Chapter Twenty-Two: Salvage

In Vernal, one doesn't simply sign up for clandestine inter-realm missions, even if one is princess to one of those realms. Ultimately, permission would have to run through Alathea, who would no doubt insist on Fostolas's go-ahead, too, since it was his realm that the shipwreck had happened in.

Fortunately, we weren't in a rush - Ben had already been in Alfheim for six weeks, so another week wasn't going to kill him. He would be presumed dead back home, but I helped him come up with a story of getting washed ashore after the wreck with a head injury and memory issues. I was an old hand when it came to lying about memory issues, and they could explain away a lot. The device - something that could bridge the sometimes-iffy divide between Earth and Alfheim - was sitting off the coast of Hibernal and Ben was the only one who could move it.

I asked Alathea about it during our next twice-weekly tea. We took this in the queen's solarium, not to be confused with the palace solarium, which was larger but didn't have its own indoor garden. These days, the queen spoke freely with me, and I think she sometimes forgot that I wasn't the Laeanna she'd known from a child… not until our conversations strayed to areas where she'd had an interest but I didn't and vice-versa. My mentioning a miraculous device that could open portals between Alfheim and Earth certainly jogged her memory, though.

She set her tea down and cast me a slightly-hurt look. "You wish to return to Urth? I thought you were over this."

"I was," I said. "I mean I am. I'm not going back, but the Earth-men might want to. As unlikely as it seems, one of them was a friend in my old life, and I guess he's a friend now."

"So I heard. This Benbouid of Earth… you and he spoke at length."

I nodded… and I resolved to have a good talk with my guards about relaying my conversations and activities to the queen. If I couldn't trust them to confidence, how much could I really trust them? "We did… and after hearing the full details, I decided it would be worth our while to recover the artifact. Not just to send Ben home, but because it might prove useful. If some southern warlord has managed to bring men and machines through, perhaps we should seek out machinists and weapon-makers on Earth to remove our disadvantage…"

"These are matters best discussed with Vittoro and Commander Pelaisa."

"True. And they can be discussed later - those plans don't matter much if we haven't got the device."

Alathea nodded. "I see no downside to retrieving it. We'll send a request to Fostolas… and, since this sunken artifact is in his waters, he may keep it if he likes. No fae realm has ever waged war on another, so we need not concern ourselves with it being used against us."

"As you like, mother. But Ben will have to go… er… Benbouid." For whatever reason, native Faeric speakers found it just about impossible to pronounce Earth names. As complex and nuanced a language as Faeric is, it lacks some of the straightforwardness of English and German. The fae were also unclear on the topic of last names. I would have been Larry of the Green Haven… or, if there were two Larrys in town, Larry the Bold or some other descriptor to differentiate us. In any case, Ben was Benbouid (Ben-bow-yid) of Earth here in Vernal.

"Oh? Why must he go?"

"The artifact will only permit itself to be moved while activated and only he can activate it - it's somehow bonded to him."

Alathea giggled - she occasionally did when something tickled her fancy, a laugh like shimmering crystals. "That's very curious - the technique of soul-bonding has been lost for thousands of years… but we know well enough how to root an object in place." She touched her finger to the table, performed a complex series of hand gestures with the other hand, and then touched my teacup. "Go ahead… move it."

I found that the cup was quite firmly in place. When I raised my hand to cast a dispel, the queen stopped me. "You can dispel a trifle on a teacup, my sweet, but you cannot dispel the effect of an artifact without ruining the whole device… and often, that's quite difficult, too. The ancients had access to techniques not available in Alfheim…"

I gasped. If the device that Ben had found was older than when the fae had come to Alfheim, older than the end of the Sylvan Age, that made it many thousands of years old, possessed of strange magics that even the modern fae, whose magic was unequalled in Alfheim, had long forgotten. I lowered my hand and gestured for Alathea to show me how to move the cup. She used a fork to scrape a tiny speck of varnish from our table, holding it on a slim finger while she shaped her mana to transfer the essence of the table to our serving tray. Then she lifted the cup up, just as if it were a normal cup, placed it on the tray, and blew the speck of varnish away.

"Note that the cup is now rooted to the serving tray…" Alathea hummed happily. "In another life, I might have been a magic teacher. Go a head… now try to move the cup."

