Dream Storm Sea (14 page)

22

Essence of the Wild

The Paragon
hit the water and skipped. On the next dip, every leak in the boat geysered. The boat bounced off the surface once more before settling into the sea.

The world continued to revolve in Hiresha’s eyes. At least the sky stayed blue.

Emesea climbed to her feet first. She was the first to teeter and fall.

The mast had cracked and now leaned to the right. Ropes wrapped around its base kept it from toppling.

Emesea wriggled upright and adjusted the rigging. The sail rolled open at a slant. The wind filled it.

“Still good!” The warrior gave the mast a smack. She curled back her spine and unleashed a bellow of laughter. “Ha ho! That was better than making love to a king atop his banquet table.”

“How can you possibly….” Hiresha propped herself up on an arm. “How is it that a human with some signs of sentience can enjoy this?”

“I’m not afraid of the afterlife’s trials. And if I die here, then the Lord of the Feast dies with me.”

“I have no such consolation. You….” Tethiel gripped his scalp as if trying to extract some insight. His fingers dug into short-cropped hair of grey. Where his ears should have been, two ridges of scar tissue told of past tortures. “I’m so lost I can’t even find my words. A pox on that fish. A pox on this blue wasteland.”

“The sea is a garden,” the warrior said. “It only looks barren if you never open your eyes underwater.”

The truth of that surprised Hiresha. Still, she had no desire to expose her eyes to fish sewage. She squinted up at the sun then back to the expanse of sea. “We should change direction. The Murderfish will expect us to continue west.”

“They don’t call her a murderer,” Emesea said.

The enchantress asked, “Who doesn’t?”

Emesea swept a hand over the sea. “They’re not all sea-cows, you know. Some fish are smart.”

Tethiel could not seem to stop himself from scratching his head and hiding at least one of his mangled ears with a hand. “How do you know a creature is intelligent?”

“The cruelty,” Hiresha said.

“The playfulness,” Emesea said. “And the kraken must’ve seen where we landed. Best to follow the wind and hope she gets tired of being cut.”

“That plan seems dubious.” Hiresha nudged a dead mackerel with her foot. The fish head was red, and its scales shifted from yellow to green to blue toward its tail.

Without oars, they had fewer choices. Hiresha wished she could have been awake enough to realize that.
A troubling thing when the most lucid person in the boat is a maniac.

Hiresha spent some minutes looking behind them, worrying that the Murderfish might follow. Deciding she gained nothing by watching for what defied seeing, she gathered up a length of the crumpled red dress. She asked to borrow Emesea’s knife.

The warrior gripped its ivory hilt. “What do you want to hurt?”

“A cut here and here.” Hiresha smoothed the dress over the boat’s side. “If the knife is sharp, I should hope the silk feels little pain.”

Emesea ended up shoving the enchantress aside and doing it herself. Hiresha then wrapped the kerchief over Tethiel’s head.

Rather than mentioning his ear stubs, she said, “We can’t have the Lord of the Feast sunburned.”

He opened his mouth, closed it, then said only, “Thank you, my heart.”

Hiresha knew then that Tethiel was far from himself, and the magic in the sea’s wildlife was a potent and dangerous thing. This concerned her because if they lived through the day they would need to eat something on this voyage.
And I’d rather not lose my mind to my main course.

The Provost of Applied Enchantment would never have anticipated the need to fall asleep holding a dead fish and a jar of sea water. The enchantress of today felt it the most reasonable action she could take. She lay on her side, using the folded blue dress as a pillow. The boards of
The Paragon
still dug into her shoulder and hip, but it took more than discomfort, fright, or life-threatening wounds to keep Hiresha from her dreams.

In the laboratory, she dipped her hand into the jar. Salt formed around her fingers. The milky crystals scaled her hand.

Intuition sat on the top shelf, above baubles of a chisel and silver calipers. She gripped her stomach. “We never thought we’d be so long at sea with so many amazing, dreadful animals. We’re so excited we could be sick.”

“I never expected to be without Fos. With an enchanted sword he might have dealt with the Murderfish.” Hiresha lifted her arm from the jar, leaving its water pure. She blew the frost of salt off her hand. The crystals vanished. “And now I’m trapped on a boat with the Lord of the Feast and Emesea the Traitor. Though my other choices involved surrender or murdering city guards to escape.”

