Chapter 10 Letter of Marque
Ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat.
I watched his long fingers drum the polished wood of his desk.
Ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat.
He said nothing for a very long time, merely stared at me with his gold-shot eyes.
Ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat.
It was his left hand drumming, for his right was bound up in a sling.
His face was still bruised from the cannister shot, and a ring of red circled one pupil.
Every feature of his face was cut and defined, and I wondered if it was a Rhi’Ahr trait or simply his.
If I ever dared sketch him, I knew it would be a series of straight lines with a sharp, feathered quill.
Nose, jaw, chin, cheek. Lines and hollows, shadows and peaks.
The ears were the same, tapering to points beneath his sweep of sea-black hair.
Yes, I realized, I’d very much like to sketch him. But I’d never let him see.
“What were their words again, Ensign?” he asked finally.
“Something about enemies and the Ship of Spells,” I said. “And that the harpiar had a soul ab—”
“No, about the boy. Tell me what they said about the boy.”
“Oh, that they should try to spare him,” I said. “That they could fetch a sum from an old sot.”
Ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat, ta-da-dat.
“That it was still worth it after ten years,” I added. “That there was a new wife but no son, and that they would pull halves in that as well.”
I stood with my hands behind my back as I delivered my story, the ship rocking gently under my boots.
“It is curious that the Templemore was there at the very time you were.” His eyes slid to me. “Does Bracebridge know of your chimeric?”
“My chimeric?” I frowned. “He saw me cast a Praesidium spell on the dock…”
“A simple Praesidium?”
“No, sir. I, um…”
He waited.
“A Praesidium Lumiere, sir.”
He arched a brow.
“I—I made it up.”
“Enhanced with chimeric?”
“Aye, sir. I thought they were going to shoot Mr. Fahr.”
“That was quick on your feet,” he said, and he blinked slowly like a cat. “Sit.”
Sit? Only days ago, I’d wanted to kill him. Now, I was being offered a chair in the cabin of a Rhi’Ahr captain. Suns, how my life had changed.
But I wasn’t a fool. I sat.
“This does present a new set of problems,” he said, and he glanced down at a map spread out on his desk, tracing the outline of the Dreadwall with one finger.
“For the last few years, the Rhi’Ahr have gained the tactical advantage by dusting their cannonshot with chimeric, but if a bluemage, Navy trained, could do the same, it could turn the tide of the war. ”
I swallowed hard, conflicted to my bones.
He looked up again.
“And the harpy said they had a ‘soul aboard’?”
“That’s what he said, sir. But surely, you’re not thinking Kit?”
“Not Kit. Never Kit.”
A soul aboard. What would a traitor look like aboard a ship where an enemy was captain?
“Who is this boy?” I asked. “And why would they think he was on the Touchstone?”
He sighed.
“That is a story that finds its beginning a thousand years ago,” he began. “With the order of the Priestlords and the casting of the Dreadwall. But that’s too long a story for you now and only has some bearing on the boy.”
“I’ve no pressing engagements,” I said with a smirk, and I swore his lips twitched.
I marveled that, despite his Rhi’Ahr accent, his words were so formal, so precise.
He spoke Overland fluently, and I wondered how long he’d been speaking it.
It was like he’d learned in a library or from scholars and scribes and more bookish folk.
But more importantly, I wondered how on erthe he’d come to serve aboard an Oversea ship with a Letter of Marque from our king.
“Very well,” he said. “What do you know of the Priestlords, Ensign?”
I bit my lip, tried to remember. Everything I knew came from my mother, so I hadn’t really cared.
“House WoodRaven,” I began, searching my memory. “They were an ancient order responsible for guarding the Dreadwall. Allisar Brontari was their founder, and they lived and studied on the Cloudgate, the floating island within the Dreadwall.”
Everyone knew the stories of the mythical island.
A channel led through the impassible curtain of water on either side of the Cloudgate, which was the only way to sail from Oversea to Nethersea.
It sounded marvelous. A place dedicated to study and rune, far removed from the mundane, bruising struggles of life.
“Indeed,” he said. “The Cloudgate, or Lindurithain as it is named in Rhi’Ahr. And while they practiced, there was peace. The Dreadwall served both nations well, keeping conflict and raids to a minimum. The RuneTree kept the Dreadwall, and the Priestlords served the Tree.”
“The RuneTree,” I said, my heart kicking over at the name.
“The RuneTree, Goddess of Lindurithain, keeper of the chimeric, worshipped by the Rhi’Ahr for centuries,” he said.
