Jarka Ruus

  The chase was under way in earnest; the fog that had offered concealment only moments earlier all but vanished. Pen did not care for what he saw as he watched the Galaphile draw closer. As fast as she was coming, the Skatelow could not outrun her. The Lazareen stretched away in all directions, vast and unchanging, and there was no sign of the shoreline they so desperately needed to reach. Clever maneuvers would get them only so far. Cinnaminson was still calling out tacks and headings, and Gar Hatch worked the controls frantically in response, trying to catch a bit of stray wind here, to skip off a sudden gust of air there. But neither could do anything to change their situation. The Galaphile continued to close steadily.

  Then a fresh rainsquall washed over them, and Ahren Elessedil, seeing his chance, stepped away from the railing, arms raised skyward, and called on his magic to change the squall’s direction, sending it whipping toward the Druid warship. It caught the Galaphile head-on, but by then it had changed into sleet so thick and heavy that it enveloped the bigger ship and swallowed it whole. Clinging to the Galaphile in a white swirling mass, it coated the decking and masts with ice, turning the airship to a bone-bleached corpse.

  Now the Skatelow began to pull away. Burdened by the weight of the ice, the Galaphile was foundering. Pen saw flashes of red fire sweeping her masts and spars, Druid magic attempting to burn away the frigid coating. The fire had an eerie look to it, flaring from within the storm cloud like dragon eyes, like embers in a forge.

  Ahead, the fog bank drew nearer.

  Ahren collapsed next to Pen and Khyber, his lean face drawn and pale, his eyes haunted. He was close to exhaustion. “Find us a place to hide, Cinnaminson,” he breathed softly. “Find it quickly.”

  Pressed against the pilot box wall, rain-soaked and cold, Pen peered in at the girl. She stood rigid and unmoving at the forward railing, her face lifted. She was speaking so low that Pen could not make out the words, but Gar Hatch was listening intently, bent close to her, his burly form hunched down within his cloak. He had dropped the Skatelow so close to the Lazareen that she was almost skimming the surface. Pen heard the chop of the lake waters, steady and rough. The wind was back, whipping about them from first one direction and then the other, sweeping down out of the Charnals, cold and bleak.

  Then they were sliding into the mist again, its gray shroud wrapping about and closing them away. Everything disappeared, vanished in an instant.

  “Starboard five degrees, Papa,” Cinnaminson called out sharply. “Altitude, quickly!”

  Blinded by the murky haze, Pen could only hear tree branches scrape the underside of the hull as the Skatelow nosed upward again—a shrieking, a rending of wood, then silence once more. The airship leveled off. Pen was gripping the pilot box railing so hard his hands hurt. Khyber was crouched right beside him, her eyes tightly closed, her breathing quick and hurried.

  “There, Papa!” Cinnaminson cried out suddenly. “Ahead of us, an inlet! Bring her down quickly!”

  The Skatelow dipped abruptly, and Pen experienced a momentary sensation of falling, then the airship steadied and settled. Again there was contact, but softer, a rustling of damp grasses and reeds rather than a scraping of tree limbs. He smelled the fetid wetland waters and the stink of swamp gas rising to meet them; he heard a quick scattering of wings.

  Then the Skatelow settled with a small splash and a lurch, sliding through water and mist and darkness, and everything went still.

  “I was so frightened,” she whispered to him, her blind gaze settling on his face, her head held just so, as if she were seeing him with her milky eyes instead of her mind.

  “You didn’t look frightened,” he whispered back. He squeezed her hands. “You looked calmer than any of us.”

  “I don’t know how I looked. I only know how I felt. I kept thinking that all it would take was one mistake for us to be caught. Especially when that warship appeared and was chasing us.”

