The Deepest Ocean (Eden Series) (19 page)

He tilted the bottle of rum over his glass, but nothing poured out. Well, that explained why he couldn’t feel his arm any more. Sighing, he leaned back in his chair.

“What happened to that shark, by the way?” he said.

“Ah, that.” Alyster hadn’t drunk half as much, and other than the open top button of his shirt and the dark hollows beneath his eyes, he looked the same as always. The surgeon’s assistant had cut Darok’s shirt and jacket off him, so he was bare to the waist apart from the bandage around his arm. His trousers stank of smoke and were damp. He wanted nothing more than to get them off and crawl into his bunk, but he had to know how Yerena was, which meant inquiring into the shark’s health.

“That,” Alyster repeated, and Darok suddenly knew it would be a while before he got any sleep. “Yerena said there’s a Seawatch operative on
their
side. Controlling those killers.”

Unity.
Darok closed his eyes. It wasn’t bad enough sailing one ship into the Iron Ocean, one ship against everything the Tureans could throw at him. Now he had a Seawatch operative, a pack of killer whales and a missing surgeon to deal with as well. He had a cold, leaden suspicion that he had just won a battle and lost the war.

“I want to see her,” he said. “You’d better stay.”

Alyster passed the word to the steward, and they didn’t have long to wait before Yerena appeared. A steady warmth, as intoxicating as rum in its own way, spread through his chest at the sight of her, but it was easier to keep his features unrevealing in Alyster’s presence.

“Sit down,” he said to her. “Let’s hear it.”

Yerena’s spine was as straight as always, her shoulders back, but her hands were clasped tightly in her lap and it was a moment before she lifted her gaze from them to meet his eyes. “Seawatch experimented with whales before. The smaller ones. But whales can’t be alone for long, so whoever was chosen to work with them had to link to an entire pack at once. Seawatch only had one trainee who was talented enough.”

“What was his name?” Darok asked, before he remembered what she had told him earlier. “Oh right, Kovir. And he defected to the pirates?”

“I knew he wasn’t in Seawatch any longer, but no one spoke of him.” Yerena leaned back in her chair, the first time he had seen her do that, but there was more weariness than relaxation in her posture. “Except when those whales attacked—that was too well-directed and coordinated to be a coincidence. If that particular Kovir left Seawatch without permission to do so…”

“…there wouldn’t be too many places in the mainland he could hide.” Of course he would end up with the pirates, offering them his unique talents and his pack of seawolves.

Yerena made a few pleats in her green skirt, and they seemed to absorb all her attention before she looked up again. “I think that’s why Lady Lisabe is on board.”

Darok frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“As I came back to my cabin, I saw her finishing a remembrance for Olver Kasley.” The man who had died, Darok thought. The first, but not the last
.
“We spoke once she was done, and I told her about the whales. Her face looked…” Yerena hesitated, and he guessed she wasn’t used to describing anyone’s emotions. “She went back to her cabin without saying anything more.”

Darok glanced at Alyster, but got a blank shrug in reply. “Perhaps you could ask her to join us?” He waited until his brother had left before he spoke again. “Yerena, it doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone send Lady Lisabe after a rogue operative? Hell, why not sic
you
on him, rather than risking a Voice of the Unity?”

“You are sure she’s a Voice of the Unity, right?”

Darok started to say
What else could she be?
and closed his mouth abruptly. He’d been suspicious of Yerena at first, so he’d made her confirm that she was a Seawatch operative, but he had never done the same for Lady Lisabe. He hadn’t dreamed of doing so, because it would have been an insult to a Voice of the Unity, not to mention a possible black mark on his career. Besides, he had received word in writing days before he’d sailed—not from the Admiralty but from Skybeyond itself—that she would join him.

So when a woman had arrived on the docks of Sweet Harbor, a woman who dressed like a Voice of the Unity and wore a gold circle and called herself Lady Lisabe, he had no reason to think she was anything else. Seas lashed by the wind into vertical walls of water had never made him queasy, but at that moment all the rum threatened to make a reappearance.

