Loth turned his head and took their captor in. She was about twenty, perhaps a touch younger, leanly built. Short black hair framed a tanned and windburned face.
“Who are you?” Loth called to her. His throat scorched with thirst. “Why have you taken this ship?”
She ignored him.
“I hope you realize that you have committed an act of piracy, mistress,” Loth bit out. “Turn back at once, or I shall take this as a declaration of war on Queen Sabran of Inys.”
Nothing.
Whoever this silent vagabond was, she had the other jewel. Fate had brought it into his path.
A hand-length case, painted with flowers, hung from a sash at her hip. That must be where she kept it.
Loth dozed for a time. Thirst and exhaustion pulled at him, and one side of his head was pounding. Sometime in the night, he blinked awake and found a gourd at his lips. He drank without question.
Thim, too, was now alert. The woman let him drink and spoke to him in a foreign tongue.
“Thim,” Loth muttered, “do you understand her?”
The other man was blear-eyed. “Yes, my lord. She’s Seiikinese,” he said slowly. “She asks how you know about the jewel.”
She stayed crouched in front of them, watching their faces. In the glow of the lantern she had brought with her, Loth could make out the scar on her cheek. “Tell her I know where its twin is,” he said. He looked the woman in the eye as Thim translated, and she replied.
“She says that if that is true,” Thim said, “you will be able to tell her what color it is.”
“White.”
When Thim conveyed the words to her, she leaned toward Loth and took hold of his throat.
“Where?” she asked.
So she did speak a little Inysh. Her voice was as cold as her cast-iron expression.
“Inys,” he said.
Her mouth pinched shut. A fine-cut mouth that looked as if it seldom smiled.
“You must give the jewel to me,” Loth beseeched her. “I have to take it to Queen Sabran, to reunite it with its twin. Together, they can be used to destroy the Nameless One. He will rise again soon, in a matter of weeks. He will come from the Abyss.”
Frowning, Thim passed his words to the woman in Seiikinese. Her face hardened before she stood and left them.
“Wait,” Loth called after her, frustrated. “For the love of the Saint, did you not hear what I said?”
“We should not provoke her, Lord Arteloth,” Thim warned. “The rest of the crew could be stranded on Feather Island for weeks, if not months, without a ship. We are now the only ones who can take word of Queen Sabran’s proposal to His Imperial Majesty.”
He was right. Their plan was at the mercy of this pirate. Loth sank into his bindings.
Thim tipped back his head and squinted. It took a moment for Loth to realize that he was reading the stars.
“Impossible,” Thim murmured. “We cannot have got this far east in so little time.”
Loth watched the woman. One of her hands was on the wheel. The other now held a dark stone. For the first time, he became aware of the unbroken roar of water against the ship.
She was using the jewel to drive the Rose forward.
“My lord,” Thim said under his breath, “I think I know where we are going.”
“Tell me.”
“We heard a rumor at sea that the Golden Empress—leader of the Fleet of the Tiger Eye—was sailing east in pursuit of the elixir of life. Her butcher-ship, the Pursuit, left Kawontay not long ago. They were bound for the Unending Sea.”
“What is the Fleet of the Tiger Eye?”
“The largest pirate fleet in existence. They steal and slaughter dragons when they can.” Thim glanced at the woman. “If she is chasing the Golden Empress—and I cannot think why else we would be this far east—then we are both dead men.”
Loth eyed her. “She seems a very good fighter.”
“One fighter cannot best hundreds of pirates, and not even the Rose stands a chance against the Pursuit. It is a fortress on the sea.” Thim swallowed. “We might be able to take the ship back.”
“How?”
“Well, when she leaves it, my lord. A man-of-war needs a vast crew, but … I suppose we have no choice but to try.”
They lapsed into silence for a while. All Loth could hear was the crash of the waves.
“Seeing as we have nothing better to do but wait, perhaps we could play a game.” He offered the gunner a tired smile. “Are you good at riddles, Thim?”
