The Sentinels

  I crashed hard into the ladder, knocking the air from my lungs. The dagger rushed forward, coming to rest in the hollow of my chest. I half expected Joen to complete the thrust, to drive that finely crafted weapon into my heart. But she stayed her hand.

  “What are you doing?” I asked once I’d regained some breath.

  “Your mouth’s moving,” she said harshly, “but your legs should be, eh?” She pressed the dagger just a little bit harder, its fine edge creasing my tunic.

  “Why—?”

  “Because you ain’t listening to me!” she interrupted.

  Trying to keep my voice calm, I finished my thought. “Why are you so angry?”

  Her face twisted, and suddenly Joen’s hand held my throat. I could barely breathe, let alone speak. She pushed me upward, up the ladder. She was strong, and I had no choice but to oblige. I raised a foot up on the first rung then the next, and Joen followed. Her arms weren’t long enough to keep her hand at my throat, nor could she keep the dagger against my chest. Instead, the blade slid down the front of my tunic to my belly, then lower.

  I climbed the ladder in a hurry.

  The crew was highly disciplined, but three days in the doldrums had begun to wear on them. Men were at their posts, but leaned on the rail or sat on makeshift seats—empty barrels and crates—or hammocks taken from below. Only Captain Deudermont, who was at the helm. stood tall. But he barked no commands, said nothing at all. He just stared off into the distance. Beside him, the wizard Robillard sat cross-legged on a floating disk of faint blue light.

  So the scene that had unfolded at middeck—me scrambling out from the hold, followed by the yellow-haired pirate girl brandishing a dagger—had surely stood out. But still, no one seemed to take any heed.

  “What is it about Jaide that—,” I started to ask.

  “It’s not about her,” Joen said as she emerged onto the middeck. She still had her dagger, but she didn’t press the attack this time. “The wind died when she got here, and I don’t even know her, eh?”

  “The wind died when she left.”

  “Oi, then maybe I’m angry she left!”

  “I thought you said it wasn’t about her.”

  “It’s not about your elf woman!” Joen was practically yelling. “It’s about the wind! You and that stone of yours … You can ride out of here any time you like, leaving bad luck behind for us. See there, see the empty sails?” She pointed her dagger at the mainsail, raised to full but slack in the still air. “Soon we’ll run out of food, eh? And our bellies will be empty as that bloody sail.”

  “What would you have me do about it?”

  “What, you mean you can’t make the wind blow?” she shouted, sarcasm dripping from every syllable. “Why are you even here anymore? I thought your elf priestess gave you new orders. I thought you were done with m—”

  She looked as if she wanted to continue, but a sudden commotion on the deck interrupted her.

  The sailors had suddenly stood up, stood straight. And they were all staring, but not at us. I followed the gaze of the nearest man up to the mainsail.

  The canvas rippled with the last breath of a gust of wind. We all stared for a few long moments, but another gust didn’t follow.

  Joen’s whisper broke the silence. “Did you do that?”

  “I think you did,” I whispered back.

  “Oi, I didn’t do nothing!” she said. “I just said, ‘You can’t make the wind blow?’ ”

  We looked up at the sail, but nothing happened.

  She raised her dagger again, blade pointing at the sail. A gust of wind rose up around her, tousling her short blonde hair, filling the sail. The dagger slipped from her hand, dropped, spinning over once before digging point first into the wood. The fine blade cut deep into the deck, sinking nearly halfway down the eight-inch blade. I stared at it for a moment, trying to make sense of it. Not even a magical dagger should have slid so deeply into Sea Sprite’s strong planks.

  Joen backed up a step, staring at the quivering dagger. I followed suit.

  “That dagger,” she said softly. “I took it from the dragon.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  “Think it’s magical, eh?”

  “Looks that way.”

  She paused for a moment. “God’s favor, then,” she said at last, stepping forward, reaching out to take the dagger.

  A hand caught her wrist before she touched the hilt. “It’s not the dagger,” said Robillard.

