If there was a stupider bunch of idiots in Nimrien, Sestra hadn’t met them yet.
She trudged along beside Bill, listening to the others bicker. Of course, if they actually stopped to think, the answer was clear. Get a boat, sail east to where the grimoire apparently was, get the grimoire, bring it home. This really didn’t need to be as hard as they were making it!
“Do you think Torbek kicked up such a fuss because that hermit lady insulted his beloved goddess?” she asked Bill finally.
“Did she, though?” Bill replied.
Sestra sighed. Every time she talked, Bill had to argue with it somehow, and every time he did it brought her a little closer to punching him in the face—or slitting his throat while he slept.
“She did, she didn’t, it doesn’t matter,” she shot back through gritted teeth. “Big and Beardy thinks she did, and that’s what he’s salty about.”
“He’s salty about everything,” Bill said. “I think he hates me.”
“Probably,” Sestra snorted. “You did almost get us all killed.”
“It wasn’t my fault!” Bill whined. “Anyone could have fallen asleep!”
“But it wasn’t anyone. It was you.”
“You needn’t keep rubbing it in.”
“You brought it up!”
Winding Bill up was about the only fun thing left on this stupid quest. She was tired, and hungry, and thirsty, and Goddesses, so bored, and if she needed to entertain herself by needling and poking at Bill’s tiny brain, well. That was the price of having her along.
“I don’t know why they don’t just get a boat so we can sail for the stupid grimoire,” she said for the hundredth time.
“Have you any money, halfling? No? Well then hold your tongue while your elders and betters work out what to do next,” Torbek rumbled.
Sestra felt the familiar pink mist starting to taint the edges of her vision and she instinctively reached for her dagger, intending to slice Big and Beardy’s beard right off… but thought better of it at the last moment.
“Money? Who needs money? Just steal one,” she griped.
“I do not steal,” Torbek said firmly.
“I must concur,” Callania put in, and Sestra shot her one of her best, ugliest looks. Bad enough that Big and Beardy kept treating her like a naughty child without the elf girl sticking her oar in it.
They had been walking along beside the shore for what felt like forever and Sestra was itching to just do something.
But on they trekked.
And on.
And on.
Gusela’s map didn’t have any place names on it, just the shape of the coast as it met the shore, and that gold shimmering point they were supposed to be making for. But as they walked, the black spot that had been on Gusela’s house seemed to steadily move.
“It is us!” Torbek bellowed suddenly. “The black spot is us! It moves as we move, and reflects our exact location! Sorcery!”
The others crowded around, checking and rechecking the map as they moved. It took a bit of walking to see what Torbek was talking about—Nimrien was a big place, after all—but eventually it looked like Torbek had been right.
Still, even though everyone said they were going to head east toward that spot, they seemed to be following north. And when Sestra tried to point this out, the big, beardy dwarf oaf just shot her down again.
So when she saw the boat just sitting there among the rocks, she badly wanted to say nothing. Let him sort this mess out, if he knew so much.
But, she had a bit of a soft spot for Elion too, and she could see he was about done, even if he was putting a brave face on it.
“Boat,” she said shortly, pointing to the boat where it sat on its side, just out of reach of the waves.
“What?” Bill said blankly, not seeing what she was seeing. Losing her rag slightly, Sestra took his head between her hands and actually turned it to look at the boat.
“Boat.”
It was too easy, was what it was. But it was there, and it wouldn’t be stealing as clearly wasn’t tied up so it must not belong to anyone, and they did need to head east, and heading east did mean finding a boat.
They all turned and looked where Sestra was pointing, but no one looked too excited. Big and Beardy looked like he might say something, but then didn’t.
“We should make camp for the night,” Nalyn said, and everyone was thrilled to agree with her. Which pissed Sestra off.
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She pitched her tent a ways away from the others. Nalyn and Callania had given up pretending they weren’t… something, and were sharing Nalyn’s tent. Torbek was tending to Elion. He’d put the elf boy’s tent up, then helped him crawl into it, and gone in after him. That was… Sestra wrinkled her nose. Well, it was nothing. It wasn’t like Nalyn and Callania. They were something. Torbek just didn’t want to leave Elion alone, and she understood why. If he hadn’t been in there, she might have been tempted to go look after him herself. If she were the sort of person who did that sort of thing.