“Did anything she’s said sound wrong? Maybe when she held the remembrance service?” He recalled how fanatical she had looked when she had spoken of the Unity. Surely such fervor couldn’t be faked. Or had she gone to an extreme to cover up the fact that she held the Unity in no great regard at all?

Yerena’s eyes were unblinking, but she shook her head. “I always thought she seemed genuine—”

There was a knock on the door and Alyster let himself in. “Lady Lisabe isn’t feeling well and can’t meet with you at the moment. She sends her apologies.”

Darok shoved his chair back. “You’ve been…close to her. Has she said or done anything that seemed unlikely for a Voice of the Unity?”

Alyster frowned, and there was a long pause before he answered. “No. If she’s a spider, Captain, she’s a good one.”

Spiders
was another name for Turean spies—little crawlers hiding unnoticed in corners as they spun their webs—but Darok thought how much more audacious it would be to put a spy in plain sight, pretending to hold one of the highest positions in the land, and never have her questioned as a result. No, it still didn’t hold enough water. A spy would need to send messages, and he could see no way for Lady Lisabe to do that on board a ship.

The real problem was proving she was a Turean. Another captain he’d been drinking with once had proposed a solution. “Lock ’em in a room for two days with nothing but salt water to drink. If they’re not licking damp off the walls on day three, they’re Turean.”

“And if they’re dying, they’re Denalait,” he had retorted. “That’ll make us very popular.”

“Have guards posted outside Lady Lisabe’s cabin,” he said to Alyster. “Two of our men. I don’t want her going anywhere alone. If she objects, let her know one member of my crew has already disappeared, and of course she’s much more valuable. That’s all.”

It was just a stopgap measure, so he had to think of some way to confirm or disprove his suspicions later, when he wasn’t so tired. Alyster nodded and let himself out, but Yerena stayed where she was.

“Your shark.” Darok remembered it belatedly. “Was it hurt?”

“One of the killers bit it.” She touched her left side, just below the rib cage. “Not too deep, thank the Unity, and your men distracted them after that. I’m sorry about the rudder.”

“Arnell and his men will build another one.” Darok spoke with an ease he was nowhere close to feeling, since until a new one was in place they weren’t going anywhere. “But is the creature close by?” If that was the case, he couldn’t justifiably ask the men to lower themselves from the ship with ropes, hanging close to the water.

“No, I sent it away. I want it as far as possible from those killers.”

He could understand her doing so, since the shark seemed to be all she had in the world, but it wasn’t the best solution either, given how useful the shark had been on their voyage. Still, that wasn’t a good time to discuss the matter.

“Do you want something to eat?” he said. It was afternoon by then.

“With the way the ship is pitching? I couldn’t keep anything down.”

He looked at her more closely. Her eyes spoke of a sleepless night, but otherwise she was as orderly as always. Her hair was braided, and the faint scent of soap and rainwater meant she’d taken full advantage of the deluge. Yerena, he realized, was one of those people who reacted to physical discomfort by making a greater effort to look no different.

“What about you?” Her gaze went to his bandaged arm. “How badly were you hurt?”

“Just an arrow—didn’t pierce anything vital.” He stifled a yawn as the effects of the rum crept up on him.

“You need to sleep.” Yerena got up, and he thought she was going to leave the cabin, but instead she went on. “Not in wet clothes either. I’ll take those off.” She knelt before him.

Darok had no objections to that at all, though after she had taken off his boots and peeled off his trousers, he wanted another reason for her to stay. He splashed cold water from the basin over his face and chest while she draped his clothes over a rail and hung up his sword-belt, but there didn’t seem to be anything else for her to do, and their time together was running out.

“Stay here,” he said. “Just to sleep.”

Her faint look of surprise faded. “I’m not used to sharing a bed with someone else for that reason, and your bunk looks narrow, but…”

“But what?”

“But yes.”