I repeated what she'd just done, modifying the spell to transfer the cup from the tray back to the table, and it worked like a charm. It wasn't simple magic and certainly wasn't weak magic, but it was a quick little ritual that an intermediate mage like me could get right on her first try. And if I could do it, that meant there were about five hundred mages across the fae realms who could do it, and dozens more beyond. Which meant finding the artifact suddenly got a lot more urgent.

"We should retrieve it as soon as possible, then, before somebody else does," I said.

"We'll retrieve it properly, child. And, if somebody else gets to it first?" She shrugged. "I'm sure they will want your friend to activate the device for them, so your friend will still get his chance to return home and we will know whether the artifact's owner is friend or foe. And if they're the latter, we can just take it back. This is nothing to worry ourselves over… don't you agree?"

"Yes, mother," I said. But I very much did not agree.

+++++

"I'm worried that somebody's going to take the artifact before we get to it," I said.

"Sure," Ben said. "But why just the two of us? I mean aren't you… you know… a princess? Can't you order a hundred people to go and get it for you?"

"I have twenty-eight people on my staff and four of them are servants… five if you count Dill. Meliswe and Dill are the only ones who don't report back to the queen, so they're the only two I can really trust… and they're pretty much my best friends…"

Ben frowned. "I thought I was your best friend."

"Sure, of course you are. But guy friends and gal friends are entirely different things, so they're on an entirely different list. But the point is I can't ask them because of course they'd say 'yes', and then when Alathea gets steamed up about my going behind her back, they'll get in trouble and I don't want that on my conscience. So it's got to be just the two of us… we can hire some other folks when we get to Hibernal, and if that makes Fostolas cross? My 'father' can deal with his daughter's hirelings however he likes."

"And Fostolas… he's the King of the Hibernal?" Ben asked.

"Right. And my fae father."

"Sweet Jesus." Ben rubbed the bridge of his nose. "And I thought being a grunt was high stakes. When do we leave?"

"Dawn."

That night, I nestled in next to Meliswe, and I felt like a dog for not telling her. And she didn't suspect a thing, either. That somehow made it much worse. I wanted her to call me out on it, to get me to spill the beans, and maybe she'd get me to sing and maybe she'd convince me to let her come along. And I also didn't want her involving herself in the whole questionable business of going behind Alathea's back after she'd given me express orders. I settled in next to her and she pressed herself against me, her soft lips kissed mine, and she ran her hand along my flank.

"How did I ever get so lucky?" she whispered.

And I didn't know what to say, because I was harboring a secret and it felt like I was cheating on her. I kissed her, and we proceeded to kiss and fondle one another for a bit - but we were both too tired to proceed much past that. I drifted off with her breathing her little snortlets into my ear, and she was still making them when woke up near dawn. The day's light was barely a blue light in the stained glass windows high up in the atrium. I wrote a letter to her explaining what I was doing and left it pinned to the change of clothes she'd set out for the day to be sure she'd find it.

I swept past a dozing guard and met Ben at his room - I'd given him his pick of clothes and he'd decked himself out like a fae or human of repute. Only he didn't quite have the mores of Alfheim down and he'd dressed in the satiny jacket of a noble with the woolen cloak of a merchant and the fine but tough trousers of an officer. There was nothing at all wrong with any individual element of his attire, but it stuck out like a sore thumb to me and would stick out to any other person with an eye for fashion. So I made him choose between officer's and mercantile attire and he chose the former on account of his being an officer but not a merchant in real life.

"You are a merchant, though. You run the soda fountain. And you're not an officer."

"I am. Second lieutenant Benjamin Grant Boyd." He saluted. "They gave me a promotion half-way through Belgium. And I only run the fountain. I'm not going to own the place until I get back to earth and my father in law kicks the bucket… hopefully a short time from now… and a long time from now, respectively."

"We can only hope, second lieutenant."

I led Ben to the stables, we horsed up, and we rode out just as the sun was peeking above the horizon. And part of me hoped that Meliswe would wake up early, find the note, and then dash out to stop and/or join up with us. But she didn't, and so we rode to the southwest, toward hibernal.

