xOxOxO
This time Amelia got a beautiful and uninterrupted twelve hours of enchanted Sleeping, which would have put her in a wonderful mood no matter where she woke up. In her opinion the cabin with its four-poster bed and knotted pine drawers was better than all the grand estates on the continent.
Sylphiel's space on the floor was empty, so Amelia knew something wonderful was already happening. Zelgadis sat in the corner, head bent and arms crossed over his knees. He didn't stir even as Amelia happily pulled on her traveling tunic and boots, which meant he was fast asleep. Not for long, she thought, ready for another day with a brooding blue shadow.
"Good morning, Zelgadis-san!" she sang.
"How are you feeling?" he asked automatically as he jerked awake.
She posed boldly to demonstrate, arms outstretched wide and one held high overhead, like a cartwheeling starfish. "Better than ever! Let's go!"
On their way past the cabins they heard a nasal yet passionate maiden's voice from one of the staterooms singing "silver and gold and a big emerald, counting my riches 'til I rule the world…"
"That must be the traditional song of Lina-san's people!" Amelia exclaimed.
"It's got to be a lot of money if she'd rather count than eat Sylphiel's cooking."
Zelgadis had a good point: the air carried an irresistible fragrance of cinnamon, honey, and browned butter. Outside the galley, servants and senior officials jockeyed for second and third helpings.
The galley was an extraordinary sight, a frenzy of joyful activity, and it smelled even better than it looked. Sylphiel had traded her tights and shoulder pads for a kitchen dress and a long apron that, somehow, looked majestic and inspiring. Her green eyes shone with an uncommon confidence as she directed the kitchen crew like Seyruun's sorcerer soldiers. Gourry stood over the stove, devouring the contents of skillets and pans as soon as they came off the heat. It reminded Amelia of the homey scenes people painted in winter, depicting the hearth goddess who blessed joyous villagers with baskets of sweets.
"Good morning!" Sylphiel said, managing a graceful curtsy in between handing dishes to the serving staff. "I wasn't sure if anyone would be feeling homesick, so I made some traditional Seyruun breakfast dishes. It looks like it's very popular!"
"I'm sure," Zelgadis said. "Thank you, Sylphiel."
Amelia looked back at the crowd outside the galley and all the lively, eager faces-surely, none of them meant me any harm. It has to be a mistake-and how relaxed they looked. Nobody could be worried about dramatic betrayals or poison plots when there were so many tasty things to eat. "Zelgadis-san, this might be one of the best ideas you've ever had."
He had his back to her, but he squared his shoulders and stood a little taller.
They took their dishes and returned to the deck to be out of the fray. It was impolite, but Amelia couldn't wait until they were settled to start eating: the mashed bananas and honey just smelled too good. As she took a bite the whole boat shook and rocked on its keel, and dozens of voices called out in alarm. Amelia steadied herself and looked towards the bow, where soldiers were gathering around a commotion in the surrounding sea. The deck was covered with vast puddles.
"What was that?" Amelia broke into a run with Zelgadis following behind. By the time they reached the bow Lina and a crumb-dusted Gourry were on the scene, weapons drawn and ready for action.
A guard showed off a reptilian scale skewered on the end of his pike. The scale was roughly the size of a human torso, and its sides dripped with ichor. Its distinctive neon blue hues were chalky and dull, as though it had been dried in the sun.
"Some dragon just missed us," the guard said. "I was up by the forecastle when it breached for just long enough to hit my pike. Based on the water it looks like it darted off to the west."
Amelia and Zelgadis exchanged looks: sea dragons should be less active in the summer, and they shouldn't be going after boats as massive as the Gracia Eternal. If they'd attracted a dragon, they needed to get away before it could cause major damage and leave them stranded.
"Let's cast Dark Mist," Zelgadis said, but didn't get the chance. His hand was slapped away by a portly middle-aged man in the white and silver-bordered robes of Seyruun's priestly class. Amelia recognized him as the shaman Dramitts, who served as the oracle for important government functions. His round face was sweaty and porcine.
"No unauthorized magic!" Dramitts said in an anxious voice. "Princess Amelia, we've got an emergency!"
"Yes, the dragon-"
"Not just that! It's with the augur's totem. Please, you must come at once!"