If she were the sort of person who had friends.
Seeing the way people were doubling up for the night, Bill had actually asked if she wanted to bunk with him, and she’d had a hard time deciding whether to laugh or throw up. In the end though, laughter was less to clean up, so she laughed in his face and told him to sleep in his own bloody tent. And he had to put it up himself, and she could see he still hadn’t worked out how to do it properly. She snickered as she settled down.
But she couldn’t sleep, and she couldn’t work out why. And she couldn’t work out why she was still with this pack of assholes. What did they matter, anyway? They were just pains in her rear, and they were idiots, always putting her in danger. Would she have faced wolves or gibbering frogmen if she hadn’t thrown her lot in with this crew? Even the money the Collector had promised to pay them was starting to seem not worth it to stick around much longer.
On silent feet she crept out of her tent and crept down to the shore, where she’d seen the boat. She stood looking at it for a long time, deciding what to do then changing her mind, then changing it back, then coming up with a new plan, all in the same moment. She bit her lip, and shuffled her feet, and at last went back to the little camp and took her tent down, stowing it silently in her pack and hefting it onto her back. She went back down to the boat and again, stood looking at it, still undecided.
As the first rays of sun began to creep above the water line, she sucked in a deep breath, tossed her pack into the boat, and climbed in after it.
It was just a little sailing boat, and though Sestra had never sailed before, she didn’t think it could be that hard to work out how to do it. And then she could sail east by herself, and maybe even find the grimoire, and possibly collect all six portions of the Collector’s payment!
With a tug on this rope and that, and after clambering out to give the boat a great shove into the surf, the sails suddenly filled with the light breeze, and the boat began to scud lightly over the waves.
Idly, she slapped at a bug that had decided to snack on her neck, and looked out over the Six Seas. She felt elated for all of thirty seconds. Then she started panicking, badly.
What had she done? Where was she going? What was she doing? She didn’t know how to sail. This had been a complete fluke. A complete piece of luck that she had managed to make the dilapidated old boat sail at all, and a massive piece of luck that she hadn’t immediately sank.
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Now frantic, she began tugging on each rope in turn, trying to work out how to turn the boat around, how to go back.
She couldn’t do this by herself.
“I can’t do this by myself!” she sobbed, and knew it to be true. Goddesses, what she wouldn’t give to even have useless bloody Bill right now. Two mouths could scream for help louder than one could.
After what seemed like hours, she tugged a rope that knocked a wooden… something, and the boat turned slightly. Heartened, she tugged the wooden thing harder, and the boat turned more. It was a wide circle she was beginning to make, but a circle nonetheless.
The boat turned out of the wind, and the sail deflated, but Sestra had miraculously built up enough momentum that, slowly but surely, the boat drifted back toward the shore.
“Thank all of the Goddesses for the tide,” she whispered fervently, dashing the tears from her face and gulping in air. “Thank the Goddesses for their help.”
She grabbed her pack and leapt off the boat the moment she was close enough to the beach that she could walk rather than swim. She hurried back to the camp, and made a big show of pretending to be stuffing her tent into her pack just as the others were coming out of their own tents.
“Up early, halfling?” Torbek commented.
“Your snoring woke me. Figured there was no sense in wasting daylight,” she shot back.
“What are we going to do now?” Bill asked, his voice just as whiny as Sestra remembered it. She stifled a smile. It wouldn’t do for him to catch on that actually, she maybe didn’t hate him quite as much as she thought she did.
“I can’t do this alone,” she murmured.
“What’s that?” Nalyn was the closest, but even she wasn’t close enough to pick up on Sestra’s mumbling.
“There’s that boat on the shore,” she said instead of answering. “It’s little, but it looks like it’ll float, and it’ll probably take all of us. We should go get it. It doesn’t belong to anyone, or it’d be tied up. We can sail east.”
It was the most she had offered since they had set out (aside from busting them out of Gekak’s castle, that was), and she fully expected Torbek at least to pooh-pooh her words and decide something completely different for them to do. But he just nodded to her and shouldered his pack.