  Joen and I looked up to see both the wizard and the captain standing over us, staring at us with stern faces. I became aware of other eyes upon us too—every set of eyes on the deck. The action had shaken the sailors from their collective stupor.

  “It’s not the dagger,” said Robillard, pulling Joen’s hand up toward his narrowed eyes. “Where did you get that ring?”

  “Same place I got the dagger, eh?” Joen replied. “Oi, let go, you’re hurting my arm!”

  Robillard grabbed her hand and tugged at the ring. By the grimace on her face, I figured the ring didn’t want to leave her finger, but after a moment Robillard pulled it free. Joen stumbled back with a yelp, crashing against me and nearly knocking both of us to the ground. A trickle of blood dripped from her hand, from the cut on her knuckle where the wizard had torn the ring away.

  “This is powerful magic, child,” Robillard said, his voice hushed. “I ask again: where did you get it?”

  “I took it from a dragon,” she said. “It looked pretty, eh?”

  Captain Deudermont interjected, “You stole from the dragon? Small wonder he attacked us, then. That was a foolish thing to do indeed.”

  I gently patted my chest, or more particularly patted the pouch set against my chest. The bag held the magical stone I had also stolen from the dragon. Though in fairness, the stone had been mine to begin with.

  “You will relinquish your daggers, young miss,” Deudermont continued, paying me no heed. “And then you will go below.”

  “Hey …,” I started to argue, but Captain Deudermont cut me off.

  “And you, Mister Maimun, will take your post in the crow’s nest.” He raised his voice so that the whole crew could hear. “We have our wind.”

  A cheer went up across the deck, muted and muffled at first. Then Robillard, now wearing the ring he’d taken from Joen, his eyes glittering with glee as he stared at it, waved his hand at the sails and a billowing gust rose around him and filled the mainsail. The cheer grew louder.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “Land ho!” I called from the crow’s nest. “Behold the walls of Waterdeep!”

  We had sailed three days under the power of Joen’s—now Robillard’s—ring before a natural wind had come up from the northwest, perfect for filling our sails on our eastward voyage. Four more days after that, the same steady north breeze chilling my bones, I finally caught sight of Waterdeep, of a safe port and perhaps a warm bed.

  A commotion on the deck caught my attention. I peered down from my tiny bucket, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. All the sailors of Deudermont’s crew suddenly left their posts. About half headed toward the hold, while the other half gathered around the pirates who’d been given deck assignments for the day. The sailors moved with the precision of a trained fighting force—a trained, well-armed fighting force, I realized, as their weapons slid free of their sheaths.

  “Hey!” I called down. “What’s going on down there?”

  Robillard, watching events from the sterncastle, called back, “Just stay put. It’ll be over soon.”

  I was already setting my feet to the top rung of the ladder as he spoke and wasn’t about to stop, but his words proved nonetheless true. By the time I set foot on the deck, the pirates on deck had been subdued, surrounded by sailors.

  I headed below.

  But I was, again, too late. I found the remaining pirate crew similarly rounded up and locked in the brig. The single cell was too tiny to hold even half the pirate crew, but once those captured above wer
e brought in, surely the brig would be dangerously tight.

  I scanned the captives, holding out some impossible hope that Joen had managed to elude the crew. But alas, her emerald eyes bore into me, peering back at me from the crowd.

  “Maimun, I—,” she started to say, but Captain Deudermont’s voice cut her off.

  “I did what I had to,” the captain said, striding into the room.

  Joen turned her gaze to Deudermont and her eyes narrowed to angry slits. “You lied to us,” she said, and several others took up an echoing chorus of protest.

  “A tenday in this tiny cell would have been unmerciful, and indeed might have been the last for many of you,” he replied. “I have no desire to inflict such needless suffering.”

  “Oi, but he means ’e needed us to crack the ice and tie the sails,” one pirate growled.

  “I could have lawfully put you to the deeps and fed my crew far better,” Deudermont reminded them.

