Two days later the first passenger died of her injuries, followed closely by the second. Neither wound had looked severe – a small bite on the arm, a shallow gouge in the leg – but they had quickly festered, turning black and rank with pus as red streaks of infection raced up the veins beneath the skin. The severity of the illness seemed strangely unrelated to the bloodiness of each wound (several people with much uglier cuts seemed to be recovering), but Aren had his own theories on that. The undead plague's original strain would've raged undiluted in the bodies of the Lordaeron ghouls. He suspected the wounded who survived would be mostly those set upon by their own former shipmates.
There was no way of telling which had caused Luciel's injuries.
A soft red glow smudged the sky to their left as the sun dipped into the horizon. Captain Verner stood near the rail, reciting the sonorous words of the rite of burial at sea over the two sailcloth-wrapped bodies laid on planks near his feet. A cluster of passengers and crew gathered around him at a respectful distance, and Aren could easily pick out Vorthaal standing head and shoulders above the crowd near the back, the solemn glow of his eyes mirroring the stars that had begun to peek from the sky behind him. Wynda stood near the front with a hand squeezing the shoulder of a sobbing dwarf woman.
She and Aren had attended each passing, half to perform the final blessings of the Light and half to ensure that the disease's foulness ended with its victim's death. Despite his earlier fears, the bodies lay peacefully still. They looked somehow smaller than they had in life; even the dwarf's stocky form looked sadly reduced beneath its canvas shroud.
"Oh, Light, by the power of your Word you stilled the chaos of the primeval seas, you made the raging waters of the elements subside, you brought calm to the wild spirits of the floods that beset our fathers."
Footsteps echoed up the forecastle stairs behind him, and he glanced back to see Callista and the Redbranches step onto the deck and then pause as they registered the scene in front of them. The brothers clasped their hands together automatically around the fishing rods and tackle they held, adding their voices to those of the passengers murmuring the words of the funeral prayer.
Callista bowed her head respectfully, pushing back the grey hood of her cloak, but her lips didn't move with the others'. Not surprising. Aren supposed he should've felt condemnation for her lack of faith, or at least pity, but somehow he couldn't bring himself to feel much of anything. That would be naïve, expecting a warlock to believe in the Light. He wondered if she really believed in anything.
"As we commit the earthly remains of our brother, Durem Staranvil, and sister, Geraldine Farrow, to the deep, grant them your peace and tranquility as their souls find safe harbor in your mercy. We ask this through the grace of the Holy Light. Amen."
Four sailors, one at the head and foot of each body, lifted the planks they rested on. Setting them on the top of the rail, they tipped their burdens gently into the sunset-tinged sea below.
The dwarf woman Wynda was comforting had managed to dry her red-rimmed eyes during the captain's prayer, but let out a strangled cry at the splash.
Something in Aren's chest twisted, and he looked away. His gaze fell on Nathanial, who was watching the woman with a troubled expression, and he wondered with another pang if he was picturing his own wife in her place.
"Sometimes I don't know why the Light allows it," Nathanial muttered.
Callista adjusted her cloak around her shoulders as the breeze stiffened. "The same reason the arcane does." For once she didn't sound amused by her own words. Actually, she looked as though she didn't care much for the taste of them at all. "Because power is indifferent, and the good are no better at wielding it than their enemies. In fact, they're usually worse."
Nathanial crinkled up his nose, eyeing her reproachfully. "Ouch. You don't really believe that?"
She cocked her head at him. "Why not? Your own superiors obviously do, or I wouldn't even be here."
Ander laughed. "Right, because you're obviously just a great big ball of demonic evil. Woooooo." He waggled the fingers of his free hand playfully at her.
She grinned wryly and swatted at the fingers he was wiggling in her face. "Hey! Oh, alright. So I'm not quite as bad as I could be. But trust me, I'm no better than I have to be, either."
"Good," Ander said cheerfully. "One less to scold me when I show up hungover to muster." He shot Aren a rakish glance to see if he was listening.
He was, but Aren was far too used to Ander's capering to be baited. "Should I be sticking my fingers in my ears?" he asked dryly.
Ander showed him a white grin. "Could you?"
Callista arched a brow mischievously at him, and this time the twist in his stomach was decidedly more pleasant.
