Ship of Dragons (Quest of the Nine Isles Book 3) Read online

  “How is it you came to be here?” asked Basil.

  The old woman looked at us as if surprised to remember we were still standing there. “A shipwreck,” she answered. “It was long ago. I have waited these many years since, but rescue has never come.”

  She looked around us at the gathering shadows. “We should speak no more out here. Nightwalker is not the only man-eating beast on this island.”

  She and Cassia ushered us through the narrow door in the timber fence. Inside, we found a small half circle of ground, containing a campfire. Beyond this was a cavern cut out of the rock, its insides lined with woven mats and scraps of rope and timber and other treasures the old one must have hoarded over the years. There was food too, piles of fruit that must have been collected from the surrounding trees. Dead fish hung drying from a pole over the fire. I decided Cassia must have gone hunting for something more filling when she had stumbled across Basil and me instead. That would account for her carrying the old woman’s spear.

  Cassia invited us to sit near the fire and offered us food. It had been a while since we had enjoyed fresh meat, and the smoked fish tasted good. While Basil and I ate, Cassia plied us with questions about where we had come from and what all had befallen me since the sinking of Corthium. Even Helia eventually overcame her disappointment that we were not a rescue party and began to show curiosity about her new guests.

  I answered all questions guardedly, and for a wonder, Basil followed my lead. I sensed that there were certain pieces of information that, if shared, might dent our hosts’ faith in me, something I wasn’t yet ready to deal with. As quickly as possible, I changed the subject.

  “I’m sorry we are not the rescuers you had hoped for,” I told Helia. “But Basil and I have supplies aboard our boat and will divide them with you before we leave.”

  “Leave?” Cassia asked. “You don’t plan to abandon us here?”

  I glanced from the dismayed dragonkind girl to Helia, whose face had become a mask of anger. Clearly this was not going to be easy.

  “Here’s the situation,” I said. “Basil and I are on an urgent mission to rescue our friends, taken captive by Gold Ship Voyagers. We will return for you, of course, or we’ll send help back. But we cannot take you with us. Our quest is a dangerous one.”

  “And you think we’d slow you down?” demanded Cassia.

  “Well, yes,” I said, squirming uncomfortably. “Anyway, even if we wanted to take you, our little dinghy couldn’t hold you.”

  I looked to Basil for support, but he looked as dumbfounded by my claims as the two women even if for a different reason. He had to be wondering why I kept insisting on the small size of our boat when the truth was it was more than large enough for all of us.

  Helia reached across the campfire and grabbed my arm. “We will not be left behind,” she said firmly, a desperate look in her eyes.

  Her bony fingers dug into my forearm with a pressure that made me cry out. The jungle cat had sunk its fangs into that same spot only a short while ago.

  The old woman looked down at the row of puncture marks where trails of blood had dried across the front of my arm. I had all but forgotten the injury in the excitement of the moment, but its painful throbbing made it hard to ignore now.

  “I will look after this,” Helia said, her mood changing to one of sympathy.

  While the old woman gathered her materials, I could hear Cassia arguing with her in the background. I didn’t catch all that was said, but by the time the two women returned to Basil and me, it appeared that an agreement had been reached. They would not insist on accompanying us. As Cassia told us, they did not want to overburden our small boat and risk none of us making it to shore. Instead, they would remain here and await whatever help we sent for them. They were safer doing so, now that Nightwalker was dead.

  I carefully avoided Basil’s curious gaze on me as they gave us this information. But I could not so easily avoid the stirrings of guilt I felt as Helia bathed my injured arm in warm water, spread some kind of herbal salve over the wounds, and bandaged them with strips of wool. I could only guess how valuable such supplies were to her, when they were in such short supply here.

  To ease my conscience, as soon as Helia had finished tending my arm, I roused up Basil, who looked as if he was about to fall asleep in front of the warm fire. The two of us tramped back out into the night, promising to fetch back half our supplies from the boat. We carried torches to light our way, and Cassia gave us her spear in case we encountered any dangers. It would have been more sensible and convenient to wait until morning. But the darkness gave us an excuse to go alone. I was taking no chances of either Cassia or Helia wanting to come with us and getting a look at our ship in the light of day.

