* * *
They let the fire burn. The man keeping watch would guard it too, and they needed a balance to the cold sand beneath them.
After the planning, the conversation turned desultory, with long pauses that grew longer. It was too late and everyone was too tired to talk of the men they’d lost or the uncertainty of their future, but anything else would have been hideously incongruous. A few at a time, the men lay down and sought the release of sleep.
In time, only Sence, Erik, and Toinette were left sitting at the fire, all three of them silent. Unfamiliar night birds called in the forest behind them. The stars were quiet overhead. Taken out of context, the scene might have been a very peaceful one.
“Have you enough wood?” Erik asked.
Sence jerked his chin at a pile off in the shadows. “We gathered it earlier. Should last until morning, or near enough.”
“Good,” Erik said. “Then I’m off as well. Wake me if there’s need.”
He lay down on the sand. Even with the sleep he’d gotten earlier and his less-than-comfortable bedding, fatigue soon stole over his body, weighing down bones and eyelids alike. Sleep itself didn’t come for a while, though: not until he heard Toinette’s voice muttering her own good night, and felt the disruption in the breeze as she stretched herself out on the land. She lay beside him, though several feet away, and he heard her slow, steady breathing.
If she was asleep, she’d been quick about it. If not, she feigned well. Either way, the sound sent Erik off too, pulling him down into slumber as into the sea itself.
Nine
Daylight, food, and a full night of sleep worked no miracles. They were still stranded on an island in the middle of nowhere, and three good men were still dead. Toinette couldn’t exactly be cheerful under those circumstances, certainly not less than a day afterward. After eating, she did feel that she could see the world without a hazy veil across it and move about without her limbs weighing twice what they should have. That would suffice.
What she could see of the island by day was a strip of sandy beach that curved around in a crescent shape. Cliffs rose stark, gray, and forbidding a half mile or so up the shore, and trees, mostly pines and birches, grew atop them. The rocks on the beach were smooth, well worn by the water. The form of the ship at rest might have been just another one, larger and oddly shaped.
“We should salvage what we can from theHawk,” Toinette said after the mostly silent meal. “It’ll be easier to repair the less we have aboard, and we’ll want food and bedding close to hand, if there’s any undamaged. And”—she glanced toward the mast—“we’ll want to give Gervase and Yakob a decent burial.”
Heads around the fire nodded, Sence’s particularly strongly at the last statement.
Erik added, as if it was a commonplace suggestion, “The two of us could get the cargo off in our other forms, aye? At least once we’ve got it onto the deck—pluck it off while we’re in the water, and swim it over.”
“I expect so,” said Toinette slowly, watching the faces of her men.
“At that,” Marcus said, “you could overfly the island. It’d be well to know how the rest of the land lies, and a sight easier than getting up those cliffs.” He waved a hand in their direction. “We’ll see about making shelters in the meantime. There were some chunks of driftwood too large to burn, and I thought I saw a few likely rocks further up the beach.”
“There’s sense in that,” Toinette replied.
Marcus rolled his eyes at her. “Sound a bit less startled when you say so, Captain, if you would?”
It was the first joke he’d made to her since the storm. She laughed, and the air took the sound strangely—but perhaps any air would have seemed to do so just then. “Humility is a virtue, haven’t you heard?”
“I’ve enough virtue as it is. Best not to overdo it.”
This time, the men’s laughter joined Toinette’s. The morning got a bit better. There was no need to explain that she’d sounded startled not by Marcus’s idea but because he’d been so willing to voice it.
“Best begin, then,” she said. “Erik?”
“As my lady commands.”
“Whoever your lady is,” Toinette said, “I suspect she has considerably less sand in her boots.”
They went off a little way to transform, as much to spare the men the sight as to avoid putting the fire out. Still Toinette thought that some of the crew were watching, Marcus and Samuel most notably among them.
Between her arrival at Castle MacAlasdair and the storm the previous day, she’d never transformed in front of anyone but other dragon-blooded. In the storm she’d had no time to think. She felt naked now, only mere nudity had never bothered her so much.
Stop being a simpering maiden, she told herself.Pretend they’re not around.
Toinette closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. Briefly she feared that awkwardness would hinder her change, but it went as swiftly and smoothly as ever. Dragon form had always come easily to her—too easily in her youth.
As soon as the change was stable, she leapt into the air, circling upward. The air currents were unfamiliar and, she soon learned, treacherous. She found herself frantically beating her wings for altitude one minute, while in the next, a headwind would force her backward. Damnably odd weather, though who knew what normal was like in this part of the world?
