“What happened to you?” asked George the boatswain, his knuckles white on the bucket handle.
I ignored him and moved to check on Ricard. He was still breathing, and the knife was low enough in his back that I didn’t think his organs were punctured. The sensation of building heat was dying down, so I turned back to the crew who were still slowly mustering above decks. “Get Ms. Jaques up here, her son has a knife in his back. Find our runners, get the watch down here and secure this prisoner. Alphonse, take some men and find out what happened to my father.”
Some of the men started to do as I’d directed, with Ms. Jaques pushing through the crowd to kneel by her son, her hands producing a thick golden mist. A couple men ran off the ship, hopefully to get a watchman or ten. Most of the crew just milled about, watching me nervously and muttering to each other. George walked over to me, careful to avoid the damaged deck sections.
“Thomas, you looked like a demon back there,” he said quietly. “The men are worried you might light the ship up at any moment. Let’s go to the officer’s mess and sort things out, eh?”
“Sure, sure,” I said, nodding slowly. The men seemed nervous to have me in sight, as I would imagine. A pyromancer on a ship was begging for trouble. I told our quartermaster to take over managing the crew, and let George lead me to the officer’s mess.
The “officer’s mess” was a small room off to the side of the officer’s quarters, and from my memory it had originally been intended as storage for mops. My father had cleaned it out and installed a small table with two benches. Normally, the officers took meals with the men, so this room was mostly used as an informal briefing room or a place for the mates to do paperwork.
As we entered, George opened a cabinet and withdrew a pair of crystal snifters and a ruby flask. “Horchewitz Reserve, best brandy this side of the Living Sea,” he said as he filled the glasses and pushed one over to me.
“Father’s favorite,” I said, nodding. “I got him that flask for his 40th winter. Mother suggested it before we did the eastern leg. He said he’d downed his last after we fought off that storm shrike without losing a man.”
“Hell of a fight,” George said, returning the flask to the cabinet and taking a seat. He nodded to the bench across from him, and I only paused a moment before joining him.
“I know how much the captain meant to you, Tom,” George said, slowly swirling his brandy. He didn’t raise his eyes from the glass, as though searching it for his next words. I decided to save him the trouble.
“I know he’s gone, George. He wouldn’t have stayed with the Ameduchis with the ship screaming his head off. If nothing else, her spirit would have dragged him back herself, solid or no,” I said. I took a sip of the brandy. Sweet. Too sweet for this conversation, but I couldn’t bring myself to set it aside.
“We’ll find him, Tom. We’ll take him back to Mrs. Samantha. Rest assured, we won’t let the Ameduchis keep him from us. Worst comes to worst, we’ll tear our way through their manor and take him back by force.”
“Yes, we will,” I said, heat building behind my eyes again. The glass started to steam, brandy boiling in my hands. I tried to will the heat down, but it was a struggle. George looked on, his expression steeled but his eyes sad.
“You know the men won’t want an untrained pyromancer aboard ship, Tom,” George said slowly. “They’d mutiny in a heartbeat if something caught, and you’d be overboard before you could blink.”
The heat died at his words, and I leaned back against the hull, staring at the webbing above me. For a long moment, I thought about how to refute the old boatswain’s argument, all the speech and debate lessons mother had drowned me in failing me. In the end, there was nothing I could really say. The men would be right to keep me off the ship, we couldn’t afford to fireproof every scrap of sailcloth and length of twine. Worse, the flame wards the Lucent used were empowered by flame spirits, bound to snuff blazes before they could spread. If I pulled too hard on the blaze in a moment of turmoil, they’d shatter their bindings and turn the ship to kindling.
“Where do I go, George?” I asked, my voice tight. “My entire life has either been on this ship with father, or across the Green Sea with mother. The Huntswines are hundreds of miles overland, and then hundreds of miles back east to Lorcia, assuming I can find a captain willing to let me on board long enough to cross.”
“We’ll get you a thrunn and enough money to travel,” George said. “With a good enough incentive, any fisherman would be more than willing to take the chance. Six or seven hours of rowing, some damp leathers smelling up his deck, for what we can give you? No hook slinger’d pass it up.”
I sighed and downed what was left of my brandy. The heat had made it bitter, but I couldn’t find it in myself to care.
-----
Two days after the battle, my father’s body was delivered on the back of a thrunn by a grizzled looking longshoreman. The man said it had turned up at his warehouse with a note directing the delivery and a golden mark. It seemed the fear of a warehouse fire or a burning manor roof had been enough to get the cooperation of the Ameduchis, though of course they denied all involvement with the attack. The living mercenary was useless for getting justice; the company had been hired by a masked man with a voice distortion enchantment.
Father had died of a single cut at the base of his skull, the precision and the sharpness of the wound suggesting either a master surgeon or a moderately powerful metal magus. No wounds or bruises elsewhere on his body meant it wasn’t a fight, so at least he had died without pain. I couldn’t bring myself to look at his face, as each time I tried the heat threatened to light the ship ablaze again.
I spent a few hours touring inns in the town, looking for a place to stay when the Lucent left port. I settled on a small but well maintained place called The Hermit’s Folly, a name that the innkeeper refused to expand on.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Finding replacement timber for the Lucent wasn’t difficult, and the harbourmaster was more than willing to sell labour cheaply to get the ship out of port as soon as he could. Fires and murder were bad for business on the docks, and neither he nor we wanted to risk the Ameduchi’s continued ‘good will.’ It was only a matter of time before they found another band of cutthroats willing to assault an already injured Lucent and her depleted crew.