  “Why are you lying to them about the ship?” Basil asked as we traveled toward the beach. “The boat is no dinghy, and it’s plenty big enough to hold all of us.”

  I sighed. “There may be no coming back from this quest in front of us, Basil. I hope we will succeed at rescuing Skybreaker and the mapmaker’s apprentice. But if everything goes wrong and nobody survives, Cassia can’t die with us. She may well be the last hope of our people, the only remaining dragonkind. I need to know that she’s stowed someplace comparatively safe until I or someone else can return for her.”

  “And neither Cassia nor Helia would ever agree to remain behind if you told them that?” he guessed.

  “Exactly. I need them to believe there’s no choice. You saw how desperate Helia is to escape these shores after all her years stranded here. She’d risk anything to sail away with us. No, one way or another they must be led to see that’s impossible.”

  Neither of us said aloud that even if it was for their own good it was a cruel deception. But both of us must have been thinking it.

  At the beach, I swam out to the ship and collected the supplies. I was the natural one to do it, being the better swimmer of us two. Basil remained back on the sand, holding the torches aloft so I could see my way back to land. I divided equally the stores we had brought from the mapmaker’s home, grateful now that we had more than we probably needed. I made it back to shore without incident, and we returned to the shelter where we had left Cassia and Helia. The campfire had been built up with extra fuel, creating a glow we could see even at a distance to guide us through the trees.

  The two castaways tried to persuade us to spend the night, and it was tempting, Basil and I both being exhausted from our trekking and the events of the day. But we couldn’t do it. I was mindful of the precious hours we had lost already in this unplanned stop on the island. The long night ahead should be spent on the sea, continuing our race after the Gold Ship Voyagers.

  So we left the promised provisions with the two women, accepted the waterskins they had refilled for us, and took our leave. It was better this way, I told myself, leaving the warm glow of their fireside for the last time. Best if nobody had any more time to change their minds.

  I turned my thoughts from the distraction of all that had happened these past few hours and back to what lay ahead—the pursuit of our enemies.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Back aboard the ship, we lifted anchor and continued on our way. All signs of the storm we had sailed through earlier were long past. We were carried along now by a pleasant nighttime breeze. The seas were calm and smooth, the sky clear and full of stars.

  Basil, probably mindful of my injury during the jungle cat attack, took the helm so that I could sleep. I curled up on the deck beneath the awning we used as shelter and listened to the sounds of the canvas flapping gently overhead as I drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  I soared through the night sky, glittering stars and a silver moon above, the dark sea far below. Just like that other dream, I looked down on a distant world where the black sea was smooth and glossy and the scattering of ships beneath me were just tiny specks amid endless ocean.

  I swooped down, cutting through a light haze of clouds until the shapes of the ship
s became more distinct. In the moonlight, I could make out their fluttering golden sails. I dived lower still until the handful of ants moving around on the decks resolved themselves into the forms of men. One ship drew me nearer, seeming to reel me in, though there was nothing special about it. This ship was larger than the others and sailed slightly behind the rest of the fleet as though something slowed it. A heavy burden of cargo perhaps.

  I glimpsed that cargo now, a large dark shadow spread across an upper deck. At first it seemed like a lifeless blur, but then it moved, lifting a broad wing. Or at least it tried to lift the wing. But something seemed to pin it down, restricting movement.

  My heart beating faster, I swooped so low and close that I could make out the scene more clearly. None of the deckhands looked up at my arrival. I was invisible, a whisper of wind passing over their ship to light upon the upper deck.

