Kushiel's Scion - Jacqueline Carey [339]
Alone in my cabin, I traced those words with one fingertip. It made my heart ache to imagine how Phèdre must have felt when she received the letter I'd written in Lucca; how they all must have felt. The awkward postscript scrawled at the bottom. Thank you for the gift of my life. I almost wished I hadn't written it. And then I remembered Valpetra's javelin, cocked and aimed at my heart, and I was glad I had.
It had been a near thing.
On our last day at sea, it stormed. It grew calm, first, late in the afternoon. The Aeolia bobbed like a cork, going nowhere. Captain Oppius cast a grim eye toward the bruised, luminous sky and muttered to himself. His sailors went about lashing things down, striking the mainsails and hoisting the storm-sails.
"This is going to be ugly, your highness," he said soberly to me. "Once it hits, stay in your cabin and tell your men to keep to their berths."
I nodded. If he hadn't meant it, he'd have used my name. Oppius da Lippi hadn't been jesting about dice; we'd passed a fair number of hours together and my dwindling purse was lighter for it. "How ugly?"
He pursed his lips. "Ugly."
It was.
A right bitch of a storm, Eamonn would have called it. It came for us an hour before sunset. We watched it approach from the deck, Lady Denise's guards and I. A smudge of darkness on the southern horizon moving closer, lightning dancing on the waves. Stormclouds piling above us in layers, dispelling the strange, livid light. Sea-swells rising, the Aeolia bobbing ever higher. I glanced at Romuald, who stood beside me, his gaze fixed on the moving darkness. I remembered his kindness toward me on the barge.
"Are you all right?" I asked him, echoing him.
"Aye." His throat moved as he swallowed. "Don't much like the sea."
And then it hit, faster and harder than I could have reckoned, fierce and primal, all roaring darkness and water, splintered by lightning.
"Get down!" someone shouted. "Down!"
It was terrible and glorious, and I wanted to stay. I wanted to see, wanted to see it all. I'd heard tell of such storms, other storms. Storms the Master of the Straits had sent; the old one, before Hyacinthe took his place. The storm that drove Phèdre to Kriti on the ship of the blood-cursed pirate, Kazan Atrabiades. I wanted to see, to know.
And men might die if I did.
"Down!" I shouted, shoving Romuald before me. "Down!"
The ship lurched and wallowed, half-swamped. A wave washed the deck, water spilling into the open hatch. No time to find my cabin. Romuald and the other guards scrambled before me, and I scrambled after them. Above us, the hatch slammed closed. A single lantern swayed wildly, hanging from a hook, illuminating scared faces.
"Blessed Elua!" someone gulped. "We're all going to die."
"The hell we are!" I grabbed the tin lantern, steadying it in both hands. Bilgewater sloshed around my ankles. "Right," I said to them, thinking of Gallus Tadius who had made us believe in the impossible. "You think this is bad? Listen, lads…"
I told them the end of the story, the story I had begun telling Lucius Tadius on the eve of battle and fallen asleep before completing. Rahab and his maelstrom, the bright mirror of the dark. The form that had risen at last in terrible, anguished brightness, the watery chains. How we had wept, had all wept at its beauty. Hyacinthe and his ragged voice, chanting charms in a forgotten tongue, pages of the lost Book of Raziel clutched in his arms.
Phèdre, dripping.
Phèdre, dripping and half-drowned, finding her feet.
Speaking the Name of God.
They knew the story. They were D'Angeline. But they'd never heard it from one who was there. I remembered the syllables of the Sacred Name, each one tolling in my head like a bell as it fell from Phèdre's tongue. I didn't remember what they were. I couldn't speak them, any more than I could give voice to the sun or the moon or the earth. But I had been there. I had heard them. I knew the shape of the word they formed, and the word was love.