The Vault of Destinies (James Potter #3) (16 page)

Barstow cursed colourfully and loudly, obviously alarmed. James looked up at him, wideeyed. The steering pole jutted straight out over the bow, trembling wildly, pointing directly at Henrietta as she plowed the waves. The magical fishline glowed and throbbed, vibrating in the air like a guitar string. A deep wooden groan emanated from the deck near the brass chair's base, and James was frightened to see that it was being slowly pried up, its huge bolts bending under some enormous pressure.

"Dodongo!" Barstow cried, struggling with the steering pole. "Use that great hairy reach of yours and grab on! Hold tight!"

Behind him, the giant ape stirred. He leaned forward in the hold, raising his head over the level of the deck, and stretched his huge right arm up out of the cargo hold's wide opening. Delicately, Dodongo gripped the rear of Barstow's chair with his huge grey fingers, holding it in place.

"What's your name, boy?" Barstow called down through gritted teeth.

"James!"

"Climb up here, James, and make it quick, if you please!"

James ran around the brass chair and scrambled up the stairs, ducking under Dodongo's huge leathery palm. Barstow moved aside, nodding for James to assume the brass seat.

"They've gone and shot out Henrietta's harness chain," he announced seriously. "Broke it clean in two! She's pulling us by the lead alone, which means we barely have any control and we're dragging low in the water. We can't escape unless I get down there and
Reparo
the harness chain straight away. I need you to take the reins and hold on as tightly as you can. It's
absolutely essential
that you not let go, no matter what, understand?"

James gulped, remembering a somewhat similar experience at the beginning of the summer. Only then, it had been Merlin and the brake lever of the Hogwarts Express. He leaned forward and gripped the trembling pole with both hands. "Got it!" he said, his heart pounding.

"That's a lad," Barstow nodded, speaking very quickly. "Just keep her aimed straight at the
Poseidon
, and don't slow down no matter what. Now pay attention: the steering pole is more than just a pole. It's a wand too. I need you to watch this gauge here. When the needle reads eightyeight knots, I need you to snap the wand upright and call this incantation:
Pesceopteryx
! Simple as that, right? That's a lad!"

Barstow leapt down the wrought iron stairway to the deck.

"Wait!" James cried, his voice cracking. "Say it again! How'm I going to remember that?"

"I'll help you," Petra called up, cupping her hands to her mouth. "Just watch the gauge!"

James looked down at the small brass instrument, his eyes bulging. The tiny silver needle trembled between the numbers fifty and sixty.

More magical blasts peppered the ship from both directions. The pirate ships on either side were coordinating their attacks, driving the
Gwyndemere
straight toward the
Poseidon's Peril
. Black sparks swirled, darkening the air. James glanced ahead. From his position on the brass chair, he could see the blockading ship very clearly. It looked alarmingly close, growing nearer even as he watched. Pirates lined the deck, shouting and waving wands and cutlasses. Henrietta churned the water, her serpentine humps plainly visible, her serrated back sawing the waves in half.

Barstow was leaning over the bow railing, so far and so precariously that James felt sure the man must tumble over into the ocean and be driven under the weight of the advancing ship. His voice carried on the wind as he shot
Reparo
charms into the water, aiming for Henrietta's broken harness chain.

"How fast now?" Petra called up to James.

"Sixty-five!" he answered. "No faster! The lead is just pulling the bow too far down into the water, dragging us! We're never going to make it!"

"Reparo!"
Barstow hollered, kicking his heels in the air as he leaned over the railing. "
Reparo
, you great useless hunk of rusty iron! Damn and drat!"

James gripped the pole so hard that his knuckles were white in the sunlight. He craned backwards and saw crewmen clinging from odd angles on the masts, watching breathlessly, their eyes wide and waiting. The
Scarlet Mist
and the
Three-Eyed Isis
tracked the
Gwyndemere
on both sides, frighteningly close, hemming them in. James could hear the shouts and whoops of the pirates from their rocking decks.

