The ship jolted and rose, completely in the grip of the wave. Behind the shark, Kovir heard a faint snap and knew it was the anchor chain breaking. All other sounds were lost in the roar that blotted out the world, and then the solid mass of water overtook the shark, flinging her ton and a half of weight effortlessly on the tide.
Kovir’s head turned to a hollow shell and a gale rushed through it, so much air that he couldn’t breathe. I’m here, he thought to calm her, because she couldn’t fight that force; she couldn’t see or hear anything other than the great surge that swept over her. You’re safe.
He forced his body to go limp and unresisting. If you’re taken miles away, you can find your way to me. If all the world separates us, you’ll come back. Nothing else matters.
Outside, glass shattered and water lashed in. The infirmary had no windows, and Kovir told himself that was good; he was warm and dry except for the sweat on his skin. But under the deliberate calm, he was only too aware that the flagship of the Dagran fleet was being tossed like driftwood, battered far more than it had been during the battle. If they took in enough water, they would sink, and if the wave slammed Nemesis into an island—
Then it would just be a slower death for him than what must have happened to Captain Garser.
He imagined his shark making her way through the shattered remains of a ship on the seabed, nosing at the occasional corpse but ignoring them until she found his body—a fancy he knew was as stupid as it was sentimental. What could she do after that, take his corpse back to Denalay? No one would recognize it as him by the time she was home.
Picturing the worst that could happen calmed him down, though, and he fed his composure into their link. The shark was tossed on the wash, taken farther and farther away from him, and he was so deeply locked with her that he had to stop himself from reaching his good arm out to her.
As the force of the wave dissipated, though, she could breathe. As long as she breathed, so did he. The sea was still turbulent, and new waves heaved through it at short intervals, so the shark swam back as far as she could during each lull. He let her drift on the brief surges to conserve her strength, aware that it might take her hours to return. But she hadn’t been crushed against rocks or hurt because she’d panicked.
And he was alive too.
The infirmary was busy around him. He heard Dr. Strant giving orders, fallen instruments being scooped up, sand hissing to the floorboards. Men staggered in. When they spoke, they did so in low voices as if too much sound might dislodge another mountain of water, so Kovir didn’t know what had happened on the deck until someone came to the side of his bunk.
“Are you all right?” It was Dr. Strant’s voice.
Kovir nodded. “The ship?” He must have been more tired than he’d expected, because it was an effort to talk, and it seemed easier to keep his eyes shut too.
“Not the best she’s ever been. That wave was carrying plenty of broken stones. But we’re afloat, and Captain Garser sent Brian here to get a status report from you.”
Kovir opened his eyes. The mess boy stood beside Dr. Strant, clearly waiting for information, but—
“Captain Garser?” he said.
Dr. Strant’s smile was tired but pleased. “It’d take more than a tidal wave to pry him off the deck. He caught a rail and held on.” The smile faded. “Probably did himself a worse injury. And when I told him not to go up there, what did he say? Oh yes. ‘Malcolm, don’t be an old hen.’”
He’d also said that he couldn’t expect men to risk their lives on his command unless they saw him equally willing to do so, but Kovir decided not to remind the doctor of that. Besides, he had a status report to deliver.
“My shark is safe,” he said.
Brian and Dr. Strant both waited until they seemed to realize that was all the information he had, then Brian bobbed his head in a nod and left. With the tension drained away, Kovir felt like a wrung-out rag, and he longed to sleep. The shark didn’t need him to find her way back to the ship; she’d covered longer distances on her own.
Before she could reach them, Garser was helped down into the infirmary and headed off Dr. Strant’s irritation by telling him their flag was visible from a peak on the island—from that alone, Kovir could guess how far they’d been taken, since the captain was likely to have been using a spyglass. “Even if it’s a trick,” he said, “the wave would have blasted their ship to hell. Nemesis is the only chance anyone has to get off that island, so we’ve set a course.”
