A Respite From Storms Page 5

  “Alixa—” he began.

  “Jasen,” said a voice.

  He turned.

  Burund approached, steps slow, but calmly measured and precise.

  “Alixa,” he greeted, nodding to her.

  “Shipmaster,” Jasen said.

  Burund joined their side. His tunic was only half-buttoned. A layer of sweat greased his ebony chest and underarms, darkening patches in the crimson-banded fabric. Cords of muscle were more pronounced this morning.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and stood very straight. Legs shoulder width apart, his poise was like a soldier’s, disciplined and perfect.

  He looked Jasen up and down, then Alixa.

  “How are you finding it?” he said simply.

  “Uhm.” Jasen hesitated. He glanced to Alixa for support, but she was not forthcoming, so he took the reins of the conversation.

  “Fine,” he said. “Kuura fed us some, uh … this stuff.” He held it out; two lonely pieces left. The biltong’s spices had rubbed off slightly, turning his palm faintly reddish-brown. It looked as if he’d bled there.

  “I like biltong.”

  “Yes,” said Jasen.

  When he said no more, Burund inquired, “And you?”

  “I do too,” Jasen confirmed quickly.

  Burund nodded. His eyes roved to Alixa, but he did not ask, perhaps sensing the answer in her body language. He turned back to Jasen, then the sea.

  They stood and watched for a while.

  Jasen thought he should speak—because he should, really, at least something to this man who had taken them in from the sea and rescued them from drowning. Even just a “thank you.”

  But when he opened his mouth, Burund looked over, meeting his gaze head on—

  And what came out instead was: “Why is your skin that color?”

  He cursed himself almost immediately. Stupid, stupid! It was a burning question, yes, but to be so blatant in his asking, when they had not been here long—it was rude, the sort of thing Hanrey would’ve berated him over for an hour (half of which would be spent sparring with Euonice). But if Burund was offended, he did not show it.

  Kuura could not have been offended, for he cut off the fellow he was talking to by exploding with laughter.

  Burund waited patiently, the faintest crooked smile playing on one corner of his lips.

  Jasen waited less patiently, feeling both embarrassed and defensive.

  Kuura said through his chuckles, “You’ve not seen dark skin before?”

  “Well … no,” said Jasen. “We’ve never seen anyone outside our village before.” He tacked on, as an unnecessary afterthought, “Until yesterday, anyway.”

  “My, my,” said Kuura.

  The man speaking to him asked a question—probably What? Kuura slipped back into his native tongue and answered, chuckling to himself as he (presumably) retold what had just happened.

  Burund answered, “The place I am from is called Coricuanthi. All the people there have skin like the men on this boat.”

  “Everyone?” Jasen echoed. Suddenly he felt like a child, no more than maybe five or six years of age, listening to the tales spun by a parent or grandparent of days gone by, or places far-flung.

  Burund nodded. “There are many of us. There are many of you: I have seen men and women with skin like yours, in the ports we visit. Firoba teems with lighter skin. As does Chaarland, and Arkaria.”

  Jasen marveled. These places—Jasen ran the names of them over his tongue, mouthing without allowing his lips to betray him. They were so strangely alien … but with them, the world beyond Luukessia grew more solid. Firoba was a place out there, a real place, touching the sea—the same sea that Luukessia was surrounded by—and its streets were trodden by people like Jasen and Alixa and Burund and Kuura, who were alive, still, when everything across the ocean had been so utterly extinguished.

  There was a world out there.

  And they were going to it.

  In spite of the ache in his chest for the family he had lost, he could not help but feel a flare of excitement.

  Then he saw Burund’s expression. The shipmaster’s lips quirked down. He watched the horizon warily, eyes fixed on something in the distance.

  Jasen turned. “What is it?”

  “A storm is coming.”

  There it was, building: the clump of cloud in the distance had grown noticeably darker even in the few minutes Jasen and Alixa had been on the deck. In another hour, those skies would be black.