"
REPARO
!" Barstow shouted, his voice straining.

"It's no use!" James called out, watching as the
Poseidon's Peril
filled his vision. The pirates on the deck had begun to scatter as the
Gwyndemere
bore down on them. Henrietta dove under the waves, preparing to swim under the other ship's long hull.

Below, Petra drew a deep breath. To James, she seemed eerily calm. She closed her eyes.

Deep beneath the deck, a dull clatter and a metallic clang sounded. The
Gwyndemere
lurched violently and rose onto the waves, buoyed up suddenly and virtually leaping out of the water. The steering pole loosened in James' grip, no longer bearing the full weight of Henrietta as she pulled the ship.

"Aha!" Barstow cried in disbelief. "The chain's repaired! Go! Go!"

James boggled, still looking up at the
Poseidon's Peril
. The
Gwyndemere
was rushing toward it, doomed to ram it in mere seconds.

"James!" Petra called. "How fast?"

James tore his eyes from the looming ship. "Eighty-five… just a little more…!"

"On my mark, mates!" Barstow bellowed, raising both hands.

"Eighty-eight!" James cried.

"
Pesceopteryx
!" Petra shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth again.

James repeated the incantation as loudly and accurately as he could, jerking the steering pole upright. Simultaneously, Barstow hollered an order to his mates in the ship's rigging. The response was immediate and shocking. Henrietta lunged forward, so quickly and powerfully that her entire body angled up out of the water, trailed by a sparkling wreath of seawater. Two leathery shapes unfurled from her back and snapped open like parachutes, spraying fine mist. Henrietta, it seemed, had wings. She pumped them in one enormous, muscular stroke and shot up into the air, her long body streaming lithely over the deck of the
Poseidon's Peril,
covering it with her shadow. Pirates scattered, and some even leapt from the deck, dropping their cutlasses as they plummeted into the heaving ocean below.

On the
Gwyndemere
, every sail unfurled at once, suddenly and powerfully, creating a deep reverberating thump of captured wind. The complicated riggings unfolded and flexed, acting almost like wings, and the great ship heaved out of the ocean, following in Henrietta's path. James held his breath, but the rest of the crew hollered and whooped, their voices rising in the sudden, rushing silence.

The
Gwyndemere
soared over the
Poseidon's Peril,
so low that her wet hull crushed the other ship's deckhouse, smashing it to matchsticks. She plowed over the
Poseidon
's main mast, breaking it like a twig and forcing the unfortunate pirate ship to roll over in the water.

James clung to the steering pole, his hair streaming behind him and his eyes wide with a mixture of wonder and terror. Henrietta moved through the air ahead of the ship like a massive, scaly banner, her body flexing and sparkling greenly, her great membranous wings swooping easily, drawing streamers of water across the sky. Finally, gently, she angled downwards, furled her great wings, and dove to meet her long shadow on the waves. She made very little splash as she plunged into the depths. Behind her, however, the
Gwyndemere
landed like a whale, pounding the surface and sending up an explosion of dense white water, drenching James. A moment later, the crashing waters fell away and the ship cruised on sedately, her sails flapping in the ocean breeze.

"A job well done, James!" Barstow bellowed happily. "I told you we'd be in for a wee tussle, didn't I? Why, I'm tempted to recruit you to a life on the high seas, I am! Not everyone can air-pilot an Atlantean razorback their first time out! I was sure we were going to end up riding the
Poseidon
home piggyback!"

James flushed, his heart still thundering with adrenaline. "Well, I don't think they got away quite as undamaged as we seem to have," he called sheepishly.

Barstow angled toward the wrought iron stairs, patting Dodongo cheerfully on his enormous head. "Ah, they'll be fine," he replied, climbing up and trading seats with James. "It isn't the first time the
Poseidon's
been turned turtle in the water. They'll have themselves a grand adventure of it, bashing their way through the hull into the sunlight, then repairing everything and turning her back over. Gives 'em something constructive to do for the rest of the day."