I had a pretty sizable cache of mithrins to draw from, which we used to refresh and change our horses as necessary. Ben and I rode across Vernal, just the two of us, just like when we were kids back in Nebraska. Past the green and golden lands, fertile fields growing ripe for harvest, pine-scented glades, ancient little hamlets bustling with trade, and wild prairie streaked with little streams and festooned with wildflowers, we rode.

But we weren't kids back in Nebraska - Ben was dressed like a man of means and I was the Princess of the Vernal. If people didn't recognize me from my likeness to Queen Alathea (whose portrait was on Vernal's mithrin coins), they surely recognized me from my portrait on the one-sixth mithrin coins, every bit as recognizable as the portrait of Honest Abe on a penny. We were traveling against the queen's orders, and I didn't expect she'd have any trouble tracking us down if she wanted to. Therefore, we trotted across Vernal to the gate and across the wilderness into Hibernal in one go. Ben and I were both dog tired afterward and we set up camp a few miles into Hibernal half a mile off the road.

Hibernal is the land of winter, but it's not always an unpleasant winter. In most of Hibernal, it's above freezing most of the time and they manage to grow hardy strains of your usual crops, even if they're not as abundant as in the other realms. Their real agricultural industry comes from meat - livestock fatten up in Hibernal like nobody's business, practically offering themselves for the winter slaughter on the bare minimum of hay, grass, oats, and grain. We rode past a few grazing fields and set camp in a little copse of bare trees, dense enough that we didn't think we'd be seen. Just beyond, we could see snow-dusted alpine forests and mountains, but we wouldn't have to traverse any harsh conditions on our way to the coast.

In the past, Ben and I hadn't thought for a moment about sharing a tent… and we only had one tent between us now, but things were pretty obviously different. If he hadn't kept stealing glances at me as we rode along, the way he went about making camp without asking for a bit of help from me confirmed it: Ben Boyd and I weren't old chums anymore. At least not in the same way.

I fed the horses, fetched us some water, and then fixed the tarp over our tent - to prove to myself as much as to Ben that being a princess didn't mean I couldn't work with my hands. Afterward, as night fell and we let our fire go to embers, I crawled into my sleeping bag, and my sharp fae eyes noted that Ben had scooched all the way to the far side of the tent, wedging himself against the spot where our tent met the ground - it had to be cold when the winter wind whipped up and blew against the canvas.

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"Why are you doing that?" I asked.

"Doing what?"

I sighed and turned to him. I could see his eyes reflecting the gauzy circles of the moon's light as it filtered through the tent, though I'm not sure whether he could see me. "You've scooted as far as you can possibly get from me. How many times did we camp out as kids, just you and me and the summer sky? Or trenching in at night as we marched across Flanders?"

Ben shrugged. "Lots of times," he said, "but it's different now, and you know why. I'm still me but you're not you…"

"You're wrong," I said, though I wasn't sure I meant it. "I'm still me. I'm still me, but I'm more than that. I'm two people now, I guess, and neither one of them wants to see you huddling into the winter wind. I promise I'm not going to seduce you and make you unfaithful to Helen the way I was to Abigail. I've got a comely fae girl in my royal chambers and I'm betrothed to a prince…"

"I thought you said you didn't fancy men…"

I sighed. "I lied. I lied and I shouldn't have. My tastes are very accommodating these days, but they don't include Ben Boyd. We're pals, the same as we've always been and the same as it'll always be."

Ben scooted away from the corner of the tent, though not by much. "Fair enough. But we're still keeping a hand's breadth between us. I'm glad you've come to terms with your new situation, but I'm not sure I ever will."

"Then we'd better get you home. With any luck, we'll make the coast by midday tomorrow and find this device. Sweet dreams, Ben."

He chuckled. "Sweet dreams, princess."

+++++

The next day was bleak, as it usually was in Hibernal, but the sun shone with a wan silvery light. I awoke not too long after dawn - I suppose my fae eyes sensed the light and roused me earlier than human ones did. I did my business in the bushes, fetched some water from the nearby creek, fed and watered our horses, and had breakfast started before Ben even stirred. He stumbled out to do his own business in the bushes perhaps half an hour later and proceeded to disassemble and pack our tent while I tended to our food. Half an hour after that, our bellies were full and we were trotting back out toward the road.

