CHAPTER 10 #2
“Where would they go? My father is a blacksmith, like his father and his father’s father.
Our family has lived in Applegrove for generations.
You can’t just pick up a forge and carry it off in your pocket.
My father isn’t going to uproot the family and abandon everything we’ve built just because I tell him that my new lady knows the future. ”
I would have to address this my lady thing, but right now I had bigger problems.
“If you die—”
“If I have to die so my family is safe, I’ll do that,” Clover said.
“I’m not a knight, but I’m not afraid. I used to be.
I used to think that as long as you didn’t get involved and kept to yourself, you’d be safe.
But that isn’t true. I also thought that death was the worst thing that could happen to you. That isn’t true either.”
“You are a child. I don’t think you understand the full gravity of this decision.”
“She’s seventeen years old,” Reynald said.
Right. He was knighted at seventeen after a bloody battle, where he’d cut his way through enemy forces. Different world, different expectations.
“I’m in, too!” Kaiden announced.
Great.
“You—shush.” I took a deep breath. “The three of you are asking me to gamble with your lives. Think about the people involved. These are the Eight Families. All of them are horrible bastards. I saw Ramond vi Everard once. I didn’t even get a good look at his face, and he scared me half to death.”
Reynald blinked. Everard’s name always made an impression. He was the scary bastard all other scary bastards were afraid of. I had to strike while the iron was hot.
“The Sleepless Duke divides the world into friends and foes. You either obey him, or you are against him, and if you oppose him, he will kill you, your family, your neighbors, your pets, and just to be thorough he will burn your house and salt your fields. He solves every problem with violence, and if that doesn’t work, he applies more violence.
He is just one of the people who will be drawn into this mess up to their eyeballs. ”
Clover looked worried. Kaiden looked undeterred, but he was barely twelve.
I met Reynald’s gaze. “You may have to cross blades with Everard. Think about it.”
In a fight between Everard and Reynald, Reynald would lose, and he knew it. It would be an amazing fight, but Everard had the Fatefire.
Reynald’s light eyes turned resolute. “Thank you for your care for me and my son. However, I’m not the kind of man who runs and hides from his responsibility. I will not teach my son to take the coward’s way out.”
His face told me that we were done arguing and I had lost. I looked at Clover.
Clover raised her chin. A determined spark lit up her blue eyes. “Do either of you know how to run a household? Where to purchase supplies and at what prices, which traders are reputable, how to balance a budget?”
“No,” I said.
Reynald shook his head. His lips curved in a small smile.
“I know the prices, so we won’t get swindled. I know the right traders, I know medicine, I know etiquette, I know how to file the right forms with the government.”
She had a point.
“If we do this, Maggie will need to look like a lady. I’m proficient in hair, cosmetics, and attire.
I can dress you in the latest fashion, so you will present the impression you want to the world.
You have a huge house and no idea how to take care of it.
You can’t even do your hair properly. You need help. ”
I opened my mouth. She didn’t let me get the words out.
“Maggie will be the head of the household, Reynald will be head of the household guard, and I will be the steward maid. I’ll be staying here.
I won’t let my brothers die. The Hreban Family will not take anything else from me.
And I owe Reynald and you a debt for saving us.
I pay my debts. I will help save Matheo and destroy Ulmar Hreban. This is settled. Come, Kaiden.”
For once Kaiden didn’t argue. He jumped to his feet and followed her out.
Okay then. I looked at Reynald.
“You heard her. It’s settled,” he said.
The hell it was.
“I will do this with or without you, Maggie,” Reynald said. “I need to know if you have my back. If you don’t help me, I’ll have to change the future myself, and I have no idea what happens next. In or out?”
He’d remembered what I told him in the Knight Vanquisher Plaza almost word for word. Wow.
His lips curved.
“What about Matheo?”
“My son is safe for now. He will wait for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I can bear to be separated from him for a few more months if it means he will grow up in a peaceful kingdom. Let me join you. Help me save my son from a future of suffering.”
I gave up. “Then I am in.”
“Good.” He stood up. “I’m going to drop off the bodies. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”
I stood up, too. “I’ll help you.”
“It will be grisly work.”
“I said I was in. I’ll manage.”
