Hunter’s Moon, 5045 Avalonian Calendar
Sixth-Month, Year 354 from the Founding
Lord Admiral Sunfall staggered as the Arianrhod’s Pride took a direct hit from a forty-pounder. Three of the large rail-guns were already gone, and the starboard wing was so damaged that for the first time in memory, the Pride was missing her stays. One more direct hit from that deadly forty-pounder cannon would blast what was left of their ship to flinders. But the locust-shaped dreadnaught they had to destroy was right before them, just slightly off the starboard bow.
The Admiral gritted his teeth. “All hands,” he said, “prepare to ram that dreadnaught.”
His Exec gave him a sideways glance. She knew, as he did, that the Arianrhod’s Pride would likely not survive that either. But she just nodded. “Av, elan.”
The call ran up and down the decks. The sail crews rolled out all the canvas the Starseed dreadnaught would take.
The Pilot cried, “Accelerating to full speed, sir!” The sails filled. The sheets and the masts groaned under the strain. Even through their etheric membrane, a wind picked up. The Admiral’s golden braid whipped him in the face.
“Eight leagues, Skipper!” cried the sounder. Then a moment later, “Nine leagues!”
The Locust bore down on them. The two great ships were going to collide head-on. The Admiral leaned forward into the wind, grinning. With his fiercely burning amber eyes, he looked like a stooping hawk.
Shaundar tried to cry out, to warn him—but no sound came out.
And then the locust dreadnaught turned hard to port, and their starboard battery let fly.
Cannonballs smashed into the Arianrhod’s Pride on all decks. Half of the mizzensail crew tumbled out into space. Flinders peppered everyone standing on the fo’c’sle. The Admiral was pierced with a thousand wooden needles along his flank. He closed his eyes against the barrage. As he did so, the ship began to decelerate.
“Helm down, Skipper!” cried one of the secondary Pilots.
He tried to yell a command; coughed, and when his throat cleared, he tried again. “Take the secondary helm now.”
“Av, elan!”
As the dust settled, Lord Sunfall searched with his eyes, and his gaze was drawn down to the deck at his feet. Aliatha Leafbower, his loyal Number One, lay on the planks, shredded by flak. A piece of the railing was buried her temple. Her eyes were wide and staring blankly at the stars. He lowered his head.
The enemy dreadnaught edged past the wreckage of their dead-in-space ship, passing close along the larboard flank. A dragonfly-shaped man-o-war closed in for the kill.
For the first time in more than a hundred years, the Admiral drew the runesword that was his family’s legacy. Its blade burst into rolling flames.
“If we have any weapons left, fire on that dreadnaught,” he commanded. “Open the armoury and prepare to be boarded.”
Once again, Shaundar tried to cry a warning, to no avail.
Instead, both Fomorian ships fired a full volley into what was left of the Arianrhod’s Pride. The foremast took a direct hit at its base with a forty-pounder. It fell like an ancient tree, slamming into the Admiral’s spine and pinning him to the deck like a squashed bug.
Then the deck collapsed beneath him.
Shaundar burst out of his nightmare with a cry, soaked in sweat.
It wasn’t the first time he’d had this dream. Ever since his father had arrived on Freebooter’s Rock, this was a recurring night-hag that rode his rest. He reached over to the bowl of water on the tiny shipboard nightstand and wrung out the cloth in it, to splash lukewarm water on his face. He tried to blink away the last image he’d seen before he’d managed to scream himself back to consciousness; his father lying dead on the wreckage of the bridge, buried underneath a pile of rubble, with his runesword fallen at his side and his stiff, pale and unmoving hand still reaching for it.
Shaundar’s father wordlessly handed him a towel.
“Thanks, Dad.” He swept it over his sweaty head while he studied the rings under his father’s eyes. They were dark enough to seem like bruises. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I slept on the deck, sir?” he asked again.
“Av, son, I’m sure.” As tired as he looked, Shaundar read only sincerity in his father’s golden eyes. Something else too, maybe. Was it pity? Or guilt?
Shaundar turned away from those fierce raptor’s eyes and started wiping himself down with the washcloth. His body was a roadmap of scars, pink and new-looking, but starting to close, now that the scurvy had been cured. He washed the furrows between his ribs; grotesque, but no longer horrific. There was another new purple bruise in the diamond shape of his hammock weaving on his flank. There was still so little fat on his body that his skin had no resistance to the gravity of his own weight.
“Son,” said Admiral Sunfall in a more gentle tone than Shaundar could remember ever hearing. He looked up. “Rualith,” he said, “you’re going to get open pressure sores if you keep sleeping in that hammock. If you won’t take my bed, at least let me have a cot brought up from the brig for you.” He sighed. “It can’t be doing any good for your leg, either.”
Shaundar’s leg had recently been rebroken by the healers on Freebooter’s Rock. The original injury had happened... three years ago, now? The Queen’s Dirk, his ship, had gone down with all hands, save three. He thought bitterly, and not for the first time, that his fallen shipmates had been the lucky ones.
He realized now that once again, the metal braces that were holding the bones where they ought to be, so they could heal properly this time, had tangled in the hammock ropes. If he were to try to get up suddenly, he would end up on the floor. And likely break my leg again, he thought with a sigh.
“Okay, Dad,” he relented. “Thank you.”
Admiral Sunfall went to the door and called for his steward. “Get Thersylvanna to bring up a cot from the brig, please.”
Thersylvanna gave Shaundar an appraising look as he bullied the cot through the hatchway, but to Shaundar’s relief, it wasn’t an overly long one. Even in the relatively spacious quarters due an Admiral, it took up a lot of room. Shaundar had been hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. After all, he’d been sleeping packed in like tinned fish on hard wooden slats for the past three years; you’d think he’d be used to rough quarters. But either not being able to move around much had prevented injury, or he had gotten used to the bruising.
“Thank you,” he said to the bo’sun as he hobbled onto the cot. He had to admit, the sheets felt like clouds against his skin.
“Glad to have you back with us, sir,” he said with feeling.
Shaundar smiled. Thersylvanna had called him “sir” even back when he was a Midshipman, which wasn’t required of Warrants—and they didn’t tend to have a lot of respect for Ensigns or Lieutenants, either. Ever since he’d offered coca leaves when Shaundar was court martialled and flogged, and Shaundar had refused—that was when it had started. The irony was that in retrospect, he probably would have taken the leaves.
He settled into the bedding and his father turned the light down again, but sleep eluded him for a long time. Being back on the Arianrhod’s Pride, when he’d spent so much of his childhood here, felt surreal. And he wanted Yathar and Sylria by his side again, packed in like they were in the prison camp. He felt naked without them.
Shaundar thought about Sylria for a long while. By now she was probably on her way back to Gorna, her homeworld. Should he have tried harder to convince her to come back to Peridot with them instead?
He was glad they’d made love when they finally realized they were going to live. That they were free. It wasn’t uncommon for elves to tryst casually, but it still had felt like something more.
Should he feel guilty, he wondered? Did doing this constitute a betrayal of Narissa? He thought she’d understand, but he wasn’t sure he did.
Then again, it was his first time.
Well, his first by choice, anyway.
He flinched away from the memory. There were so many memories that he was flinching from. At least we’re finally going home, he reminded himself. But even though he was here, sleeping in his father’s cabin like he had as a little boy, he just couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it.
Sleep continued to elude him for most of the night.
