Read The Quartered Sea Online

Authors: Tanya Huff

Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #General

The Quartered Sea (60 page)

BOOK: The Quartered Sea
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"I've never heard Bannon laugh like that before," Jurgis murmured. "Maybe this thing with Benedikt will work out."

 

Sprawled in a coil of rope, Evicka twisted around until she could see the two men by the rail. "Hope he realizes it's going to be a damp threesome.

 

 

 

When Bannon had stopped laughing and other questions had been answered without words, he looked back toward the vanished shore and said, "Do you think we'll ever see them again?"

 

Thinking he looked more like a Petrokian pirate now than he ever had, Benedikt glanced up from his reflection and asked, "What do you mean?"

 
"Well, they have ships and they know we're out here, somewhere. What if they come looking?"
 
"They won't find us. I learned a new song while I was away."
 
Unsure of the connection, Bannon frowned. "Just one?"
 

Benedikt waited until the Song of Sorquizic faded back into memory. "Just one that counts." one quarter—no one could deny that the young bard Benedikt was the most powerful Singer of water in the entire; kingdom of Shkoder. But water was the only Quarter he could Sing. And without the ability to Sing air, he was isolated from his fellow bards in a way few among them could even begin to understand. So when Queen Jelena asked for a bard to volunteer for a dangerous mission—to take ship aboard the newly built
Starfarer
and search beyond the known lands on a quest to find the homeland of the legendary Dark Sailor, Benedikt immediately volunteered. After all, he had more to prove than any other bard, and with Bardic Captain Kovar adamantly against the queen's proposed expedition, Benedikt was the only one rebellious enough to go.

 

The trip went smoothly enough until
Starfarer
was deep into uncharted waters. It was then that disaster struck, leaving Benedikt stranded with no way to get a message back to Shkoder, no way to let anyone know what had happened, no way to tell anyone that he was still alive.

 

Washed up on the shores of a distant land, Benedikt was soon claimed by his rescuers as a pawn in their intricate and perilous game of politics and religion. Could this One Quarter bard find a Song that would let him survive without disturbing the precarious power balance of a civilization he barely understood?

 
BOOK: The Quartered Sea
13.66Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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