The Assassin's Curse (21 page)

  "I understand," Naji said. He'd kept his mask on but his words came out clear and even.

  The captain nodded like this was good enough and pulled the cell door open wider. The crewmen kept their pistols trained on Naji as he strolled up to the ladder. Naji glanced at me when he walked past but didn't say nothing. The captain stopped, though.

  "What're you doing down here?" he asked.

  "Checking up on my friend."

  The captain chuckled. "Ain't gonna hurt him, little girl. Not unless he pulls a knife on me."

  "He won't." I shifted my weight from foot to foot. "Sides, and with all due respect, sir, I was more worried about Ataño striking out revenge."

  The captain roared at that. Even his cannon-men kind of looked at each other and laughed. I frowned at them.

  "Ataño ain't gonna cause no more trouble," the captain said. "Can't believe I put a man in the brig for scaring some discipline into that boy." He laughed again and all three of them climbed up out of the brig.

  Things got back to normal after that. I kept on working for Marjani, taking down measurements and tracking our course toward Qilar. Naji went back to spending all his time in the crew's quarters, scribbling over the sail scraps left over from my mathematics lessons. I went down there once or twice to keep him company, but he didn't much talk to me, just muttered over his work.

  "What're you writing?" I frowned. "It ain't magic, is it?"

  "Don't be ridiculous. When I said I wanted off this ship I didn't mean I wanted to be thrown into the open sea." Naji handed me one of the sail scraps. It was a story – an old desertlands story about a little boy who gets lost in the desert and has to strike a deal with the scorpions to make it back home.

  "Why're you writing this?"

  "I need something to do." Naji leaned back in his hammock.

  "Nobody writes down stories."

  "They do when they're trapped at sea and bored senseless." Naji hunched over his sail scrap and wrote a little swirl of something. "I hear from Marjani you're plotting part of our course each day."

  "Getting us to Port Idai as fast as possible." Not that I liked the idea of leaving the Revenge. Any boat crazy enough to take us to the Isles wasn't one I'd want to work on.

  Naji stopped writing and looked up at me, all dark hair and dark mask and the little golden strip between them. "I appreciate that." He looked down at his sail scrap. "Although I can't say I'm much looking forward to our second journey north."

  "Me, neither."

  Naji picked up his quill and began writing again.

  "You think it'll work?" I asked him.

  "Will what work?"

  "Do you think we'll find a cure?"

  Naji's hand twitched, but he kept writing, and he didn't look at me. "I don't know."

  That was not the answer I wanted to hear. I left him to his stories and stomped back up to deck, where Marjani was waiting for me with the logbook and a quill, and things fell back into their routine, ocean and wind and salt and sails.

  It felt like the beginning of the end.

 

A week later, the weather turned.

  I was helping with the rigging, cause the wind had been strong all afternoon, blowing in from the south, hot and dry and tasting like dust and spice. It had everybody in a mood, especially the more superstitious fellows in the lot, and so there were a lot of charms getting tossed around, and certain words getting uttered. And everybody was drinking up the rum, superstitious or not. I'll admit that my hands kept going to my throat that day, rubbing at Naji's charm.

  The wind picked up, and it howled through the sails, flattening 'em out and then billowing 'em up. Water sprayed out from the sea, huge glittering drops of it. Not a cloud in the sky, though, the sun hot and bright overhead.

  Crewmen were crawling all over the rigging, and Marjani was up at the helm, throwing her whole body into keeping the ship steady. A big green wave splashed over the railing and slammed into me, and I fell across the deck, hitting up against old Chari's worn-out boot. He hardly offered me a glance as he pulled at the rigging, shouting curses and prayers alike. I scrambled to my feet and grabbed hold of the rope to help him out. The whole thing felt like a typhoon if not for the sun and the weird spice scent on the wind. Maybe it was that noble from the Mists, drawing the worlds together like Naji had said…

  For a half-second, I caught a whiff of medicine, sharp and mean, like spider mint, and I shot back to Lisirra, to the entrance of the night market. The rope slipped out of my hands.

