Katryn directed Jace to stay below again while she stood up on deck. Horizon Chaser required no pilot except for Loki, and had no mechanism for any to use, but she’d found it saved other people an awful lot of shouting if they could see someone standing over the rudder looking purposeful as her little ship maneuvered its way around theirs.
Sheiral came out of the cabin, her big eyes narrowing in the eerie green light of the hold.
“What happened to all the space?” she asked. She sounded unusually timid, but Jace thought she might just have been tired.
“Filled up with food and stuff,” Jace said. “For the voyage.”
“What, are we leaving?” Sheiral asked. Her voice cracked a little. “Is that why the ship is moving again? We’re leaving?”
“Yeah,” Jace said. He held up the book. “We, uh, kind of found another book that…”
“Another book?” Sheiral shrieked. “But I’m having enough trouble with the first! And if we’re going on another voyage than I’ll be made to read this one out, too, even though nobody even asked me! I don’t want to leave Montfort! I’m happy here!”
“Montport,” Jace corrected, but Sheiral wasn’t listening. It was hard for Jace to tell when she got to really blubbering and shrieking if she was speaking proper language at all, her voice became so high-pitched and screechy.
It actually hurt his ears to stand too close to her, and in the cramped hold there wasn’t anywhere else to stand.
The hatch opened, and Katryn came thundering down.
“What in perdition did you do now, boy?” she yelled at Jace.
“Found this book, apparently,” Jace said. Kat took it with one hand, grabbed with Sheiral with the other, and pulled both of them towards her cabin without giving him another glance. “You’re welcome!” he shouted as the thin door slammed closed.
He kicked a crate of salted meat and found this to be almost as regrettable a use for it as its intended one, then stood around sulking until Kat came out a few minutes later.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been taking you for granted, Jace, when really you’ve been nothing but good luck for me. You got me out of that cave when my stubbornness had kept me there nearly to the point of starvation. You managed to find maybe the only person in the Outer Sea who can read even a lick of the texts I’ve spent years trying to translate and drop her onto the deck of my ship. You kept us from starving during the passage to Montport, and now you’ve delivered the second volume to me, all without having the slightest clue what you were doing.”
“I had a slight clue,” Jace said.
“Granted, you can get around a port town competently enough, but I mean you don’t know anything about my purpose or what it is I’m after,” Katryn said.
“Treasure,” Jace said. “Am I right? It was lost or hidden a long, long time ago and they wrote about it in those books, but everyone forgot about it and no one knows how to read them. Right?”
“You’ve got the shape of it,” Katryn said. “The books are nothing so straightforward as a treasure map, but I think they’ll have enough clues between them to let me draw one. You’re not entirely un-clever, lad… I’m starting to wonder how helpful you might be if you knew what I was after. What do you know about the Empire?”
“Elakebassis?” Jace asked.
“No,” Katryn said. “I mean the old one that came before it… the Great Empire.”
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