Bannon grasped the shoulders of Nathan’s ruffled shirt. The old man lay facedown, draped over a broken barrel. His long white hair hung in tangles around his face. When she saw him there unmoving, Nicci’s immediate impression was that he was dead, drowned and cast aside.
Bannon rolled him off the barrel and laid the man flat on his back on the sand. Nathan’s skin was a pale gray; his eyelids didn’t even flicker. Bannon bent over him, listened for a breath, touched the older man’s cheeks, peeled open his eyes. With an urgent, determined look, he rolled the wizard over, wrapped his forearms around Nathan’s waist from behind, and put his fists right up against the abdomen. He pulled hard with a short, sharp jerk, forcing Nathan to convulse. Bannon clenched his arms again with enough power that Nicci thought he might snap the wizard’s spine. Instead, a fountain of seawater spewed from Nathan’s mouth. He convulsed again and then coughed.
His hands feebly swatted at Bannon, but the young man showed surprising strength. He laid him on his back in the sand again and began pumping his long legs, pushing Nathan’s knees up against his chest as hard as he could. Nathan coughed and expelled more water from the side of his mouth before finally gaining enough strength to push Bannon away.
“Enough, my boy! I’ve survived as much as I’m going to.” He looked miserable and shook his head, then ran his fingers through his hair.
Nicci looked curiously at the young man. “He was drowned. Where did you learn that?”
“On Chiriya we knew how to rescue drowned fishermen. Often it doesn’t work, but if there is still a spark of life and we can get the water out of his lungs, the Sea Mother sometimes lets a man breathe again.”
“I’m not just a man,” Nathan said in a rattling voice. “I’m a wizard.” He bent over and vomited copious amounts of seawater.
“Clearly the Sea Mother showed you mercy,” Nicci said.
As he sat up, still wobbly, Nathan put a hand to his right temple, where a long deep gash in his forehead still bled. “I’m pleased to find myself alive again. A good way to start the day.” He touched the gash again and winced. He closed his eyes, obviously concentrating, and his expression fell. When he looked up at Nicci, his face was forlorn. “Alas, the gift still eludes me. Might I humbly request that you heal me, Sorceress? Remove at least one inconvenience.” He gave her a sudden worried look. “Or is your power gone as well? You were having difficulty during the battle—”
“I am fine,” she said. “Those were aftereffects of the wishpearl divers’ poison. Fortunately, I am recovering better than those men are.”
Bannon turned to her with a strange expression. “The divers poisoned you?” He wiped sand out of his reddened eye.
Nicci gauged his expression carefully. “Yes, in the pot of chowder you delivered.” She could tell by the look on his face that he hadn’t known, which gave her a sense of relief. “That was why I felt so weak I could barely fight the selka. I was racked by poison.”
His expression turned to dismay. “In the food I brought? I poisoned you? I didn’t know! I didn’t mean to! Sweet Sea Mother, I am so sorry, I—”
In a similar circumstance, Nicci knew that Jagang would have murdered the young man, slowly and painfully, for such an error. There were times when Death’s Mistress would have killed him as well, but she was different now. Richard had changed her. Seeing Bannon’s abject misery, his open honesty, she was reminded again of why she had not suspected the meal he’d brought.
Nodding slowly to herself, she said, “That is why they used you, Bannon Farmer. I would never think you capable of treachery or of trying to harm me in any way.”
“I’m not! I would never poison you.”
“You see, your very innocence was a weapon that others turned against me. They duped you.” She hardened her voice. “Don’t let it happen again.” As he stammered and offered far too many apologies, Nicci flexed her fingers, felt the magic, felt strong again. “It no longer matters. I have recovered.” She laid her hand on Nathan’s temple and easily summoned what she needed to knit the torn flesh of his wound.
He let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you. It was not dire, but it was an annoyance.”
She turned to Bannon, looked at his battered form. “And now you.”
The young man took a step away, uneasy about her magic, or maybe not convinced that she had actually forgiven him. “There’s no need, Sorceress. They are but minor injuries. I will recover by myself in time.” He touched the slash on his thigh.
But Nicci, needing to reassure herself that she had full control over her powers again, reached out to grasp his arm. “I insist.” She let the power flow, and his bruises vanished, his cuts healed. The flicker of fear vanished from his face. “That’s wonderful! I feel like I could fight the selka all over again.” He gripped his sword.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to do that, my boy,” said Nathan.
Nicci brushed sand off her black dress and tied her hair back out of her eyes. “I want you both intact. We have work to do.” She looked up and down the coast. “We need to learn where we are.”
CHAPTER 19
After he accepted his disheveled appearance, Nathan insisted on searching the wreckage to locate his sword, as well as any other items they might find useful for their survival. After all the misfortunes they had suffered, he had little hope of retrieving his precious weapon, but by a stroke of good luck he did find his ornate blade. The sword was wedged between a splintered wine cask and a crate that had held brightly dyed fabrics for market, which were now waterlogged and ruined.
The wizard pulled the blade free and raised it into the sunlight with a sigh of satisfaction. “That’s much better!” He winked at Bannon. “Now you and I, my boy, can defend our sorceress against any attackers.”
“The gulls and crabs are surely trembling in fear.” Nicci rolled her eyes and got down to serious business. “Before we set off, we should salvage any supplies we can find. There’s no telling how far we are from civilization, or how long it will take us to get back to the D’Haran Empire.” Even after their ordeals, she continued to think of what she needed to do for Richard and his vision for the future.
Along with several other mangled corpses of Wavewalker sailors, they found an intact keg of drinking water, from which they drank their fill, then a crate of salted meat. Nathan was discouraged to have lost all the new shirts, vests, and cloaks he had purchased in Tanimura, but he did discover a sailor’s trunk that contained a fresh shirt that fit Bannon, a tortoiseshell comb, and a packet of waterlogged letters, the ink now running and smeared. The few decipherable words indicated they were notes from a lost sweetheart who would now never get a response from her beloved.