He remembered the first time he’d heard her say
no
, on
Daystrider
’s deck when she’d refused to allow anyone to lure the shark with meat. She’d been as soft-spoken then as she was now, but her
yes
sounded just as sure and direct, and he couldn’t keep a smile off his face.

“I’ll sleep on the outside,” he said.

“If you don’t mind falling.” She pulled her blouse and skirt off.

I already have
. He snuffed out the lamp and waited for her to get into the bunk. There was just enough room for him to lie beside her and slide an arm around her waist to tuck her body against his. She wore a shift, but it had been worn and washed so many times that its fabric was gossamer soft and thin.

He pressed his face into her hair, breathing in its scent. “Once this is all over, when you go back home, will you visit your parents? Seawatch ought to give you a little time to do so.”

Yerena’s voice was flat and expressionless. “Yes, they’ll give me time.”

But not money. He cursed himself silently for having brought that up, and Yerena went on. “But there’s not much my family and I could talk about, and I don’t know what they’d say if they saw me like this.”

“What do you mean, like this?”

Her shoulder twitched in a shrug. “Trained and tattooed and turned into a Weapon of Denalay. Please, let’s not talk about it any more.”

Darok thought any parents who knew how their child risked her life to protect her people would be proud—but then again, how would it feel to know they had, in effect, sold their daughter to people who’d marked her both mentally and physically? No, her homecoming was unlikely to be a purely joyous event.

“Then maybe you’d like to stay on this ship for a little while longer,” he said, “because if all goes well, I’ll sail her back to Triton Harbor, and from there it’s only two days’ carriage ride to my family’s home. You’d be welcome as a guest.”

There was so long a silence that he wondered if she had fallen asleep, but when she spoke, it wasn’t a certain one-word answer. “I don’t know.” Her voice was so quiet he had to halt his own breathing to hear. “I’d have to think about it. But can I ask you something?”

“Of course.” In bed with her, in the dark and tired as he was, she could have asked him to bare his soul and he would have done so.

“What happened to Dr. Flaige? You don’t have to tell me if it’s privileged information.”

He felt unaccountably disappointed and thought,
Don’t be a fool
. That information wasn’t privileged any more, so he told her about how Julean’s wife had been the navigator and cartographer on
Dragonfly
, a ship that had disappeared in the far north of the Archipelago. “Maybe he would have been able to accept it if he knew she was dead. Or maybe that would have made him more insubordinate. I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that even if he somehow lives through this, there’ll be no place for him on any ship of the fleet.”

He could only hope there would still be a
Daystrider
once the Tureans had tortured as much information as they could out of Julean. “Whatever his reasons, he abandoned his duty, and he’s not a cabin boy we could do without. Wilyerd is a good man, but he’s not a fully trained physician yet and he shouldn’t have that responsibility on his back.”

Yerena covered his hand with hers. “I’m sorry. I should let you sleep.”

Darok moved his head just enough that he could press a kiss behind her ear. She was warm and clean and smelled good, her body fitting so well against his, enough to loosen the knots in his muscles despite all the events of the day. The ship rolled and pitched, but he would sleep through that too.

She belongs to Seawatch first and foremost
, he thought.
I can’t risk getting involved with her.

I already am.

It was not the first time a commanding officer had refused Julean’s request to do something, anything, to find his wife, but he had never before confided in any of the captains he had served under. Darok was the only person—other than whoever in the Admiralty had read that last letter—who knew about Julean’s child.

And that had made no difference either. He’d turned his back when Julean would have given anything for some consideration, some understanding of what it was like to not even know what had happened to his family.

It was clear Julean had to act alone, but looking out of the single window of his tiny cabin gave him pause. The water was a chaos that looked darker compared to the firelight glowing on the deck. Screams of men from the sinking
Rorqual
filled his ears and even if he wasn’t bleeding—yet—a great white shark would be highly unlikely to discriminate. He hesitated, fear starting to penetrate his frozen shell.