"If you see anybody who might be a messenger or military, we ride off the road," I said. "Alathea will want to call me back and put an end to our search."

"Are we going to get in trouble?"

I shrugged. "Probably not. Fostolas is my fae father and I've recently reconnected with him. He's not going to let a foolish scavenger hunt throw that into peril. Besides, we'll let him have it if he wants it… after we figure out how to get you back home."

"What about Albrecht and Otto?"

"The two Germans? Them, too, I hope. Fostolas isn't a bad king. He'll probably say yes, regardless," I said. Though, frankly, I didn't know Fostolas all that well. "In any case, it's a moot point if we don't get the damn thing. First things first."

It was another two hours out to the coastal roadway and another hour past that before we were at the coastal village that Ben and the Germans had stayed at for the first few weeks of their stay in Alfheim. It was a small but busy harbor, a dozen ships in port and twice as many visible out on the slate-dark water of the ocean. A cold wind whipped in off the sea that made me shiver and wish I'd brought warmer clothes - I didn't retain heat as well as I used to, and I'd have been miserable in a northern Nebraska winter. A mile or two down the coastline were steep cliffs fifty or sixty feet high. Ben had lost his 'ordinance' somewhere out beyond that, though he'd been too busy fighting for his life in the cold sea to get an exact location.

"I almost drowned," he said.

"Well it looks like clear sailing today," I said. The sky was a uniform silvery gray color except for the fist-sized blob of incandescent silver where the sun hid. It might mist or flurry, but that would be the extent of it. I patted the pound of mithrins at our side. "Let's hire ourselves a boat."

We hired the second-smallest boat in the harbor, a fishing boat with a winch that could handle two hundred pounds - enough to accommodate my weight plus the weight of the artifact if need be. I explained that we were on a treasure-finding mission, at which point the captain insisted that he get a share of the findings. Since the artifact was priceless, I got him to agree to a twenty-mithrin bonus, which was almost triple what we were paying for the boat. Still… twenty-seven mithrins to recover a world-traversing artifact was well worth it in my opinion.

Cuisine in Hibernal is pretty meat-heavy. While they manage to grow some cold weather crops, their yields are much lower than in the other realms. Instead, some poorly-understood magical effect helped animals (though not people) go to fat in anticipation of the perpetual winter of the realm, and even the fish were easy prey. They were fat, lazy things that sat in shallow depths, glubbing down water and waiting to be hauled up in a fisherman's net. Though there were also seals and porpoises that were lean enough and would snatch up your catch if you didn't bring it up quickly. We passed a dozen fishing boats on our way out to the cliffs, some of them pulling in squirming, fish-laden nets and others still trawling their nets through the water.

"About where did you get hauled out of the ocean?" I asked Ben.

He shrugged. "I was swimming for my life, and there were rough waves everywhere. The fishermen who rescued me said the storm had come out of nowhere and they were making back to harbor when they spotted me. Sorry…"

"That's more than nothing," I said. I made a sweeping gesture to the fishing boats bobbing along the waves - none of them were within a hundred feet of the cliffs. "We don't have to get closer to the cliffs than where the boats are now since we know your rescuers didn't go out of their way. We just need to find out which areas out there are between twenty-five and forty feet of water."

Our captain, Captain Thaqura, was a pelagon - one of that slightly-scaly maritime race with webbed hands and feet. Most members of their race lived on tiny islands or out at sea in big flotillas of lashed-together boats, but some of them popped up in seaside communities and formed their own little enclaves. "Those cliffs go fifty feet straight down below the water," Thaqura said, scratching at his murky beard and clacking at the little shells he'd tied in there. "The only place with less depth than that's the sandbar about half a mile straight out. It's a couple miles long but only about two hundred yards wide."

We pored over Thaqura's map - his people were natural divers and had detailed maps of all the shallows where they might dive for pearls or scour the bottom for shellfish or wreckage when conditions were good. There were a hundred different notations of depth, currents, and whatever animals were found along the bottom. Since Ben thought he'd seen yellow, seven-pointed sea stars the size of his torso, that narrowed our search area down to a two hundred by one hundred yard strip of the northeastern sandbar. That wasn't a tiny area to trawl, but it was manageable.