In his mind, Kovir set a course too, floating on a warm steady current to carry him back home. He closed his eyes and was gone.
Chapter Fourteen
The Homecoming
For all the strength of her arms, Lera wasn’t a runner—sailors didn’t have much occasion to sprint. She might have tried it anyway, to bring Richard down, except the half-mad look in his eyes gave her pause. That and the knife, since she didn’t have a weapon. She hesitated, and then he had too much of a head start.
The other man, Voyjole, bolted after him. Jason tackled Voyjole, and they rolled over in a struggling heap. Lera ran towards them instead. Whatever the hell was going on, her priority was getting Jason and herself to safety, so a rabbit punch to the back of Voyjole’s neck stopped the fight.
Jason scrambled up. He said nothing, and Lera’s heart seemed to have paused between beats as she stared at Richard’s figure in the distance, growing farther and farther from them. Whatever was going to happen next would happen. She saw Richard—along with the tiny fleck of flame—disappear into the ground as if it had swallowed him up.
Paralyzed, she stared at the emptiness where he had been an instant earlier, struggling to think of what to do. Run away? Cover her ears? Her arms and legs wouldn’t move.
The explosion sent a cloud of boiling smoke and shattered stone into the air. Vibrations raced through the rock below her feet. To her horror, she heard deep echoes as the other lot of explosives detonated. She had a sudden image of every cache setting off the one next to it, like a line of tiles toppling.
Jason pulled her down, and a wave of scorching air rushed over them, followed by a low subterranean crack as the cliff began to give way. The tremors went through her as though her own bones were splitting open. If the fracture lines snaked in every direction and fissures opened up below… No, she wasn’t going to start imagining things.
She didn’t need to. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard a roar as thousands of tons of rock slammed into the sea. Water erupted into the sky. Then came the rush of the wave.
It seemed to take hours before the dust started to settle, before she dared to stand. Voyjole had come around by then, but he said nothing to either of them, only looked at the place where part of the cliff had been. Jason told him they were going farther inland, and asked if he wanted to come with them or stay there—which was more of a choice than Lera would have given him.
Voyjole picked himself up and said he would go with them. A lot of the fight seemed to have left him, but Lera wasn’t taking chances and made him go ahead as they approached the cover of the trees, constantly aware of the rush of more waves in the distance.
Though before long they came across Garser’s men, who had reached higher ground just before the wave struck. Their boats had been smashed, but one of them went to the cliff with a flag. She led the way to the stream, so everyone drank and Garser’s men handed out some ship’s biscuits they’d brought with them.
Then she took a knife to Jason’s shirt, so he wouldn’t need to move his arms to remove it, and wrapped the burns with strips of soaked cloth, which was as much as could be done for him until they had medical help. By nightfall, Nemesis had reached the island.
After that, as a commanding officer had once said to her, it was all logistics.
Princeps had been ripped free of the rocks, though some of her crew had managed to get inland before
the wave hit. Those who surrendered were placed in irons in the hold, and Garser left fifteen of his men behind with supplies, to secure the island and hunt down any of Alth’s crew still remaining there. He wasn’t in as good a mood as Lera had thought he would be, and she assumed his injury was bothering him, until Dr. Strant told her it was because Meghan had disappeared somehow.
“Can’t say I’m surprised,” Lera said to Jason later on, in his cabin.
“No?” His brows went up. “I am. Surprised she didn’t get away sooner.”
True enough, Lera thought, since the girl was resourceful as hell. She supposed the only reason the Council might not hunt Meghan down was because, despite her tenacity and sheer instinct for survival, she wasn’t personally ambitious. She had no desire to rule Dagre in any capacity and just wanted to be left alone. Lera hoped that would finally happen.
Garser was also not pleased that they hadn’t found Richard Alth’s body, but since both Lera and Jason had last seen him within five feet of enough explosives to shatter part of a mountain, he had to be content with that. Nemesis didn’t carry enough food for a prolonged stay at the island, but they replenished their freshwater stores before the steamship left, now pointed towards the mainland.