  I stood directly before the familiar form of Skybreaker, near enough to see the glint of his scales reflecting back the moonlight. But the sight of my bonded dragon did not fill me with joy, only pain. Now I could see why the mad dragon was unable to move. He was bound with heavy chains, ropes of iron thicker than a man, crisscrossing his back and wings and hanging from shackles around his front and back legs, fastening him to great rings on the deck. His captors were taking no chance of his escape.

  Worse than that, the giant beast seemed to have no will to fight. His head drooped, his eyelids heavy over the once-fiery orbs that now looked at the world around him with disinterest. I noted with anger that there were several open wounds and slash marks across his chest and back, as if his captors had cut at him with their spears and puny swords. Each injury was a minor cut to the dragon, no more painful than the jab of a splinter. All the same, it was hard to see the once-magnificent beast brought so low. I had developed an unexpected protectiveness toward him since our bonding.

  “Lizard, what have they done to you?” I murmured sadly. But of course he couldn’t hear me.

  I had a chance to see exactly what was done when a strange figure now approached. The bronze-skinned man wasn’t a sailor but a warrior, armed with a sword at his hip and a golden veil of the kind the Gold Ship Voyagers usually wore across the lower halves of their faces. I noticed the veil dangled loose now. Perhaps the Voyagers didn’t bother as much with them when they were at sea.

  The stranger spoke harshly to the dragon, his words low and indistinct. Despite the sword he wore, he carried another weapon in his hand, a spear. The tip of it glowed faintly greenish in the darkness, as if smeared with some luminous substance. Poison, I decided.

  I watched, helpless and enraged, as he poked the dragon in the flank with the point of the spear, inflicting a small wound beneath a loose scale, a weak spot in Skybreaker’s armor.

  The injury was small, but its effect was startling. Even as the Voyager turned away and plodded off, the dragon’s head dropped lower and his eyes became glazed.

  Those people were using small doses of poison to keep Skybreaker drugged, I realized. That was why he didn’t struggle against his chains. A beast of his size could cause a lot of damage, even to a ship this large, if he had the strength to fight.

  “So this is how they’re holding you,” I said to Skybreaker.

  Then I realized there might be one other reason for his subdued mood. As if the poison was not enough, the Gold Ship Voyagers had a further encouragement meant to motivate the dragon to cooperate.

  As soon as the thought entered my head, I felt drawn away from the dragon, pulled to drift across the deck toward an open hatch and a steep row of steps descending into the belly of the ship.

  I passed the hold where cargo was stored and flitted like a shadow down a corridor that was illuminated only by the occasional flickering lantern. I had been in a ship’s brig before, when I was held prisoner by Captain Ulysses and his pirates. This ship’s place of confinement was little different than that I had seen aboard the pirates’ Sea-Vulture. Whatever force moved me now pulled me toward a square cell little bigger than a horse’s stall. But the metal bars on the front were not meant to imprison any sort of animal.

  There was a human in this cell, a skinny, black-haired boy of no more than twelve or thirteen years of age. I knew the raggedly dressed figure at a glance, even in this poor lighting. Aetios. I had heard the mapmaker call him that. The boy was a pearl diver, one of the cove dwellers who lived at the edge of the mapmaker’s swampy homeland. Once, Aetios had used his skills to procure the old mapmaker the materials he required for his trade, the octopus ink, crushed coral, and other ingredients—some of them magical—that the mapmaker needed to create his incredible maps. Before his death, the old man had intended to train the boy as an apprentice, proclaiming he had the gift to be a maker of magical maps, that the materials spoke to him and would lend him their power.

  I knew all this because I had witnessed the exchange through a dream. In the same way, I knew why the Gold Ship Voyagers had snatched this seemingly unimportant child, stealing him away from his homeland. It was because of Skybreaker. The boy had befriended the dragon, and short as their acquaintance was, Skybreaker seemed protective of Aetios. Noting this, the Gold Ship Voyagers had taken the boy prisoner along with the dragon, using him as yet another tool to control the beast. If Skybreaker resisted his captors or tried to escape, presumably the boy would be killed.

