They made good time, but the physical strain of pushing and steering the boat from the water wore him down, and each afternoon he slept deeply, and woke, still tired, his muscles aching. His rest that afternoon, however, was cut short when he was awakened by thumping above him. His eyes flashed open and he stared at the underside of the boat. Kerina!
He swam out from under it and popped his head out of the water.
Her face had gone pale.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, glancing around.
His gaze landed above. Clouds, steel grey and pitch black, clustered overhead, extinguishing the light of the sun. The storm system stretched for miles across the sky.
And the wind was blowing in the opposite direction.
Gabriel grimaced. There was no helping it. They had to get out of the storm even if it meant hours or even days of regaining all the distance they had lost.
He shoved his shoulder against the hull to turn the boat.
“Wait, where are we going?” Kerina protested. “We just came that way.”
“The wind’s too strong. We have to get out before the waves become fifty-foot monsters.”
“Fifty…feet?” Kerina’s jaw dropped, as the wind picked up around them. “But you said the waves were largest closest to the shore.”
He did not have time to explain the terrible magnificence of storm systems over the Atlantic. “Hold tight. The water will be rough.”
“Should I tie myself down to the boat?” Kerina asked, her small voice almost drowned out entirely by the howling wind.
“No.” Gabriel snapped. That way, if the boat went under, she would not be dragged down with it. “Just get under the shelter.”
She crouched under the cover, cradling her parrot to her, as he slowly turned the boat. The clouds burst open, unleashing a torrent of rain that obscured all vision. The wind swarmed into the sails, unfurling it, and the boat shot forward, fairly leaping across the water. Gabriel darted alongside, constantly adjusting the boat’s direction to keep the wind from slamming into the sails at the wrong angle and tipping the boat over. His heart raced, its thud erratic. If he ever had to travel with a human across oceans again, he would first learn how to sail the damned boat.
Or just not travel with a human.
He could dive deep, escape the storm. Return to the depths where all was calm.
He ground his teeth. His grip on the gunwale tightened until his knuckles were white. No, he couldn’t just dive deep. He would not leave Kerina.
He felt the shift of the water an instant before it swelled into a wave.
“Hold on!” he shouted, but he did not know if she heard him above the screaming wind and the roar of rising water. The boat rose twenty feet on the crest of a wave, then plunged into a trough. Kerina screamed, but her voice was lost a moment later when a second wave smashed into the boat.
The parrot soared into the air, fluttering madly.
Kerina was nowhere to be seen.
Gabriel dived instantly. His vision was clearer under the water, and he saw the panicked flailing of her limbs several feet away, under the water. He surged toward her, grabbed her around the waist, and together they broke the surface.
She stared wide-eyed at him, her body shaking hard against his. Her hair was plastered against her head instead of that glorious, wild frenzy he loved looking at. The slash of lightning across the sky accentuated that lighter patch of skin over her eye.
With his other arm, he cradled her back, trying to calm her.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “I’ve got you.”
She swiveled in his arms. “But where’s my parrot! And who’s got the boat?”
In spite of the danger of the moment, he chuckled. Did she have no fear for herself?
She pointed at a distant speck. “It’s getting away from us.”
Gabriel assessed the distance. The only way to catch up with the boat was by swimming underwater, instead of battling the waves. “Can you hold your breath for thirty seconds?”
She stared at him. Her mouth moved, as if she were about to say one or two different things, but in the end, she whispered, “Probably.”
“All right. We’ll dive for thirty seconds at a time. When we come up, grab a quick breath, then we’ll go down again.” Their eyes met. Hers were stricken with borderline panic, controlled only by sheer force of will. His grip on her tightened. “I won’t let you go.”
Her throat worked as she swallowed, then she nodded.
She clung close to him as he dove, which made it easier for their streamlined bodies to cut through the water. When they broke the surface, he waited until he heard her draw a deep, tremulous breath, before plunging down again. They surfaced and dove until they finally came up alongside the boat. It took no longer than five minutes, but to Kerina, a human utterly unaccustomed to the sea, it must have felt like forever.
He lifted Kerina up from the water, and she scrambled, dripping wet, into the boat. Her parrot dropped out of the sky, straight in her arms. Its grey feathers were ruffled, and it was as bedraggled as its owner, but it cawed, sounding far more annoyed than afraid.
“The perfect storm.” It nipped her ear. “Twenty thousand leagues under the sea.”
Gabriel started to move away, but Kerina’s thin voice stopped him. “Where are you going?”
“To the back of the boat. To push. You should get under shelter.”
“Why?” She laughed, but it was a shaky sound. “I can’t get any wetter.”
With a tired smile, he returned to his duties steering the boat.
The storm raged for several hours, and by the time it passed, dawn was breaking. By Gabriel’s estimate, they had lost three full days of travel in that eighteen-hour storm. His heart sank, but he said nothing, pushing the boat through the scalding heat of the noonday sun.
“You’ve been at this for a full day,” Kerina said.” You need to sleep, even if just for a few hours.”
“But—”
“I know the storm set us back,” she said. “But arriving there half-dead with exhaustion isn’t going to help either of us. Please, Gabriel. Rest. Just for a few hours.”
