The Stolen Princess

by Kristen Gupton

  * * *

  Come morning, Dassion awoke with the lingering effects of alcohol still being purged from his system. He emerged on deck of the ship and moved toward the rail to relieve himself over the side.

  His crew had returned to the ship, too. Like Dassion, they were just coming to life for the day. He could tell by the level of water against the ship they’d put on an extremely heavy load of coal. It would slow their travel southward, but not by much.

  He finished up and turned around, going to the other side of the ship to check the lines. A group of people were gathered on the dock not far away. They were animated, clustered around someone lying on the ground.

  Curious, he headed down the gangway and onto the dock. The voices of the locals were tense but low, despite their hand waving and head shaking.

  As he neared, one of the men stepped aside a little, allowing Dassion into the group. His eyes widened immediately, a jolt of adrenaline coursing through him.

  The body on the ground was that of the woman he’d seen the night before. Blood smeared the planks of the dock around her, as well as the ample amount of pale skin revealed by her provocative dress. She was on her back, her eyes half-lidded and hazed over.

  The cream-colored fabric of her dress was marred with wide swaths of crimson. Those stains now turning brown around the edges as they dried in the morning sun. With the deeply plunged neckline of her dress, the wound that took her life was readily visible.

  A sizeable chunk of flesh had been ripped from below her ear, extending down to her collarbone. The exposed tissues within were darkening from exposure to the air, her death clearly suffered many hours before.

  What could have done such a thing, Dassion didn’t know. His thoughts instantly turned to the rumors of such deaths he and his crew had been regaled with during the summer.

  The town’s sheriff spotted the young captain, quickly pushing his way through the crowd to get to him. “You and your ship came in day before yesterday, correct?”

  He gave a nod, forcing his gaze away from the body. “Aye, and we were preparing to leave this morning. I saw all this and thought I’d have a look. She was on the docks last night.”

  “She always was out here. Let’s have a look at you.” The sheriff reached out and grabbed both of Dassion’s wrists, pulling his hands forward. He scrutinized them closely, before looking the rest of the sailor over.

  Dassion was caught off guard by this, but didn’t resist. Obviously, the sheriff was still on the hunt for the suspect.

  He finally let go and took a step back from Dassion, appeased the young man was dirty enough not to have washed in a while, but having no trace of blood on him. “Was she alone? Did you hear anything last night?”

  Dassion shook his head. “No, but I was out pretty soundly after I returned to the ship with my men. We were out for a bit of fun before heading out again today. She approached me, but I turned her down and went onboard. I didn’t see anyone else out here. Must have been midnight by then.”

  The older man gave a slow nod. “I’m sure you’ll understand that I’m going to have to have my men look at and talk to your crew before you depart. Whoever did this will be a bloody mess, or very clean if they washed up. No offense, but men in your line of work…”

  “We’re filthy, I know.” Dassion gave a weak smile and motioned toward his ship, his gaze drifting back toward the woman’s body. “Have at it. I know my men were all with me last night when we boarded.”

  The sheriff nodded. “Good, we’ll get you out of here as quickly as we can. Most likely, the poor thing was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’d almost say it was a bear that took a bite out of her.”

  Dassion kept his doubt about that theory to himself, simply nodding.

  The sheriff kept good on his promise, and after the rest of his crew was scrutinized, Dassion was allowed to throw his lines and get underway.

  As the ship moved away from the docks and caught the wind, Dassion and the others fell quiet. To finally see evidence of the summer’s rumors like that unnerved them. If it hadn’t been for all the tales they’d heard, Dassion might have agreed with the sheriff’s theory it was probably the work of a hungry bear. Still, there hadn’t been any evidence of such an animal’s tracks in the copious amount of blood on the ground around the body. Besides, when bears killed someone to eat them, they actually ate them.

  Whatever the cause of her death, Dassion and his crew needed to put it behind them. There was nothing they could do if it was related to the deaths further downstream. If whatever it was had moved into the southern waters, it was beyond their control.

  It also meant they hadn’t escaped it by moving southward.

  He gave thought to giving up on the coal shipments and moving even further up the river to run grain from Ibia. If this was related to the earlier murders, he’d simply be traveling in the same direction as whatever was doing the killing. No, the money for the coal loads was simply too lucrative. Besides, none of those killed had been on boats.

  As night came along, Dassion opted to keep the ship on course for the night instead of mooring. The wind was favorable, and it would help make up for their delay that morning. He sent three of his five men below deck to rest, while he and two others kept the ship running through the night.

  Dassion snapped his head up as the sun crested the horizon, realizing he’d been dozing at the wheel. He looked over at Ari and Greggor, seeing them both standing around in a daze. It was time to hand control of the ship off to the others left to rest overnight.

  He called over Ari and passed the wheel off to him before heading below deck to wake the others. Dassion popped the hatch, the weak light from the sunrise giving him just enough light to get him down the ladder.

  Something immediately triggered his senses into high alert. There was a heavy metallic scent in the air, and his hackles rose. Though at least one of his men was a loud snorer, there was no sound at all, only the creaking of the ship.

