At long last, a shining wet head popped out of the water near the still waterwheel. A slim hand touched the paddles and eased noiselessly up the side to the gunwale. A sleek, shapely body slid out of the water and climbed easily onto the deck. Trailing wet footprints, the girl walked to the bow and back along both sides of the cabin. Her delicate nostrils flared at the powerful odors of ghagglers, burned wood, and stressed metal. Finding no one on deck, she opened the cabin door and peered inside. The little room was a mess of spilled tools, scattered charts and maps, tumbled wood, and broken crockery and bottles. The girl tiptoed into the room, her face woebegone.
“Is anyone here?” she asked, not really expecting an answer. The ghagglers never left potential meals behind if they could help it. She pivoted around to leave when a tiny rustle caught her ear, just the faintest sound of something brushing against wood. On silent feet she crept to the wood box near the engine and peeped over the edge.
A white-haired gnome took one look at her, screeched in terror, and tried to burrow deeper into the tumbled stack of fuel.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
Notwen peeped through his fingers up at the aquamarine face and the sea-green eyes of the sirine. He was so relieved to see a familiar, unthreatening face-female or not-he hugged a length of wood to his chest and gave her a small smile.
“Come on,” she offered him a hand. “Come out of there and tell me what happened. Where is Ulin?”
Notwen’s smile evaporated. He ignored her proffered hand and pressed back against the wall. “Sea-sligs.” He could barely get the words out. “Ghagglers attacked Dead Pirate’s Cove this morning,” he said full of misery.
She shuddered. “I was there after they left. It was horrible.”
Notwen could barely nod. “They saw us coming out of the marsh and chased us. Ulin told me to stay out of sight. That’s all I know. I haven’t seen him or Kethril since then.” Unshed tears glinted in the corners of his eyes.
The sirine’s hand went to her mouth, and her clear eyes grew huge. “Kethril Torkay? You found him? He was on this boat? Those sea-sligs took him?” In a whirl of silver-green hair, she twisted toward the door and bolted out before Notwen could answer any of her frantic questions.
“Wait!” he cried. “Don’t leave me!” But his words were lost in the sound of a splash as the sirine dived into the water. Dismayed and still badly frightened, Notwen stayed huddled in the box.
If this was death, Ulin decided he did not want any part of it. He never imagined death could be so cold and painful. First was his head. From the pain that thundered behind his eyes, his skull must have been split wide open. Beneath his head, his entire body felt weightless, yet it ached and shook with a strange ague, and his skin felt as if he were being stabbed by hundreds of tiny knives. His mind reeled from the unreality of it. He thought his eyes could be open, but he saw no light, only an intense darkness so thick that there were no shadows or definition of anything.
What happened to the bright light, the blissful release, the cessation of pain he’d always heard was the transition to death? Had it all been a nasty lie?
He vaguely remembered the net falling over his body and the terror he felt when he was dragged under the water. He could not remember coming back to the surface. Therefore, he should be dead. But this death felt like a dismal nightmare.
“Hey, you. What did you say your name was?”
The voice, hoarse and strained, came out of the darkness to his right. It sounded vaguely familiar, and he tried to search his memory for a face to fit the voice. The effort of thinking cleared a little of the fog from his mind and allowed the reality of his current predicament to seep into his awareness. He wished it hadn’t. There was something to be said for semi-consciousness. A name floated into his thoughts. “Kethril,” he whispered.
“Ah, no. I think that’s my name. At least it was when they stuffed us in this pleasant little hole.”
Ulin tried to put his feet on something and discovered he couldn’t. Panic welled up in a choking wash of confusion and fear. He thrashed wildly only to find that his body from the neck down was submerged in salt water. His hands and arms were bound behind his back, holding him nearly immobile, and what felt like a heavy metal collar was clamped about his neck to keep his head in a rigid upright position above the water level. The collar was attached to a heavy chain that must have been fastened to the low ceiling.
“Easy, easy,” said the voice close by. “Be still and let yourself wake up. You took quite a nasty blow to the head on a rock when they were dragging us in here.”
There was something reassuring and sensible about the voice in the darkness. Ulin clung to Kethril’s words and forced his fear back until he could calm his wild struggles and slow his frantic breathing. He spit some salt water out of his mouth. “My name is Ulin,” he said at last.
Kethril chuckled, a hollow sound that echoed in the space around them. “That’s better. Short, useful, and yours.”
“Where are we?” Ulin wanted to know.
“An underground cave not far from the cove. I don’t know how the ghagglers brought us here without drowning us, but I sure wish they had.”
Ulin tried to sort that out through the pounding pain in his head. “Why?”
The man hanging beside him paused for a moment then said, “Because the ghagglers usually kill their victims right away for food. The only ones they bring to their lair are those they plan to torture for fun or use in their games.”
Ulin did not like the sound of that. “Oh.” He could think of nothing more to say, so he hung in the water and concentrated on the pain in his head. He wished he had some of his sister’s mystic abilities. Linsha had been trained by the Mystics of the Heart to use the power of mysticism to heal her own minor aches and wounds. In fact, he wished she was there now with a joke on her lips and a key to this collar around his neck. With her talents, she could’ve eased his headache and gotten them out.
“Back at the gaming boat,” Kethril said out of the echoing blackness. “What did you mean when you said you were my future-son-in-law?”
“Ah, you remember that? Your daughter Lucy and I are betrothed.”
“When are you getting married?”
Considering his position at that moment, Ulin wasn’t sure there was an answer to that question. “We, uh, haven’t set a date,” he said honestly.
“Why not?” the father of the bride demanded. “Didn’t you come all the way from Solace together? Why didn’t you marry her first?”
Ulin had to admit to himself the thought had not occurred to him. He wondered belatedly if it had occurred to Lucy. He did not think he appreciated the tone of this line of questions, so he tried one of his own. “How did you know we came from Solace?”
“News about the new sheriff spread quickly. I didn’t know who it was though.”
“Would it have made a difference if you had?” Ulin asked irritably.
There was a long silence before Kethril replied. “I don’t know.”
“Aren’t you the least bit interested, a little curious about your own daughter? She’s quite a woman, you know.” Thinking about Lucy helped take his mind off his own misery, so he continued to talk to Kethril. He told him about meeting Lucy at the Academy of Sorcery and their years together as friends. There in the cold wet dark with the band of metal digging into his jaw, he described the arrival of the magistrate and the letter and their long trip to Flotsam, and last of all he told Lucy’s father how she became the Sheriff of Flotsam.
After a while his spate of words trickled to an end, and he closed his eyes and let his mind drift. When Kethril did not respond, Ulin decided the man probably had passed out from boredom. He knew he’d talked too much, and sentimentality hardly seemed a trait Kethril Torkay would possess. Lucy’s father couldn’t have been interested after so many years separated from his family.