“Lead on then,” Elion said. He seemed… stronger, and Sestra offered him a small smile. He beamed in return, which made her own awkward smile grow wider.
“Can you even sail a boat?” Bill put in as the little company began to walk down to the shore.
“Course. Can’t you?” Sestra retorted—as if she hadn’t just had the most terrifying trial by fire introduction to sailing anyone in Nimrien had probably ever had.
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If Sestra was no sailor, Callania was. It was hard not to watch, gobsmacked, as the elf lady leaped around the little boat, adjusting ropes here and there seemingly at random, and the boat responded as if it were alive and somehow bonded with her. Callania’s long blonde hair streamed behind her as she flitted here and there, and Sestra noted with a smirk that she wasn’t the only one watching. Bill’s mouth hung open and his eyes were wide—and Nalyn seemed equally enraptured.
“We are on the Six Seas,” Callania told them happily. “This is where I was born, where I grew up. Perhaps we could stop on my island, and you all could meet my tribe!”
“More plant food,” Torbek muttered under his breath.
Sestra was about to make a crack about his eating habits, when a wave of sickness hit her from out of nowhere, and she had to lean over the side quickly as she was violently ill.
“Are you alright?” Nalyn asked, and Sestra waved her off with one arm, the other arm clinging for dear life to the side of the boat. The further out they got, the choppier the water seemed to become, and the sicker she seemed to feel.
“I’m fine,” she croaked. “Just… leave me.”
But she could sense Nalyn hovering. Just like she could sense Bill retching—clearly he couldn’t handle the sight of someone else throwing up.
After what seemed like a hundred years, the sick feeling went away and she stood up straight again.
“Feel better?” Elion asked her quietly, and she nodded, testing her insides to see if they’d behave. She didn’t feel great, but she’d live. She scratched absently at an itch on the back of her neck, then stumbled over to sit down next to him.
“How do folk do this all day?” she asked. “Look at her up there, like she was born on a boat…”
“Well, to hear her talk, she pretty much was,” Elion told her.
“I’ve decided I don’t like boats,” she told him quietly. “They make my belly all… blech.”
Elion leaned back beside her. Sestra guessed, if she had to choose, he was the one she hated the least.
“It’s only for a little while. We’ll probably land somewhere soon,” he said, looking out over the water. Sestra looked too, and what she saw didn’t inspire much hope for “soon”. There were islands in view, but nothing big. Nothing that they were going to decide to land on, as far as she could tell.
It was a rough few hours on the sea. Every second, Sestra was sure they’d hit something and sink, but Callania turned out to be a really good sailor, even if she was pants at it. It looked like they could sail for as long as they wanted to.
Then Nalyn had to speak up.
“We have a leak,” she said quietly to Callania, but Sestra heard her—and so did Bill.
“The boat is leaking!” he yelped. Sestra kicked him, ill as she still felt, but it didn’t make a difference. He was determined to do what he did best: panic, and not help at all.
Sestra didn’t want to keep being thrown in with him when people thought of them. She scurried to do what she could, tugging her outer tunic off and cramming it into the hole Nalyn had pointed out. It did almost nothing to stop the water from coming into the boat, but damnit, she was trying, which was more than she could say for Bill, who was strapping small pieces of wood to his arm “so that I can float when the boat goes down”.
After a tense few minutes, at long last, Callania gasped in excitement and pointed to a far off blob. “My island,” she cried.
Sestra looked, but didn’t see much more than a green smudge. A little while later, though, it started to look like an island, and a little while after that it looked like it was actually within reach. By this time, the water coming into their boat was a real problem. Her shoes, such as they were, were starting to get damp as the water lapped over the deck. Landing on Callania’s island couldn’t have come soon enough. She gave the back of her neck one last absentminded scratch before leaping out of the boat with the others, looking around this new land.
She’d never been outside of Lerastir, so this was pretty exciting, but she did her best not to let it show. “This is where you grew up?” she asked Callania, who nodded. “There’s nothing here!”
“Look harder.”
