WindBeliever (3 page)

“To us, Your Grace, you are what you have always been. We would not dishonor you by calling you anything else but that which you are.”

“Even if I don’t like it?” Conar had inquired, one tawny brow lifted in challenge.

The Captain had grinned. “Even if you don’t like it, Your Grace.”

Now, leaning against the teak railing as the clipper sped ever faster toward the Sinisters, Conar looked out over the side of the ship and stared down into the rushing waters below.

For over an hour the ship had been doggedly pursued by a school of porpoises and he was watching them frolicking in the waves, arcing their silver-green bodies high. Now and again, their squeaky voices called out to him and he smiled.

“You like sea?”

Conar turned his head to look at Yuri. The Outer Kingdom warrior who had labeled himself Conar’s personal bodyguard, was slightly less green around the gills than he had been the day before, but his face was still strained, his lips pursed against the tug of nausea. Obviously the man didn’t like the sea as much as his four companions did for those men were forever climbing the rigging to relieve their boredom. For the most part, Yuri had kept to his cabin, a basin close at hand.

“But you don’t, my friend,” Conar answered. He reached out a hand to gently touch the warrior’s cheek. “Why don’t you stay below, Yuri. You don’t need to keep me company. I’m use to keeping my own self occupied.” He removed his hand.

The gentle, friendly touch had made Yuri’s heart ache and he had to jerk his head away before this man saw just how much it had affected him. “I hate sea,” he grumbled. “I, soldier.”

His frown deepened. “Not squid!”

A soft, sad chuckle escaped Conar’s tightly pressed together lips and he turned his head away from Yuri’s scowling profile. “I feel as though the sea has always been a part of me,” he tried to explain. “And me, a part of it.”

Yuri swallowed, trying to calm his seasickness. “There is old saying in my country, ‘The man who love sea, is loved by sea, and she always protect him’. Sea love you.”

There was a slight dimming in Conar’s eyes, but he blinked, shoving it away. “I feel at peace out here.”

“I feel ....” Yuri searched for the correct Serenian word. He swallowed hard with strained effort and then turned a sickly green color. “Sick!!” he gasped, slamming his hand over his mouth. He turned abruptly and ran away, his retching sounds concealed behind the constriction of his fingers.

“Stay in your cabin!” Conar yelled after him. “I’ll send the healer!”

“Won’t do good,” one of Yuri’s fellow warriors remarked from his place in the rigging.

Conar glanced up. “Why not, Petr?”

The man shrugged. “He no good at sea. Sea make him this way, every time. Potion no good for him. Make him sicker.”

“Like Teal,” Conar mumbled, nodding. What he wouldn’t give for some of Liza’s lavender WINDBELIEVER

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brew for Yuri, he thought. He knew that would have lessened the symptoms if not eradicated them.

“Your

Grace?”

Gritting his teeth at the title, Conar turned, saw the Captain advancing on him with a cheerful smile. He tried to answer the greeting, but his jaw was still clenched.

Serge Nickolayevich Kutusov rolled easily with the pitch of the deck. His straight-backed, shoulders-squared walk was very imposing as he came to stand beside Conar. His smile was filled with adventure.

“It just came to me how you might pass this journey and not become bored,” he said, rubbing his hands together, his Chalean almost perfect. “How would you like to learn Koussev?”

Conar’s brows drew together. “Kou ....?”

“Koussev!” Serge exclaimed. “It is our mother language.” He waved his hand from side to side, fanning the air. “There are many dialects, but only one root. Koussev is the High Speech used by the royal house.” He puffed out his wide chest, straining the fabric of his uniform coat.

“I, myself, speak twelve languages.” His face sagged just a bit. “As of yet, I have not mastered Serenian enough to feel competent to converse with you in your own tongue, but since you are fluent in Chalean, yourself, I can teach you enough of our mother tongue for you to be able to converse quiet properly with our Tzar and Tzarina.”

The idea intrigued Conar and he nodded. It was always best to be able to speak with a stranger in his own language rather than stumble through half-phrases and incorrect words that might prove embarrassing.

“If you’re willing to teach me, I’m willing to learn,” he answered. “I speak eight languages, myself.”

