Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One (38 page)

He slipped off
before Kael could question him further, pretending to correct the way Jonathan
mopped the deck. Thelred gave him one last smirk before he followed.

He figured the
truth was somewhere between the two stories, but only one person knew for sure:
and he’d decided that now was the perfect time to take a nap. Perhaps Kyleigh
might have known something, if only he could get her attention. There were
several times that he waved to her as she passed, but she never looked up. It
was almost as if she was trying to avoid him.

He blamed
Lysander. He probably let slip that he mentioned something about her being much
older than she looked, and now she knew Kael was going to question her about
it.

Blast.

The day passed
uneventfully. The pirates went about their usual chores and the clouds stayed
the same boring shade of gray. It was only when the sun began to set that he
noticed something amiss: the sky wasn’t red or orange or any of the normal
sunset colors. It was turning … green.

They sailed
closer, and he realized that it wasn’t the sky after all. No, it was a wall of
sickly green clouds.

They rested
squarely on top of the ocean, billowing up from the waves and stretching
skywards.
Anchorgloam
drifted towards
them and they reached out with mile-long tendrils, wrapping them neatly in a
cold embrace. It wasn’t long before they were surrounded on all sides. Ahead,
fog yawned to swallow them.

“It’s the
tempest,” Morris said loudly, nearly scaring Kael out of his skin. He hadn’t
even heard him waddle up.

“
This
is the tempest?” So far, all he
could see was a lot of fog.

There weren’t
any storm clouds or even an ominous rumble of thunder. In fact, it was eerily
silent. The pirates lined up at the railings, whispering anxiously to each
other as the green clouds sealed them in.

“Every man to
his station, every man in a lash!” Lysander barked, and they scrambled to get
ropes knotted around their waists. “Fall overboard in a lash, and we might be
able to reel you in. But fall untied, and you might as well — Aerilyn!”

She’d been in
the process of tying her lash when Lysander ripped it out of her hands. “Just
what do you think you’re doing?” she said angrily.

“Get below deck
this instant! A tempest is no place for a lady.”

“I thought you
said this was only a raindrop,” Kael called, and he was rewarded with a glare.

“I think I’ve
earned the right to sail through anything,” Aerilyn said indignantly. “I’ve
kept up, haven’t I? I’m just as much a part of this crew as anybody else.”

Lysander wasn’t
use to being argued with, and he didn’t take her mutiny well. “It isn’t about
rights, it’s about survival. Now get below —”

“Or what?”

“Or I’ll haul
you down myself.”

She gasped. “You
wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh, I would,”
he brought his face down to hers, “and I will.”

She didn’t back
away. She stuck her nose to his and jabbed a finger in the middle of his chest.
“If you even
think
about throwing me
over your shoulders and carrying me around like a sack of potatoes, I’ll make
sure you limp for the rest of your life.”

That was
Kyleigh’s doing. She was the one who’d taken Aerilyn aside and taught her
everything she knew about inflicting pain. Under her careful instruction,
Aerilyn had become less like a dainty merchant’s daughter and more like a force
to be reckoned with. She could bring tears to any grown man’s eyes — and
Lysander knew it.

So rather than risk a life-altering injury, he turned his anger on
Jonathan. “Make sure she’s tied!” he roared, flinging the lash at him. “If I
have to dive in and save her, I’m coming after you. Do you hear me, scallop
skull? My ghost will haunt every foul note you ever play!”

Jonathan stumbled over himself in his rush to get her tied to the nearest
mast.

It wasn’t long before the fog closed in on them. It swept up, covering
everything in a cloud of green. The deck disappeared and voices bounced around
in every direction. Lysander’s orders drifted in and out of Kael’s ears. Three
words would come from in front of him, and three more words from behind. He
itched madly where the fog touched his skin and had to keep taking his hands
off the wheel to scratch.

“Steady, lad. I know the magic is tickling you, but this is the tricky
part,” Morris said. Kael could just make out the side of his stout arm. “Hold
your course, listen to the waves.”

