Chapter Thirty-Eight: To the Strange Lands

I'd been on a ship before, obviously - there's no other way to get across the Atlantic. However, the ships in Alfheim are closer to those of the Renaissance than those of the modern era - wooden things largely beholden to the wind (though magic can circumvent that) and incapable of crossing oceans with the same confidence. To be sure, they were capable of it. Between magic and woodworking, they were well in advance of the ships that Magellan had sailed when he died trying to circumnavigate the globe but, princess or not, they were not especially comfortable to be aboard.

Our ship wasn't even a fae ship. I'm told our ships are more comfortable and, due to the magic in our woodworking, they are essentially watertight and capable of slicing through the water smoother and faster than the ships of other nations… though Gaelin says a royal accustomed to a pampered lifestyle will still find them wanting.

"Have you just outed yourself as a pampered boy prince?" Calivar chuckled.

Gaelin gasped, his cheeks going flush. "No, of course not! That was years and years ago - I was barely more than a child!"

"So you were a pampered boy prince," I said.

"Father may have kept me a bit too sheltered… after he lost his first son, I suppose he had reason to. You know how he is…" Gaelin winced. "No, I suppose you don't."

"I know him - maybe as well as the old me did. After all, I'm the one who ended the silly feud between us. She hadn't spoken to him in over four decades… though I note he hasn't called me his spring tulip since I spilled the beans on being a soul-in-transit."

"But he did talk to you," Gaelin said. "That's a start - it's a lot for an old man to take in."

By my reckoning, we were about half way across the Shimmering Sea, about half-way to the continent and outlying archipelagos often called the Outer Realms. And my reckoning was pretty close on account of Meliswe asking our captain multiple times a day how much further it was. Normally, ships from Wyrmsreach would sail out for three or four days before making port at the Isle of Cormorants a bit past halfway to the Outer Realms. However, the whole archipelago had been overrun by pirates some months ago - no doubt under the sway of the King in the South - and only the recent defeat in Autumnal had managed to stall the raids that had been plaguing the coastline.

That was among the reasons why Prince Velda had gifted us Wyrmstooth to begin with, outright refusing payment for it. She was, to hear him say it, among the finest ships in the Wyrmsreach merchant navy… which, I had to admit, may have said a lot about why the raiders never had much trouble scuttling their ships. And I would have said as much if Calivar hadn't beat me to it.

"They may make a lot of ships, but their shipwrights don't know much about working wood with magic," he said.

Calivar didn't know woodsong beyond the very basics I'd taught him, but there were other magics that could sculpt dead wood. There were a lot of advantages of working with living wood, in my opinion, but if all you wanted to do was make a hundred different beams into a single seamless piece of wood, then a fistful of mana and two intermediate techniques were all you needed to 'woodsculpt', as the fae shipwrights called it. Or 'corpse-shape' as we of the woodsong called it. I could only imagine how infinitely better it would be to sail aboard a green and living boat - an idea for another time.

We proceeded to make a project of sealing up every last beam in the hull, going down into the leaky, brine-smelling depths of the bilge and working our way up, with the captain and crew marveling over our craft, as well as the subsequent improvements to the ship's speed and handling. It was a way to pass the time when I wasn't practicing my magic or my fighting, or else just lazing away with Meliswe and Calivar in our little cabin.

"You realize this is the captain's cabin," Meliswe said. "Velda made him give it to us…"

"And there are three of us and one of him," I said. "It's a better use of the space, isn't it?"

Calivar grinned. "I wouldn't mind an even more intimate space."

I thumped my hand against the wall a few times. "Then we wouldn't be able to magically soundproof the room and our noise would keep everybody up."

"True," he said. "Thank Gaia for large rooms."