“Excellent!” Serge proclaimed. “Then you should have no problem assimilating Koussev. It is not a difficult language, at all.”

“When would you like to start?”

“Now?” Serge asked, eager to relieve his own boredom.

Conar swept his hand out. “Lead the way.”

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Passing the Sinisters in the daylight hours was one thing.

Passing the rock-strewn waters under the skipping ride of a pale crescent moon was another.

The fog was thicker than Conar had remembered from his year on the island where his daughter Nadia had been conceived and born. He had glanced at the black hump of the island as they sailed past, but he refused to name it or give it thought, for the painful jog of his memories had filled him with a despair so great he thought he would drown in it. Jasmine Cay had been the beginning of his worst nightmare.

“We call this place Cay Mist,” Serge had told him. “What do your people call it?”

“I don’t remember,” Conar had mumbled. He kept his attention on the banks of phosphorescence as the milky vapor loomed at them from out of the dark. The memories hurt.

Serge had sensed the reticence in his passenger and had ended the conversation, moving slightly away from the man whose jaw was clenched and whose hands were tight on the railing as he refused to look toward the distant island.

There was stillness to the air, a preternatural quiet that set Conar’s teeth on edge and made the hair along his neck and arms tingle. There was also a smell, one he could not quite identify, that wafted to him on the damp breeze that ruffled his thick mane of golden hair. When the clipper entered the first wisps of the ghostly fog, he tensed, his dark sapphire eyes narrowing with dread, his body going rigid as though it expected to be hit by some unseen hand coming at him from the depths of the vapor.

As the fog closed around the ship, sealing them inside its phantom arms, he found his heart thudding in his chest and sweat breaking out on his brow. There was a slight tremor in his fingers as he reached up to plow them through his damp, shoulder-length hair. The chill of the night and the mist of the salt water had turned the silken mane to a sticky mass. He grimaced, running his hands down his cold breeches leg to rid his fingers of the feel.

“This mess is as thick as pea soup,” he commented.

“On the average, it will take us two hours to cut through the fog,” Serge said quietly. “It’s slow going, but these waters are treacherous at best.”

Beneath the copper hull of the clipper, Conar could hear the faint scrape of something as the ship slipped through the night. He prayed with all his heart there were no reefs to gouge a hole in the hull for to be stranded in this murky, iridescent mist would have been a hell unto itself. His nerves were already tense enough as it was without thinking of the sea creatures, both real and imagined, which lurked beneath the smoky surface of the black waters. To have heard the shattering wrench of tearing wood and plating would have sent him into a screaming fit.

“There is nothing to worry about, Your Grace,” Sergei said. “I have navigated these waters many, many times without mishap.”

“It only takes one accident to sink a ship,” Conar grumbled.

Without warning, something loomed at him from out of the fog and he gasped, pulling back from the railing as a black mass of shimmering rock passed close enough to the leeward rail for him to have reached out and touched it. He jerked, looking fearfully to Serge, and saw a fleeting smile of reassurance on the craggy, handsome features.

“Sometimes the passageway gets a bit cramped,” Serge explained, “but we are in no danger of scraping those cliffs, Your Grace. Relax! Enjoy the quiet.”

“Relax?” Conar groused under his breath. “How the hell can I relax when we’re that close to the damned rocks?”

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“Try,” Serge told him.

He clenched his fists, digging his nails into his palms and cautiously turned back to the rail.

More jagged, deadly-looking rocks, cliffs as Serge had called them, jutted up from the water and glistened in the shimmer of ghostly fog. They looked as sinister as their name.

“Sweet, Merciful Alel,” Conar breathed. There was less than an inch at times between the rock and the side of the ship.

“Have no worry, Your Grace,” Serge said in a quiet, reassuring voice. “Our pilot is a skilled navigator. He has made journeys through tighter places than this.”

Conar thought, at best, that was a damned exaggeration and at worse, a boldfaced lie, but he didn’t say so. At that moment, he didn’t think he could have said much of anything intelligible.

