17. Chapter 17
Chapter 17
“ I can’t quite believe this is the fuel to the fire that horrified the world,” Julia said, preparing to re-seal the crude amphora with fresh wax. “I would have thought it no more than tar, had I encountered it in the wild.”
“I suspect that was the first inventor’s idea, whatever his name.”
“We don’t know for sure if that is what we are looking for.”
The room looked as though it was housing a collection of a particularly careless antiquarian - vessels large and small, the pictures on their sides either long since eaten away by time and elements, or never having existed at all. It was not a ship carrying dainty luxuries, that he could tell. Most of the contents, remarkably well-preserved in their airless prisons, were simple supplies - honey, olive oil, plain biscuits for the daily rations.
Except for one.
“It’s not as though there are many other options,” Julia reasoned. “But there is only one way to find out.”
“We are not setting anything in my bedroom on fire. At least, not on the fire that had been used to sink great ships.”
“We could try something outside. On the water, to contain it. It can’t burn on water, can it? No flame can.”
“Likely not.” The chroniclers who said otherwise, Athelstan thought, were likely simply trying to aggrandize the emperor under whose aegis the battles were thought. He knew how these things worked. “What do you propose we set aflame, then?”
“Are there any of boats belonging to the castle itself?” There was nervousness in her voice now, and not at the “setting things on fire” part. “I suppose I should know, being the mistress of the estate, but…”
“Greyharbor is a large place,” he shrugged. “And you are the most diligent mistress the estate had had in decades.” His doubtlessly capable mother died young, and the less was said about his father’s now likewise-deceased second wife, the better. “There is an old vessel or two in the boathouse.”
“Splendid! Let me get dressed for the outside.”
“Are you proposing we go now?”
“Can you think of a better time?”
“It’s certainly not the kind of experiment to be conducted in the daylight. But…”
There was a reason that had nothing to do with the level in the water-clock, nor with the current color of the sky. But speaking it aloud would have made him sound foolish, and there were few things Athelstan Waite liked less than seeming foolish.
“But?”
“It’s too late”.
“Is the great hero of the Redstone Pass afraid of things that whisper in the night?” Julia teased, rising already. Her nightgown did make her look like an otherworldly spirit in the dark, but a distractingly enticing one.
The great hero of the Redstone Pass is afraid of an embarrassing number of things, my own. Ones you would hopefully never find out.
“Nothing of the sort,” he said aloud, and followed her lead.
The night air outside was sharp with the tang of salt, and with the pinch of cold from the sea. It was the sort of night lovers in songs used for their escapes.
Athelstan himself, opening the door to the old boathouse in the dark, felt like less of a lover and more of a mischievous boy about to steal away.
The impression was deepened by the fact that the boat he was looking for - despite secretly hoping it rotted away during the years - was standing there, leaning against the wall. Brendan the Stormlord.
The boats of the royal fleet, or the sleek vessels belonging to richer seafaring families, were often named after ancient heroes. They had the glamour of the poems well-born boys all had to learn. Many ships were named, in some variation, after Kritias and Kressida, the married couple that sailed for seven years to find new home for their people; after Myrra, the goddess whose palace stood in the black depths of the ocean.
Not here. The people of Greyharbor still kept to their local heroes, more ancient than the ancients. Brendan, who kept disintegrating ships together with his bare arms and battled krakens when the seas were full of them, was spoken of centuries before Bessarion the Golden was born.
“Are you thinking of something?” Julia asked, one step behind him, her silhouette dark in the doorway.
“Nothing at all,” he shook his head, uncomfortable as always when he had to lie. “Nothing at all.”
Carrying and then tugging the small craft out and down to the water was not a difficult job. He had once managed it as a boy, after all, if not alone.
Rowing it out was even easier, especially since he was not going to bring it too far out into the sea. They had to swim to the shore, after all, and, if he had no doubt in his own abilities, Julia’s heavy skirts were bound to hamper her, whatever her past experience on the water.
“Are you sure you won’t mind the loss?” Julia asked. “It looks like a fine boat, if an old one.”
“Perhaps, I would. But there are losses I would mind far more. Given what is lying on the scales...” Athelstan shrugged.
“This craft must remember your father’s youth. Did he take you out into the sea in it?” She hazarded a guess about the nature of his memories.
Wrongly, in fact.
“No. He didn’t even know. When I had been a boy, and Orwyn little more than a boy...” A pause, a breath - a tiredness that had nothing to do with the paltry effort of short rowing. “We used to take Brendan on the water at night, playing at great navigators. Sometimes we took her to the Cormorant Isle. Sometimes just along the shore.”
“I would have never thought you to be such a little swashbuckler back then.”
“Did you think I spend my childhood reminding my brother of the existence of rules?”
“Truth be told, yes.”
“It’s not completely wrong”, he admitted grudgingly. “I did spend... most of it this way. But Orwyn had a great way of conjuring up impossible visions and making them look easy as a trip to the pantry.”
The sea was almost still in the rich moonlight.
“A bad night for smugglers,” Athelstan commented, partly to change the topic.
“Poor news for Vittorio, then. Though, I suspect, he would manage.”
“Can he be trusted?”
“As far as any man can be trusted.”
“We had not heard from him for a long time.”
“He might be a scoundrel, but he is no fool. He would not forsake the promise of a big reward for absconding with a small one.” The boat rocked as Julia moved closer to the edge and swung her legs over it.
“Be careful,” her husband warned.
