High druid of Shannara_ Jarka Ruus - Terry Brooks [91]
It was late in the afternoon of that same day when Cinnaminson came on deck. She climbed up through the hatchway leading from the narrow sleeping quarters below, stepping into the crimson light of the sunset like a shade. Pen was sitting with Khyber at the aft rail, still stewing over the way he had let himself be fooled by Gar Hatch, when he saw her. He did not know where she had come from or what she was doing there. He had thought that besides the four who had booked passage there were only Hatch and two crewmen. Now this apparition had appeared. He stopped talking in midsentence, causing Khyber, who had not been paying close attention, to look up from her writing and follow his gaze.
She was only a girl, no older than Pen, younger than Khyber, her slender form wrapped in something soft gray and green that might have been a long robe and shimmered like the sea. She looked to have woken from a deep sleep, her short, sandy blond hair disheveled and her face tilting toward the light as if to make certain of the time. Pen thought her beautiful, although he would later revise that judgment to striking, and sometime later to captivating. Her features were delicate, but unremarkable and not quite perfect. Still, they intrigued him. What mattered more was the way she moved, not looking at anything while seemingly aware of all. She glided rather than walked, the soft whisper of her gown marking her passage as she came toward them.
It was when she had almost reached them that Pen saw her eyes. They were milky white and empty, staring straight ahead at nothing. She was blind.
Pen did not know who she was. He did not know her name. What he did know was that he would never forget her.
“Are you our passengers?” she asked them, looking off into a space they did not quite occupy.
Pen nodded, then realized she couldn’t see him. “Yes, two of them, anyway. I’m Pen and this is Khyber.” He had presence of mind enough, though just barely, to remember to use only first names.
“I’m Cinnaminson,” she told them. “I’m Gar Hatch’s daughter.”
She stretched out her hand and waited for them to take it, which they did, one after the other. Her smile was winsome and a bit fragile, Pen thought, hesitant and protective at the same time, which seemed right for her condition. But there was strength to her, too. She was not afraid to come up against what she couldn’t see.
“Traveling to the Charnals,” she said, making it a statement of fact. “I like that part of the world. I like the feel of the mountain air, the smell and taste of it. Snowmelt and evergreens and ice.”
“Do you always come on these trips?” Khyber asked, looking doubtful about the whole business.
“Oh, yes. Ever since I was eight years old. I always go. Papa wouldn’t fly anywhere without me.” She laughed softly, milky eyes squinting with amusement. “I am an old salt, he tells me, a child of the air and sea.”
Khyber arched a questioning eyebrow at Pen. “I am surprised he would allow you aboard at so young an age when you could not see to help yourself. It seems dangerous.”
“I see well enough,” the girl replied. “Not so much with my eyes as with my other senses. Besides, I know every inch of the Skatelow. I am not in any real danger.”
She sat down beside them, moving effortlessly to find a place between them, her gray and green robes settling about her like sea foam. “You don’t fly, do you, Khyber?”
“No. But Pen does. He was born to airships.”
Her gaze shifted, not quite finding him. “Don’t tell my father. He doesn’t like it when other flyers come aboard. He’s very jealous of what’s his.”
Pen thought, without having any better reason to do so than the way she said it, that she was including herself in that assessment. “Too late,” he told