The Shimmering Sea is thus called because of how it looks at night. Most of the time, if you're in the middle of the ocean at night, all you can see are the stars and the moon. On a cloudy night, the black is so absolute that you can start to hallucinate if you look out into it for too long. But the Shimmering Sea looks like a regular sea by day, a strangely idyllic blue-green similar to what I've heard the Aegean Sea looks like. And, by night, it ripples with light - subtle at times, tiny little fronts of bluish energy wisping across becalmed waters. Other times, the whole ocean is alive with blues, greens, and yellows pulsing bright enough in their complex whorls that you can man the ship without any lanterns. If you're sensitive to magical energies, you can also feel the difference, a feeling that's simultaneously invigorating, as if the whole atmosphere is alive, and a bit unsettling since you get the impression that something much larger than you is observing your progress but paying you no more mind than you might pay a passing butterfly. Let's hope that whatever lurks beneath the briny blue is not a lepidopterist.

Oh, and Dill? She hated being on a boat, cursing and bemoaning with a far dirtier mouth than I'd ever heard her with that the boat was floating unmoored from the earth. She was quite ill for a few days before I helped her fashion a special hammock using the woodsong, a mesh of living roots and branchlets that would keep her completely stable, even when the ship pitched in the Westbound Waves, which came around evening most days. Those twenty-foot standing waves pulsing across the ocean were about the most exciting thing that happened aboard the Wyrmstooth. At least until we passed the outer archipelagos and started to spot pirates.

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Our plan was to make for Garsellast, which was the closest thing to a city in the Outer Realms, a settlement of perhaps twenty thousand people that had managed to survive under the dominion of several successive pirate kings. But to get there, we first had to sail through four hundred miles of archipelago, most of which were utterly uninhabitable, but some of which were not.

At first, we spotted them from afar, small ships that might have been fishing vessels keeping their distance. I figured they were pretty suspicious - beyond sailing in a wild archipelago, the ships would always keep their distance and slink from view, disappearing around islands or into coves before the sad, blurry things that the Wyrmsreach artificers claimed were spyglasses could resolve much. No, the pirates were too cowardly to face a modestly-armed merchant ship on the high seas… not without an insurmountable advantage.

I guess they thought cover of night presented them with that advantage, because that’s when they attacked. I awoke in the middle of the night to boots on the deck above us - unusual activity for that time of night. Calivar, being a chivalrous appeaser of wives, volunteered to go up and see what the fuss was about and returned a little too quickly, his golden eyes filled with the sort of worry that meant he had bad news that he didn't want to break to us.

I yawned, but my brain was already quickly approaching full alertness. "Spit it out."

"The crew just spotted three ships approaching from the southwest…"

"So away from the moonlight. They wanted to keep hidden," I said.

Calivar nodded. "I think we're about to get boarded."

None of us had been up on deck much - not because any of us were prone to seasickness or had any qualms about sailors, but because Wyrmsreach sailors didn't react well around fae nobles and royals. That's not to say they were aggressive or rude. Quite the opposite. They tended to flee in terror, prostrate themselves before us, or (most frequently) stop whatever they'd been doing to stare in awe and disbelief. Every young child from outside the fae realms had heard stories about the fae rulers, from their great power to their callous cruelty to their penchant for making twisted bargains. Now, though, the sailors barely noticed our presence.

If the sea had been active, splashing and spinning with brilliant colors, it would have been impossible to sneak up on us. But it was a calmer night than most, the little flashes and ripples of color upon the ocean barely visible from more than twenty feet away, and so the three ships had managed to come quite close before the lookout had spotted them. If we'd had a fae or oncaran lookout, we likely would have spotted them sooner…

"These dancers and humans with their poor night vision," Master Dhyr sighed. "I can see the four ships as clear as day."

"Four ships?" I said… and, now that they mentioned it…

"Yes, the big one is holding back, though I can't for the life of me think why…"

"Shit," Calivar said. The four ships weren't here to raid us.

No sooner had we realized it, there was a flash on the deck of the big ship, followed by a great splash that rippled phosphorescence across the sea, accompanied by the roar of cannon fire. It wasn't a very big cannon - given the poor aim, probably a mortar cannon refitted for a low angle of fire - but it was a lot more than what the wooden ships of Wyrmsreach were used to. I didn't imagine it would have much trouble blasting a hole in our hull. Calivar dashed over to the captain and ordered him to pull alongside one of the enemy vessels.

