Fortunately that included very few men. Those who’d been out to watch the dragon fly had mostly gone below, and duty kept only a handful in the open.
But some of those were down, among them Grimsoar. He lay against the bulwarks, water boiling over him as the ship rolled, more wildly than ever. A ghastly red line scored his chest. Eskaia looked for a handhold, couldn’t find one, and risked stepping unsupported out onto the deck.
Two steps, and it was tilting under her. She fought for balance, lost the fight, and slid on her bottom down the tilting deck straight into Grimsoar’s ribcage.
His burst of curses was a beautiful sound that she could hear even above the gale. Then he pulled himself to his feet with one arm, tucked her under the other, and lumbered back to the aftercastle.
She was too squeezed to talk for a moment after he set her on her feet. Then the ship rolled again, so far that Eskaia heard curses turn to prayer. It seemed impossible that Golden Cup could ever come back.
But the ship did. In the fleeting moment when they could talk without holding on for dear life, Grimsoar explained his wound.
“Just a rope that caught me across the chest on the way overboard. A beautiful rope burn and maybe a rib or two the worse for it, but nothing serious.”
Eskaia struggled out of Grimsoar’s shirt and handed it to him. His look told her too late that she’d also struggled out of her gown. She was standing there in two sodden shifts. They not only revealed more than she really cared to display, they were letting her freeze to death even belowdecks.
“Thank you, Grimsoar. I can find my cabin now, and some dry clothes.”
If there was such a thing left aboard, and if it mattered whether you changed into dry clothes when chances were you would die in wet ones within hours. That thought came and went swiftly through Eskaia’s mind. In its place stood a determination to die as befitted a daughter of House Encuintras. Their code of honor was not as rigid as that of, say, the Knights of Solamnia, but it did rule out dying in your bed, feeling too sorry for yourself to help those even worse off.
* * * * *
Hipparan rode the north wind toward Crater Gulf. He rode it faster than any ship could have, faster perhaps than the wind of the storm. Pirvan found the wind in his face so savage that most of the time he kept his eyes shut.
Both humans struggled to stay awake. They both knew that this was the sleep that comes with being chilled, the sleep from which few awake.
As the hours passed, the sun crept past the zenith and began its slide down into the west. Also with the passing hours, the canyons and hills of gray cloud below began to show patches of sea.
By sunset, they were flying low over an ocean that seemed restless rather than stormy. Although they were flying steadily south, their lower altitude made it warmer. Now they could dare to sleep, and did.
Pirvan awoke some time in the night, with a dim memory of a dream that must have been frightening at the time. Haimya was still asleep, and Hipparan’s great wings had slowed to a steady, almost lethargic beat.
By moonlight the thief saw that they were back down to wave-top height, following the moon trail across the water. The air was almost warm, damp with more than the sea, and hinting of land scents. They were flying much more slowly, so that he could keep his eyes open now against what was hardly more than a stiff breeze.
“We’re not far from the Crater Gulf,” Hipparan said. “But we have a problem.”
“Why am I not surprised?” Pirvan said. A yawn made his words almost incoherent.
Hipparan cocked his crest to one side and rumbled with mordant laughter.
“Do you really want to know? Pardon, this is not a time for jests.”
If that wasn’t the first apology Hipparan had made, it was close to it. Pirvan listened open-mouthed as the dragon explained.
“They do have a black dragon in the gulf. He was reaching out to see if there were other dragons about, and reached me.”
“Did he learn where you were?”
Hipparan was silent for a moment. “I doubt it. But if I learned that he was evil, then he had to have learned that I was good.”
Pirvan took a moment to digest this news. Before he could reply, Hipparan shivered.
“I wonder what he will make of it,” the dragon said, in an oddly distant voice. “He must have thought he was alone, too, serving some purpose that he would die without knowing.”
“Wouldn’t-if there’s a mage there-?” Haimya put in.
If dragons could spit, Hipparan would have done so. “That for mages! Even the most lawful folk haven’t always told their dragons what they need to know. We all remember that, and I could tell that the black had been left ignorant.”
“I feel sorry for him,” Pirvan said.
The silence this time lasted so long that Pirvan wondered if he had offended by sympathy for the black dragon. Then Hipparan quivered, and for a moment the beat of his wings almost stopped. He lost enough altitude to make Pirvan nervous before he resumed steady flight.
When Hipparan finally spoke, one might have said of a human that he seemed about to weep.
“Then it’s not a wonder that you have done by me as you have. You-there is nothing and nobody you will use like a tool, then throw away. What that means to me-when one is where I am-”
The dragon was silent, and in the silence Pirvan tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. It did not take him long, once he’d come to think of Hipparan as a boy sent on a man’s quest, in a world he did not know, where he could not expect to find other dragons or even human friends.
But he had found them, humans who had freed him from captivity, healed him of wounds that might have led to his death, and told him the truth. Or at least as much of it as they knew, so he could decide for himself whether to help them learn the rest or not.
But there was no decision to make. All the while Hipparan had been muttering about the human debt to him, his debt to the humans had been growing. An honest dragon could not deny it.
Of course, a good dragon had to be honest. But this honest? Pirvan wondered if he had just learned something new about good, evil, and neutrality, and wished Tarothin were here.
“Very well,” Pirvan said. “I think we’ll land on the slopes of that mountain to the east of the Ewide River. Not the high one with the lake in its crater, but the lower one closer to the shore.
“We’ll just untie our bags and let you fly while we hide ourselves and unpack. If anyone does strike back, we’ll be hard to find and you’ll be well out to sea.”
“I thought I was the soldier,” Haimya muttered.
“So you are. But neither of us knows much about war on dragonback, so both of us can speak.”
“Quite right,” Hipparan said. “Haimya?”
She laughed. “It’s a good plan. I’m only worried about dragonfear. I’ve heard that evil dragons can use that. Do you know if the black can?”
“No, and I can’t learn without his learning as much or more about me. There are times when mutual ignorance is safest.”
This went against everything Pirvan had ever learned, and he suspected it raised his companion’s hackles as well. But under these-call them, peculiar-circumstances, it seemed the best course.
* * * * *
As if the storm had exhausted even its giant strength in dismasting Golden Cup, the wind began dropping soon afterward. Sailors risking their lives wielded axes and knives, cutting away the wreckage of the fallen masts before they pounded holes in the hull.
Other sailors managed to set a scrap of sail on the stump of the foremast. This brought the ship’s bow around enough to keep it from rolling wildly like a log, until it rolled herself under. It became possible to stand and even move about without the four limbs of an ape, and even do work without risking bone-breaking falls.