The Jeweled Feaster paced, her long legs swishing by within her mirror. “You haven’t asked Emesea about Fos, where he is. You’re afraid what she might say.”

Hiresha glanced at a mirror displaying Emesea’s face. “When she told me we’d meet him in Oasis City, her tone of voice changed, and she maintained eye contact to see if I’d catch her lie.”

The Jeweled Feaster bared her teeth in a manner that might frighten a charging lion. “Even then she planned to abandon him.”

The enchantress said, “Yet she shows no stooping or face-plucking gestures that would hint at guilt.”

“We hope that means Fos is free,” Intuition said. “Maybe he rescued the fennec, too.”

“A romantic idea that assumes Emesea would feel any guilt at killing.” Hiresha allowed herself to view a cherished memory of the fox dashing across a tea table at the Mindvault Academy. Tail raised in triumph, he had smacked a honey spoon and launched the sticky projectile at the chancellor’s face.

The Jeweled Feaster drew her faceted claws over her neck. “If Emesea hurt Fos, you’ll have to kill her.”

“I do owe her a betrayal,” Hiresha said.

“We don’t like the idea.” Intuition peered up at the mirror with Emesea’s face. “Hurting her would be like breaking a garnet with a unique hue. She’s one-of-a-kind-ceptional.”

“She’s indispensable for now.” The enchantress willed the mackerel to float between her hands. “I need to extract the wild magic from this fish. There’s only one problem.”

“Nothing like that has been done.” Intuition leaped, legs tucked upward, and spun about in the air. “Never ever!”

“Perhaps it’ll be like dispelling enchantment scripts from a medallion.” Hiresha tried it. “No, not at all.”

She felt a touch foolish, flummoxed by a fish. An enchantress could Attract any thing to her hand, but magic had no form and no weight.

“How can I grip what cannot be held?”

After thirty-seven attempts, she wondered if she wasted her time. Yet she had seen the mackerel spark with a dazzling defensive magic. More than that, she could sense power remained in the dead creature.

“I don’t believe it can be isolated,” Hiresha said.

“Not with the techniques you learned in that crypt Academy full of well-dressed mummies.” The Jeweled Feaster lifted a rose. She pressed a finger in its center and Attracted. All the petals remained on her finger in a spiral of thorn-shaped red, leaving a bare stem in her other hand. “Try a new perspective on the problem.”

“Yes, a new point of view,” Intuition said. “One person sees a desert, another a paradise.”

“I prefer my unique outlook on life, that of persistent intelligence.”

All the same, Hiresha gave the matter some thought. She decided if she could not Attract the wild magic, she might seize and yank the entirety of the mackerel and leave behind its fishy power. She tried it, and it failed.

The enchantress studied a mirror showing herself in the laboratory, a true reflection, except delayed by a few seconds. She detected the moving fish had trailed a ghost of light, a glimpsed halo of color, though each time she viewed the scene again that hue changed. By lagging behind the fish, the magic appeared to have ties to matter and be subject to inertia.

“It is like a substance,” she said, “but without dimension.”

“A contradiction,” the Jeweled Feaster said. “Now you’re getting somewhere.”

“As far as I can determine, the universe is made of ninety-five percent contradiction. And I’m not certain about the last five percent.”

Hiresha Attracted the fish again and bent her will on seizing the wild magic. It felt rather like trying to gather a smell in one’s hand, only harder. As Hiresha channeled all her focus into the aquatic specimen, every mirror blinked out.

She needed only four dozen attempts. In the end, the dreamer’s belief in herself overcame petty impossibilities. A glob of wild magic levitated between her fingers. The size of a pearl, it hummed in and out of existence. Eddies of light stormed within it like a melting opal.

Intuition held her hands up to it. “It’s warm! And it smells like the nowness of spring days.”

“Please stop talking,” Hiresha said. “I’ve had all the nonsense I can manage.”

Hiresha could Attract the bead of wild magic into parts. She divided it into a thousand grains. They fizzed between her hands. Her mind pulled back the flecks of light that strayed too far from her fingers and Repulsed those that came too close to her skin.

The enchantress reached into a mirror displaying herself sleeping in
The Paragon
. She spread her hands, and the wild magic started sifting off the side of the boat and into the water.