  “Ye’ve had to fight us first, what,” said one. “Ye lying dog!”

  “I have no desire to kill you, sir. Even now,” Deudermont replied.

  “Only to turn us over to them as will, eh?” Joen retorted.

  “If you’re found guilty of piracy, then yes.”

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. How could I have judged Captain Deudermont so badly? I took him at his word, and every indication over the last tenday was that he meant to keep that word. Until now.

  “But enough of this,” he said, and turned to leave, then stopped to stare down at me. “Mister Maimun, you have duties to attend.”

  I squared my shoulders—not an easy thing to do under the glare of Captain Deudermont. I had always thought of Deudermont as regal, kingly, deserving of respect, even when I disagreed with him. Even when he had betrayed me—or, rather, I had thought he was betraying me, though events would prove otherwise—he had always appeared in command, and it had always seemed as if he should be in command.

  But not now. His face was pale in the meager light, and his eyes, usually so confident, looked weary. His jaw was clenched too tightly, his arms crossed defensively over his chest. He was as imposing as always, but he also looked unsure, unhappy.

  I wanted to confront the captain right then and there, try to make him see the error of his ways. But there were too many people around us—crewmen and pirates—and he would never concede in front of them.

  I bit my tongue and walked past him, out of the room. I could feel Joen’s eyes on my back, could hear her whisper, again, “Maimun, I …”

  I found the captain alone an hour later and dared to follow him into his private quarters. I begged his pardon a dozen times before he even acknowledged my presence.

  “The pirates are not your concern,” he finally said to me. He sat down at his desk and did not motion to any of the comfortable chairs in the outer room of his quarters. His stare bored into me.

  “N-not … most, no,” I stammered, and only in hearing my own voice did I even realize how scared I was at that moment. Until then, perhaps I hadn’t considered how much I had to lose.

  “Yet you come to lecture me?”

  “Your pardon, Captain, but you gave them your word.” There, I said it. And to my surprise, merely speaking the truth lent strength to me—strength I sorely needed in that moment. “Out in the fight, when the sails all tangled, you made a deal, and a good one, but now you’re—”

  “You’re a young man, Maimun,” Deudermont interrupted. “Is it not just to serve the common good? There is an old saying that the means do not justify the end.”

  I thought I understood his meaning enough to agree with that old saying, and my nodding head did just that.

  “In most cases, I would agree,” Deudermont explained.

  There was something in his voice that rang hollow to me.

  “Our situation was desperate,” he went on. “For both crews. A fight would have left all your pirate friends—”

  “They aren’t … all … my friends!”

  I didn’t like his responding smile.

  “They would all have died out there on the cold waters,” he said. “Or, what few might have escaped the blade would have spent the rest of the time miserable in the brig—and we’d not have fed them nearly as well. Instead, they enjoyed days of hope and honest work—no small thing—and something I will tell the magistrates on their behalf.”

  “Right before the magistrates hang them, you mean.”

  “The course they chose portended harsh justice, Maimun,” he said, his voice cold enough to send a chill down my spine.

  “And so they’ll all hang for it,” I said with as much sarcasm as my lack of breath allowed.

  “Not all,” he said, and I found myself believing his smile, but not his words. “There is little doubt of their piracy, but only the most hardened will be hanged. And not likely your little friend.”

  “Who’ll spend the rest of her life in a dungeon, then?”

  He shrugged—shrugged!—and oh, but I could have put my clumsy saber through his heart at that moment.

  “They chose their flag,” he said. “What would you have me do?”

  “Keep your word!”

  “I cannot.”

  “Then let Joen go!” I blurted, and didn’t even care about the desperation in my voice or the tear in my eye.

  “It is not my province to make such indiscriminate decisions. I am not a magistrate.”

  “At sea,” I argued, “the captain is judge and jury.”

  “Harbor, ho!” someone cried from out on the deck.

