Bannon turned to her with a strange expression. “The divers poisoned you?” He wiped sand out of his reddened eye.
Nicci gauged his expression carefully. “Yes, in the pot of chowder you delivered.” She could tell by the look on his face that he hadn’t known, which gave her a sense of relief. “That was why I felt so weak I could barely fight the selka. I was racked by poison.”
His expression turned to dismay. “In the food I brought? I poisoned you? I didn’t know! I didn’t mean to! Sweet Sea Mother, I am so sorry, I—”
In a similar circumstance, Nicci knew that Jagang would have murdered the young man, slowly and painfully, for such an error. There were times when Death’s Mistress would have killed him as well, but she was different now. Richard had changed her. Seeing Bannon’s abject misery, his open honesty, she was reminded again of why she had not suspected the meal he’d brought.
Nodding slowly to herself, she said, “That is why they used you, Bannon Farmer. I would never think you capable of treachery or of trying to harm me in any way.”
“I’m not! I would never poison you.”
“You see, your very innocence was a weapon that others turned against me. They duped you.” She hardened her voice. “Don’t let it happen again.” As he stammered and offered far too many apologies, Nicci flexed her fingers, felt the magic, felt strong again. “It no longer matters. I have recovered.” She laid her hand on Nathan’s temple and easily summoned what she needed to knit the torn flesh of his wound.
He let out a sigh of relief. “Thank you. It was not dire, but it was an annoyance.”
She turned to Bannon, looked at his battered form. “And now you.”
The young man took a step away, uneasy about her magic, or maybe not convinced that she had actually forgiven him. “There’s no need, Sorceress. They are but minor injuries. I will recover by myself in time.” He touched the slash on his thigh.
But Nicci, needing to reassure herself that she had full control over her powers again, reached out to grasp his arm. “I insist.” She let the power flow, and his bruises vanished, his cuts healed. The flicker of fear vanished from his face. “That’s wonderful! I feel like I could fight the selka all over again.” He gripped his sword.
“Let’s hope we don’t have to do that, my boy,” said Nathan.
Nicci brushed sand off her black dress and tied her hair back out of her eyes. “I want you both intact. We have work to do.” She looked up and down the coast. “We need to learn where we are.”
CHAPTER 19
After he accepted his disheveled appearance, Nathan insisted on searching the wreckage to locate his sword, as well as any other items they might find useful for their survival. After all the misfortunes they had suffered, he had little hope of retrieving his precious weapon, but by a stroke of good luck he did find his ornate blade. The sword was wedged between a splintered wine cask and a crate that had held brightly dyed fabrics for market, which were now waterlogged and ruined.
The wizard pulled the blade free and raised it into the sunlight with a sigh of satisfaction. “That’s much better!” He winked at Bannon. “Now you and I, my boy, can defend our sorceress against any attackers.”
“The gulls and crabs are surely trembling in fear.” Nicci rolled her eyes and got down to serious business. “Before we set off, we should salvage any supplies we can find. There’s no telling how far we are from civilization, or how long it will take us to get back to the D’Haran Empire.” Even after their ordeals, she continued to think of what she needed to do for Richard and his vision for the future.
Along with several other mangled corpses of Wavewalker sailors, they found an intact keg of drinking water, from which they drank their fill, then a crate of salted meat. Nathan was discouraged to have lost all the new shirts, vests, and cloaks he had purchased in Tanimura, but he did discover a sailor’s trunk that contained a fresh shirt that fit Bannon, a tortoiseshell comb, and a packet of waterlogged letters, the ink now running and smeared. The few decipherable words indicated they were notes from a lost sweetheart who would now never get a response from her beloved.
“Take only what we can use.” Nicci pulled out a long fighting knife the nameless sailor had kept in the bottom of his trunk. She fastened the sheath to her waist. The bout with the insidious poison had left her weak and incapacitated, but it had taught her a lesson. Even if she couldn’t use her magic, Nicci would not let herself be unarmed. Never again.
Using scraps of sailcloth, they fashioned makeshift packs to carry the salvaged supplies. Just after the sun reached its zenith, the three set off down the expansive beach.
Around them, the headlands rose up in sheer sandy ledges dotted with tufts of pampas grass and fleshy saltweed. They worked their way up to the point, from which they paused to look out into the sparkling sea. Nicci saw no other sails, no approaching ships, not even the line of angry water that marked the reefs that had destroyed the Wavewalker.
“We must have been blown far south,” Nicci said, scanning back the way they had come. From Captain Eli’s maps, she thought they might be somewhere down on the Phantom Coast.
In such an empty land devoid of any human markings, an artificial structure stood out like a shout. Bannon spotted it first with his sharp eyesight, pointing ahead across the windswept uplands to a promontory half a mile away on which stood a monolith of rocks, obviously built by people and just as obviously placed there so it could be seen from afar.
Squinting, Nathan said, “Without any frame of reference, it’s difficult to tell how large the structure is.”
Nicci set off. “We have to go see. It might give us our bearings, or point the way to some nearby town or military outpost.”
Above the beach, the bleak, grassy emptiness played tricks on them, and the promontory with its stone tower was much closer than it had seemed. As they approached, Bannon sounded disappointed. “It’s just a pile of rocks.”
“A marker. A cairn—it’s to signal a waypoint,” Nathan said.
The marker was a tower of neatly piled rocks, with the largest boulders around the base stacked and wedged to form a solid foundation on which a thin, tall
pyramid had been erected. The apex of the cairn was only a head taller than Nathan. Thick scrub grasses grew around its base, and orange and green lichen mottled the rough black surfaces of the mounded rocks. The rocks did not look like any others in the vicinity.
“Someone went to great difficulty to build this,” Nicci said. “It has obviously been here a long time.”
The wizard shaded his eyes and stared out into the sparkling ocean. “It might be for passing sailors. A point to mark on their maps. Or a signal tower … not that we could signal them anyway.” He sighed. “There isn’t enough brush to build a decent bonfire.”
Nicci turned to him with a thin smile. “A ball of wizard’s fire hurled into the air might draw some attention.”
Bannon circled the cairn, looking for any clues. He squatted down, brushing aside the lichen and moss. “Oh! Words are carved on these bottom stones,” he said, revealing chiseled letters. “It’s a message.”
Nicci and Nathan came around to see the first stone, and Nicci froze. The incised letters read, To Kol Adair.
“Well.” Nathan rocked back, sounding pleased. “I suppose that is the waypoint we were looking for.”
Nicci’s chill deepened as she saw the rough, weathered words carved into the next stone. From there, the Wizard will behold what he needs to make himself whole again.
The words on the third stone made her throat go dry. And the Sorceress must save the world.
Nathan looked at her in astonishment. He lifted his hand, flexing his fingers. “Made whole again? Do you think it means I will be able to touch my Han again? Use magic? Red knew! She knew.”
Nicci frowned, feeling a knot in her stomach. “Much as I hate to admit it, this lends credence to what the witch woman wrote.”
Bannon was confused. “What? What is it? A prophecy?” He looked from one to the other.
“Prophecy no longer exists,” Nicci said, but her insistence did not sound convincing. Maybe if this prediction was old enough, burned into the fabric of the world before all the rules themselves changed …