She begged him to go, humiliated by the endless roiling of her stomach, but Kjell held her as she quietly suffered, and searched his mind for a story to tell.
“I watched the whales today . . . so many of them . . . there were little ones and enormous ones . . . a family—families. It is like they haven’t seen ships in a very long time, and they are curious.” He spoke to distract her, to comfort her, and by doing so, comfort himself.
“Is the water just as blue?” she asked. The darkness made everything grey.
“The bluest I’ve ever seen.”
“The color of the sea is the only thing—besides being ill—that I really remember from the journey to Dendar and back again to Kilmorda. I remember the color of the sea . . . and I remember dreaming of you.” She grew quiet again, pensive, and Kjell knew she worried over him and her inability to keep him from Dendar.
“Can you drink a little more?” he pressed. He thought the air was helping. Her cramping had eased and she hadn’t thrown up for nigh on an hour. She sipped from his carafe and he blotted her chin, noting the easing of her fever and the growing confidence with which she drank.
“I thought you were angry with me,” she whispered.
“I am,” he admitted.
“But you are kind,” she whispered.
“I’m not kind.”
“And you are good,” she said, repeating the lines they’d exchanged once before.
“I am not good.” He felt like weeping. He was not good. He was not generous. He was not courageous or compassionate. He simply loved her. And love made him a better man. That was all.
“I have never met anyone like you.”
“You were a slave in Quondoon,” he whispered, and stopped. He couldn’t continue the banter or repeat the things he’d once said to her. The journey then was about discovery. The journey now was about delivery. He would deliver her to Dendar, to a king, another man, and he would go.
“I was a slave in Quondoon and a queen in Dendar,” she said, altering the original conversation. “I have changed. And yet . . . you are still Kjell of Jeru, and you have not changed toward me.”
“I made a promise.”
“To whom?”
“To you. I told you at the base of a cliff near Solemn, that if you came back I would try to love you.”
“You told me you lied,” she whispered, grief whisking away her words.
“It was not a lie, it was a promise. I intend to keep it, even when you make me angry. Even when you convince my men to act like idiots. Even though you are not . . . mine.”
She moaned, and he tried to help her stand, thinking her stomach was rebelling once more, but she buried her face and he realized it was not sickness but sadness, and he relaxed back against the rails.
“Sleep, Sasha.”
After a while she succumbed, becoming limp in his arms, lost in relief, and he listened to the waves caress the hull and whispered all the things he hadn’t told her and now wouldn’t ever tell her.
“It was not your face I fell in love with. It was not your great, sad eyes or your soft mouth, or the gold flecks on your skin or the shape of your body.” His heart quaked and his stomach tightened, acknowledging that he relished those things too. “I fell in love with you in pieces. Layer by layer, day by day, inch by inch.
“I love the part of you that shows compassion even though no compassion has been extended. I love the part of you that held my hand and helped me heal. I love the part of you that reassures others when you are afraid. The part that mourned for Maximus of Jeru and the boy who loved him. I love the pieces of the woman who was lost but never misplaced her dignity, who couldn’t remember, but never really forgot. Who was a slave but behaved like a queen.”
When dawn came, Kjell rigged the lowest sail to cast a shadow over Sasha, worried about her getting too warm but afraid to send her back below deck. She had slept deeply for three hours without vomiting, and Kjell began to relax, reassured that the worst had past.
When she woke she was thirsty and pale, but her fever had broken and her stomach was calm. He helped her to her quarters, hopeful that she could spend the next two days before reaching Dendar recovering her strength. But she returned two hours later, dressed in a new gown with her hair neatly braided around her head, creating a thick crown worthy of her title. She looked lovely, but she didn’t look well, and in addition to her fresh clothing, she wore the haunted expression and sunken eyes of things better left unseen.
“Tie everything down, send everyone below, and close the distance with the other ship,” she said, raising her voice to include Lortimer and his crew. They stared at her blankly. Just like the night of the rock slide and the sky before the sandstorm, the water was so peaceful it made her demands ridiculous, even comical.
“What do you see, Majesty?” Kjell asked, and her eyes found his, acknowledging his use of her title.
“I see the ships being tossed and men in the water—men drowning,” she answered firmly. “I don’t know why.”
Captain Lortimer wanted to drop his cargo in Dendar and be done with the lot of them. He was being well paid and the journey had gone without incident despite his fear of Padrig, who treated him with haughty ambivalence. Lortimer could afford to “appease the whims of a royal,” and he shrugged at Sasha’s insistence and allowed Kjell to order his crew about. The sailors followed Kjell’s instructions with suspicious industry, muttering among themselves, but they were dismissive of a mere woman telling sailors what to do. The King’s Guard and the travelers from Jeru, having seen her abilities firsthand, were less inclined to ignore her warnings. The guard set about redistributing the supplies in the hold and securing the stores, and the rest of the voyagers retired to their rooms to pray for deliverance.
They lowered a longboat over the side and sent a messenger across to their sister vessel with a warning to be on the lookout for hurricanes and anything—everything—else. Sasha stood on the deck, her body rigid, her hands gripping the rail, thankfully steady on her feet, her sickness abated, her fear great. And they waited, on edge all day.
The sun was sinking, brushing a shimmer of pink paint across a darkening sea, when Pascal saw something about two hundred yards off the bow.
“Captain, just ahead.” The first mate handed Lortimer his spyglass and pointed at the brilliant horizon.
The emerging dome was so big it created the effect of a large rock rising from the sea before it vanished beneath the surface once more.
“It’s probably a whale,” Lortimer reassured, but he held the glass to his eye a little too long. Something undulated, and the odd projection rose and fell again.
“The whales don’t bother the ships. In these waters, whales are the least of our worries,” Lortimer added.
“Oh yes? And what do you worry most about?” Sasha asked, her eyes glued to the place where the unidentified creature had disappeared.