by Erin Hoffman
“It could mean a great difference to your defenses,” the priestess argued, echoing his thought. “I am, of course, eager to lend any assistance I may for your crew's welfare, and my own.”
“You'll want a sea test,” he allowed. “A hand cannon would be enough.”
“It would suit perfectly,” she smiled.
The scuttlebutt flew quickly, as it always did. By the time Vidarian had collected a hand cannon and gauge, a collection of observers had gathered at the windward bow. Marielle, by fortune or her own design, was relieving the quartermaster at the helm and thus out of sight.
Ellara Stillwether, munitions officer, accompanied Revelle and the priestess, observing the process carefully. She and her lieutenant took careful measurements, assisted by Lifan, their little windreader. The priestess had been shocked at first to discover a child on board; Vidarian, in turn, had been surprised that she was unfamiliar with the custom. Lifan was Ellara's cousin, and fiercely guarded; Ellara herself had served as windreader on the Quest, when she could-the ability faded with the onset of adolescence. Ariadel assured them that no such parallel existed for fire, which typically appeared after adolescence if at all. For Lifan's part, she was as brightly intelligent as her protector, and showed a steady knack for figures that made Vidarian sure she would one day follow in Ellara's footsteps, if the land didn't lure her away.
After a full battery of initial calculations was complete, Ellara meticulously loaded the hand cannon, tamped it, laid its neck across a mark on the bow, and fired. The shot echoed over the calm water, and when it finally arced down to splash into the blue, Revelle called out a time and trajectory estimate.
As they prepared for the second shot, Ellara solemnly passed the flask of powder to the priestess. What followed was significantly more satisfying to the attentive eyes of the crew than her earlier performance with the lamps. On the deck she spread a linen cloth, and upon this spread a measure of powder. With her hands just above it, but never touching, she began a rhythmic chant, twitching her fingers to its beat. Vidarian would admit to no one that his own heart lurched when the powder began to glow; the gasps of the crew were enough.
Gradually the glow faded, and the priestess tipped the powder back into its flask by rolling the linen into a funnel. She handed the flask back to Ellara, who accepted it with reverence barely masked by her outward veneer of skepticism, and wadded the linen away into a pocket, of which her robe seemed to contain many.
Without ceremony Ellara directed Revelle and Lifan to take their readings again, and they complied swiftly. Then Ellara loaded the cannon once more, her movements as measured and diligent as if she were at her officer's test again.
The crew erupted in a furor as the shot sailed out across the water, easily a third again the distance of the first. Some whooped with delight, others murmured appreciation or amazement-and above them all, Ellara voiced a strident cry that checked the others. “Captain! Our calculations!” Her dark eyes were flinty with concern, darting as they doubtless racked through the hundreds of adjustments that the priestess's powder implied for their defenses.
“Ms. Amberwight,” Vidarian spoke without turning from the water. “My quarters. You'll find a red leather book on the third shelf. Fetch it, please.” The priestess's head tilted in inquiry as the lieutenant saluted and hurried off. “My grandfather's log,” he explained. “He had a fascination with munitions. The middle section is entirely devoted to trajectory calculation tables. Outdated, we thought, even in my father's time.” He laughed.
In moments Revelle had returned with the requested volume. She offered it to Vidarian, but he gestured instead to Ellara, who looked about ready to pounce. Or explode. She was too professional-narrowly-to seize it from her lieutenant's unprepared hands, but neither did she waste time in finding the page Vidarian directed her to.
“The measurement is quite close,” Ellara said, her eyes intense on the text when they weren't darting to her wax tablet for comparison. “We'll want to run more tests…”
“There should be enough of the new powder for several,” Ariadel offered. She seemed slightly fatigued, but satisfied as a housecat, leaning against the bow.
The sun was beginning to drop over the water to the leeward side, and here the forecastle cast a long shadow that just reached them. Celer, one of the two cabin boys, had fetched a lamp and now bore it up near them, a fine excuse to get a close-up look at the powder that his height had not previously afforded. A glint from the priestess's hands caught Vidarian's eye; a pale blue residue clung to her palms. Vidarian wouldn't have noticed it if not for the flickering lamp, but as she lifted her hand, the residue glittered like powdered graphite. And yet she had not touched the powder.
