Leoni twirled her hand. “Just hop down to the bow from the forecastle and do your business.”
One of the crew members approached, a shorter man with bulging arms and a bald head. “Oh, already need to use the toilet again?” he asked with a smirk.
Ollie came up behind the man, guffawing. His frizzy red hair gleamed under the sun. “It was too easy.”
Driscoll made a face at them as they continued past us, and Leoni and I burst into laughter again.
“You know what? Maybe I will walk the plank,” Driscoll mumbled, heading toward the bow. “Won’t have to deal with this lot anymore.”
The laughter died on my lips as his words hit me. I stared at the opening in the railing. Walk the plank. I had a way off this ship. A way to get to land. I could walk the plank. I’d just solved my problem. And it might have been my craziest idea yet.
Chapter Nineteen
Bartholomew had said we’d be passing Porth around evening time the next day, so when that time finally came, I waited for the dinner bell, and sure enough the outline of the island appeared in the distance, trees rising up along the shoreline. The bell clanged, and everyone rushed to the kitchen. I stayed behind, telling Leoni I’d be down shortly. Once she was out of sight and everyone had disappeared, I was just about to put my plan in action, when Bartholomew appeared and cornered me. “Oh, good. A moment to get the princess alone.”
I groaned inwardly. I didn’t have time to talk with the bard. But I didn’t want to be rude, so I plastered a smile on my face. “Hi, Bartholomew. Shouldn’t you be eating with everyone else?”
I glanced at the island in the distance.
“Oh, I asked Mia to save me some grub.”
“Perfect,” I muttered, leaning against the railing behind me and trying to not keep glancing at the island. “How can I help you?”
He dug his pocketbook out of his trousers and slipped a pen from behind his ear. “I’ll be the first to admit I never knew much about the Seven Spirits. I wasn’t bestowed with their gifts, so I didn’t see any reason to pay them attention, but now that you’reon board with us, I’d love to learn more about these spirits you worship. I think I could write some great songs about them, possibly sing in taverns across Arathia, expand my audience, you know?”
That softened my annoyance. It was actually very sweet. I sent one more glance at Porth as we sailed along it, the ship going at a slower pace. Dinner would last for quite a while, and I still had time to enact my plan. “Of course I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Oh great!” He opened his booklet and perched his pen to the paper as he stood in front of me. “Let’s start at the beginning. How did you all get your powers?” He gestured. “Your ancestors and such.”
I tapped my chin. “Well, all we have is the information that’s been left for us. Journal entries, historical records, paintings, a few books. What we learned was that there was an Old World, full of elementals like us who had the same powers, worshipped the same spirits.” A breeze ruffled my chiffon. “We believe the Seven Spirits appeared to them regularly, but eventually, something happened.”
Bartholomew stopping writing in his journal, looking up at me. “Like what?”
“We don’t know exactly, but we do know it was bad. Bad enough that everyone was wiped from existence, and the spirits disappeared. We’ve found countless excerpts from elementals of that time. It sounded terrifying.”
Frost, fire, wind, water all raining down, the earth drying up completely. It had been a slow end for many of them.
“Whatever happened to them must’ve scared everyone else in the world enough that they stayed away. Arathia was abandoned for a long time, thousands of years, forgotten about—until my ancestors found the continent, wanting to flee from the human lands where chaos reigned.”
“Sounds about right,” Bartholomew said.
“They discovered a continent full of treasures, not gold or anything they could sell, but information. They found evidence of the existence of the Seven Spirits, the magic they’d bestowed upon the people of the Old World. They found temples and monuments, altars. And something amazing happened: they started manifesting the powers of the Seven Spirits: frost, earth, water, fire, wind, and shadow. They realized what a precious gift they’d been bestowed and didn’t want to squander it like they’d started to discover those of the Old World had. So they created the courts, created rules and laws and treaties so that we’d live in a peaceful realm that didn’t suffer from the wars and corruption of the human lands and of the past. They started recruiting people to come, following rituals they’d found in old tomes that asked for powers to be granted by the spirits. People came, settling into different courts. They completed the rituals, and powers appeared for them as well. Eventually, the rulers sealed those rituals away in hidden locations, deciding they’d populated the continent enough.”
Bartholomew froze at that. “Are you saying anyone could become an elemental by completing some ritual?”
I tugged at the end of my braid, twisting it. “I don’t know. That was hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Now, all of our powers are hereditary. I think the spirits granted the amount of power they wanted to, and I don’t think a ritual would change that.”
“So where are these spirits now? Why haven’t they appeared to you?” Bartholomew asked, so engrossed in our conversation his journal now lay limp in his hand.
I shrugged. “We don’t know. We continue to worship them, to use the magic they’ve given us in a respectful manner, in a way that honors them. We hope one day they’ll reappear, but as to where they’ve gone, we don’t have the answers. We dothink that they became displeased with the way the people of the Old World were acting, how they’d become possessive of their powers, power hungry, even.”
Bartholomew’s face scrunched, his scars puckering. “You think the Seven Spirits killed everyone on purpose?”
“More or less.”
He swore. “Those are some scary spirits.”
“That’s why we avoid conflict at any cost.”
