The deck was alive with action now. Soldiers erupted from the various hatches of the ship. They came on-helmeted and armored, behind shields-steady in their progress. The raider’s archers loosed the last of their arrows, and then they all dashed toward the rear of the ship. At the railing, Spratling turned to the others. “Remember to clench your ass muscles, unless you want water to flush your insides from the bottom up.” He said this casually, but his gaze settled on Wren. “Are you sure you can do this?”
Wren pushed past him and mounted the railing. “Worry about yourself,” she said. A moment later she jumped. Her long hair rose above her as she vanished, each tendril reaching for the sky as she fell. Spratling hoped like hell that she survived, for something about the parting image shot him through with carnal desire.
He made sure the pilot was shoved overboard, and then he threw his leg over the railing. As he fell, piercing through layer after layer of air, he sensed the concussions within the ship beside him and knew that their pill had erupted deep within it. It contained a concoction they had paid a good deal for, an explosive in liquid form. The explosion going off inside the bowels of the warship would not destroy it. He knew that. Even if it ignited some of the pitch they used so viciously there was little hope of sinking the thing. But it would leave them with quite a bellyache. He smiled thinking about it. Then he clenched for impact.
CHAPTER
That first night Mena only listened. She allowed the man who called himself Melio, and who claimed to know her and her family, into the inner courtyard of her compound. She had never done such a thing before with any man. It was an act forbidden the priestess of Maeben, one that the day before would have seemed impossible. But in this one’s company unthought-of things happened. They sat together on the hard-packed earthen floor. Unnerved by a male presence, her servants lingered in the shadows, ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. Mena just stared at the young man; he, seemingly encouraged by her silence, let flow a rambling discourse.
He spoke Acacian, and so Mena knew her servants would not understand a word. What amazed her was that she did. She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.
He had been a soldier of Acacia, a young Marah faced with the first mass attack upon the empire in many, many generations. The things he witnessed in the war were too horrible to speak of in any but the most general terms. He had lost everything a man can lose except his life. He had seen most of the people he cared about killed or enslaved, or watched them betray their nation for a new master. He had held Acacian superiority as a given, and it still amazed him that Hanish Mein dismantled his nation’s military might so completely.
He had been wounded in one of the small skirmishes after Alecian Fields. While in pathetic retreat, the fever caught up with him. When he woke from it, the world around him had changed completely. He had been so defeated, he said, that if the will to die was sufficient to cause death, he would not be before her now. He would even have taken his own life, except that such an action was all but impossible for a soldier trained as he was. He joined the resistance in Aushenia for a time, using the work to try to win himself an honorable death. He failed at this too.
He was eventually saved from orchestrating his own death by the power of rumor. One drunken night a Teh mercenary informed him that the Akaran children had been spirited to safety. The bearer of this news could name no credible source to verify his claim, but he laid out a simple logic. Only Corinn had been captured, yes? The fact that Hanish put her on display only highlighted the absence of the others. He would have done the same with the others if he’d caught them, wouldn’t he? On the other hand, could anyone prove that they’d been killed? Had bodies or heads been produced? Had anything been displayed to the public to confirm the Akarans’ fate one way or another? The answers were obvious, and with them new possibilities dawned. The simplest of them-the one that Melio hitched himself to-was that if the Akaran line was not extinguished it could be returned to power again.
He decided to stay alive as best he could, to wait out the passing of time in the hopes that there might be some truth to the tales. For the last three years he worked for the floating merchants. His route followed the seasonal currents that circulated the Inner Sea. He had thrice ventured as far out as the Vumu Archipelago, with whom the merchants traded. He never stayed long and had never beheld the priestess of Maeben before. How fortunate it was that he had found her. She was alive! So there was reason to believe that Dariel was alive also. And surely Aliver lived and even now was planning to regain the throne. The rumors were true, and Melio thanked the Giver that he had not died before discovering this for himself.
She sent him away as dawn approached, promising nothing, admitting nothing, betraying no sign of the effect he had on her. She lay on her cot as the day came on, hot and bright as always. Her mind was surprisingly empty. She knew it should be raging with fears and doubts, memories stirred, questions raised. But she simply could not grasp onto any one thought long enough to face its import. She lay until she slept, woke when her servant warned her of the late afternoon hour, rose, and did her duties as priestess.
She returned in the early evening to find that the Acacian waited for her on the path again. Once more she let him into her compound and sat down to hear him speak. When she sent him away hours later she had still not promised anything. She admitted nothing, betrayed no sign that she thought anything of the tales he told. She slept hard through the morning, woke to the heat of noon, and stared at the ceiling above her, listening to the rustle of lizards hunting insects in the thatch. Melio had an unremarkable face, she decided. Unremarkable, and yet for some reason she very much wanted to see it again.
The next evening he awaited her at the gate to her compound. He rose from squatting as she approached, called her “Princess,” and stepped inside when she nodded that he could do so. Once they were seated across from each other, in the same arrangement as the previous evenings, the young man resumed his discourse. Amazing, really, that after two nights of talking he still found things to say. He’d heard that the prince’s agents were afoot in the land, he said, working covertly to bring divergent sectors of the resistance together. There had even been a revolt in the Kidnaban mines, led by a prophet who swore he had dreamed of Aliver’s return. Soon Aliver would summon his siblings to unite their armies, he said. Many were anxious to believe him.
Mena heard and filed away the things he told her. She also spent some time confirming that his face was, in fact, unexceptional, studying him feature by feature to be sure. Hair long and unkempt, often falling over his eyes so that he had to flick it away, brown eyes of no particular note, teeth too prominent when he smiled, cheeks that look cherubic, but only viewed from certain angles: average in every way. Not unattractive but not particularly noble or strong or suggestive of great wisdom. So there it was, confirmed. It seemed strange that she had wondered about his appearance at all.