  "The hell's your head, girl!" shouted Chari. "Hold on tight if you don't want to get knocked overboard."

  The smell of Naji's magic disappeared. He can't, I thought, scrambling to pick up the rope. It has to be the Mists. He can't be doing this. It'd put me in danger–

  And then another wave crashed over the side, and I managed to hold on tight, and all thoughts of Naji's magic washed away with it. I had a ship to keep afloat.

  By then somebody was ringing the warning bell, the clang clang clang that meant an attack or a storm or just plain ol' trouble. Seawater showered over us like rain, the salt stinging my eyes and the sores in my hands. Chari turned around and grabbed my wrist and shoved me over to the foremast. "Get up there!" he shouted, jabbing his hand toward the rigging. Water streamed over my face, blurring my vision, but then I saw it: The storm sail had come loose.

  "Shit!" I scrambled up the rope, slipping and crawling, my clothes plastered to my skin. The wind threatened to knock me off the rope but I dug my nails into the fibers, clinging with every bit of my strength. The sail flapped back and forth, snapping like a whip, though at least it was dry up here, away from the fury of the waves. I reached out and made a grab for it. Missed. Righted myself. Took a deep breath. Watched the sail and waited for it to snap back toward me. This time I caught the edge and yanked on it one-handed even though the wind had other ideas. My arms shook. My eyes watered. I screamed, trying to gather up the will to do this without dying.

  And then I had it. That split-second between wind gusts and I had it. I tied the sail back into place, looping the rope with aching fingers.

  The boat jerked, tilted, and I fell, grabbing at one of the riggings before I crashed down on deck. I cried out but the wind swallowed my voice right up and no one down below even noticed me.

  I kicked out my feet, swinging up like a monkey. The wind kept on howling. I started crawling back down, my arms hating every second of it. Every part of my body ached.

  And then I heard this low creaking groan, and I knew they were shifting the boat so we could run with the wind to safety. Under normal circumstances it ain't nothing I can't handle but with the wind and the hurt in my body it was too much. The movement knocked me loose. I managed to hang on with one hand, swinging out over the deck. What with the seawater and the sunlight, everything down there was covered in rainbows.

  Then I lost my grip, and I fell.

 

I woke up and all I knew was the hurt. Pain vibrated through my body, all the way out to the tips of my fingers and toes. My head throbbed. But I was laid out on something soft, a pile of rope and old sails, and I guess that was why my brains hadn't spilt out all over the deck of the Ayel's Revenge.

  She was moving, at least, soft and smooth, and there wasn't any wind or water splashing over the railing. No voices, neither, only the purring ocean, the occasional snap as the sails rippled overhead. I pushed myself up on my elbows, and when that wasn't the bone-breaking trauma I expected I forced myself to sit up halfway, my back aching, my head lolling.

  The air was cold.

  That bothered me. Ain't no reason for us to be anywhere near coldness, not at this time of year, and not where we were sailing. Don't care how bad that storm knocked us off course.

  Not a storm, I thought, remembering the sunlight, the scent of spider mint, but I shoved the thought out of my head.

  I took another few moments to pull myself up to standing, and then took even longer to recover from it, standing in place and swaying a little. Then I shuffled forward, limping from a twinging pain in my left thigh.

  We were someplace else. I knew that soon as I came out from the under the shadow of the rigging. The sky was the color of a sword's blade, and the water lapping up at the sides of the boat was dark gray, nearly black, and everything smelled like metal and salt. We were north, up close to the ice-islands, maybe. I'd only been there a few times in my life but I remembered the smell of the air, that overwhelming scent of cold.

  A handful of crewmen were bunched up at the port bow of the ship, all huddled together, not talking. Chari was there, and Marjani, her arms wrapped tight around her chest. I limped toward them.

  "Hey!" My voice came out strangled, raspy. Nobody turned around. "Hey, what's going–"

  I stopped. We were in sight of land. Way far off in the distance was a line of green, that vivid darkalmost-black green you only get in the north.

  And below the line of green was a line of black beach and below that, a strip of gray. The sky. A gap between the island and the sea.