  Pen glanced skyward, finding only mist and gloom, no sign of the Galaphile or anything else. Around them, the waters of the wetlands lapped softly against the hull of the Skatelow. Even though he couldn’t see them, he heard the rustle of the limbs from the big trees that Cinnaminson told him were all about them. For anyone to find the Skatelow there, they would have to land right on top of it. From above, even if the air were clear instead of like soup, they were invisible. Their concealment was perfect and complete.

  Two hours had passed since their landing, and in that time the others had gone to sleep, save for the Rover who kept watch from the bow. Pen stood with Cinnaminson in the pilot box, looking out into the haze, barely able to see the man who stood only twenty yards away. Before that night, the boy would not have been allowed on deck at all. But maybe the rules were no longer so important to Gar Hatch since he and Ahren Elessedil knew each other’s secrets and neither was fooling the other about how things stood. Pen didn’t think the Rover Captain’s opinion of him had changed; he didn’t think Hatch wanted him around his daughter. But maybe he had decided to put up with it for the time being, since their time together was growing short. Whatever the case, Pen would take what he could get.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him, brushing damp strands of her sandy blond hair away from her face.

  “That your father is generous to allow us to be on deck alone like this. Perhaps he thinks better of me now.”

  “Now that he knows who you are and who’s hunting you? Oh, yes. I expect he would like to be best friends. I expect he wants to invite you home to live with him.” She gave him a smirk.

  Pen sighed. “I deserved that.”

  She leaned close. “Listen to me, Penderrin.” She put her lips right up against his ear, her words a whisper. “He may have given you away in Anatcherae. I don’t know that he did, but he may have. He is a good man, but he panics when he’s frightened. I’ve seen it before. He loses his perspective. He misplaces his common sense.”

  “If he betrayed us to Terek Molt . . .”

  “He did so because he was afraid,” she finished for him. “If he is backed into a corner, he will not always do the sensible thing. That might have happened here. I wasn’t with him on the waterfront, and I didn’t see who he talked to. That Druid might have found him and forced him to talk. You know they can. They can tell if you are lying. My father might have given you up to save his family and his ship.”

  “And for the money they are offering.”

  She backed away a few inches so that he could see her face again. “What matters now is that if he has done it once, he might try to do it again. Even out here. I don’t want that to happen. I want you to stay safe.”

  He closed his eyes. “And I want you to come with me,” he whispered, still feeling the softness of her mouth against his face. “I want you to come now, not later. Tell me you will, Cinnaminson. I don’t want to leave you behind.”

  She lowered her head and let it rest on his shoulder. “Do you love me, Penderrin?”

  “Yes,” he said. He hadn’t used the word before, even to himself, even in the silence of his mind. Love. He hadn’t allowed himself to define what he was feeling. But as much as it was possible for him to do so, still young and inexperienced, he was willing to try. “I do love you,” he said.

  She burrowed her face in his neck. “I wanted to hear you say it. I wanted you to speak the words.”

  “You have to come with me,” he insisted again. “I won’t leave you behind.”

  She shook her head. “We’re children, Pen.”

  “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”

  He could sense her weighing her response. A dark certainty swept through him, and he closed his eyes against what he knew was coming. He was such a fool. He was asking her to leave her father, the man who had raised and cared for her, the strongest presence in her life. Why would she do that? Worse, he was asking her to accompany him to a place where no one in their right mind would go. She didn’t know that, but he did. He knew how dangerous it was going to be.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry, Cinnaminson,” he said quickly. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t have the right to ask you to come with me. I was being selfish. You have to stay with your father for now. What we decided before was right—that when it was time, I would come for you. But this isn’t the time. This is too sudden.”

  She lifted her head from his shoulder and faced him, her expression filled with wonder. In the dim light and with the mist damp and glistening against her skin, she looked so young. How old was she? He hadn’t even thought to ask.

  “You told me in Anatcherae that you would come for me and take me with you whenever I was ready to go,” she said. “Is that still true. Do you love me enough to do that?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Then I want you to take me with you when we get to where we are going. I want you to take me now.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “Now? But I thought—”

  “It’s time, Pen. My father will understand. I will make him understand. I have served him long enough. I don’t want to be his navigator anymore. I want a different life. I have been looking for that life for a long time. I think I have found it. I want to be with you.”