  This knowledge passed through my mind in a flash of awareness, but it didn’t hold my focus. My attention was all for what the boy was doing at the moment I saw him. His back was to me, and he was writing on the wall of his cell. I shouldn’t have been able to see the writing, because the nearest flickering lantern was far off down the corridor. He should have been enveloped in darkness. But there was a strange bluish glow coming from the boy’s fingertips and from the wall where he wrote.

  Fascinated, I drew closer. Now I saw the boy was holding a luminescent substance that looked like a bit of seaweed. It must have been one of the magic-tinged ingredients he had collected from diving in the waters off the cove, a material he had fetched up for the mapmaker. But he hadn’t given this piece to the old man. He must have pocketed it and forgotten about it.

  He used it now, crushing the leaves in his hands until the glowing blue liquid seeped out and using it like ink to draw upon the wall. He had no quill, and his fingertip made a clumsy pen. But I couldn’t deny his artistic skill. The likeness he sketched out on the water was immediately recognizable as an underwater scene, an image of a coral reef surrounded by little fish.

  The remarkable thing about the painting, the thing that made me stare, wasn’t his artistry. This work was capable but rougher than the experienced skill of the old mapmaker. No, what made this painting amazing was that it was alive. The water shifted and bubbled around the coral reef as little fishes darted around it. Light and shadow played over the scene, reflected from the surface above. The wall itself seemed alive with the swirling water and the glow of the magic.

  The old mapmaker had been right in detecting Aetios’s promise. The boy knew nothing. He was unpracticed and had received no training. But he had a gift. And here in a foul-smelling cell in the belly of an enemy ship, he was discovering his ability.

  I had seen enough. I drifted away, back through the cargo hold, up the stairs, and out the open hatch into the night. Curling upward like smoke, I rose into the air, toward the star-scattered sky. As I wafted past the highest mast, the ship’s golden sails fanned out in the breeze.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I woke to find the same breeze filling the sails of our small ship. A pale dawn painted the horizon and informed me that I had slept longer than I meant to. Basil hadn’t awoken me to take my turn with the compass and helm. He must have thought I needed the rest.

  I stretched now and crawled out from beneath the awning, planning to relieve my cousin at the wheel.

  “I think we’re getting close,” I told him, taking over.

  I didn’t know how I knew that. It was just a growing feeling,
an awareness in the back of my mind. Maybe it was the dragon bond telling me Skybreaker was near.

  Basil didn’t answer. His attention seemed fixed on something in the distance.

  “Another island,” he said, pointing to what was little more than a rocky sandbar ahead. A pile of rocks and a few trees made up the little scrap of land protruding from the sea.

  As I scanned the spit of land we were set to sail past, something else caught my eye. Beyond the isle were several shapes on the water, maybe as many as a dozen pieces of driftwood. Only, as we drew nearer, it became rapidly clear they were more than that. They were large and sleek, and they had sails. Golden sails.

  “Basil,” I said urgently, pointing them out.

  Inwardly I raged at myself. How could we have been so careless as to sail right up on the Voyagers’ fleet without even knowing it? The very thing we had been chasing after was right before us, and we were caught unprepared.

  Basil was surprisingly calm. “All right,” he said to me. “You wanted to find the Gold Ship Voyagers and we have. Now would be a very good time for you to share whatever plan you’ve got on how to tackle them.”

  It was time to confess. “There is no plan. I figured we would solve that problem when we got to it.”

  My cousin stared at me, stunned. “You mean you aren’t going to do anything with your magic? I would never have agreed to this fool quest if I had known you didn’t have an infallible plan. I thought sure you would do something with the red glow and the whooshing.”

  He threw up a hand as if to imitate the motion I made whenever I was blocking something with a magical shield.

  “I can’t,” I reminded him. I showed my wrist, shaking it so that the nathamite shackle rattled. A faint reddish-purple glow still emanated from my magic hand. But as long as I wore the bracelet made of the mysterious magic-blocking metal, I had no access to the power bestowed on me by the Sheltering Stone.