  And like that, all the pain in my body got replaced with the icy grip of dread, and I remembered how I'd smelled medicine back during the storm, before I–

  Marjani glanced over at me, her eyes widening. "Ananna!" she said. "Oh, Aje, I thought you'd been thrown overboard! I–" She stopped, covered her mouth with her hand. "You look like hell."

  I tried to choke out some kind of nicety, something about falling into the rope, something, anything to make her think I had nothing to do with us being within swimming distance of those horrible islands.

  Instead, I turned away from her and hobbled over to the ladder that'd take me down below.

  "Ananna? What're you… Stop, it's flooded–"

  "Stay there," I said, cause what else could I do? She didn't listen, of course, and came chasing after me, grabbing hold of my arm. Pain shot up through my elbow.

  "Let me go! I need to…" Do what? I didn't want to put it into words.

  "Need to what?"

  "Naji." It was all I could bring myself to choke out. I jerked away from her and half-slid, half-climbed down the ladder. Down below the floor was covered in a half-foot of dirty water, rum bottles floating by like they might hold some kind of message for me, and scraps of clothing and pieces of dried fish. I splashed through the water, the chill setting my whole body to shaking. Marjani had stopped at the ladder.

  "Ananna, come back!" she said. "It's too cold. You'll get hypothermia…"

  I didn't have the faintest idea what that was, and I didn't care, neither. I pushed my way into the crew's quarters.

  The first thing that hit me was that horrible medicine smell, stronger than anything that ever soaked its way into the air of the crew's quarters before. My eyes watered and my throat burned and my skin prickled from all the leftover magic. The ship walls down here were all blood-red, transformed by magic.

  And there was Naji, slumped across a hammock, blood trailing down his arms, his skin white as death. Bits of sail floated in the water around him like flower petals, leaving streaks of red in their wake.

  He lifted his head when I came in, just enough that I knew he wasn't dead.

  I splashed forward and picked up one of the scraps of cloth. His writing was all over it, the ink a brownish-red color, not black like Marjani's ink. It wasn't a story. I stared at it for a long time, not making any sense of those symbols, knowing full well it was a spell. I balled the cloth up in my fist and dropped it at my side. Naji moaned, dropped his head back. My anger swelled up inside me like a wave.

  "You son of a whore," I said. "You filthy, mutinous, lying sack of shit–"

  Naji tried to say something, but his words came out all slurred, and for a second I wondered how bad it had hurt him when I fell out of the rigging, if his body shattered like it was made out of glass. I hoped so. And then my anger was this flash of white light, hot and searing, and I waded up to him, pulled my arm back, and punched him square in the face.

  "Ananna! What are you doing?"

  Marjani crashed into the room. I hit Naji again, open-handed this time, and he tried to squirm away from me, shoving his hands between us to block me. I grabbed his wrist, dried blood flaking off on my fingers, and yanked him up off the hammock and punched him again. He slammed up against the wall.

  And then Marjani had her arms around my waist.

  "Stop it," she said. "Stop." She pulled me away from him, dragging me through the water. I strained against her, arms flailing, but it wasn't no use.

  "Calm down," she said, over and over. "Ananna, this isn't the time. Calm do–"

  She froze in place, staring at the walls, and I wriggled out of her arms and turned to look at her. Over on his hammock, Naji moaned my name.

  "Shut up," I told him. My heart pounded up against my ribs and it didn't have nothing to do with the fight.

  "The air," Marjani said. "It's all wrong…" Then she picked up one of the sail scraps and stared at it good and hard. I stood there with my chest heaving, waiting for her to get angry, as angry as I was. But she only seemed sad.

  She looked up at Naji. "You shouldn't have done this."

  "You don't understand," Naji said. "The curse–"

  "Shut up!" I screamed at him. "You're going to get us killed." I turned to Marjani. "We were always headed for Port Idai, like I said. I never thought he'd do something like this."

  "Neither did I," Marjani said. She splashed over to me. "I know about the curse," she said, her voice soft. "He told me."