Nathanial tilted his head, looking his brother over with a critical expression. "What are you going to do if the Dawn ever assigns you to a commander who doesn't think you're funny?"
Ander seemed to consider that for a moment, then shrugged, face brightening. "Finally get a chance to drink at a court martial?"
Nathanial snorted. "You think I would've learned by now." For good measure, he thwacked his brother lightly across the back of the neck with his fishing pole. "Come on, we should put our lines over the other side."
They traipsed off with their tackle in the opposite direction of the slowly-dispersing funeral, Ander taking the opportunity to jab his twin in the back with the tip of his fishing rod.
Callista looked after them for a moment with an amused cant of her head, then wandered over to lean up against the forecastle wall at Aren's side. She laced her fingers together and stretched before settling comfortably back against the planks, watching the last crimson sliver of sun dissolve into the sea. Her air of idle contentment was contagious; the mourners had mostly scattered into small knots of people clustering near the rails, and in the soft slanting light of dusk it was deceptively easy to imagine that this was a different, happier kind of voyage. For a moment, Aren allowed himself to be lulled.
"You know, there's a lot I don't like about this trip, but I'm not sorry about all of it," she said after a moment, tipping her chin in the direction of the Redbranches' departure. "You wouldn't believe how seriously most arcanists take themselves."
She said it like it was a bad thing, but Aren wasn't so sure that a little sobriety was unwarranted among a group that could burn down a city quarter with a wrong twist of thought. "They're good at getting around people." He shook his head ruefully, remembering past misadventures. "Probably better than they should be, actually."
"Well, maybe if some people didn't need so much getting around, they wouldn't have so much practice." She'd been inspecting the runes that circled the cuff of one of her sleeves, but flicked her eyes lightly up to his at the end of her words.
For reasons he couldn't quite articulate, he felt a sheepish smile begin to creep across his face before he realized how silly he must look and stifled it. "I'm their commander," he protested. "I'm supposed to need getting around."
"Oh, so that's how it works," she said, the corner of her mouth twitching in an expression that, for once, seemed to be without edge. "Are you mine?"
He had the horrible suspicion that his ears had flushed and suddenly missed his helm, which would've hidden them. She was teasing him – he had no idea how to answer that question, her position in his company was fuzzy enough on its own and the half-veiled invitation in her eyes only complicated things – and he couldn't decide if he liked it or not. Aren was educated enough (his mother had been a petty noble – married to his father for a stake in the family business – and had seen to that), but he didn't have the silver tongue that the mage schools seemed to encourage in their students, and he'd never been fond of the kind of banter that Callista seemed to enjoy.
He was saved from finding an appropriate answer by the approaching clop of Vorthaal's hooves against the deck. He looked up gratefully, then immediately felt guilty at the draenei's solemn expression. There were grieving people here. He should be representing the Light, not…doing whatever he was doing with Callista, who was a warlock and faithless and probably not even really interested in him anyway.
"There was fear that the infection could spread to the healthy," Vorthaal said. Behind him the sky had deepened to black velvet, smeared with red only at the very edge of sea and sky, and the light of his eyes glinted off the gold rings that adorned each of his fleshy barbels. "I believe I have reassured them, but it is hard to be certain. Your people's faces are so dark without sun."
"I can speak to them, but I'm sure you did fine," Aren said, straightening. Most people were a little in awe of the draenei, who were built so imposingly and seemed so ancient, and, if anything, Vorthaal's word on this illness would be more readily accepted than his own.
"It does not seem fair," he said, and Aren thought he detected a little wistfulness in the low rumble of his voice. "You become ill so easily, when your lives are already so short."
Callista laughed. "Elves and draenei, Nether. Please, rub it in more."
Vorthaal looked startled and then abashed, tail swishing sheepishly behind him, but she laughed again before he could begin to apologize. "Oh, don't look so guilty! I was only teasing. We grow up used to it," she said. "Not that we like it, when we stop to think about it, but I imagine it would be worse to expect to live forever and then fall sick. No one I know pines too much for immortality."
"That is well," Vorthaal said, relaxing now that it was clear he hadn't offended anyone. "My people live very long, so long that few have ever died of aging, but we are mortal all the same. For some it was not enough. It is a snare the Burning Legion used when they came to our world."