James felt himself grinning helplessly as he climbed down. Feeling slightly drunk on adrenaline, he angled over toward Dodongo and plopped down onto the edge of the cargo hold doors, resting his arm on the great ape's nose. He replayed the last few minutes in his head, not quite believing everything that had happened. Curiously, the thing that amazed him most was how Barstow had managed to repair the harness chain at the last possible moment. It had looked perfectly hopeless and James understood why: it would have been virtually impossible to see the broken harness chain under the waves, where it was being dragged by Henrietta. Furthermore, doing magic through water, as Merlin had implied earlier, was extremely tricky. So how had Barstow managed it?

James' eyes widened as he remembered something. Moments before the chain had magically reattached to the ship, Petra had been standing on the prow, her eyes closed, as if in deep concentration. The last time James had seen anything like that had been…

"On the train," he muttered to himself. "On the Hogwarts Express with Merlin, when he'd made the tree grow beneath it, holding it up. But how could Petra…?"

He frowned to himself. Next to him, Dodongo stirred, pursing his lips and nodding James' arm off his nose.

James got up and looked around the deck, curious to ask Petra about what he had seen, but she was nowhere in sight. James found that he wasn't particularly surprised.

T
he crew of the
Gwyndemere
left the sails up now that the journey was fully underway. The wind filled them and helped propel the ship swiftly across the face of the ocean. For her own part, Henrietta drove through the water like a gigantic corkscrew, never slowing, her scales sparkling wherever her serpentine humps broke the surface, her serrated back slicing the waves neatly in two.

The day turned long, hot, and hazy bright. James, Ralph, Albus, and Lucy remained on the decks until tea, and then spent the rest of the afternoon in the galley dining room, playing Winkles and Augers or drawing at the long tables with Izzy. James was surprised at how good an artist Izzy was and how amazingly prolific her drawings were. Petra had provided sheets of cheap parchment for the girl as well as a collection of crayons and quills with magically coloured inks that never ran out.

It wasn't just that Izzy's strokes were so confident and swift as she created her pictures; the pictures themselves were hauntingly engaging, somehow simplistic and complex at the same time. Entire landscapes would be summed up in three or four quick lines, whereas a tree on a hilltop would require fifteen minutes of careful, dense detail, overlaid with half a dozen unusual colours, creating something that almost seemed to hover on the parchment, or push past it, into some sort of invisible papery dimension. James tried studiously to mimic Izzy's style with no success.

Lucy sat across from them, her cheek resting on her forearm as she watched the blonde girl draw. "What's that one, Izzy?"

"It's the gazebo," Izzy answered without looking up. "The one in Papa Warren's lake."

"You mean
on
the lake?" Lily asked, peering across the table from her own artwork, which was much less expressive and decidedly happier, with a huge yellow sun smiling down on a simple rendition of the Burrow.

Izzy shrugged. "Either way. I only saw it once. But I remember it. I'm drawing it for Petra."

James leaned closer. There were two small figures standing in the gazebo, both girls, one taller than the other. Izzy had done a remarkably good job at representing both herself and Petra standing under the gazebo's low roof. James couldn't tell, however, if the gazebo was overlooking the lake, floating on it like a boat, or even submerged under its surface. Izzy wasn't a witch, of course, so her drawings didn't move, nonetheless there was something about the background of the gazebo picture that seemed to shift and pulse, just outside the range of vision. The drawing was strange and surreal, and James found he couldn't look at it for very long.

At the opposite end of the galley, Persephone Remora sat playing a complicated octocard game with one of her younger charges, a boy with lank black hair and pasty skin.

"Vampirates, I've no doubt," she said loftily, carefully covering one of the cards with her hand. When she lifted it, the card had turned over, revealing a picture of a capering, grinning skeleton. "I suspect they normally only hunt the ocean's face by moonlight, but it may well be that they smelled the presence of their kin. Perchance they meant for us to join them."