Page 45 of Broken Hearted
But it was true. We were stuck here in the middle of the ocean about to die. I craned my neck, searching for a boat in the water or land, but there was just a blue line as far as the eye could see.
“Try to cut through my rune. Do you still have my dagger?” I asked him.
He nodded. “And the crystal.”
A trickle of relief ran through me. At least one thing was going in our favor.
I turned my back to Adrien so he could see where the rune clungto me and felt him deftly grasp my shoulder blades. Seconds ticked by, but that restricted feeling was still there.
“Did you try to cut through it?” I asked him, panic at the edge of my voice.
“Thrice,” he confirmed.
No.
I peered at the men in the water with me. They were both seelie and unseelie. I was glad to see Adrien’s first mate, Brimsley, was still with us. “What powers have you all got? We can figure this out.”
“I can lift three times my weight,” one said.
Okay, useless right now.
“I am powerless, milady,” another mentioned.
“I sense where all the good fish are,” another spoke up.
That could be useful when we were starving, but not if we had to swim miles to get there.
“Powerless,” another said.
“I have bad taste in women,” another said, causing the men to laugh.
Well, I appreciated that morale was still high. It seemed Adrien had hired a lot of fae without powers. They probably wouldn’t have been able to find work without him.
“I can control the wind a bit,” a shy teenage boy said, as he paddled to stay above water.
My head snapped in his direction at the same time as Adrien’s. “Mathis, you didn’t tell me that,” Adrien said.
His cheeks went red. “Sorry Cap’n. It’s not always easy to control, and I got fired at my last job for snapping the mast in half.”
Whoa, that was some strong wind power.
Adrien nodded, swimming closer to him. “That’s okay. Do you think you could call the wind now, to blow us southeast?”
Adrien had picked up on the same idea I had. If the wind carried us we wouldn’t need to swim. We could cover more area that way and wouldn’t tire as easily.
“How far is the nearest land?” I asked Adrien.
Adrien looked at me. “If we go straight through the belly of the sea, there is an island about two leagues from here. It’s not inhabited, but reaching it would at least give us a chance.”
The fae boy, Mathis, nodded. “I could try.”
My legs were already fatigued from keeping afloat and the men had been at this hours longer than I had.
“Sir?” Brimsley called to his captain. “I’ve followed yer for many years and I knew the dangers of takin’Beatriceto the belly of the sea, but going there with no boat. We’ll be eat’n alive by sirens.”
“Sirens!” I shrieked.
Adrien gave Brimsley a stern look. “We have two choices. Either drown here or take our chances with sirens and possibly survive this. There’s no land closer that we could reach.”