At first, we used the little fold-out device that Thaqura called a plumber. It was a thin, rigid pole with a small lead weight at the bottom. You could unfold it a link at a time, out to about fifty feet, and then have a fairly rigid stick to poke the bottom with. It was useful for estimating depth, as well as feeling out areas with soft or hard bottoms. I suppose I hoped we'd hit a uniquely solid spot of stone or metal and be able to trawl up the device, but that turned out to be naïve. We struck solid areas multiple times, but every time we cast the net overboard to winch up the device, all we came up with was rocks and a few fish and crabs, which Thaqura distributed to one of four tanks in his hold.

"I keep all the living things," he stated firmly. "It will not count against my takings for the day."

I didn't argue with him - whatever mud-dwelling fish and white, spindly crabs were worth, it wasn't much by princess standards. A priceless ancient artifact that could traverse worlds, on the other hand, was well worth my time. Unfortunately, we didn't seem too close to finding the thing. We needed another approach.

"How clear is this water?" I asked Thaqura.

"Now? Very clear. If it was sunny outside, you'd be able to see to the bottom in parts and thirty feet down elsewhere. It only really murks up around storms."

I began to unspool a length of rope. "I think I've got an idea, then."

Since we weren't having luck above the water, I thought I might have better luck below it. Making a spell to breathe underwater was fiendishly difficult and prone to complications, but a spell to make the water around me become like air was actually a lot easier. I dipped one end of the rope in the water, lifted the other into the breeze, and shaped my mana into the rope. Then I took both ends, touched them, and blew air over them. Voila! Now a person who tied the 'water' end of the rope around themselves would enjoy a little bubble of whatever was on the other side of the rope. That is, the parts of the ocean in direct contact with me would act like air.

"You can do magic?" Ben stammered. It was hard to miss the little pulse of glowing energy as the spell took hold.

I shrugged. "I'm fae. We do magic. Hell, just about anybody can do some magic - the only question is how much. Given how easily the thing we're looking for bonded to you, I'd bet you've got some talent, too."

"Do you want me to go down? It might be dangerous…"

"Thanks for the chivalry, pal, but you don't know how to tap your mana yet. The spell would fade in about two minutes and you'd find yourself surrounded by thirty feet of cold seawater. I'll give a tug if I need a haul up and you give a tug if you need to haul me up." I tied my end of the rope around my wrist and slipped over the side of the boat.

I sank at a decent clip - two or three feet per second I'd guess. The bubble of magical not-water had to displace the regular water, and so I didn't just drop as if I was falling through air. If I did, I'd have found myself hip-deep in the muck. As it was, I only found myself ankle-deep. I was only thirty feet down, but the bottom was dark, like a muddy, inky twilight. Fortunately, my fae eyes were plenty sharp in the dark and I could pick out at least fifteen or twenty feet in front of myself. Little bivalves scooted away as I surveyed and crabs the size of my palm skittered about, some of them trying to crawl onto me. I batted them away like big, irritating bugs. Beyond, I spotted a few of the big, yellow sea stars that Ben had mentioned. They probably weighed half what I did, and I had no idea whether they'd consider me prey, so I steered well clear of them, plodding along the bottom and looking for a half-buried artifact.

The sea was cold - colder than the air above, perhaps because I was only surrounded by a thin shell of almost-air. As I breathed it in, it smelled intensely of saltwater, sea life, and decaying organic matter. Salty sewage, basically. I'd be taking a bath as soon as possible after this - maybe a dip in the holy hot springs just up the coastline. I paced around for perhaps ten minutes, giving little tugs on the rope when I needed them to move the boat to give me more slack. We'd decided two short tugs would mean a direction change and anything else meant to pull me up.

There!

I spotted a massive metal hulk thirty feet off - a big chunk of a Q-boat, or maybe the German cruiser. As I approached, I could make out writing in the murky depths below: HMS Kestrel. It was the British ship! And there! On the sandbar not twenty feet away was a little bench half-buried in the muck and what looked to be a metal circlet attached to it. It was the artifact. I gave two more little tugs and started toward the thing, brushing past little undulating pennants of green-black kelp and bending down to get a good look.

