Myrrima shook her head. “Years,” she said at last. “You will have to wait for years—perhaps only three, but ten would not be too long to wait for someone you love.”
Draken took a deep breath and prepared himself to wait.
When Rain got up the next morning, she felt embarrassed. She could hardly look Myrrima in the eye.
So she went to work. She went into the hold where Aaath Ulber snored louder than an army, and milked the damned goats, then fed them some of the grass that she’d gathered the day before. Then she went topside to the galley and boiled some oats, spooned a bit of molasses over it, and served everyone breakfast—even daring to wake the giant.
She now felt determined to win Aaath Ulber’s respect. In the few days that he’d known her, she felt he’d hardly said a kind word to her.
So she handed him a giant’s portion of breakfast and waited for him to say thank you.
Aaath Ulber sat groggily on the side of the bed, scratched his chin, thought for a moment, and said, “Thank you, child.” He studied her a moment, as if assessing the glare in her eyes, the anger in her stance. “You know I’ll expect a lot from you. You’ll have battle practice each day, of course, but there is plenty of other work to do. There will be sails to be mended, decks to be swabbed. You can start by taking the bucket and emptying the water from the bilge each morning. In a few days the wood in the hull will swell up and seal tight, but until then you’ll have to keep ahead of the leaks.”
“Yes, sir,” Rain said.
She got the bucket, filled it, and spent the next two hours emptying the bilge. Then she practiced swordsmanship for an hour. When she was done, she opened a bale of linen undergarments that the men had salvaged earlier, unbundled them, and found that the seawater was ruining them. She could smell mold growing.
So she took all four bales of garments topside and boiled the undergarments, then strung them out to dry, so that for the next four days linens were strewn over every spar and tied to every rope that held every sail.
Thus there were underskirts flying like pennants from the crow’s nest, and breast bands in the rigging, and dainty night blouses that young newlywed women liked to wear to please their men all strewn across the deck.
She’d never really get them dry, she suspected at first. The salt spray thrown up from the whitecaps kept everything moist, but she discovered that when she climbed the rigging and got high enough, she was able to dry out the clothes.
Thus she was able to salvage hundreds of garments which she imagined were worth a small fortune, but got hardly a word of thanks from Aaath Ulber.
Any free time that she had, Aaath Ulber put her to work in battle practice, and so she discovered that she was trying to stay out of the giant’s way, trying to avoid his baleful gaze.
She realized that she couldn’t visit Draken at night anymore, couldn’t try to find time alone. Aaath Ulber and Myrrima wouldn’t approve.
Draken steered them through the night and was up well after dawn, and Rain had to be content to serve him breakfast, earn a smile and a thank-you.
Soon, Rain’s muscles ached constantly from the toil of battle practice and from scrubbing the decks; she wished that Fallion would unbind the worlds, undo the damage that he’d done.
The sun rose bright and clear each day, and the skies were hardly marred by clouds. The winds drove them mercilessly toward Mystarria.
In the far north of Landesfallen, the company stopped once again to obtain firewood, get more forage for the goats, and refresh their water supply.
They set sail to the west.
Over the days, Rain’s relationship with the giant did not improve. There was a wall between them, a wall so high and thick that she could hardly see over it, see Aaath Ulber for what he was. She kept expecting him to blow up, lash out at her in a senseless fit of rage.
A week out on the voyage, Rain was on her hands and knees, swabbing the deck, when Aaath Ulber bumbled past, stepping on her hand.
She let out a scream of pain, for the giant weighed well over three hundred pounds, and she heard fingers crunch as he plodded on them.
She lifted her hand instantly, found that it was swelling and bleeding. She worried that he’d broken her fingers, for pain was lancing up her arm.
She pulled her hand away, sat up, put it under her armpit and squeezed.
“Sorry,” Aaath Ulber said.
“Sorry for what?” she demanded.
His brow scrunched. “Sorry for crushing your hand.”
She knew that she’d never get an apology for the rest of his faults, but she had to ask. “You didn’t have to kill my father. You left those men in Fossil alive. Why couldn’t you have left him alive?”
Aaath Ulber shook his head. “Oh, child, I didn’t think of it in time,” he admitted. “He pushed me too hard, too fast, and then the world went red. I— don’t know how to ease your pain. . . .”
The giant choked up, then hung his head. “The man is dead. He was a fool to fight me.”
That’s when Rain saw the truth of it. Aaath Ulber was afraid to apologize. His emotions were too strong, too close to the surface.
The words he had just spoken were the closest thing that she’d ever get to an apology.
“I thought you hated me,” Rain said.
“If I hated you,” Aaath Ulber said, “I wouldn’t be working you so hard. I wouldn’t be so eager to keep you alive. I . . . don’t know you well, but my son loves you, and that counts for something.”
Rain broke into tears of relief to know that he did not hate her, tears of frustration that he had hurt her so—then rushed to her room to bandage herself.
Draken called at the door later, but Rain did not open it. She decided that she would comport herself with complete decorum from now on. She would not seek Draken out, or go to him at night. Instead, she would avoid him.
That night, the first autumn storm blew in, a hurricane. The sky became dark, the clouds the sickly green of a bruise. Then the winds and hail struck, and lightning lashed the heavens.
The men were forced to stow the sails while the storm blew the ship backward, far from its course.
The ocean swelled, and enormous waves rose up, threatening to smash the vessel. They slammed over the railings, and drenched the decks.
Thus, the hard times began in earnest.
Yet it was not the wind or the weather or the storms that bothered Myrrima most—it was the loss of her family.
From the time of his change, Myrrima had not slept with her husband; they were growing further apart by the hour. Aaath Ulber spent his days at the rudder, eyes cast toward Mystarria and his wife there.
The children, too, seemed lost. The whole family was torn apart. Sage had lost her sister along with all of her friends. She cried in her sleep at night, haunted by the memories of rushing water.
Meanwhile Draken barely spoke to anyone, and had become so morose that he spent every free hour huddling in the hold. When he wasn’t asleep, he was feigning it, Myrrima felt certain. He too pined for his sister and for his friends. But most of all he longed for Rain.
Perhaps, Myrrima wondered from time to time, we should have left them both back in Landesfallen.
But Draken would not have been happy there, either. He would not have fit in among the Walkins. He was bright enough to recognize that.
But most of all, the children seemed to miss their father.
In the first few days of the ship’s voyage, Myrrima still saw traces of her husband in the giant—in the way that he held his head, or the way that his blue eyes sparkled when he smiled.
But over the weeks, Aaath Ulber asserted control. He began to show a gruffness that she’d never seen in Sir Borenson. He quit smiling, quit his jokes.
After three weeks Sir Borenson was all but gone. Aaath Ulber became a driven creature, and desperate.
14
Rumors of a Hero