Instead there was Valtik, grinning her strange smile, jabbering away in the rain. She craned her neck, looking up into the face of a bald-headed Jydi raider, every inch of his exposed skin scarred or tattooed in complicated knots. He answered her rhymes eagerly.
“His name is Ehjer,” Corayne murmured beneath her hood. Recruited ten years ago, loyal to my mother. A pirate. A raider. An old friend. “The one next to him is Kireem, a Gheran navigator from the Tiger Gulf.”
Indeed, a smaller man stood at Ehjer’s side, half his size, one eye covered by a patch swirling with chips of black stone. Scars bled out beneath the patch, the purple lines violently dark against his ocher skin. Smart as a unicorn, he can read the stars even on blackest night.
The two had been together as long as Corayne remembered. Relationships among the crew were tolerated so long as they didn’t interfere with the ship, and the pair kept a fine balance. Now away from their duty, they should’ve relaxed.
Instead Corayne had never seen them more on edge.
The Jydi passed Valtik, entering the shop with the patch-eyed man. They beelined for the tea bar, settling in alongside the other patrons, putting their backs to the room.
“Are they a threat?” the Elder murmured, never taking his eyes off them.
Corayne shook her head once.
“You know their crew,” Andry breathed, close enough to feel his heat. She glanced out from under her hood, meeting his wide, dark eyes like pools of still water.
“As well as I know myself. The Tempestborn is here,” she whispered.
And so is my mother.
If I get up now, they won’t notice. I can cross the square, hunt the docks. It will only take a moment. She imagined her boots, each step faster than the one before, until they pounded over the planks and up the gangway, into her mother’s waiting arms. There would be yelling, arguments, perhaps the locked door of the captain’s cabin. But Meliz an-Amarat was here. Hell Mel was here. We could be gone with the tide. To whatever horizon we choose. Toward danger, or away from it.
Corayne knew which her mother would choose for them.
And it would be the world’s ending.
It took everything to stay in her seat, gripping the edge of the bench lest she bolt away.
“Should we get out of here?” Andry said, his hand on her shoulder again.
Corayne didn’t answer, her focus on the Jydi’s broad back. Swallowing hard, she brought a finger to her lips, gesturing for quiet.
“I’ve never known you to be a tea drinker, Ehj,” Kireem said, his voice musical, the Paramount accented by his native Gheran. He shrugged out of her salt-worn coat.
Ehjer laughed heartily on his stool. “The storm rang my head like Volka’s bell. I don’t think I could touch Mother’s mead, let alone stomach whatever yss they serve up in the Adira taverns,” he said, hissing out the Jydi curse. Piss, it meant. One of the first words Corayne had ever learned in his language. “Many thanks, friend,” he added, raising his fresh cup to the tea keeper. “So, will the ship live?”
“Lost a mast, barely salvaged the hull.” Kireem crushed flowers into his own pot, stirring idly. “What do you think?”
Lost a mast and nearly the hull. Corayne’s heartbeat quickened. She tried to picture the proud and fierce Tempestborn limping into the port like a wounded animal. Nearly broken in two, Charlon had said, describing some poor ship Corayne had barely pitied. Now she knew better. Now she knew fear for that galley and its crew. Under the table, her knuckles went white.
Until there was not the bench beneath her fingers, but skin, darker than her own, warm where her flesh went numb. She squeezed Andry’s hand gratefully.
“You know better than I,” Ehjer blustered, in his booming version of a whisper. “The Captain tells you things.”
“A few weeks, if the supplies can get in. But with the Sea the way it is . . .”
“Never seen the Sarim like that.” Ehjer slurped his tea. “Whirlpools, waterspouts, thunder . . . it was furious. The gods themselves warring in the water.”
Kireem didn’t touch his cup, his single eye fixed on the steam rising from the liquid. He traced it, transfixed or dazed. “I’ve never seen anything like that thing,” he hissed. The navigator had been with Hell Mel for as long as Corayne lived, and nothing had ever unsettled him so.
“Where did it come from?” The big Jydi was just as agitated.
Kireem shrugged. “You’re the godly one between us, Ehj.”
“That doesn’t mean I understand why the goddess of the waters sent a monster to devour us.”