Veritas

by St Clare, Kelly

  Torn skin, but bare nevertheless.

  She changed without a thought below deck. But here . . . on this rowboat . . . with Jagger’s hands on her stomach, it was . . . different.

  Ebba watched his hands on her stomach and chicken bumps erupted over her tummy. She shivered violently.

  Brandy sloshed over her, and she yelped, taken unaware. She tensed, toes curling, jaw clenching until the stinging pain began to ebb.

  “All right, lass, now the big one.”

  Ebba glared at the brandy bottle. “Aye, go on then.”

  Jagger lifted his hands, and Locks poured. The burning brew hit the edges of the torn skin, and Ebba cried out, beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead.

  As the pain dissipated, she relaxed her head back with a thud on the bench behind her. “That hurt.”

  “The wound be shallow,” her father said, inspecting the injury as he cleaned it. “Just long and ugly. I’d usually sew it up, Ebba, but I don’t have my supplies. I’m afraid it’ll be a ropey scar.”

  “There’s the purgium,” Stubby said.

  Caspian folded his arms, peering between him and Peg-leg. “Is using the purgium on a whim wise?”

  “Mayhaps not.” Peg-leg pursed his lips.

  Ebba was happy with just six white dreads, and she could handle black nails. The rest of herself could stay as it was. “I’ll just heal natural-like, I think.”

  Locks tore the bottom of her tunic off. Washing the strips in seawater, he bound the seaweed in place against her wound.

  Bells sounded again from the water. The mermaid creatures were back.

  “The Jendu are very adamant that we must not put more blood in the sea,” Barrels called when the immortals’ bell-like voices faded. “They look irritated.”

  Jagger shook off his hands from where he’d washed them in the Dynami.

  “They say why?” Ebba asked, eyelids heavy as Locks finished his ministrations.

  “They’re gone again. They seemed afraid.”

  “Ye know,” she said with a yawn, “they were actin’ right weird before. Sayin’ they loved me and huggin’ me close and all sorts. If the new part be love, do ye think that was the amare workin’?”

  She glanced at Plank, but his gaze was fixed on the amare. He gripped it with both hands, his eyes a million miles away. While daydreaming wasn’t unusual for him, the anguish reflected there was.

  And unwanted.

  Ebba didn’t want any of her fathers to feel pain. When they felt pain, she felt pain.

  “Seems likely,” Peg-leg said, scratching his chin. “I mean, they didn’t do the same to any o’ us. Though, we are men.” He froze and darted a look at her.

  “True.” She nodded, not bothered by the mention of her gender. “I hadn’t thought o’ that.”

  Peg-leg relaxed and jerked his head at the amare. “Did it make ye feel love, lass?”

  Ebba thought back. “Nay, I don’t recall so. Though the third Jendu, the one not touchin’ me, didn’t seem affected. Just the ones huggin’ me were actin’ odd-like.”

  Barrels hummed. “So the bearer must be touching another person to make them feel love.”

  “But I didn’t feel love while in the kraken’s mouth, and I was touchin’ him,” Ebba trailed off, darting a look at the kraken bobbing beside the vessel.

  This gave her father pause.

  “Where was the amare in his mouth, my dear? Was it just touching tooth or flesh?”

  “Just tooth.”

  “Perhaps then,” he said excitedly, “we can assume the amare must be touching flesh to influence another.”

  “I held the amare in my teeth on the way out.” Ebba recalled. “Until he sneezed, then I put the piece in my hand.”

  Maybe Barrels was right.

  Jagger scoffed. “I thought this thing we be buildin’ was meant to be a weapon.”

  “Aye,” Ebba said. “What use is the amare?”

  Plank turned to look at her with red-rimmed eyes. “Love is a weapon, Ebba-Viva.”

  He never called her Ebba-Viva, always little nymph.

  Something deeply disturbed him. She hadn’t forgotten the conversation as Felicity disappeared. Plank had a deal with her fathers that had ended when the ship sank. Though she’d seen him ready to go down with their home, Ebba couldn’t accept that he’d wanted to die back there. Why would he want to leave? His words didn’t connect with her. That they originated from pain, she was sure. But how could love be wielded?