He focused every ounce of his concentration on the sounds of the ocean.
He closed his eyes so the fog wouldn’t distract him, blocked out the panicked
whispers that swam through his ears from the deck below. The steady, rhythmic
slap of waves striking
Anchorgloam
was his heartbeat, his breath. And then it suddenly wasn’t right.

He spun the wheel to the left and the ship groaned under his command.
Pirates cursed and stumbled sideways, holding onto whatever piece of rigging
they could grab. Kael heard something whoosh by, and turned in time to see the
object they’d so narrowly missed: it was the full half of a wrecked ship. Its
nose stuck up out of the water and its tail was hung on a jagged cluster of
rocks. He blinked, and the fog swallowed it back up without a sound.

Morris’s breath came out in a hiss. “That was a good turn, lad. I nearly
lost my britches, but it was a good turn.”

“Veer right.”

Kyleigh’s voice startled him. He didn’t know how she’d managed to find
the wheel when he could hardly see it himself, but he felt the ship turn as she
leaned around and pulled down on it.

On their left, a mast stuck out of the water. The sails that clung to it
were tattered and filthy. Their ragged ends swayed a little in the breeze,
reaching feebly upwards like a wounded soldier begging for mercy.

Then the air started to rumble.

It began as a low growl — the start of a snarl deep inside a wolf’s
throat. It grew and grew, until it filled their ears with an awful, guttural
roar. Kael thought the world was ending: he thought the sea was being sucked
downwards as the clouds caved in. Morris leaned over the rails and bellowed to
the pirates on deck, who shouted back.

Kael couldn’t hear what they said. All he knew was that the cold feeling
in his stomach was back. It reared up and though he fought with it, his hands
still shook. He turned the ship to avoid another wreck, and the rumbling faded
back — which only worried him further. Now he didn’t know if the danger
was behind or before them.

“Kyleigh?”

“Yes?” She was right at his ear.

He cleared his throat. “You
do
think we’ll make it out alive, don’t you? You don’t think we’re going to …
wreck, or anything?”

He could almost hear the smirk in her voice. “When you’ve seen as much as
I’ve seen, you stop worrying about death.” Then after a moment: “A friend of
mine had a chant he used to say before every battle — something that
steeled him for the fight, I suppose. Would you like me to teach it to you?”

“Yes.” He thought learning something new would keep him distracted, at
the very least.

“All right.” She took a deep breath. “
There
are times when death seems certain, and hope is dim. But in those times, I
forget my fears. I do not see the storm that rages, or the battle that looms
ahead. I close my eyes to the dangers — and in the quiet of the darkness,
I see only what must be done
.”

Her words coursed the length of his every vein, filling him with
something like molten iron — something that burned furiously enough to
beat back the icy monster of his fear. His hands stopped shaking and he gripped
the wheel tighter, prepared to face whatever awaited them on the other side.

After a few moments, he was calm enough to ask her something else. “How
old are you, by the way?”

But Kyleigh didn’t answer. She’d either wandered off or, more likely, was
ignoring him.

Shouts rang out from the bow. He heard a message being passed along, the
same sounds hollered by different voices. A wave of panic washed over the crew
and set their boots pounding in a frenzy of motion. Morris nearly knocked him
over in his rush to get back to the wheel.

“Hold on tight, lad!” he cried.

Kael barely had time to breathe before the fog disappeared. It brushed
passed his face, taking the cold itch with it, and left behind something much
more terrifying.

A mountain of black storm clouds hovered above them. They churned and
bubbled up, swelling against the fierce beast trapped within them: a storm that
belched thunder and spat jagged lines of lightening into the sea. But that
wasn’t the worst part, not by far.

He could almost hear Morris’s jaw drop as he said: “Well, this is new.”

A few yards ahead, the ocean dropped away. It fell from all sides and
into a bowl the size of a village. Green-blue, foamy waterfalls poured down in
straight lines, and the roar of crashing water drowned out everything else.
They already had
Anchorgloam
swept up
in their current, pulling her in, and Kael could do nothing to stop it. All he
could do was make sure they didn’t wind up in splinters at the bottom.

The bow slipped over the edge and he pulled hard on the wheel, turning
the rudder until the ship was nearly parallel with the lip of the bowl. Then
the wood groaned as the whole thing toppled forward.