Alphonse avoided me, which I expected. Pyromancers were little better than demon summoners to a merchant sailor, a fear compounded by the tendency of pirates to employ those they could as a final threat that few ships could debate. It still hurt to see my friend of four years look at me with such fear and sadness, like I had been replaced by a monster.
Ricard was strangely happy for me, though he felt the loss of my father almost as strongly as I did. While I had joined the crew at 12, Ricard had been born and raised aboard the Lucent. My father had been his father in all but name, the man who sired him any of many men his mother had been with at any number of ports. It was Ricard who explained to me many of the processes of assumption and declaration that a mage uses to shape spells and control their element. Without that vital information, I would be at the mercy of the spirits of the blaze each time I called up my power. Ricard’s healing progressed rapidly with the spells his mother evoked into his body, and by the time the Lucent was ready to sail, he was walking with the aid of a cane.
Less than 6 days after the attack, the Lucent left port, the marks of her burning all but erased under the expert care of her crew. I, of course, stayed behind, no longer welcome on the vessel I had called home for the last eight years. My clothes were in a trunk in the inn, and I had a pouch of silver and gold inside my belt. More than enough to see me back to Lorica, probably a third of what my father had set aside for personal use over the last few months; a princely sum that would easily set me up with anything I wanted on the trip back. Except for my father, of course.
I spent the first hours after the Lucent departed staring out at her over the sea. The next few years would be trying, and now I had an entire world of magic and spirits to contend with. I had never been very superstitious; unlike most of the crew, I felt that spirits were simply invisible animals, and no rite or ritual appeasement was capable of changing their actions. Only a mage binding them to their will like a drover with a whip would be enough to get spirits to provide any useful work. Now, however, I could feel the thoughts of flame, a quiet passion that waited patiently for its next chance to blaze forth and grow powerful. Tiny sprites danced and cavorted among the torches, chattering to each other with excitement and laughter. Their language was full of popping and cracking sounds, and though I couldn’t understand them I still felt the general meaning behind their conversation.
The stars were out by the time I felt ready to return to my room at the inn and seek a meal. A twist of my hand and a spark of will summoned a small ball of flame to hover above my shoulder, behind my head and out of sight. The heat felt comforting, though the night workers avoided my gaze and strayed wide from my path. There were no elementalists and few mages more feared than a pyromancer, and none of those were as obvious to the layman; demonists and necromancers hid their allegiances, sealers and voidminds had no obvious outward signs of their perversion, and druids looked like primitive tribesmen until they began their rampage.
As I reached the inn I dispersed my torchlight spell into the aether. I felt that the innkeep would be upset if I set fire to his door or hangings. It was a good thing too, as if I had walked into the common room with it ablaze, there would likely have been a very expensive explosion. As it was, seeing Ricard sitting at a table chatting with a pair of drunkards in Ameduchi livery almost caused me to light the place up. Cinders dripping from my fist, I started to storm toward their table, only to slow as Ricard turned to me with a bright smile and waved me over.
I took my seat next to him, with the Ameduchi’s men across from us. “What exactly is happening here, Ricard?” I asked, unable to keep the rage entirely from my voice.
Ricard waved to the two men broadly. “Thomas, meet Alain and Michael. Alain, Michael, this is Thomas. These two gentlemen are friends of the Patrician and have been helping him keep an eye on some troubles the harbour has been facing recently and how they seem to be assisting the finances of the Ameduchis. Funny that, isn’t it?”
I nodded warily. “Pray tell, why aren’t you on the Lucent heading back to Lorica, dear Ricard?”
“Getting revenge for Christopher. Jacquard is upstairs sifting through a few ledgers our friends here found, tracking down the purchases and sales the Ameduchi clearing house has been making for the last few months. From what we’ve found already, there’ve been a few dozen shipments of thundersand into the harbour, but none back out. We believe they’re stockpiling it for some reason, probably something nefarious.”
I nodded again, thinking. If the Ameduchis were stockpiling thundersand, it made sense that the Patrician would want them watched carefully. There weren’t many things scarier to a noble than a cannon blowing holes straight through his keep. What I wasn’t sure of was why the Patrician would be willing to bring Ricard, and by extension myself, into his confidence about it.
As if sensing my thoughts, Alain gestured for me to take a seat. “Join us, friend, and we’ll explain what our employer would like to see you do.”
When I was seated and another round of ale was delivered, Michael withdrew a roll of parchment from his jacket, gilded at the edges and bearing the seal of the Patrician’s family, the Carremundos. I took the scroll and unrolled it, breaking the seal.
“A writ of feud?” I asked, quirking an eyebrow.
Michael nodded. “You have the permission of our city, and by extension the kingdom, to strike at the Ameduchis as you see fit. Violence that harms a peer who is otherwise uninvolved will be punished, but the feud will only be ended if both parties concede to it.”
“So the Ameduchis know I’m coming?” I asked, a bit of heat creeping back in.
“As soon as they receive their formal notice of feud they will. To bad the head of the Arstillian branch of the family is touring his vineyards in the backcountry for the next few months,” Alain said with a smirk.
“What does the Patrician want me to do, exactly?” I asked, leaning back in the chair.
“That’s up to you,” said Michael, “we were only told to give you what information we had. The rest is up to you. Personally, I would stab Christain, as he’s the scumdrinker who most likely had your father struck down. The bastard has a taste for backstabbing.”
Alain nodded. “If you do try to take him down, take care. His armsman Gunther is a Norgman and a skilled mage of earth and metal. He was a captured pirate, going to be burnt before Christain paid the Patrician a hefty sum to purchase his life.”
Ricard looked at me, a hard grin and dark eyes on his face. Before I left Arstilla, I would see Gunther’s ashes blow in the wind.