The Heirs of Death

25. Eziara

EZIARA

The tempest hadn't waylaid our trip, and we knew luck had little hand in it. The ship, still battling its way through buffeted seas, was fortified with endless layers of magic and spells. None of them the work of any of the passengers aboard. They had been inked and cast long before we left the port three nights ago by hands that were powerful and unholy, capable of wielding such dark sorcery.

Three full days of doing nothing but waiting and plotting and scheming. And starving. There had been no provisions hauled in the many crates and boxes piled in the bow or stacked in the lower rooms. Only corpses—so many of them. I didn't know who they had been, what role they had plaid, what mistake they had done to be killed in our lands. Almost eight thousand years of war had driven so many mad, had wrecked their nerves and patience. Their hope.

We didn't ask about them. Didn't even show any sign of disgust at the choking stench, or at how the ship had dipped so many times beneath the water—unlike so many.

There were months at sea between Cantelot and Eziara through a steady weather, and with how it had not stopped raining for almost a week, war would have erupted by the time we reached the shore would the ship not have been charmed. Would it not have sailed as fast as the winds, almost detaching itself from the very water until we were months' worth of sailing from Cantelot. Even then, it still fed on the magic that encircled it in the shape of black clouds that bled with the endless-spreading fog. The magic that had made it so powerful it went underwater, protected by a thick barrier so we remained as dry as we could get from the continuous rain.

We'd sailed under the water, in the dark, for hours that should've been weeks, alongside creatures that peered at us from their caves. Monsters and nightmares that guarded Eziara's lands from any unwelcomed outsider had coiled around us, had stared at each face, had sniffed and seemed to taste every lick of fear filling the boat.

Indeed, those hands that charmed this watercraft were to be feared.

And now, still rooted to the rotting wood of my seat, head resting on Sédil's shoulder—and hers gently on mine—I could see the far lands through the edge of my vision.  But every focus had been on the platform as the three males in our company sparred and trained, throwing old knives they'd found in some forgotten kits, and trying the full extent of their claws.

Even in starving bodies so thin bones jutted from the skin, they still demanded attention with the precision they moved, with the swift, sharp punches, with glowing steel sprouting out of their fingers. Sédil, Leyath, and I had trained for days before, sometimes alone, sometimes all six at once. Each time, there had been an audience, hard, wrecked eyes on us—lascivious as they took in every inch of our bodies. The first time, there had been Luthian's—Veidor's—fists as a warring. The second, it ended with a treat to the monsters lurking under us. None dared a move ever since.