Kovir’s fever broke and his arm began to heal. By the time they reached the Sea of Weeds, the crew helped him to the gunwale each morning so he could put his shark through their daily paces, and Lera thought life was slowly returning to normal.
Except what was normal for her meant being alone. Not without people, because it was difficult to be solitary on a ship, but certainly not getting in too deep with any person in particular. Especially when she would never see that person once she returned home.
Even if the Admiralty sent her back to Dagre for some reason, she would avoid meeting Jason again. Because he was smart and brave and attractive, because he accepted her past—accepted her, completely—and because he made her smile. He looked more than ever in need of some large meals and a hot bath, but in the future, some woman luckier than she was would be happy to provide those.
And while it was selfish, she couldn’t bear the idea of seeing him with that other woman, whoever she was.
Telling him any of that was impossible, of course. Jason was easier to talk to than anyone she’d known, and he already knew her worst secret. She might—just might—not even feel so damn vulnerable admitting her feelings to him. But what in the world could he do about it? Give up everything he had to come back to Denalay with her?
They couldn’t even spend their last few nights together, because Jason needed to recover from his burns, and it wasn’t as though they had privacy. She took care of Kovir, and Jason shared his cabin too; since Voyjole had surrendered, he’d been taken prisoner and Jason had offered to be responsible for the man. Garser hadn’t liked it and Lera had thought it was suicidal, but Jason appeared alive every morning, so the muttering had died down.
She ate meals with him frequently, and they found a lot to talk about. She related everything that had happened during the race, and he told her he finally believed he’d paid his debt to his father. But he never spoke of what had happened between them on the island, and as they passed out of the sea forest, Lera began to think of the night they’d spent together as a sort of waking dream. The kind of thing she would do once, but never again. Jason probably felt the same way; he’d had his little taste of wild adventure and exotic foreigner, and that was enough.
Then they were back in Sandcliff Harbor.
Lera remembered the people who had crowded to watch the end of the race, but the crowd waiting to welcome them seemed a hundred times larger. The sky was full of banners. Alyster was on the deck of Checkmate, and he waved to her as Nemesis was towed into the harbor.
“I suppose you’ll go back home now,” she said to Jason.
“Yes, I’m looking forward to it.”
He sounded cheerful, as though he really couldn’t wait to go back to everything he’d left behind. Not a word about missing her, so it was good she hadn’t said anything foolishly sentimental. Best to go pack her belongings in preparation to disembark.
“Lera?” he said as she turned to leave. “You know there’s going to be a banquet in your honor, right? Well, in Kovir’s honor, since he’s being made a peer of the realm. It’s two days from now, and Captain Garser told me I was invited.”
That was odd. She knew none of them, most of all her, were likely to be alive if not for Jason, but it still seemed very generous of Garser to extend such an invitation in thanks. Especially since she had the impression Garser didn’t like him much, and she said so.
Jason smiled. “I was able to help him. Gave him a map showing the locations of all those caches of explosives, and his having it should compensate for Meghan’s disappearance.”
“How did you get that map?”
“Voyjole gave it to me. What I wanted to ask you was, may I escort you to the banquet?”
Her heart did a little flip, but she managed to keep her features still. At least, she hoped she had. “I suppose it’s customary in Dagre for women to be escorted?”
“Of course.”
She hesitated on the verge of refusing, but something pulled her back from that point. Maybe it was a reluctance to be rude when he’d always treated her cordially or maybe it was the way he looked at her—just as he’d looked up at her from the garden of the Velvet Court, with a steady trust in his eyes. She couldn’t bring herself to hurt his feelings, and she told herself that if they were only friends, it was still better than nothing.
So she nodded and went back down to her cabin. By the time she returned to the deck, Nemesis was moored, someone with more soppiness than sense had strewn the gangplank with violets, and everyone on Checkmate was waiting.