  “Aye?” she whispered.

  He broke their stare. “It’s the strongest part we’ve collected yet.”

  The dynami could crumble an entire castle passage. The veritas could drag truth from any person it touched. The purgium could bring you back from the taint itself. The scio had shown its use with both the Daedalions and the Jendu. But love?

  “I don’t see it,” she admitted, watching him closely.

  “Who knows what the Jendu would’ve done to ye if they hadn’t been swayed by the amare.”

  Ebba remembered when the creature first grabbed her. She’d thought they were drowning her. Really, she couldn’t be certain they weren’t. “I s’pose.”

  “I be thinkin’, in the wrong hands, false love could be very bad indeed—if that be what this part does,” Stubby said, arching to stretch. “Imagine bein’ forced to love yer enemy?”

  The few minutes she’d spent locked around Calypso were enough for her to agree.

  Maybe Plank had a point.

  Yet a whispering, fearful part of her said he meant something else entirely.

  Thirteen

  “What about Jerald?” Ebba called up.

  She was dressed in the only spare tunic, courtesy of Barrels, who’d appeared mournful at the loss of it, and her hacked-off slop shorts. Her legs were bare from the tops of her thighs, aside from the bandages covering them.

  Time moved slowly as the kraken, a rope looped around the base of his tentacles, tugged them toward the closest island.

  The kraken glanced back. “No, that’s too stuffy. Like I host intimate dinners no one wants to attend.”

  “Berty?”

  “How old do you think I am? There’s a difference between collecting antiques and being an antique.”

  Considering he was probably hundreds of years old, she thought Berty was about right. “How about. . . .” Ebba glanced at the others, but no one else was interested in their conversation. Honestly, neither was she, but there was nothing else to occupy her mind, and she’d already annoyed half of her fathers.

  “Do ye like Rory?” she asked. “I’m runnin’ out o’ names.”

  “No.”

  “Stanley?”

  “No.”

  “Matey, ye need to choose at least a few ye like.” Ebba sighed.

  The kraken stopped and twirled in the water. Ebba lunged for a handhold, crying out at the pull in her wounds.

  “Matey,” he declared, huge eyes wide.

  “Aye?” Stubby said, exhaling loudly as the boat settled.

  “No, Matey,” he said.

  Ebba scrunched her nose. “Nay, what?”

  The kraken snapped his beak. “I want my name to be Matey. You guys say it all the time.”

  There was a reason for that. It was a term of informal endearment. One the crew often said. And Ebba could tell that, like her, her fathers were envisioning how annoying that could get.

  “Ye don’t like Marty?” Ebba asked in a last-ditch attempt.

  The kraken scratched his bulbous head with a tentacle. “Nah. Pretty set on Matey.”

  Peg-leg groaned.

  “Aye then,” she said. “Then yer name be Matey. Meanin’ we’ve fulfilled our promise to ye, just like we said we would.”

  “You have,” the kraken choked. “I’ve never had someone keep a promise before.”

  Probably because they hadn’t got the chance to make one, but Ebba kept her mouth shut.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” the kraken said to Caspian befo
re turning to set off once again.

  The prince was washing her bloody bandages in the sea because when Ebba tried, bending over hurt. He straightened, peering at Matey’s back. “Why is that?”

  “Capricorn. They can sniff a drop of blood a mile away.”

  Barrels lowered his hands from the limp cravat he was trying to breathe dignity into. “You didn’t think to mention that before?”

  Matey kept towing them. “I don’t know what you don’t know.”

  That seemed a reasonable explanation.

  She shifted her leg over Grubby to ease the mounting numbness in her butt. Grubby’s state was no better or worse than the days prior. She’d decided to hang on to that as a good sign. Locks said he might be getting stable inside before healing, and surely if he were in real trouble, he’d be on the decline? As long as one of them watched him around the clock, they still had the purgium in their back pocket.

  “I know exactly what I don’t know,” Ebba declared proudly.