The Jeweled Feaster tapped on her glass. “You wouldn’t have wanted me to distract you earlier, but the Murderfish is still tracking you.”

Hiresha had not seen any signs of pursuit while awake. Viewing the same seas in the dream, she detected differences in the average shapes and heights of waves. Something gargantuan swam behind their boat, too deep to see. The surface still trembled with its passing.

The enchantress had the ear-roaring urge to jerk her hands out of the mirror, to hide in her dream and never return to a world with perils sporting so many tentacles. She knew, though, that it would not do.
I can’t be weak in front of myselves.

Hiresha’s lips pinched together in a look of intensity, not a scowl. She withdrew her hands from the glassy sludge of the mirror.

“I don’t have the traditional means for an enchantress to protect herself. For any surety of escaping this sea, I need a new technique.”

“Taste the wild magic,” Intuition said. “It’ll make us strong, like the fish.”

“Not as strong as a kraken,” the Jeweled Feaster said.

“True,” Hiresha said. “I’ll let Tethiel and Emesea experiment. I must keep my mind clear for new opportunities.”

“New last chances.” The Feaster glanced upward.

Beams of ruddy light descended from the ceiling. The dais’s diamonds took on the tint of rubies. The full moon of the dreamer had slid into view through the skylight. Some might have called it a “blood moon,” but Hiresha preferred to think of its hue as between that of a fire opal and a ruby.

23

Dragon Song

Hiresha awoke half-drowned in bilge water and stinking of fish. Her head rolled as she tried to focus her eyes. Everything was dark.

“The Murderfish tipped the boat once, and even that didn’t wake you,” Tethiel said. He sat with his hands pinned below him. His teeth chattered as if he huddled in a snowy gale rather than a balmy night’s breeze.

“You slept half the day,” Emesea said. She stared down the length of her knife. She lifted a ballast stone and swiped it against the blade, breaking off a fleck of obsidian.

“And half the night.” Tethiel pinched his eyes closed and clenched his teeth.

“Time sleeping is always well spent,” Hiresha said.

“Then your conscience is clear. I have many regrets,” he said. Sweat beaded across his brow like little moonstones. “They all involve eating that fish. I haven’t said anything worth hearing in hours. I might as well be dead.”

Hiresha dabbed her sleeve over his head. His skin burned. She had never seen him so disheveled at night. “You look uncomfortably close to death.”

“It’s only the strain.” He drew a shuddering breath. “Not to Feast. Wild magic poisons inhibitions.”

The enchantress glanced over the sea. “You’re saving your power for the Murderfish?”

Tethiel eyed Emesea sharpening her knife. Then his gaze scorched its way up Hiresha, and the dregs of her drowsiness drained to leave a thrilling tension.

His tongue flickered over his lips. “Right now you both look ever so appealing.”

“Oh,” Hiresha said.

Emesea sighted down the length of her knife again. The obsidian achieved such razor thinness that its edge appeared clear as glass. She nodded to herself.

“What I meant, my heart, was how did you summon such a distinguished entourage?” Tethiel pointed his chin toward the back of the boat.

Hiresha frowned. Worry zinged up from her heart as she peered over the side. She could not help but imagine she would once again see the dark slat of the Murderfish’s eye.

A plethora of fish swam after them. Some lit the waves yellow, others orange. Some had spines on their fins, others graceful tails that flowed behind like veils. One slithered in a line of red, an arm-length sea snake. They flapped against each other, trying to be closest to the boat planks. Water from their urgency splattered Hiresha’s face.

Tethiel said, “You waved your hand like a queen, and your subjects came.”

Hiresha thought back to her time in the dream laboratory. “I suppose there was the matter of my tossing wild magic overboard. Distilled wild magic.”

The press of fish enticed Hiresha with its flapping, splashing, flitting liveliness. She found herself reaching toward the water. She twitched her hand back, out of reach of the snapping teeth of a leaping fish.

Emesea crouched beside Hiresha. The warrior lashed an arm out, snatched a trout from the sea, and bashed its head against a plank. The fish lay still in the hull beside the mackerel.

“Useful, with our net gone,” the warrior said. “Next time, save some of the sea nectar for me.”

Hiresha had no intention of doing so.
She’s wild enough already.