“As careful as I can,” she promised, smiled, and slid into the water.
No yelp from her, and likely not just because the sea water was summer-warm. There must have been hundreds of times when she braved worse waters than these, on the moonless nights in hidden coves.
Nonetheless, he hurried to follow her.
It all felt like a folly, a grown man revisiting the route he plied as a boy with a too-vivid imagination. Even though Athelstan knew this was not what he was doing, that he had a mission and a goal and a good reason, the obscure shame still nudged at him.
Perhaps, it is all for the better that there was no way to come back to the years when Brendan still cut the waves. After all, if there was, he, Athelstan, would no longer be the innocent if sullen boy he had been then; there were secrets he could not unlearn. Things he could not unknow.
He was on the shore first, and helped Julia out of the water. She wrung her dark hair out quickly, without almost any coquetry involved, but it occurred to him that she looked very much like Myrrha on the engravings.
When her mortal lover saw her first, she was riding one of her dolphins, her skin as white as the pearls of the sea, and her hair as black as its depths...
Triad, this was worrying. What next, was he going to start quoting the sonnets of the City of Lilies to his wife?
“I hope this expedition is not going to end in one of us getting a mortal chill”, his wife - he found he liked the sound of the words - joked, and passed to him what they had come down to the shore with.
A hunting bow, a quiver, a small cup with the tar-like substance that might have been the Undying Fire of the half-myths.
There was only one way to find out.
Arrowhead blackened with the substance, it burst into flames the second they put it to the shielded candle that lit their way to the shore. It seemed a normal flame, if very bright.
He put the arrow to the bow.
Brendan was bobbing on the water, looking well and whole from this distance. No paint-cracks seen from here, no flaws in the wood. Looking from this distant vantage point, one might have been forgiven for thinking the boat was still young and shining, all its voyages ahead of her.
His arm stilled.
“Is something the matter?” Julia asked, standing close. So close that he could feel the scent of salt upon her hair.
This was not some idle amusement, Athelstan reminded himself. The safety of his people - and his wife, too, and his little sister - was depending on what they could accomplish tonight.
It weighed heavier than any number of memories, any tomb-full of buried hopes.
He pulled back the bowstring.
The boat was small from this distance, but not that small. More than one shot would scarcely be needed.
What would Orwyn say, if he were here?
An idle thought to be entertaining in the circumstances. What would he say? Take his younger brother’s actions for some belligerence - for were not the younger brothers in songs almost always belligerent and envious of the golden heirs? Wax nostalgically about the lads they used to be, not a care in the world? Slap him on the back for his ingenuity?
Some part of him - a part he greatly resented - still yearned for the last option. Still hoped it would be possible.
Foolishly, of course.
“Athelstan, the fire is burning,” his wife urged.
Athelstan loosened the arrow.
The flight was brief and swift. For a moment, it seemed like nothing special would happen.
Then Brendan burst into flames with a joyous explosion, the fire leaping high in the night - higher than it should have.
Julia whooped with exhilaration and clapped her hands, her face radiant.
He was watching as the fire consumed the boat, quickly and hungrily, like a ravening beast.
Consumed, and refused to stop.
The wood had been devoured - there could not have been much left for the flame-tongues to feed on. Still they continued to burn, if fainter, the circle on the sea lighting up the night.
“Fire on the water,” Athelstan murmured, unable to keep the awe from his voice. “The chronicles did not lie for once.”
“This must be the most understated reaction to seeing a burning water since the day that thing had been invented,” Julia laughed. There was no keeping the excitement from her voice. “With that, we are going to...”
“To have a card up our sleeve, yes. Though not a great one, unless we find a way to make more.”
“We can write to the Alexian Academy,” his wife proposed. “I’m sure they have some promising scholar, or else an eminent one, who would grab this challenge with both hands.”
“I thought we’ve agreed to keep this matter as secret as possible?”
“Yes, but I thought you yourself think that most people would keep silence when some gold is offered.”
“It doesn’t mean I love the fact,” Athelstan grumbled. “Besides, our coffers are not limitless. Especially given that we would likely need to hire more sails from...”
“From the sort of people I used to work with?”
“Yes.”
“What do you propose, then?”
“We tell Father Telmen, and ask him for help.”
“The priest? But - Triad, what a notion! Would he have the skills, let alone the desire?”
“He would”. He paused - on one hand, it was not his secret to divulge; on the other, the situation demanded it. “Before he found his desire to serve the Triad, he used to be a student at the Alexian Academy. Not the best one, but promising enough.”
“That’s quite a trajectory”, Julia exclaimed. “From the brilliance of southern learning to…”
“To the dour post with a dour man?” He raised his eyebrows.
“I was going to say to piety, but now that you mention it…”
“Talking him into reviving his studies would not be easy.”
“I can do it nonetheless. Or, at least, I will try,” Julia amended. Her face shone with eagerness, as though she were a child wanting to find the right answer for her tutor.
She isn’t wrong; the chaplain doesn’t trust her , Athelstan thought. And she hopes to change it.
A pity pierced his heart, such that he hadn’t felt since he saw his wife shrink away from her family’s words. She wants to be loved by everyone. By Triad, how she wants it.
He would have given her that, if he could. He would have given her permission to talk to Father Telmen on the subject, too, if he thought that would not do any good. But the idea they had to put to the chaplain was dangerous to start with, and coming from the woman he already disliked was likely to doom it.
No; this one was his own mountain to scale.