Before she could disembark in hopes of finding a dockside vendor with the motion sickness candies, the ship’s horn blared. Calya grimaced as the blend of active and passive spellwork that enabled the windrunner’s great speed came alive. Her stomach protested the way the floor moved beneath her feet and the tingle of magic lacing the air.
Calya dropped back into her seat with a muttered, “Goddess fucking break me.”
She’d put off Wembly until the morning. She wouldn’t even be lying when she claimed sickness. The tea she’d had at the Sentinels’ office was already threatening to reappear.
Closing her eyes, Calya let her mind drift, searching for anything but the nausea building at the back of her throat.
Lowe’s scowling face came to mind. Those piercing eyes. Nice ones, Calya would give him that. Gray, like the storm clouds so often present in the Valley’s skies. He always seemed to wear an expression that matched. Brow perpetually furrowed, jaw tight. There was a ruggedness to him, a bit of weathering in his face, a tousled quality to the dark hair that fell past his shoulders. It all made for a hard, imposing man. But then, Calya had never been interested in soft or sweet.
Lowe wasn’t quite a barrel of a man, but his chest was broad enough to fill out his rangers’ leathers. The forest green of the Sentinels’ cloaks suited him well. He was a bit older than her usual partners. Gruffer and more growly, too. None of that bothered her. As distractions went, he’d do nicely.
Calya’s lips twitched with a smile. There’d been something charged about their interaction at the meeting. Tension, but the antagonism had lessened more and more. She’d nearly made him smile, even if it was at her own expense. Their tension was a type that needed only a nudge of encouragement to go from wary to smoldering, unless she was mistaken about the look in Lowe’s eyes, and rarely did Calya make those kinds of mistakes.
What secrets did the ranger keep locked behind his stoicism? She’d seen the barest hint before she left. A whisper of wicked humor. It left her hungry for?—
“Caly?”
She jerked in her seat, eyes snapping open.
Her elder sister, Anadae, peered down at her.
“Ana… dae.” Calya sat up, mentally chastising herself for relapsing into her sister’s former, now discarded, nickname. “Dae. What are you doing here? I thought you’d be with Eunny and the others.”
“I stepped out to say goodbye to a colleague heading back to Rhell.” Anadae slid into the seat next to Calya. She dug in her cloak pocket and pulled out a small pouch of ginger candies, dropping it into Calya’s lap. “You’re already looking green around the edges.”
Calya greedily stuffed two of the candies into her mouth. “I’d take offense, but I don’t care.” She breathed a sigh of relief as the queasiness in her stomach abated.
“I was planning to stop by the HNE office tomorrow, but then I saw you boarding,” Anadae said, helping herself to a candy. She ignored Calya’s squawk of protest. “What? I like how they taste.”
“You should’ve mentioned you needed something at the office. I could’ve brought it over.”
Anadae shook her head hard enough for her wavy, dark brown hair to bounce. “It’s no trouble.” She glanced around to make sure the other passengers were occupied before continuing in a lower voice, “Have you had any more issues with the joint protection deal you worked on with Brint and Avenor Guard?”
Calya’s eyes narrowed, but she kept her tone as calm as her sister’s. “There’s still some accounting that needs to be straightened out, but nothing overly concerning as far as I know.” She waited a moment, watching Anadae’s face. “What don’t I know, sister dearest?”
“It might be nothing,” Anadae said. “The environmental resto project Brint drove into the ground out in Desmond’s Landing?—”
“The one that caused his fuckery with my route deal with AG,” Calya said.
Anadae nodded. “Some of the mages who joined the remaining staff to get things in order are from SU. About a month ago, they wrote requesting some of the wards Ez and I made. Not prime stock, so we sent a few that were marked as seconds,” she said, naming Ezzyn Sor’vahl, the youngest prince of Rhell as well as her partner in both love and work. Together, they’d devised the containment warding system keeping the poison from completely destroying his homeland.
“Why did they want them?” Calya asked.
“Apparently, to see if there were relevant applications of technique. But we never heard back.” Anadae’s expression turned grim. “I wanted to see if there was an error in the HNE logs when I made the request.”
“The logs,” Calya said slowly, wracking her brain for any memory of such a request.
“They were supplemented to a shipment following the new route with Avenor Guard,” Anadae said. “There should be records and receipt of payment. Ez insisted on paying for the additional stop.”
Of course Sor’vahl would insist. He’d have to, for Helm Naval would’ve offered to provide such a request as complementary. It was easy enough to arrange, seeing as a few wards didn’t exactly take up tons of precious cargo space, and Anadae was the elder Helm daughter. Regardless, a stopover at Desmond’s Landing was literally on the way; adding the package to one of the ships using the joint protection route Calya had arranged with Avenor Guard wouldn’t overly upset shipping times. A quick update to the paperwork to ensure everything was logged and in order, and the change could slip into the regular schedule without issue.
But it was the kind of scheduling change Calya should’ve heard about. The logistics manager would’ve made a note of it since the request concerned her sister. Calya made a point of reading at least the summaries of Helm Naval’s shipping logs every month. If her sister’s name, or Sor’vahl’s, for that matter, had appeared, she’d damned well remember. That she couldn’t did not bode well.
“You didn’t know,” Anadae said, more a quiet realization than a question. There was nothing accusatory in her tone, yet it landed like a slap.
For years, Calya had been fighting to prove herself worthy of taking over Helm Naval. Had been forced to redouble her efforts when Andrin appointed a trustee instead of elevating his own godscursed daughter in his stead. Because she wasn’t Anadae, the leveling presence to Calya’s supposed hot head. But then, Anadae wouldn’t have missed such an amendment to the logs. That Calya had… Perhaps she was slipping.
“It’s possible something happened on the water,” Anadae offered.
