Devin wasn’t feeling patient right then, especially not when he could hear the sounds of people shouting in the castle beyond, almost as loud as if the place were under attack.
“What is going on out there?” Devin asked.
“That is not relevant to your part in this,” Master Grey said.
“I want to know,” Devin said. He stood back. “What are you keeping from me?”
“There are many things I know that you do not,” Master Grey pointed out.
Devin started toward the door. “I’ll find out myself.”
“Princess Lenore has been taken by King Ravin’s men,” Master Grey said, in tones that held sympathy, but of a detached kind, as if none of this truly touched him. “Prince Rodry has already ridden to rescue her, while her father is gathering men to march on the bridges to the south.”
Devin felt as though his heart had stopped in his chest in that instant. Lenore was in danger? Just the thought of it was enough to make him want to go rushing after her, ready to save her. He didn’t know where the feeling came from, but it was there, and he knew that he couldn’t stand by while she was in danger.
“I need to go join the king’s forces,” he said, starting for the door again.
Master Grey moved in front of him. “And do what?”
“I could… I could help fight to get her back.”
“And do you think there aren’t enough men rushing to do that?” Master Grey replied. “Prince Rodry has his… friends. The king has his knights and his guards. You can do nothing by going with them except bring death upon yourself.”
He made it sound as certain as a stone falling from a cliff.
“What do you care?” Devin demanded.
“I care because you are too important to throw away like this. The boy born on the dragon moon? The one from the prophecy? No, this is your role: to learn, to grow into your magic, to forge the sword.”
Devin started toward the door again, but Master Grey raised a hand.
“Do you think that the king will not leave you behind if I ask it?” he said. He nodded to the smelter. “Now, you have a task to perform. Gently this time.”
Devin wanted to argue more, but he knew it would do no good. He wanted to help save Lenore, but Master Grey was frustratingly, impossibly right. He couldn’t add anything to the men already riding to the rescue, couldn’t be the noble warrior who saved her. This was all he could do.
He went back to the smelter, ready to try again. He could feel the frustration inside him, and not just at this. He had so many questions, and Master Grey would never answer any of them.
He would find a way to get answers though, to everything.
CHAPTER FIVE
Prince Greave was not used to ships in anything but the theoretical sense. Oh, he had read parts of Samir’s On Navigation and Hussard’s Around the Coasts in preparation for the voyage, but neither of them had prepared him for the reality of a violently bucking sea, a crew of sailors who more or less ignored him, and a sky that seemed just one step short of a storm.
The Serpentine was a large, three-masted ship, high sided and curved so that it was like a sword cutting through the waves. Small boats sat at the side, lashed up against railings. The sailors were tough-looking men in loose, rough clothes that let them move smoothly around the ship’s rigging. They were tough and weathered, nothing like Greave, and they looked at his smooth skin and almost feminine looks with contempt.
Only the thought of Nerra, and what they were going to do to help her, made any of this worthwhile. This was the fastest way to Astare and the great library that lay there. It was the only way to get to a place where he might find a cure for the scale sickness quickly enough. Even then… even then, Greave was worried that he might be too late.
“Is this… normal?” Aurelle asked beside him.
“Starting to wish that you hadn’t come?” Greave asked.
She shook her head. “You are here, and so I will be here.”
She made it seem utterly natural, yet Greave couldn’t imagine another woman following him here, onto the rough seas that had claimed so many lives, on a boat that could be torn apart if it strayed too close to the tearing currents near the banks of the Slate. No other woman had wanted to, but Aurelle was more than just another woman.
“You look queasy,” Aurelle said.
Greave dreaded to think how he must look then. Ordinarily, he was slender, with almost feminine features, hair falling in soft waves, features locked in an expression that might have seemed like an artist’s perfect inspiration for sadness. Now, his hair was matted with sea salt, and he had the first beginnings of a dark beard dotting his chin. His wasn’t a face that could take a beard, even when he wasn’t half green with seasickness.
As for Aurelle… she was perfect.
It wasn’t just that she was beautiful, although she was, her skin alabaster, her cheekbones and lips merely the brightest stars among a constellation of perfect features. Her body… Greave could write poems about her, especially since she was no longer dressed in a courtly gown, but in traveling clothes of gray and silver tunic, corset and britches.
None of that was as important as the fact that she was here, with him, on the best route they could find to Astare’s great library. She’d come with him on this hunt to find a cure for the scale sickness when no one else would have, searching to help Nerra, getting on the boat with him willingly, if not entirely happily.
“We couldn’t have ridden there?” she asked.
“It’s about as far north and east as you can go in the Northern Kingdom without hitting the volcanic lands,” Greave said. “To get there riding would be difficult, even dangerous, if it were just the two of us.”
“And this isn’t?” Aurelle asked, with a gesture toward the sea around them.
There was no sign of land from here; the ships had to travel wide to avoid the risk of dangerous currents near the coast. It was unnerving, when Greave had spent most of his life in the confines of libraries, but at the same time he could feel something in him expanding at the sight of all this. This was what the writers he admired had seen, the world in all its glory.
“Greave,” Aurelle said, pointing. “Look, a whale.”
Greave looked and saw a broad gray shape rising from the water, but the maw at the front was too long and too full of spiked teeth for any whale. Its body was as large as any whale’s, but it ran with fronds of flesh that might be mistaken at a distance for seaweed. Greave found his memory flickering back to Lolland’s Creatures of the Deep, and fear rose inside him.
“That’s no whale,” he said. “Hold onto something, Aurelle.” Louder, he called out so that the crew could hear. “Darkmaw!”
The crew looked round at that, and it took them a second longer to respond than they should have simply because it was him bellowing it rather than one of their own. Greave knew what they must be thinking in that moment: that this was a soft, cosseted prince who wouldn’t know a darkmaw from a shoal of herring. Even so, a second later, they saw it for themselves, and they ran for the ship’s stock of harpoons.
By that point, the creature was already diving.
Greave watched its shadow through the water, his eyes picking it out as he clung to one of the ropes of the ship. Around him, sailors watched warily, several still scrambling for weapons.
Then the creature struck.
It slammed against the side of the boat, but the boson was already turning the ship away from it, so that it didn’t bear the full brunt of the attack. Even so, it was enough to make the ship rock violently, listing to the side strongly enough that only Greave’s