Callista snorted. "I guess their lures haven't changed much in the last few thousand years."
Vorthaal shrugged his large shoulders grimly. "Why would they, when they have been so successful? Yours is the first world we have visited to have withstood more than one assault."
Aren grimaced, finding this entire conversation deeply depressing. Just one more reminder of old tragedies on a journey that seemed much too full of them already. He'd thought to find closure here, helping the last survivors of his homeland one final time, but sometimes it seemed that all he was managing was to rip the scabs from hurts that were never as healed as he'd believed. Before they'd left port, he'd been able to go days without conjuring up Lordaeron's ghosts, and had been able to imagine a time when they'd no longer trouble him at all. Now, it seemed he could hardly go hours without having some reminder thrust upon him. This wasn't how he'd meant it to be.
"The joys of belligerence," Callista said more cheerfully than he thought her words warranted. "We've been sharpening our claws on each other for years."
This particularly egregious bit of cynicism dragged his attention back to the conversation at hand. "Not true," he said, shaking his head briefly to clear it. "We won because we managed to set aside our differences long enough to lock shields against a common enemy."
She showed her teeth in savage amusement. "And the only reason we had shields to lock was because we'd been bludgeoning each other with them for the last few thousand years. We just want the Legion to leave us alone so we can go back to killing each other properly. All those demons running around tipping battles one way or the other…very unsporting."
Vorthaal looked at her sidelong, white-lit eyes narrowing speculatively. "I have not yet decided if you believe everything that you say."
She gave a vague half-shrug. "That's alright. Neither have I."
He let out a bemused rumbling chuckle. "I would say that humans are odd creatures, but by the commander's face, you are simply an odd human. Perhaps I will…sleep on it?" He seemed uncertain as to whether he'd used the right expression, but when no one corrected him, he continued. "It is time for me to retire. I will see you tomorrow."
They bid him goodnight, and it didn't take long for his hoofbeats to fade into the bowels of the ship. In the quiet that followed his departure, a woman's muffled sobs were clearly audible over the slap of waves against the hull and ruffling of canvas.
The forlorn sound shattered what was left of the peace Aren had allowed himself to indulge in. He squared his shoulders beneath his tabard to keep them from sagging as the responsibility of his position seemed to settle back onto them as oppressively as it ever had. "I should go, too. I need to check on Luciel and the other wounded, make sure Wynda's alright…"
Callista watched him inscrutably for a moment, leaning her temple up against the weathered wood of the forecastle wall. "Do you ever make anything easy on yourself?"
It was an unexpected question, and it was hard not to flinch at the suddenness of it. He didn't have an answer, and the anger that flared in his breast startled him. He didn't like being blindsided, didn't like the way she threw words around like they were darts and then watched to see if she'd hit anything vital, didn't like the way she was always so damnably certain. It wasn't fair. The world had buckled under Aren's feet years ago when the Scourge came, so badly that not even his faith had managed to shore it back into place again, but even though the warlock believed in nothing but the callous indifference of everything she never seemed to fear that the ground would shift beneath her step. He was drawn to her surety even as it irritated him, and what galled the most was the idea that she wouldn't even care.
Well, maybe he couldn't make her, but he didn't have to further whatever game she thought she was playing with him, either. Meeting her eyes implacably for a heartbeat longer, he turned and strode down the stairs.
Callista waited for his footsteps to fade before wandering to the rail, looking thoughtfully over it into the onyx sea below. Her question had stung him, obviously, but then, she'd meant it to. Sir Aren seemed to be what was, in her experience, that rarest of all things: a truly sincere man. Her reasonable side told her that only made him a fool – after all, people without guile were so often taken advantage of by people who were…well…like her – but somewhere along the line a grudging respect had crept in. He hadn't led a sheltered life, and it must've taken immense strength of spirit to not become bitter as the Scourge devoured his entire world. What's more, they'd fought a lich together, and despite her cynical sense of misgiving she was beginning to like him. He deserved a better life than one where he was perpetually tormenting himself for things he could never have helped.
Even so, she thought she'd seen real anger in that look he'd given her before heading below, and she wondered if she'd hit a more tender nerve than she'd meant to.