  “We’ll avoid it,” said Jasen, “won’t we? It’s alongside us.”

  Burund shook his head. “No.” Without taking his gaze from the horizon, he said, “These are not storms we can avoid.”

  4

  “Please talk to me.”

  Jasen and Alixa had retired below deck. He’d watched the storm for some time. At first, he questioned Burund. Maybe he even wondered just how good at captaining this vessel the man was, if in twenty-four hours he had run into one storm and was certain of barreling into another, even though the Lady Vizola, as far as Jasen could see, was sailing at a perpendicular angle to it.

  Yet increasingly the shipmaster’s assessment appeared correct. The waters grew rougher, waves higher and more frequent, breaking against the ship’s hull and throwing a spray of foam into the sky. The dark cloud had spread, spilling across the horizon in each direction and approaching.

  Jasen had rarely seen storms.

  He did not know they behaved like this.

  Burund may’ve been disturbed; it was difficult to tell, his expressions were so subtle. If this was not business as usual to any of the rest of the crew, though, Jasen would never know, unless relayed by Kuura—and he had dashed off at first sight of the storm, taking and distributing instructions from Burund in quick, hard syllables.

  “You should return to your cabin,” Burund told Jasen and Alixa at last.

  They obeyed. And there they sat now. Alixa had her back to the wall, beside a porthole looking out at increasingly choppy waters. Dusk appeared to have fallen many hours early as the blanket overhead thickened.

  Jasen sat against the door, on the floor. The bed was damp where they’d slept in their clothes. Unsightly and over-large though these were, he did not want to wet them too.

  Alixa said nothing, just held her knees close.

  Jasen tried again. “Please, Alixa. I know you’re upset.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m upset too.”

  She fiddled with a fold of her tunic. “Are you?” Sullen, not exactly questioning.

  “Yes,” said Jasen.

  Quiet.

  Then Alixa said, “So why’ve you still got an appetite? Why can you still question, and engage, and take everything in like it’s some—some big adventure?”

  She smacked her palms against her knees.

  “This is not some big adventure,” she told Jasen, looking at him for the first time since breakfast. “It’s not. Our families are dead.”

  “I know.”

  It was quiet, for a time, or at least the approximation of quiet they were afforded on the Lady Vizola. The deck outside remained busy. Likewise above them, bootsteps sounded up and down once or twice, muted by the thick wood separating decks. Each wave hitting was its own sound, a forceful noise like a great buffeting hammer blow of wind—only it produced a weary groaning when the water broke against the ship. The spray rained down, also quieted by the size of the hull.

  It continued, fading into the background.

  “It’s like …” Alixa said eventually. She paused, searching for words.

  “It’s like a great hole has been cut out of me,” she said. “It’s endless, and dark, and it hurts … and I know, completely, that it will never be filled again. It will never heal. It will just be an empty gash in my soul.”

  A tear trickled down one cheek. She thumbed it away. Another replaced its track. This one, she ignored.

  “I’m looking down into the hole now,” she said
softly. “All I can do is stare into its depths.” A sigh. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wrench my gaze from it again.”

  She closed her eyes.

  Jasen sat, thought. He’d intended to cheer Alixa, to offer her his hand and to pull her out of the despair swallowing her. But to hear her say it now … he couldn’t help but turn to his, too, looking into the great cleft that now split him. That was how he saw it: not a hole, exactly, but a canyon that had been scored out, like a claw or knife had been run through his heart. Where Alixa had one chasm, though, Jasen had two, crisscrossing. The older—that carved by the loss of his mother—had never healed. Some days, it seemed to bleed.

  This new one—his father, and with him all of Terreas, although it was a fractional, secondary part of it—would be the same.

  To keep from thinking of his father’s last moments—if he had woken early at dawn and been there to see the mountain exploding, to hear it, maybe even turning to see it before a wave of fire washed over him—

  To steer himself from these thoughts, Jasen instead turned to his last moments with Adem.

