“Brace yourselves!” Nathan shouted.
Nicci tried to manipulate the wind, the waves, but the ship was an ungainly, doomed hulk. The sea had an implacable grip. The winds were ugly and capricious.
With a terrible grinding roar the ship drove up on the reefs. Dark rocks broke the keel and gouged open the lower hull. The deck boards splintered and scattered apart. The mizzenmast toppled into the water.
As the night thickened through flickers of lightning, Nicci thought she saw the dark silhouette of a distant coastline. Impossible and unreachable, the land provided only the mocking hope of safety. But only for a moment.
Angry seawater rushed aboard as the great ship broke apart and sank.
CHAPTER 18
Having wrought sufficient havoc, the storm dissipated and fled. The scattered clouds moved on like camp followers after a victorious army. Waves rolled and washed up on the rock-studded sand.
Nicci awoke to the shrieks of gulls fighting over some prized piece of carrion. Her entire body felt battered. Her muscles and bones ached from within, and her stomach still roiled, mostly from seawater she had swallowed in her struggle to swim ashore in the wind-blasted night. She brushed gritty sand from her face and bent over to retch repeatedly, but produced no more than a thimbleful of sour-tasting bile. She rolled onto her back and looked up into the searing sky, trying to get her bearings in her spinning mind and memories.
She heard the waves rumbling and booming as they crashed against the shore, slamming into the headlands, but here on the long crescent of a sandy beach, she seemed safe. She propped herself up on an elbow to reassess her situation, one step at a time. First, her own body. She felt no broken bones, only some bruises and abrasions from being thrown overboard and hurled by waves onto the shore.
Nicci inhaled again, exhaled, forced a calm on the queasiness inside her. Her heart was beating, her blood pumping. Air filled her lungs. She was restored now and could once again touch the tapestry of magic that was a familiar part of her entire life. She had been so weak after the wishpearl divers poisoned her, and Nicci did not like to feel weak.
The flood of memories crashed in like a riptide—the storm, the selka attack, the shipwreck.…
She climbed to her feet and stood swaying, but steadied herself. She was alive, and she was alone.
The gulls shrieked and cawed, challenging one another. A flurry of black-and-white wings settled around several corpses washed up on the shore, broken sailors from the Wavewalker. Birds fought over the bodies, pecking at the flesh, squabbling over choice morsels, although there was feast enough to gorge a hundred gulls. One seized a loose eyeball and plucked it out, held it by the optic nerve, and flew away while four other birds stormed after it with accusing screams.
At first Nicci thought one of the bodies might be Bannon’s, but she saw that the dead man had long blond hair. Just one of the sailors she did not know. Since these dead men were beyond her help or her interest, she turned to scan down the strand for any survivors.
The beach was strewn with wreckage deposited by the storm: splintered hull planks, smashed kegs, a spar that had been strangled by ropes and tattered sailcloth. Larger barrels lay tossed along the sand, some halfway buried by the outgoing tide, like dice tossed by giants in a capricious game of chance.
She waited motionless, like a statue, just trying to regain her mental balance. So much for their quest to find Kol Adair. She was cast on this desolate shore, with no idea where she was. She had never believed the witch woman had any secret knowledge. Nicci stood there bedraggled and bruised, lost, and she did not feel ready to save the world in any fashion, not for Richard Rahl, not for herself.
Even with the crashing waves, the whistling wind, and the shrieking gulls, Nicci felt overcome by oppressive silence. She was alone.
Then a voice called to her. “Sorceress! Nicci!”
She spun to see Bannon Farmer coming toward her. He looked waterlogged, his ginger hair clumpy and tangled, his face bruised. His left cheek had been smashed and discolored, and a long cut ran across his forehead, but his grin overshadowed those details. He bounded around a large curved section of broken hull that had piled up against a rock outcropping.
“Sweet Sea Mother! I didn’t think I’d find anyone else alive.” His homespun shirt was drying in the hot sun, leaving a sparkle of crusted salt on the fabric. “I woke up with sand in my mouth and no one around. I’d been caught in some tide pools about fifty feet from shore. I called out, but no one answered.” The young man lifted his arm to display his lackluster sword. “I somehow kept my grip on Sturdy, though.”
Nicci ran her eyes over his body, checking to make sure he hadn’t been wounded more severely than he realized. On the battlefield, she had often witnessed how shock and fear could deceive a man about how hurt he really was. Bannon seemed intact and resilient.
She asked, “Have you found Nathan?”
A look of alarm crossed his face. “No, you’re the first person I’ve seen.” He squared his shoulders. “But I just started looking. I’m sure Nathan’s alive, though. He is a great wizard, after all.”
Nicci frowned, knowing that Nathan had been unable to use magic during the selka attack. With concern for the old wizard, she made her way down the beach, shaking off any lingering aches and dizziness. “Where did you search? Have you gone this way?”
“I came from back there.” Bannon pointed. “That’s where I washed up. But most of the Wavewalker wreckage is scattered down here. Maybe the currents brought Nathan in this direction.”
The sunlight was so bright on the sand that it hurt Nicci’s eyes. She squinted, shaded her brow so she could look down the coastline, which curved out into an elbow of headlands that drew fierce waves like a magnet. Whitecaps battered the rocks, and the explosive boom could be heard even a mile away. If Nathan’s body had been thrown into that cauldron, he would have been smashed into a pulp.
With surprising energy Bannon ranged ahead, calling the wizard’s name. Nicci half expected that they would find his smashed corpse sprawled on the sand under another busy cluster of seagulls.
Halfway to the loudest crashing waves, they saw yards of sailcloth draped like a burial shroud on the beach, amid the remnants of splintered crates. Bannon spotted a tumbled pile of barrels, rope, and more wadded canvas. Nicci caught up with the young man just as he lifted a ragged swatch of sailcloth and cried out, “Here he is!”