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Winia pulled herself over the ship’s railing and fell to the deck with a wet plop. She shook the water from her hair and looked around: the absence of crewmen was surreal. It would have been creepy, except that she could See there was nothing evil on board. Of course, it was still daylight. The evil seemed to have holed up in the hills, for the most part, and the ship was safe.
She immediately went below deck. It was always possible that someone else had returned to the ship as well, and she might meet up with them down there. If not, there were still things there that she knew she would need, whether she met up with anyone else or not.
Winia went to Raekar’s cabin first. Most of his more potent tools were securely locked away – or with him, where ever he had ended up. Winia removed the key to his emergency cache from its place of hiding and proceeded to rummage through arcane that were generally forbidden for her to touch. When she stood, her satchel was bulging and she felt considerably more dangerous than before.
Next, she went to the soldiers’ bunks. Hopefully there would be a travel pack among their kits that she could load with food from the galley: Winia didn’t know if it would be safe to return to the ship in the future, and didn’t care to gamble against the possibility that it wouldn’t. She opened the door and froze.
Bodies. They filled the berths like crates stacked in a hold. Stiff, inanimate: some were partially mummified, all were dead. Winia choked on the urge to vomit and stumbled back. The door swung shut, cutting off the horrible sight, but Winia had already turned away.
Her stomach heaved dryly. There had been no stench of rot, and neither had her Sight given her warning. There were no souls in those corpses. Inanimate, they were no more evil than a knife or a block of wood – but Winia realized that was a temporary truth. They were being stored. At any time they could be awoken again, and Winia remembered what the undead had Looked like when awake.
She scrambled to her feet. The ship was not safe: even though she saw no evil now, those corpses really could be awakened at any time. She darted back to the ladder leading above decks, and threw open the hatch just in time to see a ghoul pull itself over the same railings she had climbed over, coming from shore.
Winia stared. It wasn’t evil. And as if that weren’t strange enough, it had a woman clinging to its back. The ghoul’s passenger released her hold and slumped to the deck boards with a groan. “Thank you, Elik. I couldn’t have managed it with this arm.”
She was slender, Winia saw, with short, ragged blonde hair. Her clothes were a patchwork of threadbare cloth under partial armor, and one of her arms was in a splint. She also had long, sharply pointed ears that peaked out halfway over her shoulders. She was an elf.
Winia stared harder, but the elf, oblivious, turned to the ghoul. “Elik?” she asked – then followed the corpse’s gaze to Winia. She yelped and scrambled unsteadily to her feet, then drew a long, ancient looking sword.
“Relax,” Winia said, climbing the rest of the way through the hatch. “There are two of you and just one of me, and I don’t even have a weapon. Not much of a threat here, is there?” Winia’s heart pounded as she offered the lie. Her gaze was a weapon, if she removed her eye patch, and many of the things she’d stolen from Raekar’s chest had creative alternate uses.
“You seem awfully confident for someone who isn’t a threat,” the ghoul said warily. “And given what your friends did at the castle, I think we’ll treat you as dangerous until we know otherwise.”
Winia’s heart did a flip. It was talking to her. Well, that was better than it attacking, wasn’t it? But…her friends? She hadn’t been able to find anyone after fleeing into the woods. Had some of the others found each other and…done what? Ignore the part about danger, she thought. A subtle threat that has been spotted is treated more seriously than an over exaggerated one.I’m safer if they think I’m dangerous than if they decide I’m brash. That had been one of Raekar’s lessons.
“Oh?” Winia asked as casually as she could. “And what’s that?”
“They attacked it,” the elf snapped. “But they killed the wrong lord, and now they languish in the dungeon, awaiting Vessadial’s pleasure with the other prisoner.” Her words were hissed with anger and frustration, but Winia barely noticed.
“Prisoners?” Winia gasped. “Was one – was one older, without armor? A man with grey hair and a thin sword? A wizard? Is he still alive?!”
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