"Alongside it?"

The notion there would have been that, even if we had to fight the pirates in melee, their capital ship would have to blast through their own ship to get to us. But I imagine he knew as well as me that the Wyrmstooth wasn't nearly fleet enough to pull off that maneuver. The cannon fired again, this time hitting the prow of the ship, rocking the whole desk, sending splinters flying and rigging flailing about. Some of the men started panicking - they'd never seen anything like cannon fire before.

"Laeanna! The spellsword!" Meliswe pushed it into my hand. "Destroy them with your lightning…"

I gripped my spellsword and held it aloft. I had no time to lose - the big ship would fire again any second. But, if I aimed just right, I could send a great bolt of lightning tearing down right on top of them. Of course, that would alert anybody watching for many miles around that somebody was playing with big league magic. Effective, but not exactly subtle…

"Laeanna, what are…"

I held my hand up, demanding silence. Between reading Twelve Lessons I'd learned enough about and a few weeks of commanding pelagine water spirits for bedroom antics, I was pretty familiar with the mana shaping involved with water conjuration. I brought my spellsword low and twirled it around… twirled it as if I was stirring a great pot of stew. The ocean churned and sloshed, and suddenly a current pulled us fast. I'd just created a great whirlpool at the center of the enemy ship formation. One of the three smaller ships was swallowed almost immediately, and the others began to circle. Unfortunately, we began to circle, too. Meliswe and Calivar conjured up gusts of wind to carry us beyond the great vortex, but it was barely keeping us even as the two remaining ships circled lower and lower, their crews abandoning ship, as if that would somehow keep them safe from the churning, sucking waters at the whirlpool's center. Even the capital ship was being pulled into the current.

The gun on its deck flashed again, and I only heard the first half of its impact before my ears rang from its deafening volume. For two lazy seconds, I registered that I was tumbling through the air and that I'd been skewered by about a dozen medium-sized splinters from the exploding deck. The whole hull buckled and the ship began to list.

"…anna! Laeanna! Are you all right?" I looked to Gaelin, looked to my forearm, and nodded. I'd been poked like a pincushion, but none of the shrapnel wounds were especially serious. I looked at my hands, bloody and prickled with splinters.

"My sword! Where's my spellsword?"

Nobody knew, and there wasn't time to find it. A moment later, the hull buckled and I stumbled back into Calivar's arms. I thought we'd been hit by the mortar again, but that wasn't it at all - we'd just collided with the big ship. When I'd stopped casting the spell, the whirlpool had started to lose power, and among the first things it had done was launch us right into a course alongside the big ship. It was close to twice our size and reinforced with steel plates - not a modern naval ship, but something close to the ironclads that presaged them several decades before.

Master Dhyr tugged at my sleeve and then made a running leap, sailing through the air and onto the deck of the pirate ship. With a start, I realized that we were rapidly sinking, the hull already listing to the starboard at fifteen degrees, and our only chance to get out alive would be to take the larger ship. I unsheathed my combat sword, unfurled my wings, and buzzed through the air.

It never even occurred to me that close to a quarter of our number were fae and fae-kin. We could have flown off into the night and landed at some secluded cove on one of the nearby islands. We wouldn't have been out of harm's way by any stretch, but it would have been a lot safer than trying to capture a large ship of seasoned pirates from your much smaller, quickly-sinking ship. But I wasn't about to sacrifice most of our people, let alone the entire crew of the Wyrmstooth.

I flew up high enough to spot Master Dhyr and, hearing the crack of rifle fire, realized I didn't want to be in the air for too long. I landed next to them, figuring that was the best place to be if we were doing melee combat. Meliswe thought likewise, I guess, because she touched down right behind me. Meanwhile, as our other fliers touched down and our non-fliers leapt and scrambled desperately to board, the crew of the pirate ship realized they were being boarded, and swarmed, dashing to retrieve weapons or else to surge at the attackers before we could form up. There were dozens upon dozens of them, too… close to three times our number if I had to guess.

Master Dhyr shot me a wary look. "If I have not said thus before… there is no such thing as cheating in battle…"