“Heave to, scallywags!” the parrot squawked as he fluttered up.
The motion drew Gabriel’s attention to a forest of masts and sails on the horizon. Even as he watched, the ships drew closer, moving faster than they were.
Gabriel’s throat tightened. “Pirates.”
Kerina stretched to peer at the ships, then ducked down, as if she could hide.
“What are we going to do?” she hissed.
“Outrun them.”
She pointed down at the boat. “In this tiny thing?”
“We can’t leave it behind.”
“No…” Her lips twisted. Her next words were uttered so quietly that he scarcely heard them. “It cost everything.”
He did not have time to wonder at her wistful tone, however. The pirates would be on them in no time. He set his shoulder against the hull and pushed, his muscles straining. The wind provided a little assistance. Even so, it was hours of hard swimming before the pirates veered off in another direction.
His shoulders heaving with each breath, his muscles weak and trembling, Gabriel finally sagged in the water. His peripheral vision flickered like the ragged edges of a wind-tossed black curtain.
Kerina leaned over the boat. “Get out of the water. Now.”
The snap and sharp edge of her tone made refusal impossible.
He pulled himself out of the ocean and crumpled in the boat.
Kerina tried to lift him up. “Get under the shelter, or you’ll catch a chill. The blankets are warm there.”
Gabriel managed to mumble out the words, “I’m wet.”
“You know what? The blankets will dry out. Lie down.”
He crawled from the scalding heat of the sun and collapsed under the shade of the shelter in the stern of the boat. The blankets were warm, as she promised, and dry, absorbing the chill from his
skin.
He felt movement around him, but could not find the energy to open his eyes.
Her arm slipped up his neck, raising him up. “Here. Drink this.”
The liquid he sipped from the cup she brought to his lips was bittersweet, but it slipped easily down his throat. “What is it?”
“A tonic to help you recover your strength. Now sleep.” Her voice seemed to fade. “Everything will be all right.”
* * *
Gabriel awoke with a start. The smell hit him first—herbal and earthy. He sat up slowly and stared at the wet, black mud smeared over his arms, chest, back, and legs.
“What…”
“How do you feel?” Kerina’s voice interrupted his thoughts.
He crawled forward until he was out from under the shelter, then stood, slowly flexing his muscles. The deep, lingering ache was gone. “What did you do?”
She shrugged. “Salt and herbal rub. It’s great for muscle strains. I thought you might need it after so many hours—days—of hard swimming.”
“It’s amazing…even if I look like some kind of mud monster.”
Kerina laughed, flashing white teeth in a brilliant smile. “It’ll wash off—most of it, anyway.”
“How long did I sleep?”
“Not long enough, in my opinion. But now you need to eat.” Kerina held out a plate with slices of fish. She scrunched her nose. “And it’s raw, but it’s sea bass. Your favorite.”
How did she know, he wondered as he ate slowly, enjoying the wind against his skin. Kerina’s magic made her amazing, but her kindness made her wonderful.
She sat across from him, on the small seat in the bow. Her bird perched on the top of the mast, like a lookout.
“We got through that crisis all right,” she said. Her feet tapped a lively rhythm on the wooden planks, as if she were dancing in place.
“We were lucky.”
Kerina shook her head. “I think people make their own luck. You pushed the boat all day and all night to make it happen.”
His brow furrowed as he recalled something she had said hours earlier. “You said something about the boat—that it cost everything. What did you mean?”
She waved away his concern. “Oh, it’s nothing.”
But in her eyes, he caught a glimpse of something he could not put a name to. He reached out and grabbed her hand in his. “It’s not nothing. What did you mean when you said, ‘it cost everything?’”
She shrugged. She still did not look at him. “We needed a boat, and I didn’t have anything to trade for the boat—except the house and the land around it.”
His breath caught. “What do you mean? That you’ve nothing to return to?”
“Oh, I have family, far away…but not that house. Not anymore.”
His hand pressed against hers, and it seemed to him that her grip tightened too.
“Why?” he asked quietly.
“Because you needed me,” she said, her voice as quiet as his. Then she flashed him an impish smile. “And because I can’t swim.”
* * *
Several weeks spent in close proximity made one thing expressly clear to Gabriel. Kerina had a way of twisting out of quiet, intimate moments with a well-placed, distracting smile and a light joke. Laughter would then defuse the moment, and Kerina seemed grateful to not have to delve into any deeper discussions about her, her past, or her future.
It seemed as if there was only his present—his urgent need to save his people.
It felt wrong—unbalanced—but if there was anything he could do to change the lopsided relationship between him and Kerina, he did not know what it could be. As the days passed, his urgency to find the Legacy Stone only increased, and he was glad to finally see the familiar mountains rising in the distance.
Kerina leapt to her feet and peered over the bow. “Is that South America?”
“We’re about a hundred leagues northwest of what used to be Rio de Janeiro,” Gabriel told her from the water, where he kept pace beside the boat. “We still have a ways to go.”
“I never knew there could be mountains so close to the ocean.” Her smile dazzling, Kerina threw her arms out. “It’s beautiful!”
