Sword of Fire and Sea (The Chaos Knight Book One) Read Online Free Page A

have said more, but three tones from a brass bell atop ship cut him short. Setting the cup aside, he offered his hand to Ariadel. “If you'll excuse me?”
    Her touch was like fire—not surprising, perhaps, if one had time to think about it. Vidarian hadn't. And like fire, it didn't let go easily. “Captain, I have little doubt that Endera tricked you into this.”
    Vidarian laughed softly, dodging her earnestness by dint of a quick step backward and a respectful half-bow. “It was my own folly, Priestess, and I intend to make the most of it. The Quest and her crew have no equal on the sea, I promise you that.”

 
    F

or the next two weeks Ariadel could rarely be seen abovedeck, plagued as she was with seasickness. Or it was certainly sickness, and certainly from the sea travel, but unlike any Vidarian had ever seen. She spent most of her time in meditation, and was friendly if demure at meals with the crew—she had even entirely won Marks, the cook, to her side by dint of her willingly shared Velinese cooking techniques.
     
    No one on a Rulorat ship would be intimidated by ability, but Marks, an old stick of a ship's cook who had served under Vidarian's father, had a certain pronounced discomfort when it came to revealing admiration for the priestess's particular expertise. When pressed, he was a stoppered bottle uncorked—“And her knife skills, Captain—I know chaps'd pay good honest scratch at the academy to watch that woman shred ginger!”—but each admission came with guilt more worthy of an eastern cathedral. Because only Vidarian of all the crew knew that Marks had, in his youth, aspired to be a land chef in one of the imperial courts, he was the sole recipient of the cook's confessions, and so over the course of those first early weeks acquired, not quite willingly, a rather thorough education in the culinary comparison between the Velinese mainland and the sprawling southeastern empire.
    When not administering jovial cooking lessons, and instead caught unsuspecting by a knock at her door, the priestess's eyes had a furtive look, pinched as if all the world were pressing down upon her. But by the third week she'd improved significantly, enough to explore the ship in earnest. While making the rounds one morning Vidarian noticed a suspicious amount of handiwork being done aft on the main deck: net weaving, sail patching, minor woodwork—someone had even hauled a barrel up from stowage for recaulking.
    He found Ariadel at the eye of the storm, whispering to the lamps. The sight brought him up short, and he only realized he was staring when Calgrath, a spry and time-wrinkled topman who as far as Vidarian knew hadn't actually aged in a decade, addressed him in an awed mutter.
    “Somethin’ else, ain't it, Cap'n? She been at it all morning—already fixed the row lights along the port corridor.” Vidarian almost quailed to hear the reverent note in Calgrath's voice; he'd seen the man stoically extract sea urchin spines from a cabin boy's foot, fight a pirate with only a flying jib to his back, and laugh through a storm that sent half a dozen salted sailors back to land permanently. In fifteen years only the moonlit glaciers of Val Morhan had awed him.
    As the priestess whispered to each lamp, the cuffs of her velvet robe hiding her raised hands and obscuring her words, the flame within leapt up like a loyal puppy to a long–missed master. She left a trail of bright flames behind her, and yet with every invigorated flame the assembled crew collectively held its breath.
    Vidarian cleared his throat sternly, and the spell was broken. Crewmen and –women jumped in startlement, then made a good show of shouting duties to one another as they returned to their assigned work. Vidarian did his part by glaring in dissatisfaction, but he couldn't help being relieved for all their sakes that it was him who caught them gawking and not Marielle. The first mate had been efficient and professional as always, but one