The stars burned like a host of candles. Tané kept her gaze on them as she steered the Inysh ship, using the west wind as well as the jewel to spur it.
The Inysh lord and the Lacustrine gunner were finally asleep. For quarter of an hour, the former had been straining to solve the easiest of riddles, making Tané grind her teeth in irritation.
I close in the morning, I open at night,
And when I am open, your eye I delight.
I am pale as the moon and live only as long –
For when the sun rises, behold, I am gone.
At least now he had stopped blathering about how clever it was, and she could think. If she timed this right, she would be under the eye of the Magpie tonight.
Using the jewel had left a fine sheen of cold sweat on her. She breathed slow and deep. Though it never drained her strength for long, she sensed that the jewel was drawing on something in her. She was the string, and the jewel was the bow, and only together could they make the ocean sing.
“Loth.”
Startled, Tané glanced across the deck. The Inysh man was awake once more.
“Loth,” he repeated, and tapped his own chest.
Tané looked back at the stars.
In the South House, she had learned some of every language in the known world. She knew Inysh well enough, but she preferred that the strangers thought otherwise, lulling them into the false belief that they could speak freely.
“May I ask your name?” the Inysh man said.
Great Kwiriki, wash away this fool. Still, he knew about the waning jewel—that was reason enough to keep him alive.
“Tané,” she finally said.
“Tané.”
He said it gently. She stared him out.
Though he could be no more than thirty, and though he looked presently as if a smile had never been further from his face, there were already laugh lines around his full lips. His skin was the same deep brown as his eyes, which were large and full of warmth. His nose was broad, his jaw strong and unshaven, and his black hair puffed in small, tight curls.
She had the sense that he was kind.
Straight away, she shook off the thought. He hailed from a land that spat on her gods.
“If you cut me loose,” Loth said, “perhaps I can help you. You’ll have to stop in a day or two. To sleep.”
“You misjudge how long I can last without sleep.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You do speak Inysh.”
“Enough.”
The Westerner looked as if he might speak again, but seemed to think better of it. He leaned against the gunner and closed his eyes.
She would have to question him sooner or later. If he knew where the other jewel was, then it had to be returned to dragonkind—but first, she needed to reach Nayimathun.
When Loth finally dozed off, Tané took stock of the stars and turned the wheel. The jewel was like ice in her hand. If she continued like this, she would soon be in Komoridu.
She drank a little from her gourd and blinked the dryness from her eyes.
All she had to do was stay awake.
The Unending Sea was an exquisite sapphire blue that turned almost to violet when the sun set. There were no birds in the sky, and emptiness as far as the eye could see.
It was this emptiness that concerned Niclays. The fabled isle of Komoridu had yet to show itself.
He gulped from his flask of rose wine. The pirates had been generous tonight. Their leader had made it clear to them that if they found the riches of the world, they would owe it to the Master of Recipes.
And if they failed to find anything, all of them would know who was to blame.
Death had never held much power over him. He thought of it as he did an old friend that would one day knock again on his door.
For years, he had sought to make the elixir of immortality in the spirit of discovery. He had never meant to drink it. Death, after all, would either end the pain of grief or reunite him with Jannart in whichever afterlife proved to be the right one. Each day, each step, each tick of the clock took him closer to that golden possibility. He was tired of having half a soul.
Yet now death loomed, he did fear it. His hands shook as he gulped more wine. It occurred to him briefly that he ought to stop drinking, to keep his wits about him, but even sober, he would never be able to fight off a pirate. Best he was benumbed.
The ship kept cleaving through the water. Night painted darkness overhead. Soon enough, he was out of wine. He dropped the flask into the sea and watched it bob away.
“Niclays.”
Laya was hurrying up the stairs, clutching her shawl around herself. She took him by the arm.
“They’ve seen something ahead,” she said, eyes bright with dread or excitement. “The lookouts.”
“What sort of something?”
“Land.”
Niclays stared in disbelief. Breathless, he followed her to the prow of the ship, where the Golden Empress stood with Padar.
“You are in luck, Roos,” the former said.