Page 39 of The Flame and the Forsaken

He’ll take the admiralty from you when he finds out you’ve helped me.

Well,Erran thought, with a wry twist of humor.That ship seems to have already sailed.

“It’s going to be rough,” he said. “If we can even get there in this thing.”

“I can’t guess how long we’ll be out here. You can still go back.”

He scratched down his chin and neck. “If we can make it to even one island in that archipelago, there’ll be vegetation we can eat, food we can hunt. A water source. And then we can...” He breathed deep. “Form some kind of a plan.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Aye.” He stood with a stretch. “Tide is about to go out again. Still no wind, but we’ll make do. You want the tiller again or the sails?”

Mariel’s face peeled back. “I’ll stick to the tiller, thank you.”

Erran closed his eyes and felt for the wind’s direction. Still weak, but north. They needed to go northeast, but he could work with it. “Let’s pull anchors. We’ve already wasted enough time.”

Mariel madeslight adjustments in the tiller’s direction while Erran played the sails. At times, she caught herself watching him, his shoulders all neat, flexing lines under his shirt, which hadn’t yet fully dried. It stirred something in her, which she knew better than to mistake for attraction, but it reminded her shewasalive... was a real, whole person who could feel something other than vengeance.

She had to grudgingly admit they made a good team. Maybe not in marriage, or in anything else that mattered, but she knew no one else who could have taken over theMistwitchand navigated her with such effortless ease.

As he worked, she saw the man who could one day lead a fleet but never would.

Why he was there—why he’dstayedafter she’d skirted just around the truth but close enough for him to know her crime was nothing petty—was a secret he held close, just as she was holding her own. She would never have risked so much for him, a bruising realization that stoked her guilty conscience. When the reckoning inevitably came, the power to exonerate them would not be hers to give, but the least she could do was explain he’d followed her from nothing more than some misguided sense of marital chivalry.

“Coming into the Eastern Shelf,” Erran called over his shoulder.

Mariel swallowed her pride to ask, “What... What does that mean?”

“The eastern side of the White Sea is actually two distinct bodies of water, and where they meet, there’s a... The best way to think of it is a collision of opposing tidal systems. The force can pull even the most hardy ship under.”

Her skin prickled with a fear she’d not considered. “Can we go around?”

“Nay. To go around, we’d encounter worse problems.” He shifted his stance, and the top sail snapped against the wind. “It’s just the first obstacle in sailing beyond the White Kingdom. By far not the hardest, but the islands we want are just on the other side.”

“Then how...” She hadn’t actually asked, or even wondered, why mariners could never leave the kingdom seas. “What do we need to do?”

“Grip that tiller for your life,” he said. “And pray we haven’t angered the Guardians too deeply today.”

Mariel squinted into the misty afternoon for any signs of the Eastern Shelf he was speaking of, but the sea was the same on all sides: choppy, endless, and misty from the scattered rain. She was still searching when something large and swelling caught in her peripheral vision. Turning, she saw a wall of water coming toward them and screamed.

“Crank it to the east, Mariel!” Erran hollered. His boots slid along the deck as he grunted and tugged at the halyards. “Harder!”

“I’m trying!” Mariel bared down, but it wasn’t enough. She was losing her footing, her hold, and the giant wave was coming right at their starboard hull. It was tall enough to swallow them whole. It was all happening too fast for her to adjust. “Erran, what do wedo?”

“Stay calm and quarter us—ah, steer us at an angle against the wave.”

Her heart leaped into her throat and lodged there, thumping and pounding. “I’mtrying, but it’s notbudging! It’s going to swamp us!”

“Trust me and keep turning!”

Ocean spray from the coming onslaught temporarily blinded her. She looked up, wondering how Erran could sound so calm, and was stunned to see him reefing the sails. The bottom one was rolled halfway up, and he tied it there.

“Mariel... We need... the sea anchors... not all of them, just two on each side...”

She wiped her face on her sleeve and peered behind her. “I can’t get to them unless I lock the tiller!”

“The tiller will be fine. We just need some drag to pull our rear?—”

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