“Which is more than my father could claim,” Beiro muttered as the tour continued. I declined to comment any further on his bandit sire. I, too, had an outlaw father. A lying father to boot. Hyla barked orders to the crew, taking the role of our boatswain who had been laid out with a sour tooth that had sickened her greatly. I prayed to the witches she recovered after having the tooth removed and the hole packed with persimmon seed paste.
Slowly we came free of the dock and were creeping out of the bay.
I showed them the important parts of my ship, or important to regal guests. Where to find the cockboats, where the galleywas located, and where they were to sleep. Below decks was cramped. The hammocks tight, and the air pungent. Many men chose to sleep on deck, under the stars, and rightfully so. Only the captain’s quarters had a private sleeping area, and envoys of the king or not, they were not taking my bed. Perhaps if they were the queen, then yes, but a dwarven mercenary and a wyrm-loving scout? No. Call me petty. I liked my comforts.
The tide rolled us out gently, the winds brisk but not howling, and so once we were cleared of the dock, my helmsman, a lean whip of a human named Oliver Plott, gave the wheel a mighty twist to set us pointing out to sea. With the wind in my face, I felt the call of the salty waves splashing against the side of the Cloud’s Shame.
I left my two guests by the mainmast to stride to the bow, letting the call of the sea enter me, and reached out with my gift to stir the briny deep to aid the winds in propelling the ship with greater speed. Shouts of my crew floated past me, the cool glow of the lucent in my pocket aligning me with the sea. Somewhere, in the distant most corner of my mind, I could hear the witches. They did not sing like sirens, nor cackle like hags. The three sisters sought only to aid the one who held the lucent. Generally. The sea was in my veins, pulsing through my body, rushing into my thoughts as I summoned the water to heed me. The sisters were thousands of miles away, deep in a crevasse at the bottom of the Stormhold, but their gift to my father hummed as I directed my magicks into it, concentrating on it.
“See the foam!” I heard Beiro shouting. A smile pulled at my lips. “There! In the foam! A seal! Several seals!”
“Aye, coming to feast on the fish that the captain’s magicks stir up into the waves,” Hyla replied, pride in every word she spoke. I wished I didn’t feel so betrayed by her. She was the only thing close to family I now had, other than a far-off possible brother on an ivory throne. I hoped not to dwell on him, for ifthe tests turned out to be false, my head would likely be resting on a pike. “Ridged-nosed porpoise will soon join them as well as the gulls.”
Nose tipped upward, I grasped the rails, boots planted on the deck, standing as near the wooden carvings of the sea witches as I could get. With a sigh, I pushed my all into moving the Cloud’s Shame away from the port of Quinn’s Quay. The Stormhold greeted us as it always did…with a bite of cold, a spray of sea salt, and a welcoming roll and pitch only a seafaring wolf like me would love.
My guests and I were in my quarters dining on a light meal of fruit, salted fillet of sea bass, and some wild rice. The crew had already ventured into the cramped galley for their evening meals. A sloop such as the Cloud’s Shame had limited space, so there were no tables nor chairs for the crew. The cook, a dwarven woman named Pith who had a penchant for collecting teeth of all species and fashioning them into earrings, cooked most of the food over an open flame in a sandbox. Due to the small area of my ship, the galley was only large enough for Pith and her messmate Simon, a young half-bred Bhaston elven lad with a deformity of his upper lip. Tossed out as an infant, my father had taken him in, and he had served us for thirteen seasons with that crooked smile.
While we had a table and chairs, the crew scattered about the ship to enjoy their soup and hard bread. Fresh water was rationed and overseen by the cooper, a rough and rowdy human who went by the name of Dirk, for fresh water on a ship was more valuable than gold. I’d locked my chests tightly before opening my windows to allow the cool breeze to ride in on ashanty about the sea witches. They appeared quite frequently in the songs we sailors sang.
“I know little of the sea witches,” Beiro commented around a mouthful of rice that he had slathered with butter and brown sugar scraped from a sugar loaf. After water, rum, and food supplies—as well as tobacco and spices—was sugar. I’d had men stab each other over what one perceived as a slight of his shipmate over the doling out of sugar. Of course, my crew had knifed each other over other things. A beautiful woman. A beautiful man. A ferret. A pickle jar. Long sea voyages made sailors quick-tempered at times. “Can you tell me about them?”
His lover—I knew this to be the case for Grimmane, as most dwarves are, was not one to tinker about with fanciful words or demure behavior—grunted at the question. The dwarf had announced the ginger root elf was his and should anyone on this ship think to press their lips to Beiro’s, that person would be kissing his war hammer instead. A threat we all knew the mercenary would make a reality.
“Well, the witches are a threesome of sisters, daughters of the sea titan Nerevahn, he who sits below the waves on a coral throne.”
“Does he have no wife?” Beiro asked, glancing at his wyrm trying its best to chew through the stout lock on my chests. I could only smirk at the disgusted sounds coming from the dragonling.
“He did, at one time, a titaness named Peragras, the world-drowner. When she lived up to her name and tried to cover this world in water, he slayed her in a mighty battle that created the Isles of Melowynn and the uncharted lands to the northwest.”