It was an amazing piece of craftsmanship, fashioned of eternite, a host of magical jewels, and a silvery metal that I couldn't identify. It looked amazing even covered in a month and a half of muck and with a little colony of crabs making parts of the thing their home. I considered whether I should do the ritual to try to bring the thing up through the water… it would be a lot trickier than moving a tea cup across a table… or should I swap places with Ben and hope he could find the thing before the spell wore off and he found himself floundering thirty feet under?

Just then, there was a hard tug on the rope that nearly pulled me off balance. I had all of about two seconds before I found myself dragged right off of the sandbar, dragged upwards through the currents of the channel and toward our boat on the surface. I lost sight of the artifact, fading into the muck and tangle of kelp as I was reeled upward like an exasperated, princess-shaped fish on a hook. Ben and Thaqura each grabbed one of my wrists and hoisted me over the edge of our boat.

"Can you make our ship go faster?" Ben asked.

"What did you haul me up for, for Pete's sake? I'd just found the thing!"

Ben pointed southward, toward three ships, each a bit larger than ours, rounding the promontory of the cliffs and making straight for us. Each ship had ten or twelve men on deck, most of them wearing dark gray woolen cloaks… and some of them had rifles. Presently I heard the staccato crack of gunfire - mostly splashing in the water around us. They were trying to scare us off, and damn if it wasn't working.

"Is the sail set, captain?"

"It is, miss," Thaqura said.

I tore off two scraps of my own dress, pressed one through a little bullet hole in the mainsail (or maybe the hole had already ben there) and passed my mana into the scraps. Then I blew on the free scrap, which puffed wind into the entire sail. The fabric pulled taut and a few ropes pulled loose. Thaqura cursed and ran after the wayward rigging, shouting for Ben to help him. As soon as they had the sail back in order, I blew and blew again, the magic of the spell pushing us away far faster than our pursuers could follow and carrying us back toward the harbor.

"That's a pretty fancy trick," Thaqura said as the docks swung into view. Our pursuers hadn't chased us past the sand bar.

I cursed. "We didn't get the artifact." And, much worse, somebody with three boats and a contingent of rifle-carrying Earth men had stolen the thing right out of our grasp.

"I suppose I won't be getting that bonus, then," Thaqura sighed.

I wound up giving the old captain another three mithrins for his troubles and his discretion, bringing his payment up to an even ten coins. After that, Ben and I waited by the harbor for another hour, hoping the three ships might make port and we could make a move on the artifact. When it became clear that wasn't going to happen, we made for the main trade road, figuring we might get to Vernal before nightfall and pretend we'd been on the Vernal side of the border the whole time.

Unfortunately, a clean 'escape' wasn't to be. We weren't yet at the gate into the strip of wilderness between Hibernal and Vernal when a company of mixed guards rode up to us. We might have made a run for it, but that would have only forestalled the inevitable, because they knew exactly who I was. As they approached, gauging by their armor and their mounts, about half of the men were Fostolas's and half were Alathea's. They saluted me, but they were clearly under orders above my pay grade. Wonderful.

"Princess Laeanna! Thank Gaia!" their captain said. "We've been charged with finding you and bringing you back to Vernal City. Has this man kidnapped you?" I suddenly realized that there were a few arrows and even more accusatory glances pointed in Ben's direction.

"No, he was helping me track down an artifact of great importance." I scanned the group of soldiers… there were perhaps forty of them. "In fact, we might be enough in number to track down the thieves who attacked us to get at the thing and steal it back for my father… we ride for the coast!"

The captain held up his hand. "Queen Alathea thought you might be on some ill-advised adventure… her words, princess, not mine… and gave me these instructions." He unrolled a small message and cleared his throat.

"Princess Laeanna is not to involve you in whatever harebrained adventure she's gotten herself into. Unless the matter is, in your judgment, an imminent threat to the realm, you are to find Laeanna and bring her back to Vernal City posthaste, and she is to be confined to her quarters until her wedding date. Your Sovereign, Queen Alathea. Tell me, princess, is this a matter of imminent threat to the realm?"

I wanted to say yes. "I suppose not," I mumbled. Insisting otherwise would only damage my credibility.

The captain nodded. "I understand that you still think it's important, my lady, but I have my orders. Please follow us, then - your friend may accompany us. If you'll indulge me, though, I'd like to hear about this artifact…"