I took a deep breath and followed him down the stairs, to a basement full of corpses we needed to load onto the boat.
Dead bodies were heavy as hell.
I knew this. It was one of those academic facts you learned from reading, never expecting to encounter it in real life, until you had to drag eleven corpses about a hundred feet through a stone passageway and then carry them over a grassy bank to a boat in the middle of the night.
In the fantasy books filling my shelves, heroes slung limp humans over their shoulders with a manly growl and then hauled them like they weighed nothing. The level of bullshit involved was criminal. Reynald was a lot stronger than me, and he grunted, strained, and took frequent breaks.
Finally, all the corpses were in. Reynald paused on the dock and held his hand out. I took it—it was rock steady—and he carefully helped me into the boat. He put his hand on the mooring line and stomped twice on the dock boards.
I glanced at him.
“For luck,” he said. “It’s tradition.”
This world or ours, sailors were superstitious everywhere.
Reynald freed the mooring line, climbed into the boat, and started tying and untying various ropes.
The sail caught the wind, unfurled, and the boat slipped into the current, still slightly rough from the recent rain.
Reynald secured the lines and moved to the big wooden rudder at the stern, about a foot from where I sat on my bench.
The corpses, trussed up in canvas, lay on the bottom of the boat like cordwood.
We sat silently, watching the estates of Anchor Drop slide by, darker shadows in the night, marked by an occasional lantern. The sky above us was smudged with clouds.
When Reynald told me he’d bought a boat, I defaulted to one of those small fishing boats people towed behind their trucks all over Texas highways as soon as the summer heat started. Which was ridiculous, but that was where my brain went. What Reynald had purchased was nowhere near that.
The boat looked like something ancient Vikings might have taken upriver to raid the English monasteries.
Except it was less of a dragon boat and more of a swan.
It sat low in the water, a graceful, sleek wooden vessel about thirty feet long and seven feet wide with a single mast supporting a complex moss-green sail.
Its sides curved from the raised stern, swooping low in the middle, then rising again at the bow, crowned with a small figurehead of a horned sea serpent.
The serpent sported a mouth of scary teeth, and they weren’t wood.
Someone had ripped those fangs out of the mouth of an actual marine monster and glued them in. You had to admire the dedication.
The boat sped down the river. We rounded a bend, and the current dumped us into the much wider, calmer Dokkon, the main river of Kair Toren. The cold breeze flung moisture and a hint of salt in my face.
We skirted a wooded island with roofs peeking through the trees, passed a big trader ship with a bloated hull, and then two people in a small fishing boat. They didn’t pay us any mind, and I didn’t look too closely at what they were doing either.
The river widened. Docks crowded the banks, with wooden ships of all sizes moored for the night. A sea of dark masts and stowed sails rose on both sides. A few more minutes, and the Dokkon carried us out to sea.
The ocean spread before our boat, endless and calm.
The clouds melted away, and an enormous sky reigned above, studded with glittering stars.
Three moons spilled their light on the water: Prata, a giant silver crescent with gold tiger stripes; Drao, a much smaller ruby-red waning gibbous; and Broe, the smallest of the three, a grass-green, last-quarter moon.
The view took my breath away. I smelled the briny salt water, I felt the wind and the steady movement of the boat under my feet, so it had to be real and actually happening. But it was so . . . magical.
We turned left and kept going, farther from the mouth of the river, within the view of the coastline.
Ahead something shimmered in the water like a spill of faint fluorescent paint.
Reynald steered for it. The swirls of faint blue and pink drew closer and closer, rippling through the water.
The boat slid through them, and I saw the outlines of glowing algae suspended like a floating island over the ink-black depths.
Tiny fish with luminescent fins darted through the frilly leaves.
The boat slowed to a leisurely drift.
Reynald let go of the rudder, fiddled with the lines, and sat on the other bench across from me.
“It’s lovely,” I told him.
He nodded. He seemed lighter, almost carefree. “I’ve always liked the ocean.”
“When did you learn how to sail?” He had been born in the northern highlands, a rough region bordering Selva’s mountain range. Once upon a time his people had been sea raiders who invaded Rellas and settled deeper inland, but they’d given up their sea legs a couple of centuries ago.