Dog gritted his teeth. “Come and get it,” he croaked. But his voice didn’t boom now. The words came not from the belly, but from the throat, more smoke than fire. Still, there was no chance he would back down. He turned sideways and raised his sword, pointing it so that the tip was inches from Packer’s heart. The others stood and cleared a small space, moving chairs away and the table from between them, so the two could face each other properly.
Packer stood still, not taking his eyes off Dog. Rather than raise his guard, though, the younger man lowered his sword casually, resting its point on the rough flooring. Dog prodded a few times, brandishing his sword menacingly, actually poking Packer in the chest twice.
“Come on!” he demanded. His voice was now nasal. The room grew quiet again. The fishermen were suddenly worried Packer might not fight after all, even now. Last time it was fists, and humiliation. With swords, Packer might end up dead.
Packer had no such concerns. He shook his head casually, pulled on his earlobe. “You need to relax,” he instructed his opponent. “You can’t fence when you’re tight as a drum.” Dog looked sour—but more surprised than angry. Packer spoke with a casual authority the older man had not expected.
Now Packer raised his sword and stepped back, his body melting easily into a perfect guard position, eyes focused and ready, his blade just touching Dog’s. “But most of all, Dog,” he said, with a sudden, burning energy that seemed almost joyful, “try not to show so much fear.” And he smiled.
This drew howls from the audience and a loud curse from Dog. The elder took a great sweeping hack at the younger. Packer reacted as though he expected exactly that move, as though he had meant to provoke exactly that move. He met the blow effortlessly, with the ring of steel on steel. In the same motion, his blade slid down the length of Dog’s, sparking as it went, until its tip sliced across the knuckles of Dog’s sword hand, easily missing the useless hand guard.
As Dog winced, a second flick of Packer’s blade, executed so quickly it was almost imperceptible, sent the old sword flying across the tavern. Before it came to rest on the floor, and before the fisherman could grab his bleeding right hand with his left, the sharp tip of Packer’s sword was pressed, cold and unyielding, into the sagging skin of the older man’s throat.
Dog grabbed Packer’s blade instinctively with his uninjured hand, closing his fist around it, but Packer quickly slid it out of his grasp, slicing Dog’s palm and fingers as he did. And then he put the point right back where it had been, at Dog’s throat. Dog held his two hands up, both of them now bleeding. He stepped backward reflexively until he stumbled into an open chair.
There he sat, hands now balled into bleeding fists, eyes wild, neck held back in a futile effort to stay away from the point of Packer’s sword, which felt like it had already bored an inch into his throat. The room went quiet again. Dust swirled in the lamplight.
Packer’s face was flint, but his voice went soft. “Now would be the appropriate time to show fear.”
No one drew a breath. They all heard Dog’s throat gurgle. His head didn’t move, but his eyes darted around the room, vainly looking for help. He was having trouble grasping that there would be no help; it was already over.
Packer read his eyes, his expression, waiting for the moment when the obvious question arose in Dog’s mind. And as soon as Packer saw it, he spoke. “Apologize to my father.”
Dog’s pride warred with his instinct for self-preservation. His mind spun, searching for another option, any option but apology or death. Apology was shameful; he had been ridiculing Packer Throme and his father, Dayton, for years. To simply retract it all in a moment would be to crumble completely, to admit cowardice as well as defeat. And yet to die at this boy’s hands would be more shameful yet, giving Packer the last word, proving Dog wrong—and forever. Worse yet, Dog would be dead.
He very much did not want to be dead. But would the boy do it? Packer saw that question forming, the arrogance returning to Dog. He pushed just slightly on the blade and nodded, so there would be no question that he was willing.
Dog believed. From deep within him came a roar, full of anger and passion born of fear and pain. His teeth were bared, the strings of his neck taut and visible. He was a wounded, cornered animal, screaming his fury and his terror.
Packer’s face didn’t change, his blade didn’t move. And then the rage in Dog was spent, and the roar rose to almost a shriek, petered out to a whimper. Dog closed his eyes, wrenched them tightly shut. He was breathing heavily, and looked like he might cry.