“The tests, I'm afraid, should rightly wait for tomorrow, and daylight,” Vidarian said, and though both Ellara and Revelle looked as though they'd like to object, they could hardly slow the sun, and quelled their objections. Ellara surely was mentally concocting some way to float lamps on the sea's surface so as to prolong the experiment, but she would have to settle for poring over the elder Rulorat's book into the deep hours of the night, as she doubtless would.
“Priestess, if I may?” Calgrath offered, and Vidarian turned to him in surprise. He gave a little bow, excusing himself, but continued, “Our medical kit? Surely-”
“It would take a trained specialist in the medical arts to adjust those. I dare not risk imbalancing them,” Ariadel apologized, and added, “I'm sure your ship's mender has them in the best condition possible.” This won a smile from the old seaman; the priestess could not know that the mender in question, currently on a watch shift if Vidarian recalled the day roster, was Calgrath's younger brother-in-law; but the keenness in the old man's eye when it came to medicine should have told her enough.
“Priestess, a word, at your convenience?” Vidarian ventured, and Calgrath bowed himself away.
“Of course, Captain.”
Back in the wood-varnish embrace of the forecastle anteroom, Vidarian sat quietly, not speaking, while Marielle, off from her shift at the helm, delivered the familiar silver tea service from the galley, almost certainly prompted by Marks. The grey kitten, which had been confined to the forecastle after three times managing to raid the galley (and nearly losing its life to the cook on the third) slept soundly, curled on a brocaded chair.
“Will you be liking anything else?” Marielle asked coolly, once she'd settled the tray. She was a scant degree off, in the angle of her hips, from bodychecking the priestess, as if to deny her presence.
“No, thank you, Ms. Solandt.”
“Very good, sir,” she nodded, and finally spared a glance for the priestess, out of protocol. “Nistra's peace.” She bowed, and left, shutting the door behind her.
The priestess permitted herself a soft laugh once the door was safely closed.
“Something amuses you, Priestess?” Vidarian couldn't quite keep the frost out of his tone.
Her laughter stilled. “Just an odd expression, it strikes me,” she said, and leaned forward, folding her hands self-consciously. “It seems I've done something to offend you, Captain.”
“Only insofar as you've been playing tricks on my crew, Priestess,” Vidarian said. “Neither they, nor I, deserve such.”
The priestess's eyes widened; her etiquette training surely did not cover direct confrontation. Better, Vidarian thought, that she learn sea ways quickly-he reined in his anger to a cold implacability, but was startled, himself, to find that there was disappointment there as well.
When she didn't answer, Vidarian continued, “There was something on your hands. You added it to the powder.”
She stiffened. “I said that we had a remedy, not that it was supernatural.”
“But the chanting, the hand-waving, the glowing. The lamps. Trickery, yes?” As he spoke he heard his father's anger in his own voice, the rumble of distant thunder.
“They're not fairly ‘tricks,'” the priestess insisted hotly. “They do work.�
� Now her hands came together under the cuffs of the robe, vanishing.
“But it's nothing to do with elemental manipulation.”
“It's nothing to do with my elemental ability,” she corrected, but reluctantly, a deer brought to bay. “It is manipulation.”
“Why?” he asked simply.
She surprised him by sliding to her feet, rising gracefully as a courtier. She inspected her upturned palms ruefully, then brushed them against the velvet robe. A pang of uneasy guilt shot through him at the distressed curve of her shoulders, the set of her jaw. He'd meant to chasten her, to demand forthrightness, but not to wound her. “I've never been skilled with the necessary deceptions,” she sighed.
“Necessary?” His voice was sharp again, and he took a deep breath. “Why should deception be necessary?” he continued, willing his grandmother's civility, calling up arduous etiquette lessons from his childhood.
