Bastion of Sun

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

A New Friend

The splash of waves woke Helix. That and something sharp in his side. He groaned, feeling splinters and wetness against his cheek, and cracked open his tired eyes to see damp timber. His tongue felt around his mouth, tasting something sour and awful. Bile? And memories returned, landing on him like a crashing wave...

A lantern in the dark, finding him.

His mark, revealed to all.

Vomiting on the deck.

Chains.

He gasped, jolting upward, yet came up short, steel rattling. He looked behind him. His wrists were pink, his skin chafed from the metal manacles latching him to the mizzenmast. "It wasn't a dream," he whispered, starting to feel sick once more. Then he remembered his sore ribs, but didn't see anything nearby that could have been digging into him.

Strange...

The cry of gulls came back as his world refocused like a lens.

He looked up, squinting. The sun was bright above—too bright—as if the sky were on fire. He tried to rub his sleep-encrusted eyes but the shackles shook again, mocking him. Slowly, a figure resolved itself.

A woman.

Sitting on the boom, perched precariously, her steel-tipped boot swung a hairsbreadth above him. Helix glanced about. Normally the quarterdeck was reserved for officers—but he noticed only a swarthy-faced helmsman manning the ship's wheel, and the man was out of earshot and his gaze fixed ahead. It left Helix and the woman essentially alone. Helix scampered backward, pushing himself upright to get a better view of her and he felt his mouth go dry.

She had scarlet hair and wore tight, faded black leather pants and a loose shirt that might have been white at one time but was marred with dirt and blood. Her slender arm rested on her bent knee, leather and metal-strapped vambraces on her forearm and bicep, and he watched a dagger dance amid her fingers. Her other arm was crooked in a makeshift cloth brace.

She looked down.

"Morning," she said with a faint smile. Her voice was husky yet light, and her piercing brown eyes—a faint band of black charcoal circling them—narrowed on him. It reminded him of the Algasi he'd read about in the stories, fierce tribal warriors who fought for honor, yet while she had neither the wildness nor the darkened skin of an Algasi, there was a certain feral quality to her. She watched him, curious yet disinterested. Helix wasn't sure how she seemed both, but she managed it. In the same way that she was pretty and fearsome.

Helix rolled his shoulders, trying to get feeling back into his muscles as he sat up straighter, pressing his back against the mast. His ribs still smarted as if riddled with tiny splinters, and he looked down, trying to find what had pained him so. He groaned. Had I slept on a steel bar?

"You were out solid," the woman voiced. "I was bored. I woke you up." She lifted her boot.

"You—why would you—" he growled, confused and angry. "Wait, who are you?"

"Who are you?" she replied.

He groaned again as his side throbbed, and his back and... In fact, everything seemed to ache, but none of that mattered in the wake of his memories. My dream is dead. "It doesn't matter," he said forlornly and hunkered back down, huddling into a ball, feeling sorrow settle over him like foam upon the sea, his heart heavy. Gulls cried, as if cackling at him.