Washed Ashore on the Distant Isles

1588-02-01
Shore of the Distant Isles

I woke on a strand of pebbles and salt, my arms locked around the plank that had kept me afloat.
Seaweed glued my hair to my face; cold shook the marrow in my bones. The surf breathed in and out like a sleeping beast.

A shadow leaned over me. A man with his hair tied back, a sabre riding easy at his hip, grinned down.
“Bonona sends its lads by sea now?” His accent was rounder, rougher, the humor quick behind it.
He offered a hand and a heel of bread. “Carlen Rowen of Lynden,” he said. “Up you come.”

I told him, haltingly, of storm and wreck. Rowen snorted at the first mention of Bonona.
“High-society twirlers,” he said. “Perfumed peacocks with pretty guards.”
The words were sharp, but the cloak he wrapped around my shoulders was warmer than any insult was cold.

He led me up a wind-polished path to a low cottage above the grey-green water.
A fire caught; a pot began to sing. Between spoonfuls he spoke of the Empire’s edges and the free cities that kept them honed.
In his telling, Bonona’s grace was a weakness; Maraisbourg’s guilds, he said, ought to have taken the capital long ago.

I said little. The tide had chosen my path, and my thoughts were still tangled in the whispers I had heard in Bonona.
But the stew steadied my hands, and the hearth unknotted my jaw.

I had drifted to a new shore, and a new master had found me.