The 3 Seas

While there were certainly few stranger ships prowling the Outer Sea than the Horizon Chaser, it had the advantage of being small. The mind that rebelled at the sight of what should, by all rights, be a three-masted galleon could content itself with the existence of a smaller craft that propelled itself without visible means.
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Jace saw very little of Sheiral for the brief remainder of the voyage to Montport, which did not overly distress him as the change in her status from barely tolerated passenger to vital part of the crew had not been enough to lift her out of the misery with which she seemed to greet all circumstances she found herself in.
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“If you want entertainment, I can sing,” Sheiral said. “My tutors said I was wayward and backward, but I have heard what passes for singing down here…”
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“Anyway, listen,” Katryn said to Jace. “When the two of you came crashing into my cave, I was running pretty low on supplies and not sure what to do next… we helped each other out, though to be fair, you made it easier for me to get away from Faresia than it would have been otherwise.”
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If Jace was certain of anything in his increasingly uncertain life, he was sure that Sheiral would welcome the news that they would soon be making port and leaving the tiny, poorly furnished, and increasingly fishy-smelling hold of the Horizon Chaser behind them for solid land. He held onto this piece of news as talisman to ward against her ill-will and the stream of arcane, incomprehensible profanity she directed at him the moment he descended below deck, knowing that it would be just the thing to turn her mood around and coax a smile out of her, or possibly even a kind word.
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“Oh, well, excuse me for not knowing the finer points of enchanter’s syntax,” Katryn said.
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Katryn spent most of the passage to Montport buttoned up in her cabin… going over her books and charts, Jace assumed. She stuck her head into the hold to yell at her passengers when their arguments became audible. She came out for food, after it was made clear that procuring and preparing fish were entirely Jace’s responsibility. She came out on deck sometimes in the evening, when Jace’s lonely watch was ending.
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In the early hours of the voyage, Jace had been looking forward to Sheiral’s recovery… which he had no doubt she would make, as there seemed to little point to his rescuing her and their escaping the island on what was clearly a magical ship if she never woke up… so that she could be suitably impressed with the way he had discovered a magical ship and arranged for their passage from the island.
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Five days out from Faresia, Jace was finding out the limitations of his fish-catching abilities. Out on the open ocean, he could not simply dive overboard at will and bring back up a meal’s worth of food. While the Horizon Chaser displayed a remarkable ability to slow down or loop around him without losing its speed, her captain was not tolerant of the idea of treading water while the boy hunted around the dark depths for stray fish. Loki, whom Jace had gathered was the strange ship’s pilot, was even less patient.
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“If you don’t believe that two reasons are sufficient to stay my hand with steel drawn against you, that actually comes to bear rather neatly with the third point,” Iskondra said to the downed man. She lowered her sword a fraction of an inch towards his face, bringing the sparking blue orb almost in contact with his skin. “Which is that ending the life of a lowly assassin is a task more fit for an executioner… or an exterminator. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that I would not stoop to doing so, if pressed to the point. It is only for the sake of the fourth and most important reason that I have not slain you.”
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