“How is he?” Ren asked. He leaned on the side-rail of Storm as they charged across the dark tide of Comet Cove. He had sailed these waters hundreds of times aboard the Dispatch. Vanci’s ship had been swift, but compared to Captain Urro’s galley, it was only mediocre. Ren had been Vanci’s first mate for five years under Gharo’s authority. When last he chopped through these warm waves, his entire world had changed unbeknownst to him.
Tass looked at him, perhaps sensing the immanent but inconceivable change on the watery horizon. Her eyes were as salty and as red as that distant sunset. But then she looked away and her shoulders gave a shrug. “Same as he was this morning, and same as he was last night.”
The young man nodded. “If there’s one thing I know about Lerran, he won’t quit without a fight,” he said.
“But he has fought. We all have,” Tass said. “We’re all out of it.”
Ren looked at her. He wasn’t all out of fight. No matter what happened to Lerran, someone was going to be made to pay for it, at some point. Ren wouldn’t have it any other way. But as he regarded Tassina’s swollen torso and exhausted, gaunt face, he knew she wasn’t going to be an active member of that fight. Not without rejuvenation.
“Will we survive?” she asked him. “This place we are sailing to?”
“I survived it once,” Ren said.
Tassina looked at the Captain, ten feet away with his hands on the wheel. Urro had given his crew a valiant speech as they left the docks of Sheld, similar to the speech Ren had given his loyalists in the Royal Rogue Inn. One urging them to remain true and steadfast in the face of impossibility. “You vanished for a year.”
Renado nodded. “I don’t know why or how. I don’t know about anything Tass, but you told me you would stay in Sheld for Lerran and now you’re leaving Sheld for him… so we have to try.”
“In his rare moments of wakefulness, Lerran and I agree on one thing,” Tass said. “This baby must live.”
Ren hung his head and watched the foam forming and then dissipating as the Storm held the wind in its sails. He didn’t have the spirit to tell her that if the child was her top priority, she ought to have stayed in Sheld. They had all come—limping Asar, bedridden Bran, Woodro, Omma, Karsef…. They would all endure or perish together. Her pregnant belly too.
He looked at Tass and smiled weakly. “I survived the Isle once, and I’ll do it again.”
Woodro heard his words and nodded eagerly. The energetic warrior believed his own myths, and, frankly, Ren had no reason no to. That man would pilot a second burning ship if Ren asked him to, even onto the Isle of Dusk.
Tass rested her head on Ren’s shoulder, and they watched the sunset together. The next four days would be long, but then… then they would know.