  “Always a good thing,” Stubby said.

  Caspian smiled. “And just what is it that you don’t know, Mistress Pirate?”

  They were back to Mistress Pirate again? Why? Was he angry at her?

  She glanced at him in question, but he either hadn’t realized the change or was working hard to pretend he hadn’t noticed her reaction. He’d only called her Ebba a couple of times, but the informality had made her feel like they were getting closer.

  Switching back made her feel like he was pushing her away.

  She pushed aside that dilemma to focus on his question. What didn’t she know?

  An awful amount was the answer.

  She didn’t know how the root of magic was meant to be used to defeat the six pillars. She didn’t know if touching the sword was something she should do. The whole courtship thing with Caspian still confused her a smidgen. She didn’t know why Plank was so devastated, nor why Jagger had treated her like she had the plague since he touched the amare.

  And she didn’t know. . . .

  “Hey,” she said to Matey. “What do ye know about the six pillars?”

  Matey gasped, jerking in the sea and sending a small wave of water into their rowboat.

  “Watch it,” Peg-leg said. “The swell’s already three meters high and ye’re fillin’ us up.”

  A few of her fathers grabbed goblets and set to scooping water out of their boat. The small vessel was streamlined at one end to cut through the waves. The smaller bench she sat upon—able to fit two pirates—was situated there, with three wider benches spaced out through the rest of the rowboat. Large enough to survive in but not much else.

  If they didn’t have immortal help and barrels of grog, their odds of living would be dismal. And the grog would eventually run out.

  Ebba shivered as the cool water soaked the bottom of her tunic, and spared a thought for Grubby, who was nearly submerged in the bottom of the vessel.

  “What do I know?” Matey screeched. “What do I know?”

  Ebba rolled her eyes and waited.

  “I know that my grandfather never got over being taken by their taint. That’s why kraken have such a bad name. Because of the things he was forced to do.”

  Plank stirred and glanced up. “Yer grandfather had the taint?”

  “A lot of magical beings did during their last reign. It wasn’t until the pillars were defeated that we reverted back.”

  Caspian straightened. “You mean we’ll be able to save those currently under the pillars’ power?”

  “The taint works differently with immortals.” Matey spun around again. “They have to be trapped and drained. Our magic battles against the pillars’ power. If the pillars are weaker than the immortal they’re draining, they lose. If they’re stronger, the other immortal will slowly be taken unless it can escape. And why? Why do you want to know about them?”

  Jagger eyed him. “I worked on their ship for two years.”

  The kraken drooped and didn’t utter a single word. “Everyone knew they’d returned to this realm when the wall began to crumble. After last time, we thought they’d be dealt with immediately. Though the powers of oblivion did call the magic folk back to the immortal realm last week.”

  “They did?” Barrels asked, exchanging a leaden look with the rest of them. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “I know this is a mortal realm, but for many immortals, this is our home. We were locked away from it for hundreds of years. I don’t want to be locked away again. I’m not going back.”

  Ebba reached out a hand to pat his tentacle. “Ye should, Matey. The pillars have taken the throne, and their taint be spreadin’ through the waters west o’ here.”

  Matey scoffed. “Ugh, the west waters. I can’t stand that side of the realm. Too fake. The mortal sea creatures there spend their lives trying to look younger. It’s ridiculous. And the gossip! Don’t get me started.”

  He was judging others for gossiping?

  Jagger’s silver gaze narrowed on the kraken. “How do ye know so much about the taint?”

  “I’m not sure I like you,” Matey said. “You seem a bit full of yourself.”

  Jagger appeared genuinely amused by that. Taken off-guard, Ebba threw a grin at him, which he returned.

  The kraken sniffed. “I grew up on stories from my grandfather.”

  He had? Ebba straightened, ignoring the twinge in her side.

  Locks beat her to the question. “He was open about the taint then, yer grandfather?”

  “Super open,” Matey replied. “Even when the taint left him, he found it hard, remembering what he’d done. But he always said the best way to heal is to speak of your troubles. He said that only idiots keep it all inside.”

