Rising tide - Mel Odom [100]
"Is the boy all right?" she asked.
"He's eating, and from the look of him, he'll be sleeping soon. He told the captain that Skeins scared him, but he understands why it had to be done."
"Good." Sabyna pushed wet hair from her brow. "He'll start to feel the real pain in the next couple of days, when he realizes he's survived and his father hasn't."
Jherek knew that was true, and that there was nothing he could do to spare the boy that pain. Living hurt was a fact he'd learned early, and one that had stayed with him the longest. "What will Tynnel do with him?"
"The best he can," Sabyna answered. "He'll post for the boy's family and leave him with a temple in Athkatla when we reach the port for care. He'll check on him, but that boy could well end up being an orphan. It happens. This is a hard world."
"Aye." Jherek hunkered in the blanket for a time, wishing he felt more like sleeping. He felt drawn to the woman. In the three days aboard ship, he'd watched her and liked what he saw. Rescuing the boy the way she had, though, had shown him some of the differences that lay between them. He wished it would have made him like her less. The attraction, however, remained.
"I heard the boy tell Tynnel that pirates took the ship," Sabyna said.
Jherek nodded.
"Pirates killed my brother," she went on in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, "but I told you that, didn't I? My father was ship's mage on Glass Princess back then."
The ship's name struck a chord in Jherek's memory. Something moved restlessly in his mind and he instinctively shied away from it. Anything that far back couldn't be good.
"We were attacked by Falkane's ship, Bunyip."
Jherek's heart skipped a beat.
"I remember it well," Sabyna continued. "My mother and I had just put away the remains of morningfeast, and a fog swelled up from the south as it sometimes will during this time of year. Only on that day, Bunyip was following it in. We ran a race for a time, our sails filled with the wind."
Jherek remembered the ship then, and the chase. He'd been five, clinging to the ship's rigging as his father had commanded. It was his job to put out any fires that might start on the deck when the boarding began. Merchant ships who knew they were going to be taken often retaliated by trying their hardest to make taking them dangerous to the pirates. He always stayed near the wet sand barrels that he used to put out any fire arrows that struck Bunyip. The pirate vessel's namesake, a creature of the seas half seal, half shark, was known for the characteristic roar it unleashed before it took its prey. Falkane had ordered a specially made klaxon created to make the same roar, only much louder. Jherek remembered it ringing in his ears that day.
"In the end," Sabyna went on, "Bunyip closed on us. The boarding crew was more merciful in those days than they are now."
"I know," Jherek said hoarsely.
"Falkane ordered the captain and most of the crew killed. It was butchery, but he spared my father and a few other men, my other two brothers who were still yet children themselves. He also spared my mother and the women on the ship."
Images flickered through Jherek's mind of that day, more details available than he'd ever been able to remember in the past. He'd clung to the railing, scared and crying as he always did when he saw the vicious bloodletting that happened on a ship Bunyip had grappled onto.
"My brother Dennin was sixteen, still a boy, but with a man's growth. His magic could have been strong, but he denied it, called to the blade. Before my father could stop him, he challenged Falkane to a duel." Sabyna shook her head. "It was no duel. It was an execution."
Jherek didn't remember that. At the time he'd been standing by the railing, sure even as a child that he could no longer endure the fear and the sheer evil that radiated from his father and the pirate crew. Men and women had been murdered-and worse-on Bunyip's deck, and his father had made him witness most of the atrocities.
During the boarding then the two ships