The Price of Peace by A.R. Knight

Author:A.R. Knight [Knight, A.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798888580035
Publisher: Black Key Books

Chapter 18

On The Sea

The Tsuro cut the seas better than any knife, molding with the waves and scooping their power into its own bobbing acceleration. The craft dipped and rose, tacked and surfed with canny expertise. Svarde watched from near the captain’s till, admiring the crew’s controlled efforts as they spun from one rigging to the next, one rudder control to another to keep the Tsuro one with the water.

The Foti ship up from Vis, compared to this, had been a hammer mashing through the waves. No subtlety, no grace. Just raw power. Then again, that was the Foti way. Svarde felt it in his axes, stowed in a trunk Maena gave him for the voyage. Felt it too, in the cloak weighing on his back, the blood in his veins. Raw power forged into something useful.

The Tsuro and its sailors seemed born of a different grace.

“Catching you looking,” Maena said, stepping away from the till and handing it over to the first mate. “Never been on a Rana ship?”

“Not once.”

“Then you haven’t truly sailed.”

Svarde chuckled, “Kance would take issue with you.”

“They don’t sail. They fly. We know the water, they avoid it.”

“Which is better, I wonder?”

“I don’t think you need to ask my opinion.”

The Rana crew, Maena included, drifted off the heavier wear adorning them on Noctia, the open sea air prompting a wholesale fashion change. Gone were the armors, the badges and honorary ornaments for ranks and status. Most wore nimble robes dyed in colors befitting their station, such that the Tsuro’s deck looked less like the drab brown and metal Svarde knew and more like Vis’s florid jungles.

“Do you always dance so much?” Svarde said, nodding to the crew as they flipped, swung, and tumbled around the deck. “It has to be risky.”

“If you don’t know what you’re doing, like anything else,” Maena replied, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Svarde and looking over her ship. “If you do, then we save energy. Watch, and you’ll see.”

This was their third day at sea, spiriting northward, so at first Svarde took her comment to mean he hadn’t really seen anything yet. An insult, or perhaps an invitation. He chose two sailors, one up top finishing tying a spare sail now that the wind had picked up, and a second carrying a rope from bow to stern for some unknown errand. At first their movements seemed fast but random, jerked in odd directions. As the Tsuro banked down a wave, the rope-carrier actually lost ground, back-stepping with the heavy rope laden across his shoulders. No concern showed across the man’s face. When the Tsuro came up the next wave, though, the man tilted forward into a run, a headlong dash along the deck.

Sure he was going to go overboard, Svarde started that way, ready to dive off and grab the moron before he was lost.

Maena stopped him.

“Watch, Foti.”

The doomed run slowed as the Tsuro topped out its ascent, the carrier going past the ship’s mid-deck, nearing his destination. The Tsuro started down,

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