The wind pushed the ship along at a good clip, and moon-flecked pearls of spray rose from the bow. It had been a while since Callista had last sailed, and she'd forgotten how enormous the night sky could look at sea. Craning her head back, she watched the sails sway against a brilliant scatter of stars, the White Lady and Blue Child just beginning to rise as bright crescents near the horizon. The occasional sailor scurried along the deck behind her but paid her no mind. Captain Verner had issued a curfew after the collision with the Scourge, but she and the rest of Sir Aren's company seemed to be tacitly exempt. The idea that the crew might actually find her prowling reassuring was a strange one to her. Most people considered warlocks one of the things that lurked in the shadows, not a defense against them.
Tiring of the empty night, she turned back towards the forecastle stairs. After the attack, she'd stopped trying to adapt to the schedule of the ship and gone back to her usual nocturnal habits. She'd grabbed a few copies of magical texts before getting hauled off on this voyage; maybe she'd take a lantern down to the deserted mess and read them for a while. Now that the wounded had been moved back to their own quarters, it was pleasantly quiet there at night.
A few hours later, her eyelids had begun to droop.
She yawned, leaning back on the bench, and pushed away the square of spell-diagrammed parchment she'd been annotating. The mortals of Azeroth had had much greater contact with demons since the re-opening of the Dark Portal, and a lot of interesting work was coming out of the wreck of Draenor. She'd gotten a little behind on it, distracted as she'd been with yanking imps out of nobles' gardens, but this voyage was giving her the chance to catch up.
She'd reached her limit for this night, though. Gathering her papers in one hand and the light in the other, she made her way around the tables of the empty mess towards her quarters. The lanterns that stood sentinel along the walls of the passenger corridor had been dimmed to reddish sparks, but at least they were lit. She felt none of the unfocused menace that she had the night of the attack.
All the same, she jumped as a muffled clatter shivered up through the planks under her feet.
What in the Twisting Nether was that?
She paused, listening, but the noise didn't repeat itself. Something in the hold? It sounded almost as though a crate had tumbled to the floor. Maybe some cargo had slipped its bindings?
Shifting her grip on her parchments, she scowled at the dim stairs at the end of the corridor. They'd done several thorough sweeps of the ship after the attack, and she was sure that no ghouls had escaped, but that didn't mean she was about to ignore any strange noises. Probably it was nothing, but she'd sleep a lot better once she was certain of it.
Ducking quietly into her quarters so as not to disturb Wynda, she tucked the parchment back into her pack and then hesitated. Was this worth changing into her robes for? The enchantments would be helpful if she actually found anything dangerous, but, on the other hand, if some passenger stuck his head out and saw her dressed like she was strolling into Tarren Mill there'd be a scene. Settling on a compromise, she left the robes folded at the bottom of her bag but grabbed the belt that held her sheathed dagger. She buckled it on over her tunic as she shut the door gently behind her and strode towards the stairs.
Once she descended to the landing she stopped, straining her ears against the creak and groan of sea-tossed wood.
Nothing.
She doubted she'd find anything more menacing than a particularly clumsy rat, but she still closed a fist around one of the soul shards she habitually kept in her pockets, feeling the bleed of power into the air around her as she fashioned a spell.
The shard vaporized in her fingers as the shadows that painted the walls around her seemed to leap together and coalesce, whirling into a vaguely-humanoid mass. Two eyes like white stars winked into existence in the amorphous void of the demon's face.
"Must feed," it rasped.
She waved the voidwalker off impatiently, giving it a mental command and following its shadowy back down into the hold. She generally preferred Jhormug for this type of thing – the voidwalker hated her with the same icy hatred it harbored for all living things, and its company was decidedly unpleasant – but it would be too much effort to keep the felhunter from howling, and she didn't want to panic the whole ship. Thal'kuun, whatever its personal shortcomings, was at least quiet. And despite the hazy formlessness of its body, its claws were very real and razor-sharp.
Flames guttered in her cupped hand as she slipped between the dark stacks of crates. The crew had done their best to remove all signs of the battle, but they'd been less thorough in their scrubbing down here than they'd been in the living spaces, and blotchy stains still marked the planks where bodies had lain. The air smelled of saltwater and pitch, but she thought she could still detect a sour whiff of decay underneath.
