Chapter 5 Sofie
Chapter five
Sofie
Not long after I made the deal with Bluebeard, the pirate captain left. In his stead, someone knocked timidly at the door to the captain’s cabin.
When I opened it, I discovered a round-cheeked little boy who was overburdened with blankets and furs. He was much cuter now that he wasn’t brandishing a knife at me.
“Cap’n sent me to set up your bed.” The boy sniffed the burden in his arms. “Not sure if it’s fit for a lady, but it was the best I could find.”
I let him in, wondering where this bed was meant to be set up.
Ah. The floor. Of course. Bluebeard was every bit the gentleman I’d have expected.
“What’s your name?” I asked the boy.
He paused in his labors, straightening the makeshift bed. “I’m Jovus, but you can call me boy or cabin boy.”
“I most certainly will not.” I crossed my arms and made a point of sitting down on the captain’s bed.
The boy blanched. “You shouldn’t sit on Cap’n’s bed, miss. He don’t like it. The other brides got in trouble for doing it.”
“It’s Sorceress Dar’Vester,” I told the boy, “and I’m no ordinary bride. I’ll sit where I please. What’s he going to do about it?”
“Chores,” Jovus said like a question, “as punishment?”
I laughed. “I’d like to see him try to enforce that.”
The boy dusted off his hands, suddenly nervous. “I’m supposed to let you inspect me, too. For trying to break the curse?”
All the bluster went out of me at that. He was just a child…though not the only cursed child I’d seen this week. Still.
At least Bluebeard was actually keeping his word. I’d have this curse figured out in no time.
“Come closer,” I bid Jovus.
The boy was…unremarkable. If the curse was on him, too, then it was hiding itself well. Then again, I was surrounded by it here—and I likely carried it myself now that I was Captain Bluebeard’s wife.
I frowned at the wedding ring still on my finger, the opal swirling with some kind of spell. I suspected it was a protection enchantment, though it was either faded with time or broken down by the curse itself. I tried to pull it off.
The ring was stuck. Because of course it was.
Yet when I twisted and examined it, it looked as though it ought to fit over the joint.
That smacked of some kind of magic. Perhaps I couldn’t see the curse directly, but I could spot little signs of it like this.
Death magic was the most cunning of all spell types, after all.
But no amount of squinting or scrutiny gave me even a glimpse of the powerful curse that was at work here. Was this some kind of joke? Did the curse even exist?
Except something had made my spells rebound and sting me earlier. And something was keeping this ring on my finger.
Well played, Sorceress Bride. I should’ve known your work would be cleverer than that.
With a sigh, I dismissed the boy. “That’ll be all.”
“That didn’t even hurt,” he said, suddenly cheerful.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Who told you I’d hurt you?”
“Not you, miss. But magic is dangerous.”
So it was. I thanked the boy and sent him out.
My next visitor proved to be the cook.
“You have five minutes to tell me what you’d like for dinner and to inspect me, too, ’fraid that’s all I can spare.
” The words would’ve been brusque if the man didn’t seem so merry.
Mr. Smalt, as he introduced himself, had cooked for Captain Jax for several years now.
As I studied him for signs of the curse, he cheerfully told me of all the places he’d seen since joining the crew.
“And to think, the palace sacked me, and the head chef said I’d never amount to anything!” Mr. Smalt finished brightly.
“Palace?” My cheeks colored a bit.
“I come from Endergeist, where we picked you up,” he explained, oblivious to my discomfort. “Shame, what you had to do to that princess. The king and queen waited so long to finally have a little one of their own.”
My stomach sank, almost all the way to my toes. In fact, if it fell through the polished planks of the captain’s cabin, straight through the underbelly of the ship and into the bottom of the ocean, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
“People used to get so excited if there was even the rumor the queen was with child,” he rambled on. “Lovely that it finally happened. Guess there’s worse things, though, then having a babe who sleeps all the time, eh?”
I bristled at that. “A curse is no light matter, and the princess is not asleep.” Yet. “The spell won’t take hold until she is of age. I’m not needlessly cruel.”
“I know,” replied Mr. Smalt. “That curses are not a light matter, I mean. Can’t say I know you well enough to assess your character, though you seem nice enough. Bit stiff.”
As if to prove his point, my back went rigid. I wanted to be offended, but couldn’t quite manage it. Part of this was because of his jovial demeanor.
The rest was because I was quickly becoming fed up with this curse. I was back to wondering if I had been misled.
