages’ attacks until the first death occurred which would be a much richer source of power. A crow waiting for something to scavenge, that was him. He’d never felt ashamed of that before. Now, with Lorel watching him, seeing him at work, he wished he was something—anything—else. A simple advisor and diplomat. A soldier or sailor. Even the assassin she’d once believed him to be.
Lorel touched his arm. “Is this difficult for you? Does it hurt?”
“No.”
He turned his head to look at her and was surprised to see true concern on her face. “Once the fighting begins in earnest there will be more for me to draw from. For now I have to search for it, and I’m not accustomed to having to do that.”
“Is it too soon to surrender? I want this finished before the sun sets.”
“Soon, I think—”
Before he could finish the sentence, a magebolt tore through the nexus toward the Raven. Almost absently, Janek turned it, pushing it back toward the pursuing Charmoc.
And something went terribly wrong.
The spell wasn’t like the others, but he didn’t see the trap hidden within the bolt until it was too late.
Searing pain shot through his skull. His vision went white. He tasted blood on his tongue, and his knees buckled.
Lorel grabbed onto him, holding him upright. His instinctive reaction was to grab for power. His old master had drilled that into him—not to waste any thread of power, not even that originating in his own pain. Those had been ugly lessons, but they’d happened so long ago the horror of them had mostly faded. The instinct remained.
He could hear Lorel’s voice, but he couldn’t piece together the meaning of her words because as soon as he reached for power, the pain in his head intensified.
This wasn’t a trick he’d seen yesterday. Apparently, their spellweaver had constructed a trap especially for him. All this time, they’d thought they were the ones luring the mages in.
“Lorel…” Somehow he’d ended with his back on the deck. His head was cradled in Lorel’s lap, and she was bent over him.
Her head was turned, and she was shouting. “Keep them off our backs, Dani. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
He worked his mouth but could only force out one word before the world went dark. “Trap.”
Janek was unconscious on the deck and the Charmoc was closing in. Dani had done her best to escape, but Kenna was spent and they’d let the Charmoc get too close to outrun them now. Their plan—to feign surrender and give Janek a chance to save Mira—was in shambles. Without Janek, they’d be lucky to escape with their lives. Without Janek to protect him, Caden didn’t stand a chance.
Lorel might still be able to save her crew. She could offer them Janek. She could dig Caden out of the smuggler’s bolt and hand him over to the Order without a fight. There was a chance they’d let the Raven go free.
It was their plan of last resort, but they weren’t there quite yet.
Someone shouted from above, and Lorel curled her body over Janek’s head a moment before the grappling hooks landed with a thunk on the deck. There was a screech of wood as the hooks caught and a jolt as the ropes pulled taut. Her crew was under orders not to cut rope and Lorel let that stand for now.
Laying Janek’s head gently on the deck, she stood as Dani came up the ladder.
Dani’s eyes widened when she saw Janek. “What’s wrong with him?”
“I don’t know.”
Lorel waved Kenna toward Janek’s body. “See if there’s anything you can do. He was fine a moment ago and then he collapsed.”
Dani looked to Lorel. “Orders?”
Lorel froze.
Dani’s green eyes fixed on her expectantly. Jamie stood a step behind Dani, waiting for her answer too. Lorel squashed her rising panic. There was no time for her to fall apart, not while there were people depending upon her to keep her shit together.
“I’ll talk to the mage to see if I can buy time.” She turned to Kenna. “Will he recover?”
Kenna frowned. “They spiked that last spell. Everything else they cast was straightforward enough. The last one was created by a sorcerer, intended to disable a sorcerer. I don’t think Janek expected the backlash.”
“They have a sorcerer?”
Kenna shook her head. “Not aboard the Charmoc. We’d have seen sign of it before now. This was a bound spell hidden within the magebolt. If it had been a normal bolt, he’d have been able to use the energy created by his pain to break it. This one triggered when he tried to absorb the energy. He sucked the spell right into his body. I’ve never seen anything like it. I can feel Janek fighting it. He’s still conscious…”
“Will he recover?”
Kenna hesitated a beat too long. “I think so.”
Damn. She needed him awake now. The Order’s soldiers were already beginning to board the ship. Her crew stood down as ordered, though it was clear they didn’t like it. They would fight for her and die if necessary. It was her job to prevent it from being necessary.
She started toward the stern of the ship where the soldiers were thickest. Dani fell in behind her.
“Follow my lead,” Lorel said, and went to intercept the mage.