  Ebba glanced at her fathers, biting back on her snicker.

  Stubby scratched his chin as he cleared his throat. “Aye, and how long did it take for him to begin speakin’ o’ it?”

  Matey stopped towing and floated with them. “I wasn’t born then, but I know it was three months because he kept journals.”

  Three months. Her fathers took twenty years. Ebba grinned as she observed their sheepish expressions. Peg-leg knocked her ankle with his peg.

  “Idiots,” she declared happily.

  This time all of them glared at her. Except Grubby. She glanced down at his legs that were now cleared of the water Matey had splashed in.

  Ebba blinked as his foot twitched. She waited with bated breath, but nothing else happened.

  Her eyes were playing tricks on her.

  “Your grandfather kept a journal? In the water?” Caspian asked.

  “Our ink is water-resistant,” the kraken said, chuckling. “Though don’t ask where it shoots out of.”

  . . . She wasn’t planning on it.

  “I don’t suppose we could read that journal?” He glanced at Ebba and Jagger. “The thing is, we are tasked with putting together the root of magic that will defeat the six pillars and rid humans and immortals in the Exosian realm of the taint.”

  “Impossible,” Matey declared. “Humans can’t be cured of the taint.”

  What? Ebba jolted, listening to the shocked exclamations of the others.

  “Tainted mortals died when the pillars were defeated last time,” Matey said.

  “But . . . we’ve left our friends and family back in the realm,” Caspian said urgently. “That can’t be right. There has to be some way to save them.”

  Ebba watched her friend closely as her fathers exchanged worried murmurs. Saving his people was what Caspian had held onto since his father died. He couldn’t lose hope again. And neither could she. Her fathers could be freed of the taint, regardless of what the kraken said.

  “—Verity—"

  “—Sherry—”

  “—Marigold—”

  Ebba turned to look at Jagger, who’d squeezed his eyes shut. The pirate had only come with them to ensure the pillars would be defeated and his tribe would be safe.

  “We’ll figure sumpin’ out,
” she said in a firm voice, unsure if she was attempting to convince herself or everyone else. “There is a mortal that can survive the taint.”

  She jerked a thumb at Jagger on the bench opposite her. “He can. He was on their ship for ages, and he’s gettin’ better.”

  He was the immune, yes, but maybe his natural resistance could be mimicked somehow. Magically. Ebba had no clue; she only knew they couldn’t give up hope of saving their friends back on Zol. If Jagger could be saved, they had to believe others could too.

  The bags under Jagger’s eyes were long gone. The sinister shadow behind his previously darting silver eyes had changed. Always too tall for a pirate, he’d gone from wasted to the muscled side of lean. Not only were his clothes and body different, Ebba had to admit—to herself—that the way he behaved now was a far cry from what the taint had made him do months ago. She was yet unsure as to where his exact moral compass pointed, but she knew when the compass needle moved—when his tribe was threatened. His threats to Caspian had steadily dropped off, and though Jagger put his change of heart down to ‘owing the prince for the loan of veritas,’ she wasn’t so sure about that. He’d helped out on the ship, saving her life when he probably wouldn’t have bothered once. Were these all signs of his immunity forcing the taint out for good?

  Ebba jumped as the kraken screeched.

  “Shut. The. Clam. Door,” he said, swimming back and forth before them and slapping the surface with four tentacles. “No! I won’t believe it. I can’t believe it!”

  Ebba watched him in mounting concern. “Believe what?”

  The kraken wrenched to a halt before Jagger and sank down into the water until his beak was just above the surface, his glowing eyes fixed on the pirate. “You’re the immune? The only mortal able to resist magic? I’m your biggest fan. Seriously. You were always my favorite in the stories.”

  “I thought I was full o’ myself,” Jagger replied, face impassive though his lips twitched.

  Matey ignored him, already running his eyes over the rest of the rowboat. His clicking voice trembled as he asked, “Please do not tell me all three watchers are on this rowboat. I’ll die. Right now. I’ll just die if you tell me that.”