Tethiel’s hands twitched as if trying to free themselves, but he kept them trapped under his legs. “Eme of the Sea was good enough to distract me with her tales. I hope she’ll continue.”

The warrior asked, “Want a story about the gorgeous or the ferocious?”

“To me, they’re the same,” he said.

Emesea gutted the fish with a few flicks of her wrist. She spoke of a green whale, underwater volcanoes, a school of deadly fish called the Fanged Typhoon, giant fire worms that cooked the sea, cronefish that sweated inky death, a lobster whose claw could snip time, and tentacled creatures that mesmerized by the shifting patterns on their skin. Meanwhile, blood dripped from the fish that hung from the rigging.

The enchantress would have protested the sea stories, but their terrors seemed to calm Tethiel. They had quite the opposite effect on her. Hiresha felt as if sea fleas hopped over her skin, nibbling at her composure.
Any moment the Murderfish could smash us to the inconsequential. What could we do to stop it?

When Hiresha thought of a more productive topic, she blurted it out.

“Your dragon,” she said to Emesea. “You said you’d call it.”

“Only if we needed scaly help.”

Hiresha scowled. “And being whipped about a by blue-blooded—”

“Fine.” Emesea reached for the oilskin sack. “Keep your dress on.”

Tethiel cast Hiresha a damp smile. “Does the Provost of Applied Enchantment now count dragons in her social strata?”

Hiresha felt an itching heat. Embarrassment should have stopped her from asking Emesea about her dragon. It seemed so unlikely, but the warrior had done nothing but challenge incredulity.

The enchantress said, “If he can drive off the Murderfish, I’ll be most pleased to make a dragon’s acquaintance.”

Emesea rummaged in her oilskin sack and pulled out panpipes. The third-shortest cylinder had been crushed. Emesea tried to reshape the pipe by wedging in a finger.

Tethiel asked, “Are those made of dragon teeth?”

“Condor quills,” she said.

“Honesty is the most unbecoming habit,” he said. “Oh ho! I might be on the mend.”

Emesea pursed her lips against the panpipes. Her first note was the mournful cry of a drowned soul. Her second, that of a bird calling for her lost nest mate. The third, of wind whispering through a cave eroded into a sea cliff.

The depth of emotion shocked the enchantress. Hiresha felt pinned against the planks by sorrow. The sound punctured her from heart to spine. She could not help but think of friends that had been taken from her.

The fennec, with his white ear tufts. Fos, with his boyish smile and easy grace. Maid Janny, with her rude winks and insufferable faithfulness. The maid’s daughter, and Alyla, too.

The panpipes vibrated with sadness. The melody had notes of silence, from the broken pipe. Hiresha would wait for a sound that never came.

The enchantress recalled her first courtship, her first disappointments. She thought of the children she had once been certain she would raise. She remembered the twisting tower of the Academy now forbidden. She imagined her diamonds forgotten in some dusty chest, perhaps dropped, damaged, drowned.

She thought of the years of life lost to her disease.

She saw herself dying alone.

The song ended in an upward trill, as if a songbird thought she recognized her mate in the distance.
Or perhaps,
Hiresha thought,
she at last admitted to herself that what was lost won’t return.

The sea was hushed. The wind had stilled, and the sails sagged slack.

Emesea rested the panpipes upon her knee. Her cheeks reflected blue from the nearest dream storm. The enchantress needed some time to realize the warrior cried.

Hiresha’s surprise redoubled when she spotted tears on Tethiel’s face. Streaks crossed down the lines etched on either side of his mouth. His shoulders slumped as if he carried a great burden.

Only when she felt a drip on her chin did Hiresha admit that she too had wept.

She needed three swallows before she could speak. “Will your dragon come soon?”

Emesea shrugged. “If she heard. The seas are wide, and they are many.”

The warrior slung herself down, facing toward the side of the boat. She nestled one arm under her head. The enchantress assumed she slept.

The stars winked out of view as Hiresha too descended toward slumber. On the stairway in her mind, she heard Tethiel’s voice.

“I’ll watch for the inevitable.”

She turned back to see marble steps leading up to an archway filled with night sky and a dream storm as azure as sapphire.

“If the Murderfish returns and I expect the worst,” he said, “should I wake you? Or is there peace in your dreams?”