  Dassion squinted, trying to get a better look as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. He shuffled forward, his foot striking something heavy.

  It was one of his men. Dassion sighed, thinking the others might have come down and gotten pass-out drunk the night before. The weird smell could be from one of them getting sick. He stooped and slapped the man’s chest, trying to rouse him.

  There was no response, and Dassion pulled back his hand. It was wet and cold. He almost became ill himself, thinking he’d stuck his hand right into the source of the offending smell below deck. He checked his hand in a weak beam of light coming through the hatch.

  It was red.

  He lowered his hand and looked around the room again, his previous fear returning but with good reason. The man before him wasn’t sleeping, he was stone dead. With his eyes adjusted, he spotted the other two men, also lying on the floor. He checked them both to find them as cold and unmoving as the first.

  Dassion slowly stood back up, his entire body shaking. Though the three men he knew to be in the room were dead, he felt the eyes of someone else upon him. He didn’t make a sound, trying to figure out which dark corner the killer lurked in.

  He backed up toward the ladder, stepping over the bodies, afraid to turn his back to the darkness around him. Dassion reached out with his hand, groping for the rungs of the ladder. Only when he felt one did he dare to turn, racing up the ladder as quickly as he could manage.

  Once on deck, he slammed the hatch closed behind him, fixing the iron latch upon it.

  “What’s going on?” Ari called over after watching the captain’s frantic escape.

  “They’re dead!” Dassion said, waving his hands toward the hatch. “They’re all dead! Just like the woman we saw yesterday!”

  “What?” Ari and Greggor asked back in unison.

  He held his bloodied hand out toward them as he ran over. “Dead! All three of them! Whatever killed that woman is on the ship! I locked the hatch, it has to still be down there!”

>   “After they went to bed, nothing came up,” Greggor said, feeling the tingle of his complexion blanching out. “Unless they killed each other…”

  “We would have heard something,” Ari replied, brow furrowing. “Are you certain they were all dead?”

  “Aye, they were,” Dassion said, running his clean hand through his tussled ginger locks. “I don’t know what to do. We can’t drop anchor here and evacuate the ship, there’s nowhere to go.”

  Ari gnawed at the inside of his cheek before responding. “We’re not that far from Takrah.”

  Dassion bobbed his head, knowing he needed to calm down and think things out. “All right. We’re close enough to survive without going below deck for supplies. If it’s down there, it’s not going to escape with the hatch locked, is it? We’re all exhausted, been up since yesterday morning, but we can make it. We’ll take turns at the helm. Let’s just get to Takrah.”

  Ari nodded. “I can explain to the guards at the dock what’s going on once we arrive. They can go down there and pull whoever, or whatever, is down there out for us.”

  “Greggor, are you onboard with us doing this?” Dassion asked.

  The larger man gave a curt nod. “I don’t see many other options. We’re closer to Takrah than anything else.”

  “All right, then.” The young captain nodded toward the hatch. “We’ll keep going, unless whatever is down there gets out. If that happens, we abandon ship.”

  * * *

  The sunset in Takrah left the entire sky a deep red. There’d been a massive sandstorm earlier in the day, filling the sky with a dusty haze.

  Dassion and his crew were relieved to arrive before night fell. The three survivors were exhausted, hungry, and horribly stressed by the time the ship was moored.

  Sadori cargo auditors soon approached the ship as was customary. The three sailors hurried down the gangway before they could board, not wanting them to open any of the ship’s hatches without knowing what had happened.

  Ari gave over the required cargo manifest to the inspectors, but immediately asked them to order armed guards over to the ship. He explained to them in rapid-fire Sadori what had happened to them before their arrival.

  The auditors were doubtful, but opted to signal over guards. Whether Ari was telling them the truth or not, law enforcement would be needed either way. The Sadoris tended to be overly cautious with the process of checking in ships as they still weren’t terribly accustomed to dealing with much foreign trade.

  The three men waited on the dock as two armed guards boarded the ship to go find the alleged murderer. Their short swords were drawn before they reached the deck of the ship, and a third guard remained near the sailors in case they needed to be arrested.

  The guards stopped near the hatch to the crew quarters. The bloody footprints Dassion had left after escaping the compartment earlier caught their attention. Something unusual was going on, and they stared at one another to steel their nerves before they dared to open the hatch.

  The stench of the now decaying bodies below deck wafted up when the compartment was opened. The guards at once knew something horrific had unfolded on the small riverboat.

  They called out to be given a lamp, unwilling to go down into the darkened compartment as the sunlight faded. There was a scramble dockside as the auditors and the third guard hurried to meet their request.

  They never got the light they asked for, however. The guard closest to the open hatch stooped down to try and look in the cabin while they waited.

  Someone was at the base of the ladder below. The guard’s instinct to recoil wasn’t fast enough, and before he was able to back up, the stowaway got onto the ladder, reaching high enough to grasp the man’s ankle.

  A single cry escaped him as he was pulled off balance and through the hatch, disappearing from view. His head struck the edge of the opening as he was dragged downward, knocking him unconscious.

  The other guard leapt backward and called for the others left on the dock. He hadn’t caught sight of what had grabbed his partner, but he had no intention of getting any closer to the hatch before someone else was nearby.

