The captain was as good as his word. During the night and the following morning, the Tarnil slaver had been left in the Lady's wake. Her lights dimmed to a glimmer and then were lost over the horizon.
The girls had barely slept that night. Olive and Nora watched the waters with frightened and wary eyes until by the noontime they lay in an exhausted heap against the stern guardrail.
Stanton, however, had fallen fast asleep on the deck as soon as the excitement had died down. His slumbering form was sprawled underfoot with the careless ease of a rag doll, unknowingly earning black looks from several grim-faced sailors as they attended their duties. Aaralon envied his blissful ignorance. Between the unsettling rocking motion of the ship and the brisk wind that blew across the waters, he found the night much too unsettling to answer the call of slumber.
In the late afternoon hours, a dense fog descended on the lake. The crew of the Lady of the Mist was clearly accustomed to this, as they quickly posted a watch atop the single mast where a permanent lookout's crows nest would have been on a much larger vessel.
"Aye, we'll be putting in to port within the hour," the captain told the weary students in answer to their unspoken question, "a shame the Red Demon be such a dragtail galleon, else I would've loved to see the hornets nest that the city would turn into were we to pull into harbor with that beast in tow." Aaralon smiled and nodded politely in response to the captain's black-toothed grin.
The port city of Anchorswane was much larger than Aaralon had first imagined. The Lady of the Mist was only one of nearly a dozen vessels moored there, and for all its speed and elegance, it was clearly the runt of the lot.
If Aaralon was suprised by the city, then Stanton was in a state of shock. The farm boy, who had never seen a village larger than the collection of homes and shops outside of the mage school grounds, was nearly agape. Stanton was pressed against the railing as he strained to procure a better view of the streets and row upon row of houses and buildings that spread out before them in a vast quilt of lumber and stone.
The captain set a calloused hand on Stanton's shoulder, causing the boy to jump in suprise.
"A beauty of a city aint she?" the captain asked, with a hint of pride in his eyes."
"Yes sir, it's certianly that."
"Pretty as a virgin though she may be, A lad like ye'd best take care here. Anchorswane be as rotten beneath the surface as the planks of any Tarnil vessel I've ever known. Ye'd best stay aboard until the bustle dies down." |