Bluebeard hadn’t fabricated the details, had he? Not that he’d given me many. Then again, I’d rushed into making the deal with him, convinced it was the only way out.
I closed my eyes a moment, listing what I knew for sure.
I knew there was a curse. The way the second curse reacted when I laid it upon Bluebeard was proof. There was already a curse present.
I knew that death magic and cursed objects were real. I’d studied quite a few of them at Dewspell, and read about hundreds more.
So why—and how—was the curse hiding from me?
“One thing I’ll say for this curse,” Mr. Smalt said, changing subjects as though we had, in fact, been discussing the curse already, “it does keep me from slicing myself in the kitchen, long as we aren’t too close to the Hidden Isle.”
That had me blinking to clear my vision, no longer focused on magic but on the cook’s ruddy face. “What do you mean?” I asked.
“Didn’t the captain tell you? We can’t be killed or even take more than a bit of a walloping until we get closer to the isle. It’s part of the curse.”
Part of the curse. The Hidden Isle. That description tickled something in my memory.
I thanked Mr. Smalt for his help, confirmed my choice of menu and my dietary restrictions, and sent him on his way.
My third visitor proved to be the man I’d first mistaken for Captain Bluebeard.
He was almost as tall as Jax, though built a bit leaner.
Still, I wouldn’t want to be paired up against either of them in combat drills.
First Mate Aoki looked as though he could take on a bear, but there was more than just brute strength to him.
A hard edge hid behind his dark eyes—eyes I remembered from the night this ship was boarded and its crew dispatched.
I suspected he had a more ruthless nature than the other pirates I’d met so far, and that he didn’t particularly care to keep it hidden.
I still hadn’t asked what was done with the survivors from the original crew.
If there were any. I didn’t have the heart to, and frankly, it wasn’t my job.
Fairy godmothers had all sorts of missions, and it was imperative we didn’t carry our own standards into the various countries and cultures we went to.
This pirate ship was undoubtedly a culture all its own.
“I can only spare a few minutes,” Aoki said, tone flat as if he’d like to be anywhere but here. “This ship is operating with a skeleton crew as it is.”
“Trust me, I won’t need long.” I resigned myself to more failure.
This time, however, as I studied the first mate, I held my hands up to either side of his temples, an act he had to stoop for. There. At last! I could feel something.
But it was so tightly bound up inside him, I couldn’t distinguish the threads of the two entities.
And there must be two. As a student at Dewspell, I’d learned that a death curse was like spreading one’s soul far and wide, putting the essence of the caster into everything it touched.
So for the first time, I was sensing her.
The Bride. And it did me not a lick of good.
It was as if she had wrapped this man in her arms, winding her limbs through his rib cage, snaking her eyes behind his eyes, joining with him instead of simply latching on.
And as I tried to probe her curse further, I felt her push back.
I recoiled, sucking in a breath. That stung.
“Impossible,” I muttered. This spell was acting like a marionette curse, a type where a living caster actively manipulated the curse and its effects. It cost a tremendous amount of energy and concentration.
How could all that come from touching a cursed object imbued with a death curse? None of this made sense!
“You were right,” Aoki said. “That didn’t take long.”
I looked up at him quizzically.
“We’ve been inspected by all manner of sorcerers and mages. All the ones worth their salt confirmed what the legends say. It’s an unbreakable curse.”
I clucked my tongue, not bothering to hide my disdain. “No curse is unbreakable. They all have exit clauses.”
“Not this one.”
“It has one,” I insisted. “I just have to find it.”
“By the time you sift through all its other clauses,“ he said, his eyes burning bright, “we’ll either be at the Hidden Isle, or you’ll be dead.”
“If that’s true, then why in the gods’ names would your captain pursue such a treasure?”
Aoki rolled his eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand, beachmaid. Whether you’re a privateer, a pirate or part of some rich country’s navy, the Queen of the Sea is every sailor’s dream.”
I felt the floor undulating like waves beneath me. “The treasure you’re after is the Queen of the Sea?”
He inclined his head in confirmation. Confirmation that I was on a ship full of fools.
In the legends, the Queen of the Sea was a treasure imbued with magic, an astrolabe that allowed anyone to navigate any body of water safely.
I could see why pirates would want it, especially in this day and age, when huge swaths of the ocean—most notably the Diam Sea—had become so filled with chaos magic, they were now unnavigable.