Page 16 of Hijack the Seas: Seismic

I gave up, sat up, and put a finger to his lips. Which he instant grabbed in a fist because he was determined not to be distracted this time. Unfortunately for him, so was I.

“Among the many lessons of the past eight months or so,” I told him, seriously because he’d asked for it, “one stands above the rest: enjoy the downtimes. They don’t come along often, and if you spend them uselessly arguing, you’ll regret it when the pressure builds up and you explode.”

He kissed the finger before releasing it. “I’m more concerned about you exploding.”

I sighed and sank back into the evil, evil bubbles. The fey might have finally found a way to trap me. Right now, I didn’t care if I ever got out.

“Okay, you send me away,” I said. “And you lose because there are tons of them and only one of you, and they don’t care if they cheat. And then we lose, all of us, ‘cause Faerie wouldn’t have sent us here if she thought we could win this without the Green Fey. Then the gods come back and kill us all, including me.

“So, I get to spend the last few weeks or months of my life wracked with guilt and fear and mourning your loss.

“Thanks for that.”

Pritkin didn’t reply for a moment, and his voice sounded different when he did. “You’ve changed.”

I sucked in some bubbles, then spluttered and coughed them out again while flapping a hand at him to let him know I was okay. “You think?” I gasped.

I blinked water out of my eyes to see him regarding me soberly. “I wouldn’t have—I didn’t want this for you,” he finally said.

“This?”

“This fear. This pressure. The constant weight of the world on your shoulders, any number of worlds. That ridiculous happy-face T-shirt you wore the first time I saw you—that’s what I wanted for you.”

His hand cupped my cheek, and I smiled at him wearily. “Pythias don’t wear happy-faced Tee’s.”

“They don’t smile much, either. Lady Phemonoe rarely did, and her predecessor wasn’t much better from what I could tell.”

“Gertie smiled,” I said, remembering my old mentor fondly.

“Name once.”

I could name several, but one stuck out. “After a training mission on the Devon coast. She’d set Agnes and me the same job: find the item she’d buried with a time signature that showed it wasn’t from our era.”

“Not from your era?” Pritkin’s brow wrinkled, maybe because he didn’t know Gertie, who had been the Victorian/early Edwardian Pythia. I’d had to go back that far to find someone willing to train me.

I nodded. “Doesn’t happen very often, but sometimes a naughty witch or wizard trying a time spell actually survives and has to be hunted down. But of course, they know we’ll be after them and cast spells to make themselves hard to find. One way to get around that is to zero in on an object they dropped.”

“What kind of object?’’

“Doesn’t matter. You start with the easy things to spot, the kind of stuff that anybody might lose—a handkerchief, a piece of jewelry, even a hairpin—and eventually progress to harder items like a leaf caught on their shoe.

“They all feel . . . different, wrong, out of place, like a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. The Pythian power knows that whatever it is doesn’t belong in that time and sends up an alert—”

“And you do a locator charm to take you right to them,” Pritkin finished. Because while he might not know Pythian magic, he knew just about everything else.

“That’s the idea. Only no time traveler had dropped this particular object. Gertie put it there to give Agnes a test and sent me along to add an extra layer of difficulty because she was running out of things to challenge her with. Agnes was a bitch, but she was a talented bitch.”

“Another layer of difficulty?”

I smiled slightly. “There was only one object and two of us.”

“Ah.”

“I ended up covered in rotten seaweed, thanks to Agnes shifting me into a pile on the beach. But roughly the same time, my spell caught her and flung her half a mile into a mountain of fish remains beside a pier where the fisherman cleaned their catch.”

Pritkin didn’t say anything but blinked slightly as if he’d thought Pythian training was full of tea parties and tarot readings. Not that there hadn’t been some of those, but there’d been a lot more stuff like Devon. Because our enemies were like the fey, they didn’t play fair, so we had to be prepared for anything.

Including knickers full of seaweed.

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