Thal'kuun glided stolidly before her, its shapeless body simply deforming to pass through the places where Callista had to squeeze sideways.
There was no sound but her own footsteps and the rasp of her clothing against the crates, but the flickering light of the fire in her hand coupled with the memories of the last time she'd entered this place conspired to make it creepier than it should have been. Shadows danced and swayed, and her imagination had no trouble conjuring the hunched bodies of ghouls around each twist of the path. She found the frigid touch of the voidwalker's mind at the edges of her own perversely comforting.
They'd just passed the place where Jhormug had broken a crate – swept now of broken glass – when she heard it. She froze, holding her breath as she listened to the quiet series of splashes. Not the waves against the hull; this was too irregular and too close. There was water under their feet in the bilge, she remembered. She wasn't sure if anyone had boarded up those holes she'd burned in the deck earlier, but now seemed like a good time to check.
As they moved around the roped barrels where she'd first seen that necromancer, she caught sight of a dappled pattern of light on the planks above, as though a lantern was shining off the water in the bilge. It seemed no one had closed off those holes after all, though the smashed crate and the Scourge remains had all been removed.
She narrowed her eyes. Not undead, then – they wouldn't need the light – but something was amiss here, and whatever it was was about to be very sorry.
The top of a rickety-looking ladder poked up over the charred side of one of the gaps. Callista clenched her hand, extinguishing the flames, and motioned Thal'kuun first down into the bilge.
Rather than using the ladder, the voidwalker simply glided to the edge and drifted downward like black smoke.
Callista had just reached the ladder and craned her neck to peer into the hole when a terrified shriek echoed upwards in concert with a cold surge of delight across her bond with Thal'kuun.
She hissed through her teeth, suddenly unsure. That scream sounded decidedly human…and the voidwalker never seemed that pleased to torment anything she wanted it to kill.
Cursing under her breath, she yanked back viciously on her minion's tether, stopping it from doing…whatever horrible thing it had been contemplating…and half-slithered half-jumped down the ladder. She landed knee-deep in slimy seawater and caught one of the rungs to avoid slipping on the curved bottom of the bilge.
At first all she could see was Thal'kuun as it loomed like a shifting tidal wave of shadow over something cornered against the side. A blue flare of magic shattered against its chest in tinkling shards of ice, and she swore again. "Get away from there!"
The voidwalker slid backward with a reluctant growl, revealing two rather damp and stunned-looking humans. The first, she'd expected – Dinah, that half-fledged mageling with the brown hair and too-large eyes – but the second startled her. Magister Sabrice blinked up at her, eyes wide with fear, before recognition crossed his features and they composed themselves into a reproachful expression. It did nothing to quell Callista's growing irritation.
"Did it touch either of you?" she asked crankily. Creeping through a dark hold waiting for something hideous to leap at her wasn't her idea of an enjoyable night.
"No," Dinah said in a small voice, swallowing shakily. Her back was still pressed up against the grimy bulkhead, but she seemed disinclined to move. "It just reached…"
And given them a solid dose of its own native version of a fear spell, by the looks of it. Callista turned her head to study Thal'kuun disapprovingly. For a mostly-faceless blob of voidstuff, it was doing an excellent approximation of a sulk – its entire form seemed squatter (though it still towered over any of the humans), and it flattened even more at her inspection, narrowing the white holes of its eyes. "Feed," it grumbled.
Callista sighed grumpily. She supposed it wasn't really the demon's fault; it was only doing what it did, after all, and if there really had been enemies down here she would've been pleased with it. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out another soul shard and held it in her palm. "Yes, feed."
A quick cantrip loosed the bindings on the shard, dissolving it into an amethyst vapor that flowed to merge with the shadows of Thal'kuun's form, momentarily swirling on its surface like purple oil before being completely consumed. The voidwalker's simple pleasure at being satiated brushed her mind, but not for long. "Rend flesh," it hissed in a tone she imagined was hopeful.
Dinah and Magister Sabrice watched nervously as it reared almost to the planks overhead and flexed the shadowy points of its claws.
"Later," Callista said, dismissing it back to the Nether with a gesture. Its hatred roiled her thoughts briefly before vanishing.
