‘I see. Anything you can do about that?’
Arian had to hand it to the prince: his tone was one of amiable curiosity, unmarked by the slightest tremor of fear. He might have been discussing the merits of the wine from his father’s vineyards. ‘Caelon knows this ship better than his own wife,’ said Arian. ‘We’ll slip the trap for as long as we can, praying the wind drops or we spy ships of the fleet.’
‘And what, do you suppose, are the chances of that?’
‘I would not lay money on it.’
‘Then we are hoping for the miraculous.’
‘You could say that.’
Caradryel laughed. It was a light, unaffected sound, and it made several of the deck-hands turn from their labours. ‘I should not fret, captain,’ he said. ‘The miraculous has a way of following me. Always has. Should you wish to, you might give thanks to the gods for having me amongst your crew this day. In any event, try not to look so worried — it is not, as they say in Lothern, good form.’
Caradryel could only watch as the corsairs did exactly what Arian had predicted. They ran fast, dipping through the pitch of the waves before crashing up again with spiked prows. More details became visible — curved hulls glossy as lacquer, black pennants fluttering around bone-like mastheads, ranks of warriors in ebon armour, crowding at the railings, eager for the boarding to come.
Caradryel withdrew from the quarterdeck and walked unsteadily towards the prow. As he did so he scoured the western horizon. The sky was clear, the wind remained strong, the seas were empty.
Dying here will annoy my father, he thought to himself as he drew his sword from its scabbard. That, at least, is something.
His blade had not been well cared for and showed signs of rust along the edges. Caradryel had never been a warrior. He had never been much of anything, though that had never shaken his inner confidence. He had always assumed that his time would come and his path would open up before him like the petals of a flower.
‘Bolts!’ came a cry from the high-top, and spearmen on either side of him crouched down low. Caradryel followed suit, pressing himself to the deck. A second later the air whistled with crossbow quarrels, some of them thudding hard into the wood, some sailing clear.
Before Caradryel could react, the Ithaniel opened up with its own bolt throwers and the recoil shuddered down the spine of the ship. Spray crashed up over the prow, salty and death-cold. He pushed his head up from the deck and saw two black sails standing off, eating up the wind just as Arian had predicted. The other one had tacked in close, bursting through the heavy swell like a pick hammered through ice.
Another volley of bolts screamed across the deck at stomach-height, barely clearing the rails. Caradryel saw a spearman take a quarrel in the midriff, another catch one in the thigh. Several shots scythed through the sailcloth, slashing it open and cutting the ship’s speed. Archers mounted in the masts let fly in return. Caradryel couldn’t see the results of their shots, but he guessed they would be meagre.
He kept to his hands and knees and crawled towards the high prow. He heard the aft repeaters loose again, followed by the crack of wood splintering. For a moment he thought Arian had scored a hit, but then the Ithaniel bucked like an unbroken stallion and slewed round hard.
Caradryel was thrown over to the nearside railing, still ten paces short of the prow. He stared back down the length of the ship. Spearmen were running towards the quarterdeck. The lead corsair was now right on the Ithaniel’s stern and loosing grappling hooks.
Caradryel gripped his sword two-handed and wished he’d paid more attention to the expensive lessons he’d been given back in Faer-Lyen. For all that, fear still eluded him. He’d never found it easy to be afraid. The overriding emotion he felt was irritation, a nagging sense that something was wrong — that dying in the middle of the ocean on a nondescript errand-runner was not how he was meant to leave the world.
‘Repel boarders!’ came Arian’s powerful voice from the quarterdeck, followed by a commendable roar of determination from the spearmen around him. Caradryel watched them form a knot of resistance, their speartips glinting in the sunlight. ‘For Asuryan! For the Sacred Flame!’
Then, as the Ithaniel fell away and the corsair warship rose up on a rolling wave-front, he saw the foe revealed — ranks of druchii swordsmen, four-thick along the pitching railing of the enemy decking, poised to leap as the grapple-hooks pulled tight. Caradryel saw them jostling to get to the forefront — they outnumbered the asur by at least two to one, and that was before the other two ships drew alongside.
Caradryel started to stagger back the way he’d come, teetering along the tilting deck with sword in hand, certain he’d be no use but belatedly determined not to cower in the prow while fighting broke out at the other end of the ship.
Such a waste, he thought, gripping the blade inexpertly and thinking of the fine silks of his robe, the ancient towers of Faer-Lyen in the mountains, the future he’d planned out in the courts of Lothern, Caledor and Saphery. Such a stupid, terrible waste.
He made it less than ten paces before falling flat on his face, slammed down against the deck by sudden wind and movement. He tasted blood on his lips and heard an echoing rush in his ears. He cursed himself, angry that he’d already tripped over his own feet.
But then he lifted his head and saw the reason he’d fallen.
He had not tripped. Amid the sudden screams he had just enough wit to realise that his role in the combat had suddenly become entirely irrelevant, and that no one else — druchii or asur spearman — had any further part to play in what now unfolded. The battle had been snatched away from them, swatted aside contemptuously by power of such splendour that it made the world itself around him seem diminished into nothingness.
Caradryel hardly heard the sword fall from his fingers. He barely noticed that his jaw hung open stupidly and his eyes stared like a child’s.
It had all changed. In the face of that, and for the first time in his short, privileged life, Caradryel at last learned the heady rush of true, undiluted fear.
Arian didn’t see it coming. Caelon didn’t see it either, nor did the sharp-eyed archers in the masts. Very little escaped the eyes of the asur, so it must have moved fast — astonishingly fast, faster than thought.
The druchii were slow to react, but even when they did it was painfully inadequate. Whoops of relish changed into screams of terror just before it hit them, snapping the grapple lines and whipping the rigging into tatters. Arian saw some of them leap into the water rather than face it. He’d fought druchii before and knew they were no cowards, but he understood the panic. What could they do? What could they possibly do?
He barely held on to his wits himself. Part of him wanted to bury his head in his hands, cowering against the decking until it shot clear again.
‘Fall back!’ he shouted, somehow dragging the words out of his throat. ‘Man the sails and pull clear! Pull us clear!’
He didn’t know if anyone heeded him. He didn’t even turn to look. All he could do was watch, gazing out at it as if newborn to the world and ignorant of all its wonders.
As long-lived and mighty as the children of Ulthuan were, some powers in the world still had the heft and lineage to overawe them.
‘Dragon,’ he whispered, the word spilling reverently from his cracked lips. It might have been the name of a god. ‘Holy flame. A dragon.’
Caradryel pressed himself up against the railings, trembling and useless.
The wind itself had changed — it was as if the elements of air and fire had suddenly burst into violent union. The ships rocked crazily, thrown around like corks by the downdrafts from splayed wings.