Chương 180: 4. You Make Pretty Ornaments

Remi Faa Degala drums her fingers impatiently as she reads yet another imperial missive. Something is going on in the mainland, and none of the letters she's been getting have painted a whole picture. Shaa demands reparations, Gaa and Goa are in a bidding war against each other for new ships to be commissioned, and there's even one letter bearing the imperial seal censuring the Degala tribe for the destruction of a vessel belonging to the Church of the Great Wheel.

Not that she's particularly worried about imperial censure. In fact, she's of a mind to ignore all of it. It's not like the tribe is in any danger if the nobles try to press the issue—the tribal grounds are nearly unassailable in force, and even if there was an attack, the tribe would simply leave. No, what Remi is actually concerned about is why the hornets down on the mainland are buzzing around her head.

"What in all Her names have you gotten us into, you mad old crone?" she mutters irritably. Obviously, Grandmother is or was in Stebaari and got into some kind of scrap with the church. But why? Given that it's Shaa barking about reparation it would have been the inquisition, and it can't have been all that bad if the Empress is only offering censure over it. Lots of pawing the ground, but not serious enough to lock horns over.

"And of course whatever trouble she's picked up is going to be coming right back here," Remi sighs. A knock on the cabin door interrupts her thoughts.

"Senior Elder? Are you busy?" a boy's voice calls from the other side of the door. Remi tries not to roll her eyes at the title. She's the youngest so-called 'elder' in the fleet, but the others insist on deferring to her, as if her name is somehow more valuable than decades of experience on the sea.

"Not at all," she responds.

"Please, come in." The boy lets himself in and salutes. He's young, but close to adulthood—probably on the cusp of completing his core class. Still just a boy, though—or he wouldn't have been sent as a runner.

"You have a message for me?" she prompts him.

"Yes, chief—" he cuts himself off when she raises an eyebrow, then clears his throat awkwardly.

"I mean, Senior Elder, ma'am! It's, uh, kind of weird..." Remi just holds the messenger's gaze, patiently waiting for him to finish. Too much prompting and he'll forget to act on his own.

"If they never have a chance to swim on their own, they'll drown at sea," her grandmother would say.

"A message arrived earlier," he starts to explain.

"And the other elders think you should see it." Odd that they would send a runner just for that.

"Okay," she says, turning back to her work and holding out a hand.

"Give it here and I'll add it to my reading."

"It's not a letter, ma'am," the boy replies awkwardly.

"The message is, uh... well, maybe it's best if you saw it for yourself." Remi furrows her brows. It's bad enough the elders are foisting off the deluge of angry letters from the mainland on her, but now they won't even let her write her correspondences in peace? She resists the urge to sigh dramatically as she pushes herself up onto her hooves.

"An envoy?" she muses out loud.

"Someone must be truly desperate for my attention." The chieftain was clever when she chose where their tribe would stake their claim. The land routes into the area are horribly treacherous, requiring visitors from the mainland to cross a desert, a mountain, and then the enormous brackish lake on Degala's side of the mountain.

From the sea, the delta is a horrible mess of swamps, marshes, and floodplains that are too shallow for any ship to cross without intimate knowledge of how the local distributaries change with the season. Clever travelers attempting to ground their ships near the shallows and make the rest of the journey on foot often find themselves or their ships lost within a few days. It's a horrible inhospitable place, unfit for long term settlement. Perfect, in other words.

"No ma'am," the runner interrupts her thoughts as she follows him above deck.

"It's some sort of magecraft." She blinks. Well, that's new. Remi only knows a few groups that would have a mage capable of long-distance messages like that. The Church of the Great Wheel, ever a source of powerful sorcery—though usually rather conservative about its use—is one possibility. Another would be the Empress herself, through her court mages, though it's hard to imagine why she would bother after already publicly censuring the tribe.

"The Obora?" she mutters to herself, before quickly discarding that idea. Their diviners have much better things to spend their magic on than bothering her, and it's not like the desert nomads have a pressing need for quality ships. It turns out to be none of them, she discovers, disembarking from her grounded ship to see the shimmering message written in light across the muddy beach where the fleet is currently resting. Three days. Hostile pursuit. Location four.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Remi purses her lips as she reads. Mage messages are often short because of the cost of the magic involved, but it's enough for her to grasp the meaning. She hurries over to where the other tribal elders are gathered, their furtive chatter dying as she approaches.

"Senior Elder Remi," one of them greets her with a salute—a woman twice her age who has children that have been out to sea more often than Remi.

"What do you make of this?"

"Elder Shala," Remi replies in greeting.

"What's the weather going to be like for the next few days?" Any other time, the non sequitur might have gotten her some strange looks, but the elder gives her a wry grin as she answers.

"Rain, would you believe it? Day and night, starting as soon as dusk depending on the wind." Remi sighs and puts her hands on her hips.

"Make sure the tribe is ready for an emergency relocation," she orders.

"Get any patches done by tomorrow, or we'll be working waist-deep in the muck."

"Are you certain it's legitimate?" one of the elders asks nervously.