Still Packer waited. He knew Dog’s moment of decision had not yet come. Dog had not yet decided to live with this moment branded into his memory, and into the memories of all these men; neither had he decided to die and be done with it. The choice would be made now—now that the anger was gone. How deep did Dog’s pride run?
The moment hung in the balance for what seemed like an eternity, Dog unwilling to choose, and Packer unwilling to choose for him. But it was Packer’s resolve that crumbled. As his own emotion bled away, Packer suddenly saw himself—in this moment, detached from the events that had led to it. What if Dog were to choose death? Would Packer really kill him? A seated, helpless, unarmed old fisherman? Right here, like this? What was he doing? What would Panna think when she heard about it? And she would certainly hear. He looked around at the shocked, fearful, amazed expressions of those around him.
He had no idea how long he’d been standing here, the point of his sword poised to kill—but he couldn’t continue, not another instant. He withdrew his sword, and sat down in the nearest open chair, his back to Dog. He laid his blade on the table in front of him.
Dog put a thumb and forefinger to his own throat, found the pinprick, was relieved to find so little damage. Then he looked around the room, assessing the much greater damage done to him in the eyes of his friends. Those few who would look at him seemed sad. He looked at Packer’s back and forced a crooked smile.
“Well, boy. It’s just as well you got kicked out of seminary. You’d sure make a lousy priest. No need to turn the other cheek when you can handle a sword like that.”
There was scattered laughter, general agreement. But Packer hung his head, closed his eyes. It was a thrust to the heart.
Cap rushed up with a bar towel and began to bind it around Dog’s bleeding hands. Dog rejected the help, snatched the cloth from the barkeeper. “I better go tend to these little scratches. I got work to do tomorrow.” He eyed Packer with a cautious look. The younger man didn’t see it. But when Dog said, “I’ll see you later, Packer Throme,” Packer heard the dark promise in it.
Hangman’s Cliffs, the village Packer called home, was little more than a spot of lamplight perched above the ocean, the Vast Sea. A half-dozen storefronts huddled together on a rough cobblestone street, and a few dozen wooden and stone houses gathered around them. A small stone church stood at one end of the main road, facing the tavern at the other.
The church had no sign out front, but a cheerful hand-carved Welcome graced the doorway. At the other end of the town, above Cap’s tavern doors hung a crude painting of a sea monster with a snake’s body and a dragon’s head, lightning coming from its mouth. It was the beast the locals called Firefish, and it was the name of Cap’s pub. The main road ran east and west, so that the sun rose on the front doors of the church and set on the stoop of the tavern.
Behind the church at the western end of the unnamed main street were woods that stretched up and down the hills for miles, part of the timbered, rocky land that surrounded this warm circle of humanity. Beyond those woods were the Deep Woods, and beyond them, the Nearing Plains, which stretched nearly forever, north all the way to the Cold Climes, where few men dared to live, and south and west as far as the Great Mountains.
A stone’s throw east of Cap’s little pub, behind it, the ground rose up a few dozen feet. This rise was part of a long, rocky, tree-strewn ridge that ran parallel to the coastline along the top of the cliffs. Whe
n the ridge dropped off on the other side, it plummeted almost straight down into water. The small fishing village sat perched almost five hundred feet above the ocean. The fishermen trudged or drove their mule carts more than five miles each day around these cliffs, winding through switchbacks, to and from the ramshackle docks of Inbenigh, an unpleasant little spot that was named, or so the story went, after the carefully heeded advice to be “in by nightfall.” And so, the elevated haven of Hangman’s Cliffs was a fishing village hidden from the sea.
Packer had been born and raised here. He knew the terrain as only a local boy could. He had climbed and played and hiked during endless summer days, fall and spring, year after year, all along the rocks, clambering closer to the cliffs’ edge than his parents knew or ever wanted to know.