9
The Order’s soldiers weren’t gentle about disarming the crew—not that Lorel had expected them to be—but Dani was irate. Lorel was concerned that Dani would do something stupid before Lorel even had a chance to attempt to talk her way out of this mess. Only after the crew was disarmed and the still-unconscious Janek bound, did the mage come aboard.
The mag
e in charge was a man of middling years with hard, close-set black eyes and a prominent nose. He had the slender compact build that was common amongst the Ghadrian nobility. Aside from the heavily stitched robes he wore, his appearance and bearing reminded Lorel very much of Serat.
He looked over the crew of the Raven with a haughty gaze. “Is this everyone?”
The captain of the Charmoc, marked as such by the silver braid at his collar, stepped forward and bowed smartly at the waist. “This is everyone on the ship. They’ve all been disarmed, and we’ve placed mage shackles on both the sorcerer and the Erysian witch.”
“You found no sign of the prince?”
“No, saer.”
The mage scowled at the news. Turning his head, he shouted to the man standing behind him on the Charmoc. “Bring her.”
Lorel watched as a soldier hauled a young woman across the deck of the Charmoc. This had to be Mira. She was young to be empress, much younger than Lorel had expected, but she was clearly Caden’s sister.
She looked like a prettier, more petite version of the prince. Her hands were bound before her, her wrists chafed raw, and there was a murderous glint to her eyes that caused the soldier holding her to flinch when he saw it.
Good. That was good. Mira might be of some help to them.
Rather than force the girl to cross the boarding plank, the soldier set the empress on the rail and gave her a firm push toward the Raven. Lorel sucked in a gasp of air as Mira tipped forward. Before she fell to be crushed between the ships, the mage made a small gesture with his hand and drew the girl to him. At first Mira struggled, clearly unaware of what the mage had intended, and then she went rigidly still when she realized she wasn’t falling.
When she was several feet away from the mage, he made another gesture with his hand and she crumpled to the deck like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She landed hard, taking the brunt of the fall on her battered forearms rather than her face. Lorel took an instinctive step forward before a blade blocked her path.
In a low voice, the soldier holding the blade said, “You don’t want to interfere. Trust me, you don’t.”
Ignoring the warning, Lorel raised her voice as the mage hoisted Mira to her feet. “I told you we wouldn’t stand in your way, but I won’t have any woman abused aboard my ship.”
The mage didn’t respond to Lorel’s challenge. He didn’t so much as look in her direction. Instead, he gripped Mira’s wrist and jerked her arm straight. The sun glinted off something on his finger. On closer inspection, Lorel saw that it was a small, sharpened metal hook. After making a shallow incision on the inside of Mira’s arm, the mage collected the welling blood in a small glass vial. When the vial was half full, he pushed Mira toward a waiting guard.
“See that the wound is tended.”
Without waiting to see if his order was followed, the mage poured a drop of blood into a palm-sized brass compass. Nothing happened so far that Lorel could see, but after a moment he began to walk toward the stairs.
If Janek was right about the device, Caden would be discovered within moments and then Lorel would have nothing left to negotiate with for the lives of her crew. She was out of options. Catching Dani’s eye, she nodded sharply.
Dani grabbed the sword she’d stashed in the roping and intercepted Mira and her guard before they reached the boarding plank. The crew of the Raven sprang into action behind her. Some grabbed for hidden weapons. Some shoved off grappling hooks and cut the ropes binding the ships together.
The Ghadrian soldiers moved to stop them, and Lorel made for the stairs, following the mage. Shouts raised behind her as the crew of the Raven engaged the Ghadrian soldiers. She heard the plank hit the water with a great splash and the groan of wood as the ships briefly made contact.
The impact sent her stumbling into a wall as she descended the stairs, but she kept her feet beneath her and grabbed the long knife hidden she’d hidden in a cubby above the stairs. Another shudder ran through the ship. She jumped the last four steps, using the extra momentum to take down the Ghadrian who was guarding the mage’s back.
The soldier sprawled to the floor, rolling as she landed on top of him. She should slit his throat. Dani would do it. Cinn wouldn’t hesitate. Lorel had never been able to match their ruthlessness.
Scrambling to her feet, she kicked the guard’s hand away when he grabbed for her ankle. The mage was already at the door to her cabin. She ran after him, cursing Janek with every step. This was supposed to be his job.
How was she supposed to take out a mage?
She hadn’t the faintest clue. She only knew that she wasn’t letting anyone board her ship, humiliate her crew, abuse a young woman right in front of them all and then murder a man who’d once saved her life.