“Hmph, my people have a very different story about the creation of the world,” Asdren chimed in between bites of fish, rice, and bread. Butter coated his beard and fingers.
“As do the wood elves and the city elves.” Beiro tossed a bite of bread to the raven perched in the window. The bird flew to the floor to grab it. “But you are a city elf,” he said as his attention returned to me. “And your father is a human. The humans have their own gods. So how is it that you come to worship the sea witches?”
I leaned back in my seat, easing the front legs from the floor planks. The roll of the ship was like a mother’s rocking arms to me. My boot heels came to rest on the table.
“I worship what I was taught to worship by my father and his father before him as most of us come into our religious beliefs. I do possess a healthy respect for the beliefs of others. Also…” I waved a hand in the air to see our glasses filled with dry white wine lifted from a ship sailing to Celear just a full moon ago. My how an elf’s life changes rapidly. “I’ve seen storms come up from nowhere to sink a ship in the time it takes to sneeze. I’ve seen creatures rise from the depths that still haunt my dreams. I’ve been witness to things on the sea no scholar can explain. So I harbor respect for the witches as a pirate born and bred.”
“Not born, Your Grace,” Beiro softly pointed out. I winced at the term that had somehow become attached to my name by one skinny royal scout.
“There is no blood proof of those deathbed claims tossed out by an elf whose mind was riddled with senility,” I hurried to point out. The dwarf and the scout exchanged looks I would have liked to slap from their faces. Instead, I poured myself more wine, watching as the dark red wine leapt from the bottle into my goblet. “Also, if you call me your grace once more, I will toss you over the side and let the sharks nibble on your entrails.” The wyrm stopped gnawing on the lock to growl at me. I glared right back. “Yours as well, you thieving shit.”
The dragon was not intimidated. Nor was I. For now. Give the beast a full four seasons, then I would be slightly less prone to poking him.
“But as a blooded son of the throne—”
I held up a hand to stop Beiro. “My blood is that of a pirate and a whore. That is what I was told. Until it is proven otherwise by those who know better of this than I, then I refute that shite title and all others. Now, do you wish to hear more of the sea witches, or do you wish to sit here spilling rice down your shirt as we piddle-fuck about with meaningless aristocratic drivel?”
The young scout looked chastened. “The witches please your…captain.” He flicked several kernels of rice from his shirt, which the raven hopped over to eat.
“Much better. The sisters are triplets. Nymira Tidebound, Lirentha Saltveil, and Vaelora Moonwake. She who counts anchors, she who unites storms, and she who sorts salt and bone.” I ticked the names off on my fingers. Speaking their names stirred up a soft hum from the lucent in my pocket. Dismiss them as I may wish to strangers, the sisters were wound into the bloodlines of my father’s family as far back as memory could recall. “They govern the seas and those who sail upon them. Nymira picks through the debris of sunken ships, gathering anchors to take to the dark crack in the seabed where they reside. Lirentha summons small storms to bring them into mighty typhoons to wreak havoc on those who defile the sea, and Vaelora sorts salt and bone for use in divination. They are not good or evil. They watch over the beasts in the depths as well as we who sail on the waves, but if a soul misuses the creatures that the sisters call brother and sister, then they will lash out with a fury few live long enough to recount the tales.”
“And their father?” Asdren enquired then held out his glass for more wine. I filled his goblet to the rim with a smile and a flick of my finger.
“He lingers in the sea mourning the death of his wife, his anguish rising up at times to cause giant waves to wash onto land, wiping away the homes of mortals.” Asdren sat back, hands coming to rest on his belly, and belched. I nodded. “Pith will be happy to hear you thought so well of the fare.” Beiro sat silently, breaking bits of bread for his raven to eat. The wyrm flew over, obviously vexed by the locks, to grab a fish from the platter for his meal. “You need to teach that wyrmling some manners. Does he behave so at the palace?”
“He has never been to the palace. This will be his first time among the nobles and the royal family,” Beiro replied as a new song floated in, this one accompanied by a lute. A love song filled with angst. As one who had never felt the sting of love—and wished to keep it that way—the lament of the brokenhearted elf lad crying out for his lady love was nothing more than a tune on the wind. Falling in love, my father had always warned, turned a wise man into a broken fool. Those words now felt hollow. Did he love my mother, the aristocrat, and was that why he had schooled me to abhor romance? Was my mother a noblewoman at all? Why would he leave her behind if she were with child? Had he sailed off before she knew? If she were nobility and found herself increasing, would the shame of being unwed and carrying a bastard half-breed spur her to give away her son? Or was I just a foundling like Simon, taken in by privateers to serve as free labor? What story was true? Which one was a lie? My head spun in confusion. Or perhaps the spinning was the result of the fourth bottle of wine I had ingested. Possibly.
“Ah, then perhaps your wyrm and I should become better friends, as we’ll be the sole newcomers in the castle with no courtly manners,” I offered, to which the dragon, humped over his pilfered fish, spat at me like a cat. “Perhaps not then.”