He loved this place, and back then he had assumed he would always be here, as much a part of the landscape as a tree or an outcropping of rock. Going to sea with his father in their small fishing boat was as far from home as Packer ever thought he’d go. He would sit perched here beside his father, an eight-year-old boy watching the ocean, listening to its distant thunder. Saying few words, the fisherman taught his son about the enormity and the power of the created world, things seen and unseen, secrets known and deep secrets kept by God and the sea. If God could create all this, what couldn’t He do? And a God who would choose to create all this, intricate in its beauty, perfect in detail, enormous in power, detail upon detail on such a grand plan, well…that was a God worth serving.
As Packer grew older and the work of fishing drew him in, he found himself fighting the inexorable flow of his life. The fishermen constantly scraping for subsistence, alternately praising and cursing the sea for what it yielded or refused to yield, somehow did not seem right. As the numbing and thoughtless repetition of their life dragged on him, he began to understand that he was connected to the created world, and the Creator of the world, in ways others around him did not seem to be or care to be.
Dayton Throme understood the longings within his son’s heart. He told Packer there was a path for people who thought such thoughts and felt such things as he did. On this path, he could dedicate himself to God and to helping others love this great Creator. Packer’s mother was thankful; she wanted her son to be anything but a fisherman, to live anywhere but Hangman’s Cliffs. She felt keenly the scorn that was heaped on her husband for his strange devotion to the legend of the Firefish—certainly more keenly than Dayton did, who simply shrugged it all off with a laugh.
And then there was Panna Seline.
As far back as Packer could remember, Panna was always there. Panna, the daughter of Will Seline, the beloved village priest. Panna and Packer, playing, her silvery laughter rising up to the sun, the unceasing smile that teased behind her eyes always. The two of them had spent many hours talking about the world and everything in it, the sea and everything in it—sea monsters, pirates, the glorious life of the tall ships. And the God who created it all. Then, with a path to the priesthood opening up for Packer, their growing affection began to turn to love. And love grew into dreams for the future…and plans.
But so much had happened since those days. Dayton was gone, lost to this world years ago, his name now on the list Taken by the Sea—etched onto the marble memorial that stood in the cemetery amid the clearing in the woods. With Dayton gone from her life, Nettie Throme couldn’t stay in Hangman’s Cliffs. The day after Packer left for seminary, she moved back to her family in the Cold Climes. In Packer’s mind that awful plaque read, All Dreams Shattered—All Hearts Broken.
It had been two days ago in the City of Mann when Packer had heard that the Trophy Chase was headed to Hangman’s Cliffs. For months he had tried to locate her, following whispers and tips up and down the coast, but she was always one day ahead or one town away. Then, following a rumor, he’d found himself at a pub in Mann called Croc-Eyed Sam’s. There he found an old pirate signing up sailors for a dangerous, secretive mission. But no strangers, and especially no fishermen, were welcome. Among the whispers that night, however, he heard the name of his own village uttered more than once.
It was a sign, a good omen. Packer knew exactly where a captain would take a tall ship if he had reliable information about the coves and tides and inlets near the village.
The cliffs themselves ran north and south as a whole, winding in and out along the shoreline for two or three miles like a corrugated piece of tin bent in a series of sinuous, eel-like “S” shapes. The result was a series of naturally formed bays that, had there been any way to dock or get ashore, might have made excellent ports of call. They would certainly shelter ships from any storm.
It was from above one of these small bays a mile-and-a-half north of town that Packer had found the Trophy Chase and her sister ships at anchor. The three vessels stood on the water, motionless. They looked as if they could have been painted on a blue background of sky and sea. Only the occasional flutter of the skull and bones above the Chase hinted at her true nature, like the revelation of dagger claws in the lazy stretch of a cat.
She was as perfect a vessel as Packer had ever seen, smoother in line and turn than he could have imagined a ship being; long, lean, as though in motion even when still. To Packer, she looked as much a part of the ocean as a dolphin, as a seagull. She looked like she could fly as easily as she could sail. The Chase was every bit the equal of her reputation. He drank in the sight. And he determined more than ever that he would put his new plan in motion, right here at the Hangman’s Cliffs he knew and loved so well. It would be a new beginning; his new calling would start where the old one had, looking out over the ocean.
“Trophy Chase,” he said aloud, just to hear the sound. The name rolled into the pounding of the waves below, into the salt sea air and the cries of the gulls. He said it again.