  She reached out and touched his face, tracing its ridges and planes. “You said you love me. I love you, too.”

  She hugged him then, long and hard. He closed his eyes, feeling her warmth seep through him. He loved her desperately, and he did not think for a moment that his age or his inexperience had blinded him to what that meant. He had no idea how he could protect her when he could barely manage to protect himself, but he would find a way.

  “It will be all right,” he whispered to her.

  But he knew that he spoke the words mostly to reassure himself.

  Twenty-four

  At daybreak, Pen and his companions got a better look at the Slags, and it wasn’t encouraging. The wetlands had the look of a monstrous jungle, an impenetrable tangle of trees, vines, reeds, and swamp grasses, all rising out of a mix of algae-skinned waterways that stretched away as far as the eye could see. The eye couldn’t see all that far, of course, since the mist of the previous night did not dissipate with the sun’s rising, but continued to layer the Slags in a heavy, gray blanket. Swirling in and out of the undergrowth like a living thing, snaking its way through the twisted, dark limbs of the trees and across the spiky carpet of grasses, it formed a wall that promised that any form of travel that didn’t involve flying would be slow and dangerous.

  Ahren Elessedil took one good look at the morass surrounding the Skatelow, glanced up at a ceiling of clouds and mist hung so low that it scraped the airship’s mast tip, and shook his head. No one would find them in this, he was thinking. But they might never find their way out again, either.

  “Here’s how we go,” Gar Hatch said, seeing the look on his face. It was warmer in the Slags, and the Rover was bare-chested and shiny with the mist’s dampness. His muscles rippled as he climbed out of the pilot box and stood facing the Elf. “It isn’t as bad as it looks, first off. Bad enough, though, that it warrants caution if we stay on the water, and that’s what we’ll mostly do. We’ll drop the mast, lighten our load as best we can, and work our way east through the channels, except where flying is the only way through. It’s slow, but it’s sure. That big warship won’t ever find us down here.”

  Pen wasn’t so sure, but Gar Hatch was Captain and no one was going to second-guess him. So they all pitched in to help take down the mainmast, laying it out along the decking, folding up the sails and spars and tucking them away, and tossing overboard the extra supplies they could afford to let go. It took most of the morning to accomplish this, and they worked as silently as they could manage; sounds carry long distances in places like the Slags.

  But they saw no sign of the Galaphile, and by midday they were sailing along the connecting waterways and across the flooded lowlands, easing through tight channels bracketed by gnarled trunks and beneath bowers of limbs and vines intertwined so thickly that they formed dark tunnels. Three times they were forced to take to the air, lifting off gently, opening the parse tubes just enough to skate the treetops to the next open space, then landing and continuing on. It was slow going, as Hatch had promised, but they made steady time, and the journey progressed without incident.

  It might have been otherwise, had the Rover Captain not been familiar with the waters. Twice he brought the airship to a standstill in waters that ran deeper than most, and in the distance Pen watched massive shapes slide just beneath the surface, stirring ripples that spread outward in great concentric circles. Once, something huge surfaced just behind a screen of trees and brush, thrashing with such force that several of the trees toppled and the waters churned and rocked with the force of its movement. Yet nothing came close to the airship, for Hatch seemed to know when to stop and wait and when to go on.

  By nightfall, they were deep in the wetlands, though much farther east than when they had started out, and there was still no sign of their pursuit. When asked of their progress, Hatch replied that they were a little more than halfway through. By the next night, if their luck continued to hold, they would reach the far side.

  That couldn’t happen any too soon for Pen. He was already sick of the Slags, of the smell and taste of the air, of the grayness of the light, unfriendly and wearing, of the sickness he felt lurking in the fetid waters, waiting to infect whoever was unfortunate enough to breathe it in. This was no place for people of any persuasion. Even on an airship, Pen felt vulnerable.

