Still, as the crew prepared to set sail, something nagged at Magiere ... as if she and her companions should leave this ship right there and then.
Chapter Eight
Sailing down the coast on The Thorn, Wynn couldn’t arrange another private moment with Osha until they neared the port of Oléron. It didn’t happen the way she expected.
Early one evening, after Chane rose from dormancy and went up on deck, Wynn was alone with Shade in their cabin. She took time to herself to jot notes in a journal, though she no longer recorded anything too critical. The dangerous, important things she dictated to Shade or shared by showing the dog her recalled memories. Shade, as a majay-hì and more, locked those secrets away inside herself beyond anyone’s reach.
Wynn stuffed the journal away in her pack and stood up to stretch. “Come, Shade.”
Out in the passage, she led the way to the stairs and up on deck to check on her other companions. Pausing in the aftcastle doorway, she was surprised to find Chane and Nikolas sitting side by side on two barrels, with mugs of tea beside each of them. They were intently perusing a text that Chane had brought along, likely one that Kyne had forced on him for his studies.
“No,” Nikolas said, pointing at the current page. “This symbol is quite different. If you break down the strokes of its construction according to the methods of the Begaine Syllabary, the Numanese word here is ‘confusion.’”
“Why not use the previous symbol?” Chane asked.
“Because that one reads ‘puzzlement.’ Strokes and marks in a symbol for a word are meant for sounding out that particular word ... and the term meanings are not what the syllabary is about.”
Wynn’s gaze fixed on Chane’s red-brown hair hanging forward to almost block one eye. Seeing him slightly hunched over that book swept her back to when she’d first met him.
She’d been helping Domin Tilswith, her mentor at the time, in starting a tiny new guild branch in Bela. The branch was the first of its kind in the Farlands of the eastern continent. They’d been given an old decommissioned barracks no longer used by the city guard. Chane often came at night to drink mint tea and pore over historical texts brought over half the world to that place. Sometimes he’d seemed starved for intelligent or at least educated companionship, and Wynn had been secretly flattered by a handsome young nobleman spending so many evenings with her.
At that time Wynn had no idea who—what—Chane Andraso was.
Vneshené Zomrelé ... “Noble Dead” ... vämpír ... vampire ... undead.
That felt like a lifetime ago, though their pasts could never be erased. Not his for his victims and enemies; not hers for what she had done since returning to the guild.
Neither Nikolas nor Chane appeared to have noticed her.
Though the young sage still had dark circles under his eyes, for once, while assisting Chane, he didn’t look so bleak and lost.
Chane might be an undead, once a predator of the living. He could wield a sword as if it were part of his hand, and he dabbled in minor conjury of the elements as well, but at his core he was a scholar. No matter what he did—had done—Wynn knew this, and she could never forget it.
Then she noticed that Osha was nowhere to be seen. She pulled back, forcing Shade to retreat down the steps. At Shade’s huffing grumble, Wynn didn’t stop to explain. She headed down to the lower passage and the farther door of Osha and Nikolas’s shared cabin. After a brief hesitation, she knocked.
“Osha?”
“Here,” he called in an’Cróan Elvish.
She cracked the door, peeked inside, and asked, “Are you all right?”
Osha was sitting on the cabin floor with his legs folded and his back against the left-side bunk. Tonight his white-blond hair was pulled back at the nape of his neck with a leather thong. The effect made his tan elven face appear more triangular than usual. But he didn’t look at her at first.
On the floor before him was a candle. By the way its wick smoked, sending a thin trail curling into the air, it had just been snuffed. Osha finally looked up, as if he had been watching that candle, and he nodded to her.
“Yes,” he finally answered. “The young sage looked better tonight, so I left him on his own ... allowing some privacy for both of us.”
“Oh, of course,” Wynn said, backing out.
“Not privacy from you,” he added.
It was short, startling, direct, and so unlike the Osha she remembered.
Still uncertain, she stepped in, holding the door until Shade followed and flopped on the cabin floor near the right-side bunk.
“Sit,” Osha told her, gesturing to the other bunk across the room by Shade.
Wynn tensed slightly as she settled there facing Osha. This small cabin again reminded her of when she and he had sailed down the eastern coast of the far continent and away from his people’s lands. They’d often sat upon the floor to talk. It had seemed so normal then, unlike now.
For a silent moment, Osha stared at the trail of smoke from the candle’s wick. He suddenly thrust out one finger, appearing to split the trail in two and dissipate it. He sat there, hand still held out with his finger extended as the smoke finally thinned and was gone.
Wynn again saw the burn scars on his hand and wrists.
From where he left off in his tale, she might have made guesses about where those scars had come from—and she didn’t want to guess. She wanted the rest of his story, but she couldn’t quite find the way to ask.
“You wish to hear more,” he said bluntly.
He was not at all like the Osha that she had known, but that part of him was still in there somewhere—it had to be. She nodded.
A flash of something passed across Osha’s features. Had it been sadness, perhaps the thought that she was here only to learn his secrets? Then it was gone, as if he didn’t care what brought her to him.
“There I was,” he said, “standing before the portal of the Burning Ones....”
The white metal doors separated, swinging outward to grind across the cavern’s level stone. A wall of heated air rushed out to strike Osha’s face and body as the cavern’s temperature rose sharply under a stench like burnt coal.
He choked as hot air filled his lungs.
From the last and only time he had been here, he had known this was coming. He stood there, waiting for his body to adjust. After a few more breaths, drawing hot air was still painful but bearable, and he looked through the open doors, raising his torch high.
Beyond stretched a wide passage, and the deeper he looked, the darker it became. There were glistening points of light on its craggy walls, likely from minerals in the stone, for the heat was too much for any moisture. Slipping his blade back into the sheath up his sleeve, he still lingered. Should he strip off his cloak and leave it behind? No, that might be taken below as a sign of disrespect for the covenant between the Anmaglâhk and the Chein’âs. He should be fully and properly attired as a member of the caste.
With his free hand, Osha pushed the cloak over his shoulders to let it hang down his back. There was no more reason to delay, and he stepped through the open portal into the tunnel, working his way down the uneven passage until it narrowed suddenly at the top of a carved stone stairway.
A red-orange glow from below dimly illuminated the stairwell’s close walls. There was a small bracket in the wall, and Osha placed the torch inside it. Light from below increased slightly, as did the heat in the air, as he descended. He continued on, down and down, losing track of the passing time.
When it seemed the descent might never end, he stepped down onto a landing and looked through a rough, door-sized opening in the rock to his right. Out there, the orange-red light brightened, making the opening look like the mouth of a hearth in a dark room.