Besides, she could see from his demeanor that it was unlikely that the mage would stop there. Any man who would so abuse an empress would have no problem at all slaughtering a ship full of rebels. He’d sink the Raven to the bottom of the sea. If the Raven was going down, her crew would go down fighting.
Gripping the doorframe, Lorel pulled herself into the room, slammed the door closed, and shot home the bolt.
The mage turned slowly. His gaze touched on the knife in her hand, but he didn’t look particularly concerned about it. “You wish to speak to me, Erysian?”
“We are loyal servants of the emperor,” she said. “You had no cause to board our ship. Why are you doing this?”
“You’re harboring fugitives. That makes you enemies of the empire.”
“We rescued men from a sinking ship.”
He smiled tightly. “You should have let that ship sink.”
“We had no way of knowing that you were after those men,” she said, taking a step closer and waving her hand toward the door. “Take the lot of them, just leave my ship alone. We’ve done nothing wrong.”
She hoped that Janek would recover soon, that Dani had managed to cast them free from the enemy ship, that someone would break Kenna’s bonds so she could contain the other mage. She hoped that Caden was even now crawling deeper into the belly of the ship.
The mage looked down at his compass and then around the small room. He sighed irritably. “Show me where you’ve hidden the prince, and I’ll let what’s left of your crew have what’s left of the ship.”
When she hesitated, he shook his head. “Decide quickly. It’s your crew dying up there, not my men. I can assure you of that.”
It was a generous offer, and more than she’d expected from him. She might even have taken him up on it if she’d thought he was telling the truth. She started across the room, but stopped abruptly when he held up his hand—not because she wanted to stop, but because she was suddenly unable to move.
Her heartstone warmed against her skin. The rest of her body went cold as the mage’s spell wrapped around her, holding her in place.
The mage stepped closer. “I tire of this. Where is the boy?”
“I was going to show you where he is.”
He smiled and shook his head. “You must think me a fool. Tell me where to find him. I’ll let you go when I have the prince in custody.”
She tightened her grip on her knife. She was shocked when her muscles actually responded. Her fingers flexed lightly around the hilt. The spell was still there. The mage hadn’t released her. She could feel the pressure of his magic wrapping around her legs and torso, but his control over her wasn’t complete.
The heartstone burned hotter against her skin, and as it warmed the spell seemed to weaken. The mage showed no sign that he was aware that anything was amiss.
Her next breath came easier. She felt the magic ease its heavy grip. It would still be difficult to move. She would be slow, but maybe if she could distract him…
“Behind you,” she said. “The wardrobe has a false bottom. There’s a latch at the back. Run your thumb along it. You’ll find it.”
His blue eyes lit with triumph and he turned. Lorel lunged at his back, bringing her knife up. I
t was the clumsiest lunge she’d ever executed. The part of her that had once been the most celebrated dancer on the island was deeply ashamed by her lack of grace. She was glad that there was no one to witness her sluggish, staggering charge.
The mage sensed her movement and spun to face her, crying out in surprise. The tip of her blade tore through the fabric of his robe. But rather than sink into flesh, the blade was deflected by something hard. It felt like she was striking against rock or armor though she knew it was neither. Her hope extinguished.
He was a mage. Of course he would shield his own body before going into battle.
Cursing, the mage shoved her aside. Her head cracked against the corner of the table. The vial of blood fell from his hand and shattered on the ground, splattering her with the empress’ precious blood.
“You bitch.” The mage bent down. His hand fisted in her hair and he pulled her to her knees. “How did you do that?”
“I don’t know.” It had to be the heartstone. The stones were said to protect their bearers, were they not? She’d heard rumors from the invasion, but she’d only half believed them. She’d never experienced it herself. Of course, she hadn’t brought her stone to the Keep and none of the Keepers on the island would even think about using their magic to attack a living being.
The mage traced a glyph on her forehead. His finger cold and damp against her skin. Immediately, pain exploded behind her eyelids. Her heartstone became a fiery brand against her skin.
“You will tell me where to find the prince.” The mage’s fingers tightened in her hair and he shook her roughly. “Now.”
The pain was shattering. She wanted to tell him. She wanted to tell him everything he asked. Her mouth worked with eagerness to form the words even as she fought to hold them in. It was splitting her apart, the mage’s compulsion to speak fighting against her will to keep silent.
Tears leaked from her eyes as she choked on her own tongue.
“He’s…He’s in the wardrobe,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The truth. It…has a false bottom. I told you the truth.”