It was good to see them all again, especially because she felt a bit more accepted among them now, and Kovir was happy to be in familiar surroundings. He couldn’t stand for long, but Dr. Strant accompanied them to speak to Checkmate’s physician and assured Kovir he would be able to walk by the time he returned to Denalay. A good thing too, since Lera could imagine the reaction from Seawatch if their operative was returned in a permanently damaged condition.
Though his recovery meant he had no choice except to attend the banquet, but he refused to wear Dagran fashions. Instead he had a change of clothes he’d brought from home—clothes in the unadorned, drab grey Seawatch preferred, because those called less attention to operatives.
Except in his case, Lera knew those would stand out, especially since they were worn, darned and faded into the bargain. Besides, as Jason had told her on Nemesis, grey was a mourning color in Dagre.
But fortunately the banquet was organized by the wife of one of the many, many lords in Dagre. Lera couldn’t pronounce the lady’s last name, but she soon found out that though Dagran women didn’t fight battles, some of them had more than the normal allowance of both spine and charm. Kovir ended up in blue velvet breeches and a white shirt embroidered with ivory vines. He still didn’t look completely appropriate, but that was better than making everyone think he’d suffered a death in the family.
For her part, Lera declined the offer of a dress, partly because she wasn’t used to wearing those and partly because the current Dagran fashion was for low necklines. With her breasts, she’d never dare bend if she wore something like that. Her uniform was cleaned and pressed by the afternoon of the banquet, so after she pulled on black trousers and polished black boots that came up to her knees, she buttoned her coat, pinned the silver bars on the sleeve and looked in a mirror.
Exotic, and not in a good way. At home, she would have looked functional, crisp, competent. In a Dagran ballroom, especially with her scar, she’d look odd and immensely out-of-place. She didn’t give a damn what foreigners thought or said about her, but she didn’t want to give people any reason to look down on her homeland.
She undid her braid. By then she’d trimmed the burned ends of several locks, and she combed her hair out until it cascaded smoothly down her back.
That was better. Exotic, but in a good way. And in one of her rare moments of vanity, she thought there was nothing like the severe black-and-white background of her uniform to set off hair that looked like a wake of fire.
Two carriages arrived at the harbor for them, though both were drawn by matched horses rather than being steam-powered contraptions. Probably because those left smuts on clothing, whereas with horses, all she needed to do was watch where she put her feet. The driver climbed down, but Jason stepped out first and opened the door for her, so she got in with him. Although she’d never been much for grand celebrations, the carriage was so well appointed that she couldn’t help feeling excited. Even the horses wore plumes on their heads.
Jason’s clothes, she thought, were clean and perfectly suited to him but not at all ostentatious. “I like what you’re wearing.”
“Thank you.” He glanced down at a new suede jacket—in a slightly deeper shade of brown—and dark trousers. “I thought it was best not to get too dressed up. People believe you’re trying to ape your betters if you do that.”
What betters? Lera thought, but when they reached the manor house where the banquet was being held, she was taken aback to see how well dressed everyone else was. Satins gleamed in the light of a thousand candles and every swish of skirts flashed foamy lace. Some women sported feathers, fans and scented handkerchiefs. It was a little daunting.
But she was there as a show of support for Kovir while the Minister made a speech. She had expected Kovir to kneel while someone touched his shoulder with a drawn sword, but Jason said that was only for knighting and no one drew swords in a ballroom anyway, it was vulgar. So Kovir was made the Earl of Loftmark without too much fanfare and thanked the Council of Dagre for the honor, though he still wasn’t allowed to escape.
Everyone applauded, accepted tall glasses from servants circulating with silver trays and drank a toast—not only to Kovir now, but to all of them, all the Denalaits who had so nobly and generously come to the aid of another land in its hour of need. Finally the talking was over and the Minister, with a smile, suggested the festivities might begin.
The Highest Tide Page 28