  Before the third guard could get onto the ship, the attacker came up the rest of the ladder to emerge on deck. He slowly rose to his full height, the tattered clothes he wore blood soaked. His long, dark hair was a tangled mess around his head and shoulders, but it did nothing to hide his rage-filled gaze.

  “Don’t move!” the lone guard ordered, hearing the third guard running up the plank behind him.

  “Or what?” the figure snapped back in Sadori. His lips parted to reveal his elongated fangs. Even in the fading light, those ivory teeth stood out against the man’s dark and bloodied beard.

  “Vampire!” The guard held out his weapon before him, the blade visibly trembling.

  The third guard made his way to the side of the other. While they’d pulled stowaways off of ships several times, this was an unknown scenario for them.

  The vampire ignored their demands to get to his knees and surrender. He simply smirked and turned his attention toward the river to his left. Within seconds, he made up his mind and ran in a few long strides toward the rail. In a graceful leap, he cleared the side of the ship and dove through the algae-riddled surface of the water.

  The two guards followed after him to the rail and peered over. The green surface of the water never broke to reveal the escapee’s location. He had vanished completely.

  * * *

  Dassion and his two remaining men were soon taken away from the scene. They were led to a nearby inn and allowed to clean up and eat following their ordeal. They wouldn’t be allowed to return to the ship until the bodies and cargo had been removed. The Sadori shipping authorities intended to scour the entire ship for any other people or clues as to what had happened.

  Ari, Dassion, and Greggor sat around a small table in the lobby of the inn. While they’d been served a hearty dinner, all three of them found it hard to eat. While the food itself was fantastic, their sorrow over the deaths of their friends and their overwhelming exhaustion made it hard to function.

  The guard who’d been pulled through the hatch had survived, and he came to the inn a few hours later. He spoke to the trio briefly, Ari needing to translate for the other two. The bodies of Dassion’s crew had been removed from the ship, and the young captain was invited to come see them while the ship continued to be scrutinized.

  While Dassion didn’t have any real desire to see his dead crewmen, it was his duty as their captain to see they were handled with respect. Begrudgingly, he got up from the table and followed the guards out, giving a plaintiff look back toward Ari and Greggor as he was led away.

  Dassion was taken a short distance away to a dockside warehouse. His men had been brought inside and lain out side by side. They were exactly as they’d been on the ship, their bodies stiffened in death.

  The savage wounds to all of their necks drew in Dassion’s attention. How someone could have done that to all three of them without making a sound baffled him. It must have all happened while they were asleep, the killer ripping open their throats badly enough to stop them from making any real sound. Death certainly followed quickly for them, though it was obvious they’d suffered like the woman he’d seen in Lodain.

  Silent tears trailed down Dassion’s cheeks. He’d been sailing with these three men for years. They’d been loyal and stuck with him ever since he’d taken command of the riverboat. All he could do was thank God he and his other two companions had survived.

  Guilt and fear drilled into his mind, though he didn’t know what else he could have done to stop what had happened. Suddenly, his time spent on his brother’s ships in the Northern Sea didn’t seem so bad. Facing the cold and storms was far better than coping with outright slaughter.

  Dassion ran his hands down his face to brush away the tears. Perhaps it was time to sell the boat to whoever would take it in its bloodied condition and head back to the ocean. Though the river had bee
n the safer option initially, it clearly was no longer the case. There was more money to be made at sea, anyway.

  With most of his river crew dead, the transition wouldn’t be much harder than starting over with what he had. Ari and Greggor would certainly go with him, and his brother would probably float him enough money to get set up with a new ocean faring vessel.

  “Are you the captain of the ship these men came from?” a female voice asked behind him in Tordanian.

  Dassion startled and turned around, having been too lost in his thoughts to hear her approach. He looked the small woman over, wondering who she was.

  “Aye, I am,” he said. “You’re not Sadori, are you? Where did you come from?”

  “No, I most definitely am not Sadori,” she replied, shaking her head. Her eyes fixed on the dead sailors, and she frowned. “I’m one of King Sipesh’s couriers. I was delivering a contract to Emperor Betram. I heard there was trouble with a Tordanian ship, so I came to investigate.”

  Dassion quirked a brow. While her Tordanian was excellent, her accent was most definitely Alerian. He recognized it easily enough from his years out at sea. How she could have ended up a courier in Tordania was curious, but he had no reason to doubt her claim. His day had been filled with far stranger things.

  If she was a courier and wanted a story to take back home to the king, then he had one to tell.

  “All right, then,” he said. “I don’t really care to relive it all, but I suppose I don’t have much of a choice, do I? Do me a favor and buy a few drinks first, though, would you?”

  Chapter 2

  The gray light of a winter morning poured through the windows of the castle. Keiran left his room and headed down the corridor toward the stairs. The door to his old room was slightly ajar, and he stopped to look inside.

  Garhan sat within, working on his latest painting. One brush was clamped between his teeth, another in his hand, lightly flicking away. He let his eyes drift from the piece for a second, spotting Keiran in the doorway. He lifted his free hand and motioned for him to enter.