She turned, the robe swaying gracefully with her, but with more weight, his sharper eye concluded, than velvet should account for. “Your people have noticed the fading of your tools, you've said as much yourself-over decades.” He nodded, but rather than pursuing her case, the priestess bafflingly turned away again, and then back to him. She searched for something in his eyes, boring into him until he could feel his cheeks heating. “What I'm about to say would have me confined to Sher'azar for a decade, if Endera or anyone else found out,” she began, but now that she had committed this much did not hesitate. “The tools aren't simply fading. Our ability to manipulate the elements has also been dwindling-not merely for decades, but for the better part of a century.”
A cold fist of dread clenched in his stomach. “The sea wars-”
“-were the beginning of the unrest,” she agreed. “A great change is coming. We've seen this dwindling accelerate in the last decade, and now-”
“-the Vkortha,” he finished for her, and again she nodded.
Silence stretched between them. The kitten, according to the enigmatic internal logic of cats, had slept through their heated discussion, but now awakened and stretched. The priestess picked it up, coaxing a rattling purr out of its thin chest with a few strokes of its back, and settled herself on the chair it had just been occupying.
“Strange doings,” Vidarian said at last, folding his hands. “I can't begin to comprehend them. But I also have never seen willful deception come to a good end. I still do not now see why this cannot be explained to my crew.”
“Do you tell your crew every smallest detail of your charting decisions, your courses, which contracts you accept and which you do not?” she asked, scratching the kitten behind its ears. It purred louder, then rolled under her hand, kicking upward with its feet and attacking her playfully. She wrestled back for a moment, then released it onto the carpet.
“Not every detail,” he said, bound by his own honor to honesty, though unsure what he was admitting, exactly.
“Yet they follow you, because you are their captain,” she said, looking up at him again. “If you were to democratically decide every detail, the ship would never move.”
“I do not demand their deceived belief,” he said. “That's something else entirely.”
“But we do not truly deceive,” she insisted, and the intent sincerity in her wide eyes was more disarming than he'd have liked to admit. “The benefits that I have provided to your ship are genuine.” That he could not deny, and the fervor in her voice was not sternness but ardent conviction. “Captain, you must believe me, that what I have seen as a priestess of Sharli, again and again, is that the priestesshood is needed. The priestesshood alone retains the records of these fluctuations in elemental energy, and if we are to survive, we require the support of the common folk, which comes only when they believe that we are still capable of our foremothers’ deeds.”
“I will not argue against that cannon shot, and I am grateful,” he said. “But can you really be so sure that the priestesshood knows best?”
She smiled, asking with her eyes if he was so sure about baiting her. He smiled back. “I'm never sure of anything,” she said. “As the philosopher Veldaus said, ‘the sure mind is the closed one, capable only of repetition.'”
“You certainly seemed sure of him,” Vidarian said, nodding at the kitten, which was presently attacking a tasseled end of the table runner.
“Her,” Ariadel corrected absently. “I apologize for unsettling you,” she said, her head tilting in what Vidarian was sure was sincere puzzlement. “I don't know what came over me. It's against my training to hold with such impulsive superstition.”
He laughed before he could stop himself. “A fire priestess? Trained against superstition?”
She colored slightly, but her smile was gentle; the sudden thought of Endera even attempting such an expression surprised Vidarian with its absurdity. This Ariadel was obviously unlike any fire priestess Vidarian had known. “You must have little experience with priestesses,” she said, echoing his thought. “Although the common folk”-her eyes dropped to the tray Marielle had brought in, surely unconsciously-“permitted and, yes, even encouraged their superstitions, the priestesshood rigorously trains against such things.”
“Yet I must bear them in my crew.” He sighed, and at her worried glance, smiled again, wryly. “Fear not. I will not betray your secrets. But I will appreciate your honesty in private, at least.”
“That I can promise you,” she said, and he gave a little half-bow of thanks from his seat.
Beneath them, the ship was moving, turning on its course. Vidarian's stomach clenched again, for he knew their place on the chart. They angled southwest, the prevailing south wind dropping from belled sails; in such fashion did the Empress Quest enter the Outwater. And her lights blazed bright against the great dark sea of the night sky.