  But perhaps his anticipation of what was going to happen when it was time to leave the Skatelow was working on him, as well. Taking Cinnaminson from her father was not going to be pleasant. He did not for a moment doubt that he could do it, did not once question that he could do whatever was necessary. But thinking about it made him uneasy. Gar Hatch was a dangerous man, and Pen did not underestimate him. He thought that Cinnaminson’s fears about what might have happened in Anatcherae were well founded. Gar Hatch probably did betray them to Terek Molt. He probably thought they would never live to reach the Skatelow to finish this voyage and that was why he was so distressed when Ahren Elessedil reappeared and ordered him to set sail. It wasn’t unfinished repairs or stocking of supplies that had upset him; it was the fact that he had been forced to go at all.

  What would he do when he found out that his daughter, his most valuable asset in his business, was leaving him to go with Pen? He would do something. The boy was certain of it.

  On the other hand, Pen hadn’t done much to help matters along from his end, either. He hadn’t said a word to his three companions about what he and Cinnaminson had agreed upon. He didn’t know how. Certainly, Tagwen and Khyber would never support him. The Dwarf would do nothing that would jeopardize their efforts to reach the Ard Rhys, and the Elven girl already thought his involvement with Cinnaminson was a big mistake. Only Ahren Elessedil was likely to demonstrate any compassion, any willingness to grant his request. But he didn’t know how best to approach the Druid. So he had delayed all day, thinking each time he considered speaking that he would do so later.

  Well, later was here. It was nightfall, dinner behind them by now, and the next day was all the time he had left. He couldn’t wait much longer; he couldn’t chance being turned down with no further opportunity to press his demand.

  But before he could act on his thinking, Gar Hatch wandered over in the twilight and said, “I’d like to speak with you a moment, young Penderrin. Alone.”

  He took the boy up into the pilot box, separating him from the others. Pen forced himself to stay calm, to not glance over at Ahren and Khyber, to resist the urge to check how close they were if he needed rescuing. He knew what was coming. He had not thought Cinnaminson would be so quick to tell her father, but then there was no reason why she should wait. He wished fleetingly, however, that she had told him she had done so.

  Standing before Pen, the misty light so bad by now that the boy could barely make out his features, Gar Hatch sh
ook his bearded head slowly.

  “My girl tells me she’s leaving the ship,” he said softly. “Leaving with you. Is this so?”

  Pen had given no thought at all to what he would say when this moment happened, and now he was speechless. He forced himself to look into the other’s hard eyes. “It is.”

  “She says you love her. True?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  The big man regarded him silently for a moment, as if deciding whether to toss him overboard. “You’re sure about this, are you, Penderrin? You’re awfully young and you don’t know my girl very well yet. It might be better to wait on this.”

  Pen took a deep breath. “I think we know each other well enough. I know we’re young, but we aren’t children. We’re ready.”

  Another long moment of silence followed. The big man studied him carefully, and Pen felt the weight of his gaze. He wanted to say something more, but he couldn’t think of anything that would make it any easier. So he kept still.

  “Well,” the other said finally, “it seems you’ve made up your minds, the two of you. I don’t think I can stop you without causing hard feelings, and I’m not one for doing that. I think it’s a mistake, Penderrin, but if you have decided to try it, then I won’t stand in your way. You seem a good lad. I know Cinnaminson has grown weary of life on the Skatelow. She wants more for herself, a different way of life. She’s entitled. Do you think you can take care of her as well as I have?”

  Pen nodded. “I will do my best. I think we will take care of each other.”

  Hatch grunted. “Easier said than done, lad. If you fail her, I’ll come looking for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I won’t fail her.”

  “I don’t care who your family is or what sort of magic they can call on to use against poor men like myself,” he continued, ignoring Pen. “I’ll come looking for you, and you can be sure I will find you.”