Magister Sabrice pushed himself away from the damp bulkhead and straightened, bolder now that the demon was gone. He'd hiked his trousers up to his knees, revealing his skinny calves, but the fabric was still soaked to the edge of his tunic. "I can't believe you rewarded that thing for – "
"Acting the way it's supposed to?" she snapped dangerously. The cold filthy water she was standing in had already filled her boots and begun wicking up her calfskin leggings, further souring her already foul mood. "You should take a lesson from it, Magister. What do you think you're doing down here?"
As if she couldn't guess. A partially-shuttered lantern stood next to a spellbook on top of a crate serving as a makeshift table, and she could read the distinctive characters of Eredun on the exposed pages.
"Teaching," Magister Sabrice said, drawing himself up and looking at her down his long nose with impressive haughtiness.
Callista eyed him balefully. "Rend flesh" was beginning to sound less and less like a totally unreasonable demand. "Teaching. Of course," she said in a deceptively even voice. "Teaching what? Fel magic? To a complete novice? On a shipful of people, separated from an entire sea full of very deep, very cold, very unbreathable water by one very thin hunk of wood?" She kicked her toe against the bulkhead for emphasis, words an irate hiss. "Are you insane?"
"I don't like your tone, girl. Or your implication." Beyond his habitual nervous tugging at one sleeve, Sabrice didn't seem at all intimidated by her now that the demon was gone. "We're not fools. We were only translating spells, not practicing them."
It pacified her slightly to know that there hadn't really been any danger of the ship burning down, but she was still very annoyed. The way he kept calling her "girl" didn't help. "You're a warlock? I guess I'm not entirely surprised." She looked him over coolly, stepping up onto one of the lower rungs of the ladder to lift her feet out of the water.
Twin spots of color rose in his papery cheeks as he sloshed over to the crate and scooped up the lantern and spellbook. "I am no such thing." At Callista's skeptically narrowed eyes, he elaborated. "I…dabbled…once. But not anymore."
She cocked her head, still clinging to the ladder. Now that piqued her interest. Almost the only reason anyone who started down the path of demonic magic returned to magecraft was because they found they didn't have an aptitude for it. Even among those, it wasn't common; far more often they simply destroyed themselves with power they couldn't handle. To backpedal down that path far enough to become a successful mage showed an unusual amount of both self-knowledge and self-control, and Callista's opinion of the magister actually rose slightly. Though he was still, at this particular moment, an idiot. "If you'd given it up, why are you tutoring her?"
Dinah had been watching the two of them argue in somewhat nervous silence, but she'd recovered from the scare the voidwalker had given her enough to cross her arms defiantly when Callista jerked her chin at her. "I was going to learn anyway."
Magister Sabrice sighed. "If she insists on making this mistake, I think it best she at least be supervised. Don't you?" He flicked his hand in a distracted gesture and the crate levitated to elbow level, dirty seawater pouring from its joins. "Come along, no sense all of us getting any wetter now."
Finally, something she could agree with. Callista pulled herself the rest of the way up the ladder, climbing out of the bilge onto the dry planks of the hold. "Ugh," she said, feeling the squelch of slimy water in her boots.
Dinah and the magister scrambled up behind her, the ensorcelled crate floating up last and gliding into place amongst the other cargo.
"Are you going to tell the captain?" Dinah looked up at her with a mix of apprehension and challenge, her book of spells tucked under one arm.
Callista raised a brow. To be honest, the idea hadn't even occurred to her. She supposed it was probably the technically correct thing to do, but running to authority had never been her preferred answer to anything. Besides, then she'd have to admit to Verner that she'd almost let a voidwalker eat two of his passengers. "No."
She smiled hesitantly. "Thanks."
"You're just lucky I wasn't Wynda," Callista muttered. Flames flickered in her cupped hand, augmenting the light of the magister's lantern. "Come on, let's get out of here. We smell like the canals at midsummer."
They squeezed back through the crates towards the stairwell, shadows parting before their pool of light and closing in like curtains behind them.
"So, Dinah," Sabrice said with the air of a man about to impart a lesson, "you've seen your first hostile demon. Are you still sure you're being wise?"
"Yes," she said stubbornly after only the briefest of pauses.
Callista snorted.
"Now that you know I'm doing it anyway, you might as well help me," Dinah said to her hopefully.