  He’d gone to bed that night, in the Weltan living room, opposite his father. Their house had burned, all the memories of his mother, all her keepsakes, gone up in smoke … and Adem had held it together. He’d held strong for Jasen when another great piece of his life had been destroyed.

  And Jasen had known all the while that he was leaving. He’d not said a word about his mission with Shilara and Alixa to save Terreas. Instead, he’d pretended to be a shocked-into-silence son, then awaited his father’s snores and snuck out.

  If the mission for grain had been successful, he reasoned, it was acceptable to leave his father—and for Alixa to leave her family—with the fear that they, too, had gone beyond the wall and been ravaged by scourge.

  How cruel he’d been.

  And so Adem had died, not knowing Jasen was alive and safe—was just on the other side of the wall, in fact, come home to save his people...

  … and all of it was Jasen’s fault.

  Just as Alixa was confident the wound she bore would not heal, Jasen was certain that this was truth: he was the cause of Terreas’s destruction. Not first-hand, exactly … but in allowing for his father to refuse Baraghosa, Baraghosa had in turn laid down a curse upon the village.

  It had killed them.

  And Jasen had had a hand in it.

  If he were stronger, he would climb the steps to the top deck this moment and pitch himself into the sea.

  He could not. His nerves were not enough.

  Besides … Jasen’s were not the only hands bloodied.

  Baraghosa’s were bloodier still. The sorcerer, with his strange lights and his promise that Terreas would come to regret their decision—he shouldered the blame for unleashing the magics that had caused the mountain to rupture and ruin Terreas.

  And so Jasen had a reason to keep going: justice.

  Vengeance.

  He would murder Baraghosa, with his bare hands if he had to. He would strangle the breath out of the wizard, watch as the light left his eyes, as his face turned blue, then purple, and finally a waxy, pallid white.

  This was why he kept moving. He had to keep moving.

  And so did Alixa. If he could do anything for her now, it was to remind her of that.

  He licked his lips. “Remember when my house burned down?”

  Alixa’s face flickered. “How could I not?” she asked quietly. “It was … barely days ago.”

  It was. It felt like a lifetime though. So much had happened between then and now. Alixa felt it too: Jasen could feel it in the way her words sighed out, reluctant yet resigned.

  “If it had happened to you,” Jasen said, “what would you have done?”

  Alixa frowned. “What?”

  He repeated himself, a touch more forceful.

  Alixa’s mouth twisted, pulling sideways. Her eyebrows drew down, pressing a line between them. “What would I …” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Jasen. Probably cry.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know.” She sounded exasperated. “Why does it matter? My house did burn down, more or less, and I am here.” Scowling, she added, “I didn’t have much choice in it, but I am here. Just like you.”

  “Yes,” said Jasen, rising. He sat on the edge of the bed, turned to her. “We’re here. Just like I was still there after my house burned down. I lost everything—we lost everything,” he added quickly, as Alixa’s mouth opened, “but I had to keep going. Now we have to do the same. We have to … to start anew, even after everything we knew is lost. We can’t just be paralyzed.”

  “I am not paralyzed,” Alixa said, her frustration giving over to hotness now. Tears threatened, warbling the edges of her words. She clamped down on them, holding them back as she took a steadying breath. Sitting taller, she said, “I am in mourning.”

  Jasen opened his mouth to answer—but he had none. Maybe that he was too?

  Before he could find any words, though—

  A thunderous wave crashed against the ship. The sound was barely dulled by the hull; for the noise, the waters might as well have been crashing over Jasen’s head. The ship gave a terrific lurch.

  Jasen barely had a moment to think. One moment, he was staring at Alixa. The next, it was like the world exploded, for the second time in as many days; the room tipped and he was on his back. Alixa yelped, landing heavily next to him in the V-shaped channel that now was the floor. The bunk groaned after her, covers thrown off—

  BANG!