The words had barely left his lips when a puff of smoke flew from a cannon portal facing him. Packer dove for cover. The cannonball crashed just below him, sending shards of rock high into the air. “Vigilance,” he said with respect as dust and debris rained down on him. “Vigilance and precision.” He knew these words—they were two-thirds of the motto by which Scat Wilkins sailed his ships.
Packer scrambled back down the far side of the rocky ridge, taking care not to be seen again.
“Today?” Fourtooth asked, his wet eyes unblinking. “You saw the pirates today?”
Packer nodded. He was sitting at the center of the pub now, where Dog had been, with all eyes and ears riveted to him and his message. He had come here to warn them, but now, after his skirmish with Dog, his heart wasn’t in it. His words seemed flat and hollow, like he had to squeeze them from his chest. “Scat Wilkins and his escorts are anchored off the Hangman’s Cliffs just north of here.”
Fear darted into the eyes of the old fisherman. He hunched forward as if a pain had shot through his belly. “What do they want?”
“He’s here for supplies,” Packer replied. “No doubt he’ll send a party into town tonight.”
“Here?”
Packer fought irritation. “Yes, here. Hangman’s Cliffs, and every other village for ten miles up and down the coast.”
“But why?”
Packer took a deep breath. He knew they needed more. He forced himself to concentrate on these men, on the faces around him. They needed to understand. “Well, that’s how he works. He won’t dock the Chase in just any port in the kingdom. I guess he thinks he’ll be boarded, or infiltrated. So he comes to small towns and scrounges.”
“For what?” asked Cap Hillis, staring from his place behind the bar.
“Everything. Canvas. Lumber. Clothing. Food. Water. Ale.”
With this final statement, the reality finally hit Cap over the head. “You mean…you mean, pirates might be coming here? To my pub?”
Packer’s irritation dissolved with the sudden fright he saw in the old tavernkeeper. He felt warmly toward him. “No, Cap—I mean pirates are coming here. Tonight. If the town is locked down tight, they�
��ll knock on a few doors, make their deals, and go away; so I’m told. But no one should be out until morning.”
More silence. Then Ned Basser spoke up, still stinging from Dog’s poor showing. “You better hope you’re not lying.”
Packer was silent, trying to untangle the logic of that statement.
Fourtooth stood up slowly. “I gotta get outta here,” he said wide-eyed. Then another thought crossed his mind, and he sat back down heavily. “But first I gotta have another drink.” He reached for a pitcher of ale, but his neighbors already had him under the arms, helping him up and out of the tavern.
Packer watched them all go. He took a deep breath. His message had been delivered, and believed. He felt some relief, but not enough to penetrate the dark cloud brought on by his duel with Dog.
Cap, alone now in the pub with Packer, picked up the half-empty pitcher of ale that Fourtooth had coveted and put it down between them. Then he slapped a clean mug in front of Packer, eyed and selected an empty mug from a nearby table for himself, wiped it dutifully with his towel, and poured ale for the two of them. He kept an eye on Packer, trying to assess him.
Cap was plenty nervous about the approach of Scat Wilkins, but he could see that Packer was not. So long as this young swordsman was around, he figured, maybe there was reason panic might be delayed.
“You were a fearsome foe here tonight,” he said finally, testing the waters. He wanted to know how deep this new steel ran in his good friend’s son. The boy had always had more backbone than he’d showed, but it was generally hidden beneath a sensitivity that never really fit in well here. The priesthood had seemed right for Packer. But was that soft heart now gone?
Packer shook his head, slouched back in his seat, and toyed with his mug. What if Dog had sworn at him, stood up, called his bluff? What if he had simply decided to die, and leaned into Packer’s sword? This quiet moment would now be utterly hellish, with the priest summoned, a body on the floor, Dog’s wife arriving to find herself widowed, weeping uncontrollably, hysterical, cursing Packer. Panna would never look at him again. There would be a sheriff’s deputy called, and even if Packer were vindicated, he would live with that moment forever.
The Trophy Chase Saga Page 2