He held the wheel and at the same time, fought to keep his feet on the
ground as they fell. He knew if they went straight down, it would smash them to
bits, so he made the ship turn and take the fall at an angle: just like how
Roland taught him to climb down tricky slopes.

It worked.
Anchorgloam
skirted
the wall and reached the bottom of the bowl with a splash and no splinters. But
the tempest wasn’t done with them yet.

At this bottom of the world, the waves climbed to three or four times the
height of their tallest mast. They were monsters of the deep — leviathans
with jaws the size of Tinnark. As the waves stalked them, the wind and the rain
worked together: one whipping while the other stung. The cold seeped through
their skin and froze the marrow in their bones. Lightening toyed with them,
striking a fingernail away from their sails and illuminating each terrified
line on their faces.

The ocean scooped
Anchorgloam
up and tossed her from one wave to the next, she rocked dangerously as the wind
beat her sails. Kael’s arms were shaking from the force of trying to hold the
wheel steady. He could feel his strength fading; his mind began to lose its
sharpness.

“Hold fast, men! With all that you are — hold fast!”

The cry came from Lysander. He and a dozen others were wrestling with the
sails, trying to get them tied down. But the wind swirled from every direction.
It cut back and forth in painter’s strokes, ripping through the sails and
making the ropes scream in agony.

Kael realized they wouldn’t be able to tie them down. There must be
another way. The library was chalk full of books on storms and sailing, and he
was grateful now that Morris insisted he read them. He combed through his
memory, searching frantically as the words and pictures flashed before his
eyes. Then he had an idea.

“Free the sails, track the wind!” he shouted, and he heard Morris echo
him.

Lysander passed the order on, and soon all the men had stumbled over to a
tie — wading through icy water and fighting against the gales. They
latched onto the ropes and hauled back, tilting them until they were full.

Anchorgloam
lunged forward,
narrowly escaping a towering wave as it crashed behind them. The force of the
wind and the wave shot them across the bowl. He could see the other side rising
up ahead of them. It was every bit as steep and swift as its brother.

“I’m sorry, lad!” Morris said, his eyes wide with terror as they took in
the wall. “I’ve doomed us, there’s no way —”

“Yes there is!” Kael said. A wave crashed over him. It burned his eyes
and he spat out a mouthful of water so cold that it made his teeth hurt. “Tell
the men to keep tracking. We’ve got to get every last gust of wind.”

“Aye, aye!”

Morris passed the order along while Kael spun the wheel. They would climb
just as they fell: at an angle.

The bow hit the wall and the rushing water tried to shove it back down,
but the power of the wind was greater.
Anchorgloam
began to climb, propelled by her full sails. The pirates moved back and forth,
shouting to each other as the wind changed directions, and sprinting to catch
it. They climbed fast; soon they were nearly halfway up the wall. And then the
tempest struck back.

Shadows crossed Kael’s hands, and he felt something enormous eclipse the
sky above him. When he turned around, he saw a wave so monstrous that it was
worthy of legend. Foam gathered at its top. It groaned, leaned forward, and
Kael cried out in warning. Then it fell.

He’d never been crushed by a boulder, but he imagined it couldn’t have
felt worse than being crushed by a wave. A giant’s arm slapped into the middle
of his back, knocking him off his feet. The water took his breath and his legs.
It tried to rip his arms off the wheel, but he held it stubbornly in place. He
refused to let the tempest win.

When the wave finally fell back into the ocean, his knees struck the
ground as the earth reclaimed him and his face smacked into the wheel. He was
so numb with cold that it wasn’t until he wiped the hair out of his face that
he saw bright red blood staining his sleeve.

“The sails, to the sails!” Morris bellowed.

Kael looked up and saw that all of the pirates had been washed off their
posts. They were stuck in a tangled mass of bodies and ropes at the back of the
ship and while they struggled, the sail ties flapped freely.

Without her full sails,
Anchorgloam
began to slip backwards as the water reclaimed her. It pulled her down slowly,
like a spider dragging in its paralyzed prey. He knew if the sails stayed empty
much longer, they’d all be smashed to bits.