  “The harbormaster has spotted us and signaled us in,” Deudermont said. “We’re no longer at sea. Is there anything else, Mister Maimun?”

  So much had been confusing in my strange journey, my life, but nothing more so than that strange conversation with a man I had thought was one thing, but was proving to be another. To claim that we were no longer at sea? A man like Captain Deudermont did not abide, did not govern, that kind of a cheap dodge. It made no sense to me—not the breaking of his word, not that this was his plan from the beginning, and not his refusal to free Joen. What threat was she to him or to the Sword Coast? She was just a girl, a kid like me.

  There was nothing more to say, though, and like a good sailor, I took my post. I would be needed in the crow’s nest to help guide the ship into port. At this time of year, the ice floes had receded to the north, but the occasional berg could still drift down this far south. I would be the ship’s eyes this one last time.

  I had learned well never to count on anyone but myself, and if Captain Deudermont wouldn’t help me, then I had to make my own way. I had the stone, I had a purpose, and I had Haze, but I was missing something—something I couldn’t leave Sea Sprite without.

  The stone had brought all this down upon me, upon us. The stone had brought Joen out to sea with Chrysaor, the genasi pirate. The stone had put Deudermont and his sailors on Chrysaor’s tail. Every event that had led to Joen’s capture had been brought about by this cursed object, this weight around my chest—around my entire life. Maybe the stone had been working on Captain Deudermont, turning him back on his own word?

  Maybe not, but it didn’t matter. I knew what Deudermont had promised the pirates—a way back to Waterdeep in exchange for their help in restoring the ship—and I knew that their side of that bargain had been fairly delivered. I knew what was right, and I knew now what to do.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Hey, Tonnid, you mind helping me with something?”

  The man the crew called “Tin Head” looked up from his task. He was securing some lines near the port rail, standing a few yards from the nearest sailor.

  “Whaddya need, Lucky Lucky?” His voice was low and ponderous as he whispered his nickname for me.

  “Look, Tin,” I said, “I don’t think I’m gonna be here much longer, and there’s something I want to give you before I go.” Tonnid and his buddy Lucky were the closest things I had to friends on this ship—besides Joe
n—and I hoped my bluff would make enough sense to pry him from his duties. Thankfully his assignment was nonessential, and though he could certainly catch trouble from the captain if Deudermont knew he was leaving his post, the big sailor nodded.

  “I left it near my bunk,” I said, leading the way stealthily to the ladder below. A few other crewmen took note, but only in passing. They had their own duties to attend to.

  The crew’s quarters belowdecks were in some disarray. The crew—those who hadn’t been on deck for the past six hours—had been celebrating the end to a successful voyage. Cards, crude bone dice, weighted clay mugs, and stale bread were scattered about on the few makeshift tables thrown together from empty crates and barrels. About the only thing anyone had done to clean up was to blow out the candles.

  I took a seat on a bunk near an abandoned card game. Tonnid sat across from me.

  “Look, Tin, I’m sorry,” I began.

  “You ain’t here to gimme anything, are you?” he concluded.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You wanna take something.”

  “You know, you aren’t as dumb as people think,” I said with a chuckle.

  “Nope, I ain’t. But I don’t mind ’em thinkin’ it.” He rose slowly. “But I can’t just give you the key, y’know.”

  There it was. In that moment, in that admission, I knew that I wasn’t the only one angry about Captain Deudermont’s betrayal. Many of the crew of Sea Sprite had served aboard pirate ships as well, and in the long and dangerous days at sea, friendships had been forged between the crews. We had all worked for the common good, after all. These sailors knew redemption, and since a man’s word was about the only thing a sailor had to hold onto during the trying days at sea, Deudermont’s betrayal had stung them profoundly.

  “I’m sorry, Tonnid,” I said again. I stood and snatched one of the weighted clay mugs, still filled with a bit of ale, from the table. I leaped at Tonnid, swinging the mug at his head. The man, much larger than I, didn’t even flinch. He bowed his head, catching the mug full in the brow.