I had no faith of my own. I worshipped no sun or moon, no star or tree, but cities went to war for less than this.
“She ran chimeric in her very lifeblood,” he said. “Her rings were spun of magik with the most archaic of spells.”
A shiver raced along my skin, and I leaned forward to study the map.
The RuneTree was as mythic as the Cloudgate, an ancient belief to explain present-day magik.
A tree pulled from the sea and spun for the moons, whose branches spanned the stars, whose roots girded the erthe.
It sounded far-fetched, but I’d not say that to him.
He was Rhi’Ahr. I had no idea what he believed.
“The order of the Priestlords is nothing more than a history lesson now,” he said darkly. “Because of what your people refer to as the Abolition.”
I was only a child when the order was abolished. With the Priestlords on the Cloudgate, it was ensured that no one on either side could attack or withhold passage. But they grew too powerful, too dangerous. They chose a side, and the king took action.
“Everyone in Oversea knows why it happened,” he said, his voice low, almost soft. “But I suspect few know how.”
I glanced up at him, and for a moment, he looked old. Not in body, for in fact, he was not that many years my senior. No, he looked old in his mind, in his heart and spirit. Weary. No, world-weary, as if the sea had sent him more than his fair share of storms.
That was something I could understand well.
“For the abolition of the Priestlords was not done at the stroke of a pen, Ensign, but by the slash of a broadsword and the crack of a flint. The entire order was slaughtered. Every man, woman, and child. Every homani, faun, minotaur, and Rhi’Ahr.
Seventy noble souls murdered in one night, and the monastery razed to the stones. ”
And in that moment, everything changed. This was more than history or politics. This was personal for him, and painful, and he had just shared it with me.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
He took a deep breath, winced at the action, and a lock of dark hair fell across his forehead. He didn’t push it away. We sat in silence for a long moment as his words sank deep.
“When the order of the Priestlords was…abolished,” he said, “there was nothing, no one to prevent the Cloudgate from being used as a channel for war.”
“But war didn’t happen,” I said. “There was a decade of peace, I think, between the Abolition and the Second…Declaration of War?”
My voice went up with those last few words, but he nodded woodenly. I released a breath, relieved that I’d finally remembered something useful from my years at Berryburn.
“There was peace, Ensign,” he said, “because the Cloudgate began to disappear.”
“Disappear?” I asked. “How could it disappear?”
I knew it moved, but it disappeared? That was serious alchemy.
“Stormveil,” he said. “Archaic magik.”
Just like the Touchstone. And apparently, the Endorathil.
“Few could find it,” he went on, “and if they did, the corridor could collapse at any time, catching them in the Sheets or the Silence or the Dreadwall itself.”
The Sheets and the Silence, as foundational to our navigation as the Dreadwall.
The Sheet Latitudes was a rim of hurricane storms that flanked the Dreadwall, and the Silence a ring of scorching heat and suffocating magik in between.
Leagues deep, or so it was said. No ship was allowed to enter them for risk of shattering, sinking, or worse.
“But ten years ago, five Rhi’Ahr ships did find it,” he said quietly.
“They found the Channel and made it to the island. They coveted the power of the chimeric and wanted to mine it, take it for their own king. They thought, because of the Abolition, it would be abandoned, but when they set foot upon the island, they discovered the Tree…”
His jaw tightened as a storm gathered behind his sea-blue eyes.
“But these Rhi’Ahr did not believe she was a goddess, for they were pragmatic and proud. And they committed the most heinous crime upon the peoples of the erthe, a scar upon the Worldrune and upon very magik itself.”
His breath caught in his throat.
“They cut her down, Ensign,” he said. “They cut the RuneTree down.”
His eyes held me in their currents, spinning, swirling, dragging me deep. I was racing yet couldn’t move.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
“Pride kills,” he said. “Always.”
His face was set as stone, but I could tell it was masking something deeper, more painful than the timbering of a very old tree.
“If I may ask,” I said. “If the RuneTree was chopped down…”
“It was,” he said.
“Then how can it still power the magik of our world? Why does the Dreadwall still exist?”
“The Dreadwall was affected, Ensign,” he said. “It is falling, bit by bit, and causing gaps that allow Rhi’Ahr ships to slip through. Your unfortunate frigate was one of many lost to the Endorathil and her fleet.”
The Endorathil. How I dreaded that name.
He shrugged. “The rest is a lesson in higher alchemy that you are not ready for.”
“But I want to know it all.” This time, I didn’t regret my rush of words. They were true, and I was hungry for rune.