Gabriel laughed too; her joy was infectious.
She looked down into the crystal-clear waters, and then scowled. “There’s something down there.”
He shrugged. “It’s just a statue that used to stand on a nearby mountaintop. People say that it was cast down when the meteor hit and found a new home in the sea.”
“It’s huge! I’ve never seen a statue so big. What is it like?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never swum close to it.”
“Why not?”
Gabriel stared at her. “I…don’t know.”
“It’s not that far down, is it?” She stared at the statue, as if trying to gauge its distance from the boat. “It’s magnificent. Can you tell me what it’s like?”
It would only take a few minutes, and if something so simple would make her happy, then why not? Gabriel nodded, then pushed away from the boat, easily diving deep toward the white statue of a bearded man in a long robe, arms outstretched, as if welcoming the world into his embrace.
Instead of turning cool from its increased distance from the surface, the water—oddly—warmed as he approached the statue. Frowning, he circled the statue, still gleaming white despite the decades in the water. Why had algae and other sea plants not taken root on and around it?
Was there some kind of magic in the statue?
Something in the shadowed recesses beneath the statue drew his attention, and he swam closer. On the sandy ocean bed, concealed beneath the fallen statue—right over where its heart would have been—a notch in the ocean floor pulsed, as if alive.
Alive, and waiting…
Gabriel drew in a sharp breath. The sacred place, awaiting the return of the Legacy Stone.
He glanced back up to the shadow of the boat, to the mage on board.
Somehow, Kerina had known. She had found the sacred place.
Was there no limit to her power?
Chapter 8
Kerina hadn’t been prepared for how intense their travels would be. When the first storm had hit, she’d thought, it can’t get worse than this. And when they first saw the pirate ship, she thought, again, it can’t get worse than this.
And yet, none of those events, or even the other storms to follow, were the worst of what they encountered on the voyage.
Today, though, was full of hope. They had caught sight of land, although, according to Gabriel, they still had some ways to go and were sailing south to Rio de Janeiro. The sun shone bright, and Kerina took a deep breath of the fresh, ocean-scented air. The day was perfect. Not a storm in sight. What could possibly go wrong?
It had taken Gabriel sacrificing a few hours of sleep each day over the course of three weeks, but he’d managed to get them not only back on track, but ahead of schedule. He seemed insistent on pushing and rushing, telling her that he didn’t know if his people could really survive as long as he’d already been gone. He stopped only to sleep or eat, and she enjoyed the latter moments the most, even when it included questionable meals.
Gabriel held out a slice of raw fish to her. “You won’t even try it?” he asked. “I tried it your way.”
“My way is good,” she said.
He shrugged. “That’s really subjective, isn’t it?”
Kerina spread her hands. “I guess that depends who you ask.”
Gabriel let out such a hearty laugh that Kerina jumped a little. When he stopped laughing, his gaze landed on hers, and something shifted in her stomach. This time, it was not seasickness. It was some fluttery, light, excited feeling that stole her breath.
His smile fell away, replaced by an expression she couldn’t read, and silence swelled between them. It was a moment, an uncomfortable moment, in which she felt the inexplicable urge to kiss him.
But that was wrong for so many reasons. He was a siren. She was
human. And perhaps more importantly, she was a fraud. She couldn’t fall for the man she was lying to.
“Sure,” she said, willing to say anything to break the moment. “I’ll try it.”
Gabriel’s eyebrows pulled together, and after a moment, went up. “Oh! You mean the fish. You’ll try the fish my way. Really?”
“Yep.” She reached out and took the slice of raw fish from his hand, trying not to wince on the outside the way her stomach clenched on the inside. “Can’t wait…”
“You don’t have to—” he began.
But it was too late. She had already dropped the raw fish into her mouth.
“Down the hatch,” the African grey squawked.
Kerina refrained from shuddering as the slimy slice of bass slid past her tongue and down her throat. She forced a smile.
“There,” she said. “Did it.”
“Did you really?” he asked. “Or was that some sort of trick? Maybe you used magic to make it disappear.”
She felt her lips quiver, threatening to disrupt her plastered on smile. “I really did.”
He held out another piece. “Want some more?”
“No, I think—” The boat rocked hard to the left, and she grabbed hold of a rail to stop from falling over. “What was that?”
Gabriel leaned over the side of the boat, then sat back up and looked at her, shaking his head.
“Well?” she asked. “Did we hit something?”
Gabriel shook his head again. “Something hit us.”
Kerina’s heart sped up in an entirely different way from earlier. “What does that mean?”
“Stay here,” he said, grabbing the large knife Kerina had always kept stowed on the boat. Then he dove into the water.
Kerina lunged toward the end of the boat, staring down into the dark waters. “Gabriel? Gabriel, what happened? What was—”
Another thud slammed into the boat, knocking her back onto her bottom. Her side crashed into a seat, and the ache in her ribs made it hard for her to move and regain her balance. Another thud crashed into the boat.
“Gabriel!” This time, she didn’t try to look into the water. She just held on tightly. “Gabriel! Where are you?”
Mage’s Legacy: Cursed Seas Page 7