One week later Vidarian sat closeted in the aft cabin, door firmly shut and commanding officers instructed to ensure that the priestess stayed on the other side of the Quest for a brief duration. When he was satisfied that all was secure, he settled down on the bench bed and drew his sword.
Since Endera's description of steel's “remembrance” he couldn't quite look at his ancestral blade the same way. The longsword, light and strong with the slightest arcing curve to the blade, was as old as the Empress Quest-five generations past, and Vidarian was the sixth. If what Endera said was right, some fraction of his grandfathers’ souls remained in the blade.
Sunlight filtered down through the blue and green stained glass set into the back portholes of the cabin, bathing him in gentle aquamarine light. It slid across glimmering steel like foam along a beach as he turned his arm, feeling the familiar weight of the three-quarter-tang blade and its mahogany covered hilt. As always it felt like an extension of his hand, the weight of his family settling like a protecting mantle about his shoulders.
The square of flattened steel just above the sword's silver-plated crossguard bore six names-and when Vidarian fathered a son, his name would be chiseled in below them at the boy's thirtieth birthday. Seven generations did not make for an ancient tradition, but theirs was sound, and its weight rested heavily in Vidarian's palm.
As was sometimes his habit, he sat contemplating the names for a time; having long since memorized every serif and curve, the letters were familiar, almost mesmerizing. He was still staring at them when the first shouts rang out abovedeck, pierced by the emergency cry of the boatswain's pipe-ship sighted, ship closing.
Vidarian sprang to his feet and only just remembered to sheathe the blade before thundering out the door of the cabin.
High afternoon sunlight lanced his eyes as he ran out onto the deck. Men were boiling up the ladders at either end of the ship, and Calgrath, perched in his customary position in the crow's nest, was bellowing down.
“Captain! Ship sighted off th’ port bow! It's the Starless, sir, and she be closin’ swift!”
Spitting a curse, Vidarian began roaring commands. Fast as the Empress Quest was, she was no match for the Starless Nigh
t, a pirate vessel known for breaking speed records as a matter of annual sport. And she'd been lurking, to appear so suddenly. Off to port was a collection of tiny islands wreathed by perilous shoals, all but invisible in the dark waters; it was madness verging on suicide to plant a ship there, but that was a fair description of Vanderken's strategy.
Marielle met him at the wheel. She was already shouting orders to the rest of the crew, but paused to exchange a few low voiced words with Vidarian. “Captain, these're not Starless waters. She hasn't been seen in these parts for over two years! Mighty odd if you ask me.”
“Right now it's best not to ask, Ms. Solandt. Just get me every cannon aboard aimed at that loveless craft!” Taking a sighting from the compass at his right, Vidarian spun hard on the wheel, bringing the Quest about as hard as she would bear, swinging her slender bowsprit around to face the Starless. “Solandt!” he shouted, remembering something. Marielle answered with an “Aye?” from across the deck. “Get someone to the priestess-keep her below deck! Once she's secure, get back up here and unlock the fore starboard chest-I'll not have these men meet Vanderken with rusted weapons!”
“Aye, sir!”
The orders were rapidly carried out, and well for it, too, as the Starless was closing with disturbing swiftness. Within moments, it seemed, cannon-fire boomed on the distant waves, falling short of the Quest, but not nearly short enough.
The wind was against the opposing vessel but she plowed on unconcerned. The Quest's arc shortly brought her around nearly ninety degrees to her own wake, presenting her gallant and cannon-studded port bow to the rapidly closing Starless. “All cannons fire when ready!” came the distant shout from Marielle, and Vidarian held the wheel firmly on course.
A resounding BOOM! shook the deck as the Quest opened fire, the priestess's augmented powder performing superbly; the crew roared to hear such play. The Starless, steady on her approach and moving too swiftly to accurately gauge position, could not avoid the shot in time, and took a hit to her highest mast. Her answering forward salvo was equally ineffective, thrown off by the damage to the high sails, but it spat salten spray across the Empress and her crew.
