I sat on the deck of the Ocean's Rose with the only book I'd managed to shove in my trunk before I had to leave my homeland forever: an illustrated history of the Qilari swamps. It was an old book, a gift from some visiting dignitary or other who had heard about my love of the swamps. When I was a little girl, I'd been mad about them. I thought I'd outgrown the obsession, but banishment will send you wheeling back to your childhood, apparently.
I was sitting in one of the rickety wooden chairs left out for passengers, alone except for the handful of sailors scrambling in the ropes overhead. The book lay open in my lap, but I couldn't concentrate on the words. I'd read it twice on this trip already, and there was still another two months before we landed in Lisirra, the city that would serve as my prison.
A family came up on deck, shattering the peaceful, windy silence. They looked Empire, like most of the people on this ship, and they had a tottering little boy who ran up to the railing and peered over the edge, shouting about sharks. His mother joined him, saying something I couldn't make out over the wind. They were speaking the Empire tongue, which was my entire reason for eavesdropping. I'd certainly need to be fluent soon enough.
The wind picked up and turned the pages of my book, landing on a dog-eared illustration of the Qilari crocodile, mean-faced and spiky-tailed. I shut the book and settled back in my chair. The masts were silhouetted in the sun. Two sailors scurried along the tops of the sails, shouting to each other. Empire again, although a dialect I wasn't familiar with. I caught every three or four words— ship, sight, direction. Cannons .
Cannons? My Empire was rustier than I thought. The Ocean's Rose was a passenger ship, and decidedly not one for aristocrats or the wealthy. I doubted they had cannons on board.
The two sailors were joined by a third, a woman who swung in on a rope. She landed lightly on her feet, balancing herself against the top of the mast. I couldn't see her face, but she nodded her head vigorously and then swooped away again, dropping to the deck a few paces away from me and rushing off toward the captain's quarters.
The family was still standing by the railing. They'd been looking down at the sea, not up at the sky, and missed that bit of excitement.
And then an officer came on deck.
He walked over to the family first and spoke to them in a slow, hushed tone. I tilted my head toward them, trying to be inconspicuous, but I couldn't hear. The mother and father exchanged brief, worried glances; the son was still clinging to the railing. A pause. Then the mother wrapped her arm around her son's shoulders and led him away, speaking to him as she did so. I caught, “a bit of time down below—” before the officer appeared next to my chair, the chain draped around his shoulder glittering in the sun.
“Good afternoon, Lady Anaja-tu,” he said.
“That's not my name,” I snapped, more harshly than I’d intended.
He faltered. I'd confused him. “Excuse me,” he said. “My, ah, lady—”
I scowled, but I didn't correct him a second time.
“I'm afraid we'll be sailing into a storm soon. We're asking that all passengers retire belowdeck. I'll send a porter around when it's safe for you to come back up.”
“A storm?” The sky was a blank curve of blue, like the side of a flawless Saelini glass vase. “Are there even any clouds out?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice firm. “We have a soothsayer on board, my lady, and these storms can form without warning, this far out.”
I'd studied enough science at university to know that storms don't materialize out of an empty sky, but I didn't say anything. Perhaps magic was involved. If that was the case, then I didn't think going belowdeck would do much good, but—
I remembered the sailors shouting the word cannon .
“It's not a storm, is it?”
The officer gazed at me with a polite and quietly desperate expression.
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