She lingered, seeing his reluctance to look at her, the stiffness of his shoulders. “Why did you stay?” she asked. “I know you wanted no part of this.”
“Despite my misgivings I can’t deny the wisdom in your words. If we don’t finish them, they’ll come again. Better one long war than a dozen short ones, bleeding the Isles white with every generation called to fight them. Besides, I made a commitment, as you may recall.”
She remembered that night after the Teeth, his offer of another life and the promise made beneath the stars. “If it’s any comfort,” she told him, “we would never have sailed the western ocean together. Regardless of any other . . . developments.”
He didn’t turn but she saw his shoulders slump a little. “No,” he replied, his tone sombre rather than bitter. “That day at Alltor, the way you looked at Al Sorna . . . And I thought there was nothing else he could take from me. And your face. The face of a stranger.”
“I had hoped you might see the face of a friend.”
She heard him utter a faint laugh above the wind. “Is that what you imagine the future holds for us? Friendship? When this war is won you think I’ll still command your fleet? Stay at your side for all the long years of your reign? Your faithful former pirate? Your muzzled dog?” He glanced over his shoulder at her, rain coursing down his face, all vestige of his smile gone. “I let you put me in a cage, Lyrna. Don’t ask me to live in it forever.”
Lyrna turned as Murel tugged insistently on her arm, gesturing at the door to her cabin where Iltis stood, drenched from head to toe and wearing an expression of pointed impatience.
“I strongly suggest you take shelter, Highness,” the Shield said, hauling on the tiller anew as another wave lifted the prow towards the sky. “Storms have no respect for rank.”
? ? ?
As he had predicted the weather calmed over the succeeding days, allowing Lady Alornis an opportunity to demonstrate her new device. “Brother Harlick was kind enough to provide a few inspiring examples from history,” she said, fitting a large set of bellows onto a copper tube protruding from the contraption’s underside. The engine had been placed on the Queen Lyrna’s port bow and was even odder in appearance than the ballista; a brass-and-iron tube some twelve feet long, bulbous at one end tapering to a narrow spout. A large barrel sat atop it halfway along its length and it rested on an identical base to the ballista, meaning even someone of Alornis’s diminutive proportions had little difficulty adjusting its angle. Furelah stood at the thing’s narrow end, fixing what appeared to be an elongated oil lamp to the spout. From the way she stood, working with arms fully extended and eyes continually straying to the barrel fixed to the device, Lyrna divined her Lady Artificer’s latest novelty harboured considerable potential.
“There were no images to work from,” Alornis went on, running a cloth over some kind of circular lever on the contraption’s bulbous end. “But an Alpiran text from some six hundred years ago did provide a fulsome description of the machinery. The greatest difficulty was in establishing the correct mix for the fuel.”
“This is an Alpiran device?” Lyrna asked her.
“Indeed, Highness. Used in a sea battle during one of their civil wars. It seems the emperor of the day witnessed its first use and promptly outlawed it, fearing the gods might judge him needlessly cruel. They called it Rhevena’s Lance.”
Rhevena, Lyrna knew, was a principal goddess in the Alpiran pantheon, guardian of the dark paths that must be traversed by every soul upon death. But Rhevena was a kindly goddess and lit the paths with fire so that no good souls lost their way. However, the fire was a living thing, possessed of wisdom and insight, and would flare to engulf an unworthy soul. Lyrna’s heart began to beat faster as she noted the way Furelah completed her task and moved back from the engine with ill-concealed haste, the lamp she had fitted to the spout now lit with a bright yellow flame.
“Lamp oil is too thin,” Alornis continued, working a spigot on the side of the barrel, “and burns away too quickly. So I was obliged to use base oil. Even then it required thickening with pine resin.” She stood back, giving her invention a final look of appraisal before turning to Iltis and Benten. “My lords, the bellows if you would.”