For what seemed to him to be an eternity, the ship glided slowly and cautiously through the fog-shrouded waters. The stillness, not a sailor speaking, not even a single clank of metal or wood as the men moved about to do their assigned tasks. The ship creaked, of course, as all ships creak, and the water rushed gently and quietly beneath the keel, split apart in a quiet hiss as the bow slipped through it, but other than those natural nautical sounds, there was utter silence on board the Anya Katrine.

“Not much longer,” the captain said quietly, but even as quiet as it had been, Conar jumped, his body quivering as a tingle of surprise flowed down it. He didn’t look at Serge, his attention was glued to the lethal rocks slowly slipping past him, now further away, thank the gods, from the ship.

He began to relax.

And that had been a mistake.

From out of the fog came a sound that made the breath stop in Conar’s throat and his hair stand on end. It was a bellow of sorts--hissing in, rushing out, washing over him with a terror that set him to trembling violently.

He was a brave man, braver than most, but his nerves were already stretched thin and this shriek in the fog-laden waters, this unknown growl of whatever creature had issued it, brought Conar McGregor’s eyes wide in his pale face. He had to bite his lower lip to keep from crying out in alarm as the bellow came again--sharp hiss, rush of bellowing, prolonged and nerve-shattering echo.

And then came the deep clang of some unseen bell far off to the starboard--once, twice, three times. It stretched Conar’s bravery as fine as a gossamer thread. He could feel his knees clicking together through the fabric of his cords and when the bellow sounded again, closer still, he jerked his head toward Serge.

“What the hell is it?” he shouted, feeling himself ready to be pitched headlong into madness by the sound.

Serge’s face creased with surprise. “A fog horn, Your Grace.”

Even though he felt as though he were being chastised, the other sailors looking at him with both mild reproach and curiosity, he couldn’t stop the stutter of fear that made him ask just what the hell was a foghorn. If the sea creature wasn’t dangerous, he wanted to know.

“Will it attack the ship?”

Understanding lit Serge’s face and he looked about him, said something to his men in his native tongue. There were smiles, shakes of the head, and a few chuckles as the men realized Conar had no idea what it was he was hearing.

“I forget sometimes that you Outlanders are not as advanced as we are,” Serge said in a tone too close to condescension to be dismissed. “It is simply a warning device, Your Grace. A horn WINDBELIEVER

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which blows to warn us to be on the watch. The lighthouse at the Isle of Winds is close by. You should be able to see the light in just a moment or two.”

Feeling like a fool, and not liking the feeling one bit, Conar looked back into the darkness.

He strained his vision to be able to pick out the lighthouse glow, but he could see nothing through the fog. There were lighthouses all along the Serenian coast. He was accustomed to seeing those tall, cylindrical towers jutting from craggy spars of land at the water’s edge, but the fog horn was an entirely different matter. Perhaps if he could see the thing, he wouldn’t be as concerned about it as he was. But when the hiss and bellow and echo of the thing called the fog horn came once more, it didn’t unnerve him quite as much as before. However, the deep clang of the distant bell made him grind his teeth.

“I don’t like that sound,” he mumbled to no one in particular.

“It won’t be long now before we are in Outer Kingdom waters, Your Grace,” Serge called.

“You’ll be able to see the coastline of our homeland when the fog begins to lift.”

Conar nodded, still miffed. He scanned the fog, still couldn’t catch sight of the elusive fog light sweeping across the waters toward them. Somehow that made his anxiety even more pronounced.

“Our people are eagerly awaiting you, Your Grace,” Serge told him, trying to take his passenger’s mind from the clang of the bell off to their left. He came to stand beside Conar at the railing, leaning his arms on the polished teak. “You’ll be able to meet our people, see our beautiful lands. We have as much diversity in our geography as does Serenia. There are tall, snow-capped mountains, deserts, ocean-side villages, farm lands. The royal family will wish to show you the historical ruins of our country, have you sit with them at court.”

Conar moaned beneath his breath. Those were the last things he wanted to do. He moaned again, just contemplating what was being planned for him.

Serge didn’t hear. “The Tzarevitch, the royal Prince Mikel, will want you to accompany him to the musicales, the ballets. He loves to dance, does our Prince.”