"Who else would know exactly where to find us, when the weather will let us move, and bring enough trouble back to require it?" she replies sardonically.

"It's real. The chieftain is coming home." * You'd think that after months in a sweltering desert, the rain would be a welcome reprieve. It might have been, if we weren't on a ship. But with rain came wind, and with wind came waves, and with waves...

"Huurkgh," I dry-heave over the railing, having already long since run out of anything to produce but stomach acid and bile. Jira eyes me with urbane amusement as she carefully navigates her vessel through the storm.

"Mind you don't slip, Little Baddie. In this weather, we'll never find you." I groan and offer her a weak thumbs up, unable to muster up the energy to protest the epithet. We've gotten pretty used to being on the ship, by now, but I underestimated how much worse seasickness would be in more turbulent waters. The storm snuck up on us—by which I mean everybody except Captain Jira, who had not only expected it, but seemed to have been waiting for it.

If I could have my way, we'd be safely below deck, but Jira ordered all hands on deck to sail through the rain. And we are still sailing. The ship is a hive of activity, with sailors bellowing over the howling winds to call out orders and make adjustments as the wind and waves pummel the ship from what feels like every direction at once. I can't make any sense of it myself, but the sailors move with practiced ease—albeit also with a familiar tension in their shoulders.

The storm is dangerous, but it's a danger they know well. The captain, for her part, is entirely at ease as she deftly steers the ship to cut through an oncoming wave.

"Brace!" she calls out, her voice carrying over the sound of the rain and wind with supernatural clarity. I grip the railing tight and fight the wave of nausea that joins the very real wave of seawater that bears down upon us. All around, the sailors find ropes, handholds, or in Msshi's case an entire mast to hold themselves steady.

Against the rocking of the ship, the Fa'aun are impossibly sure-footed, their hooves carrying them across the rain-slicked wooden deck as easily on a forty-five degree incline as they would if it were level, but this is where the real danger is. Two threats in rapid succession. First, when the bow of the ship slams into the wave with a jarring crash, potentially knocking Fa'aun off their hooves—their balance and fleetness having been traded at some point in their evolution for a lack of stability.

Then the rush of water that floods across the deck, as if to wash away any sailor who might have stumbled. Nobody is washed overboard this time, nor have they been any other time, but only because every such wave has been met with the exact same call and the white-knuckled death grips of the entire crew. For the Fa'aun sailors, every one of those waves is like staring into the eyes of a Flaregaze Basilisk. One wrong move would be instant death. No, I correct myself, not instant.

It would be drowning or freezing—both slow and painful deaths. Getting blown up by an ornery lizard would be far better.

"Talla, I need eyes," Jira shouts. Just ahead of us, at the bow of the ship, where she just took most of that wave head-on, Talla clambers back up onto her hooves, legs shaking and wet fur plastered to her face. With a visible effort of will, the glowing orb over her shoulder focuses to cast a beam of bright light forward, illuminating our path. All I see is rain and waves. Water from above and below, closing like the jaws of some cosmic leviathan to swallow us into its briny depths.

But Jira just clicks her tongue and turns the wheel of the ship to adjust our course against some heading that exists only in her head. I think I might be developing a case of thalassophobia. What feels like an eternity later, the storm finally lets up enough for me to do anything other than cling desperately to the rails and empty our stomach overboard.

Why it was necessary for us to go through all that still isn't quite clear to me—we certainly weren't contributing anything of value—but Jira gives us a nod of respect as I join her at the helm, still feeling rather unsteady.

"Well done, Maev Violet," she congratulates me with a grin.

"You've weathered your first storm at sea."

"Thank you," I croak.

"Why?" She chuckles.

"Respect, sailor. Fargo and Msshi can do the work of men, but you and the Lady spend most of your time below, and there's only so much the crew can appreciate mended sails and clean linens." Said lady joins us, her own legs shaking like those of a newborn deer.

"This was a blooding," she groans.

"Draga did something similar with me when I joined his team. Had me hunt a monstrous anomaly solo to prove that I was more than just a pretty lantern." The sinking sensation in my chest at his memory doesn't get any less painful, but I'm slowly getting better at pushing through it.

"Is that why he made me take point with him to clear that basilisk nest?" I ask.

"Saban was a little less overtly threatening after that." Yet another name we left dead in our wake. I try not to dwell on it—not when I know for a fact that Allison has memorized a list of every single person we've killed or gotten killed. Now made a little bit more complicated by the nascent civil war we left behind us along with a ship's worth of burning corpses. Talla nods.

"Though I can't help but notice that this time being a pretty lantern was exactly what was demanded of me."

"Better that than a seasick ornament," I grumble. My treacherous headmates didn't even have the common decency to suffer through it with me, every one of them going suspiciously quiet while we rode out the storm.

"Hah!" Jira barks, loud and sharp as she slaps my shoulder hard enough that I stumble slightly.

"Both of you make very pretty ornaments. It's not about what you can do—it's that you were here, facing the waves with the rest of us. That matters. To the crew, to the family, and..." Her grin widens as a distant shape appears on the horizon, barely visible through the rain. Land, at last.

"To the tribe," she finishes.