  That impact was worse, somehow. The wooden bed frame sprung free from its moorings—damned thing was only screwed in on one post—and, anchored only by that lone corner, it swung around and crashed into him. He cried out, thrusting uselessly with his hands as if somehow he might stop gravity from taking its natural course.

  A distant PING!—and the screws holding it were torn free as gravity overloaded them.

  The frame rolled, hitting hard into the heels of his palms. An angry stab of pain radiated up both arms—

  The bed was falling right way up again, the room evening out, floor returning to its rightful place.

  Jasen’s eyes bulged. Barely a few seconds, the whole thing had taken—oh, and now he was racked with pain, all over.

  Something moved alongside him.

  Alixa, he thought.

  He twisted to ask if she was all right—she would have taken the impact from the bed frame too, or perhaps the trunk as it skidded along the angled floor—but she was already up, a blur of motion.

  “Wait—” he began.

  She thrust open the lock. And then she bolted out, the door swinging madly behind her. Voices filtered through it, all the same: panicked.

  Jasen stumbled to his feet, using the jamb for support.

  He was aware of something wet underfoot, welling up through a puncture he hadn’t been aware of in his boot.

  The porthole.

  A terrible, dark maw, Jasen only saw churning beyond. Skies and sea had merged into one incomprehensible whorl.

  The hatch had not quite maintained its seal. Seawater had flowed in through an imperfect edge, staining the wood dark—and coating the cabin floor with a half-inch of liquid.

  Scourgey can’t swim, Jasen thought.

  He knew where Alixa had gone.

  Another wave slammed the side of the ship. They were focused on this side—starboard, Jasen thought, though he had no idea if that was right or not—and the concussive blow threw Jasen backward. He crashed half against the door jamb, sending a tremor up his spine. Then the door was flying toward him, swung around on his hinges.

  He took the blow against his palms—another stab of pain up his arms, into his shoulders.

  Another spurt of seawater flowed in around the porthole.

  The hold was underwater. If that first impact had compromised anything, it would be filling even now.

  And Alixa was racing toward it to save Scourgey.


  Jasen set his face. Turning on his heel, he pushed into the cramped corridors of the Lady Vizola, alive with shouting voices, and chased after his cousin.

  5

  Men were hurtling through the corridors. How many cabins there were down here, Jasen did not know. But they were many, and doors were thrown open as Jasen passed—most by the force of the waves, but more than a couple by sailors who beat furious feet down the halls to—wherever it was they were going.

  A man with wide palms and frenzied eyes gripped Jasen as he ran past.

  “Dagot-bah? Ootohp cahnayh!”

  Jasen stared wildly back. “My cousin—”

  The man with frenzied eyes said something, but another wave slammed the Lady Vizola, and they were sent sideways. The wall of a cabin broke their fall—painfully.

  One last bark from the man, when the ship’s movement had steadied. Then he released Jasen, turned, and hurtled down the tight confines toward stairs that would take him up.

  Jasen moved in the opposite direction, running hard. More portholes had been inadequately sealed, or perhaps just knocked out by the first fearsome wave, for water spilled past doors and out into the main corridor.

  A crash rocked the ship again and sent Jasen sprawling. He thrust his hands out, grunting as he collided hard with the corner of two walls.

  He groaned—

  The ship was groaning too.

  It’s going to come apart, he thought, a low pulse of terror moving through him.

  What happened when a ship broke apart at sea?

  He racked his brains desperately for an answer that might assuage him here. But in none of the stories he had heard, none of his imaginings, had the possibility ever occurred to him. His mother had read him tales of pirates and sailors who were wrecked onto deserted islands. Battles happened at sea in some stories, and boats were invariably sunk. But how their people escaped, what their options were if the worst happened … no story had ever detailed it. The bad guys were simply felled and drowned.

  Now, Jasen realized, they would want to live—

  How, though?

  The ship groaned again, plummeting sideways. Jasen clawed for a nearby door jamb, holding firm.