"That might not be inadvisable," Sabrice said, startling her with his agreement. "My knowledge is mostly academic, I'm afraid. I was never even fluent in spoken Eredun, only written. Maybe if you helped her become acclimated to demons in a controlled setting…"
Callista wrinkled her nose in irritation. The last thing a novice warlock needed was to become "acclimated" to demons. Quite the opposite, in fact. Fel magic could be unpredictable and hard to control, and a warlock early in her training would know exactly enough to be dangerous to herself and little else. A healthy dose of fear would keep her cautious and alive.
Wet, cold, sleepy and annoyed, however, Callista was in no mood to try to articulate this. Instead she just scowled over her shoulder at them. "Absolutely not."
They took another few steps in silence before Dinah's high voice piped up again. "If you don't teach me Eredun, I'll tell the captain you've been summoning demons in the hold."
"Dinah!" Sabrice scolded over Callista's peal of surprised laughter.
It was an awkward attempt at coercion and Callista found it, bizarrely, almost endearing. Like a kitten first discovering it had claws. "Better, but no," she said once she'd managed to choke down her amusement. Maybe the girl would do alright after all.
The sullen silence behind her was almost palpable. She glanced back and almost laughed again at Dinah's expression of high indignation, but restrained herself in an uncharacteristic fit of mercy. The girl's face had colored and she'd hunched herself as far as possible into her cloak, clearly not at all appreciating being laughed at. She glared balefully at Callista's inspection.
"You're a witch," she muttered sulkily.
That was almost too much for Callista's slippery hold on composure, but she managed to keep herself straight-faced. "In every possible sense," she said dryly.
Magister Sabrice let out a strangled cough.
As they tramped up the stairs into the passenger corridor, Callista was relieved not to see armed sailors waiting for them at the top. Luckily, it seemed their noise hadn't carried above decks.
They parted ways silently, Dinah and the magister entering their own rooms while Callista continued down the hall to her own. Unlike the two mages, who had both been barefoot and had had the forethought to roll up their trouser legs, Callista's boots and leggings were soaked and she was beginning to shiver in the cool night air. Not to mention the smell – she sniffed disgustedly at her sleeve where some water had splashed onto it, but the gesture turned into a yawn halfway through. Hopefully Wynda wouldn't wake her too early tomorrow.
The sound of footsteps padding down the short corridor that led to the officers' quarters arrested her with the back of her hand still covering her mouth. She briefly considered making a dash for her room just to avoid an explanation, but realized she wouldn't make it in time and paused crankily to wait, lowering her arm.
After a short moment, Sir Aren rounded the corner.
She shifted half-heartedly towards her quarters, unsure how he would react to her after their last conversation and, for once, not in the mood for an argument. Like her, the paladin was dressed in afternoon attire instead of his nightclothes, but unlike hers his expression was hazy with sleep. He must've taken the time to change after the noise woke him. "Callista?" he said, looking blearily startled to see her. At least he didn't seem to be angry. "I thought I heard someone scream."
He didn't sound at all sure about it, though, which suited Callista fine. "Don't worry about it," she advised, making to move past him.
He stepped out in front of her, forcing her to stop. "What are you doing up?" he asked, looking her over more closely. His forehead creased in a puzzled frown as he seemed to notice her wet clothes for the first time, and his nose wrinkled slightly. Catching a whiff of bilgewater, no doubt. That hole hadn't smelled at all pleasant.
Mild embarrassment didn't improve Callista's ill temper in the slightest. "Figuring out why some creatures eat their young," she muttered, pushing past his arm.
His mouth opened slightly as though he meant to say something – probably to ask her what in the Light she was talking about – but he seemed to reconsider after a glance at her face and shut it again, watching in bemusement as she stalked past.
Relieved to have escaped, Callista pushed open the door to her quarters, kicking off her sodden boots on the other side with more violence than was necessary. There was a lot she'd gained as a warlock, and more often than not she was pleased with her choice, but every now and then she wondered if just finishing Academy wouldn't have been a lot less trouble.
A/N: The captain's funeral prayer is a modified version of a Catholic prayer for the same purpose. Also, writing this last bit has given me the most horrible urge to write cracky Children's Week fic. Next chapter is Kalimdor!