And as Sestra narrowed her eyes and looked into the surrounding trees, expecting nothing at all, suddenly houses began to appear, as if they hadn’t been there the whole time. Sestra sucked in a breath, realizing with a jump the busy little village that was all around her, completely unseen at first glance.
A young elf boy was digging in the sand on the shore, and Sestra saw his eyes widen when he saw them. He leaped to his feet, stammering. “M… M’lady,” he managed, and it was Sestra’s turn to goggle. The little elf boy bowed deeply before standing up straight again. “I will fetch your parents, m’lady.”
When Sestra looked at Callania, her face was red. Prettily red, she thought with annoyance. Did elves always have to be so… pretty? At least Elion was doofy.
“I apologize, companions,” Callania said quietly. “I wanted you to see where I came from, but I rather forgot the ceremony that would accompany my return.”
And two older elves emerged from the trees, a stunning elf woman who looked like an older version of Callania, and a handsome elf man with the same hair and eyes. The boy ran in front of them, leading the way.
“My lord, my lady… the lady Callania,” he announced (pretty unnecessarily, Sestra thought, unless Callania’s parents were as simple as Bill), and the older couple moved forward.
“Darling,” the older woman gasped, and pulled Callania into a tight hug.
Was that was it was like to have a mum? For a split second, Sestra wished there were someone, anyone, in all of Nimrien who would feel like greeting her like that after being apart from her.
“May I present Lord Corym Naefaren, and his lady wife Bellaluna,” the young boy recited, like he’d had it drummed into his head.
“You are royalty,” Torbek gasped, looking at Callania like she’d punched him in the business area.
“I am not!” Callania said quickly. “My mother’s brother is married to the youngest sister of the queen. The queen is royal, as are her children. I am simply…” and here Sestra heard her sigh. “Noble.”
“Noble,” Torbek sneered. “Still more than we are, are you not?”
“Leave her alone,” Nalyn broke in. “She can’t help the circumstances of her birth any more than you can. Big and Beardy.”
Sestra couldn’t help laughing out loud when Nalyn used her own nickname for Torbek. “Yeah!” she put in.
All through this chatter, Callania’s parents had remained silent, but now her mother spoke. “It is an honor to receive the guests of our daughter.”
“Where are we, exactly?” Elion wanted to know.
“This island is known as Hallinet,” Lord Corym told him.
Part of Sestra wanted to be snarky and sassy. But another, newer part of her told her to keep quiet and be respectful. She held her tongue, and thought hard about the feeling she was having. Like she should be polite. Like Callania’s parents meant something to Callania, and Callania meant something to her, Sestra. She felt herself going red in the face, but the dozen retorts that sprang to her tongue stayed safely inside her. So she said nothing, just scratched her neck a little.
“Mother, Father,” Callania said after a long pause. “We can stay for a meal, and perhaps a night, but then we must press on with our quest.”
“As you wish, daughter,” Lady Bellaluna smiled.
“And where is my lady sister?” Callania asked. Even Sestra couldn’t miss the cloud that passed over Callania’s mother’s face.
“Lady Caeda is hunting,” she said. “She should be back before night falls.”
Sestra watched Callania to see how she took the news. It wasn’t that big a deal, surely—no one had any idea they were coming. The little elf boy had had to go fetch her parents, after all. It wasn’t that surprising that Callania’s sister would be out doing something when they just happened to show up.
“And did my lady sister leave before, or after, hearing the news that I had arrived?” Callania asked, and Sestra flinched.
Even she knew not to ask questions you might not want the answer to.
“After,” Lord Corym said finally. Callania slumped, but said nothing.
“Enough pleasantries. Show us to where we may wash,” Torbek said gruffly. In his own, brash, rude way, he was rescuing Callania from the awkward moment. It looked like her parents were choosing to take his rudeness in the manner in which it was intended—without offense.
“Nelaeryn will show you to the guest quarters,” Lady Bellaluna said, and the little boy puffed himself up and grinned.
“Please, come with me,” he said importantly.
Sestra and the others followed him in silence. But she couldn’t help stealing a few sneaky glances at Callania. What was up with her and her “lady sister”?