On the lowest deck of the boat, just across from the hold, was a bunk full of cone incense and candy wrappers. It was also inexplicably home to a massive marble bust of Prince Phil, even larger and possibly even more formidable than its real-life counterpart, with glassy obsidian eyes and a cavernous square mouth illuminated by magical flame. Scattered on the floor in front of the statue were twelve small tiles, each bearing a single letter that glowed bright red:
(M) (T) (C) (D) (A) (K) (A) (S) (R) (S) (T) (I)
"What the hell is this?" Lina asked, shuddering. "How can anybody sleep with a giant Phil in here?"
"It's an augur's totem. It gives commandments and sends messages," Dramitts explained. "In times of great crisis, the tiles display orders from the sacred spirit of justice that protects Seyruun. You must follow its commands to ensure peace and prosperity. That's why you can't just go casting spells all over the place! It must be trying to advise us on how to defeat the dragon."
"So what are we supposed to do with these?" Zelgadis said, looking over the letters, and Amelia could tell he was only half-listening even as he spoke. Nothing captured Zelgadis's interest like something to solve. Once he'd found one of Amelia's childhood toys, a wooden burr puzzle with dozens of interlocking parts, and he'd sat there transfixed for three hours until she told him it was missing a piece.
Dramitts shook his head to mean he didn't make the rules. "The tiles fell out when the ship knocked around, so we have to unscramble the letters and put them back in its mouth. If it's correct, the sacred flame should disappear."
The four of them dropped to their knees to peer at the tiles on the ground. Amelia wiggled her toes in her boots. It had been a while since she'd taken part in a good pointless caper.
Zelgadis squinted, then rearranged the tiles:
STRICT DAMASK
Two six-letter words from a twelve-letter jumble would have been a respectable achievement in a parlor game; it was altogether useless here, but Zelgadis allowed himself a subatomic smile of satisfaction. "Wow, Zelgadis-san!" Amelia said, both because she was impressed and because she knew he craved external validation the way Lina craved maple creme cookies.
"That makes no sense," Lina said flatly.
The tiny smile exploded, and Zelgadis was back in the much more familiar territory of being wounded and irritated by his terrible friends. "Well, if it's giving us directions to follow...we're probably looking for a phrase in the imperative mood. That means action words," he said quickly to Gourry, whose ears were leaking steam. "Here, let's try this. STACK RATS, hm, no … "
"What is it with you and rats, anyway?"
"Action words. Like 'act'?" Gourry asked. He drew out the letters A C T.
"Well, yes..."
"Oh. That's not so hard, then," and he kept shuffling until he spelled out:
ACT MAD SKIRTS
" 'Act mad, skirts'?" Lina repeated, standing up only enough to give him a sharp kick in the back. "Who are you calling a skirt? Are you some kind of gangster picking up a damsel?"
"Who's a damsel?!"
"That term is a very rude way to refer to women, Gourry-san!"
Zelgadis sat in sullen frustration, as anyone who fancied themselves an intellectual might when they were struggling in a match of wit and wordplay with Gourry. "...so we're supposed to make the girls mad? How would we even tell the difference?"
"Zelgadis-san!" Amelia cried.
"You aren't even wearing a skirt."
"Why are we talking about what clothes I'm not wearing?!"
Blows were exchanged, foul words were let loose, and there were a number of most unjust insinuations made amidst discourse about the propriety of gendered language. Nonetheless, everyone could agree that the skirts present were indeed acting mad, and so they might as well try the combination of letters in the statue. The flame continued to burn. Within seconds the statue spat out the tiles, still emblazoned with the magical letters but no longer glowing red.
The shaman Dramitts cowered in a corner, looking like he had new doubts about the wisdom of hereditary succession if not the gods themselves. "This isn't a game, the augur's totem is sending us a message directly from Seyruun! It'll be hours before it's recovered enough magical energy to try again. Please, you must take this seriously!"
"Buddy, this is as serious as we get," Lina said, and meant it. Dramitts left to say a prayer.
They spent the rest of the day patrolling the waters for dragons. While the ocean appeared to be stubbornly dragon-free, even the ship's least experienced sailors could tell something was amiss. Heaping clouds gathered overhead but carried no sign of rain. The scale from the beast's hide had the unmistakable dullness of death, yet those who had seen it insisted the creature was wholly among the living. The mysterious message from the oracles in Seyruun only added to the sense of looming peril.
"If we've got to watch for dragons, we should do it from the top, Zelgadis-san!" Amelia said, pointing forcefully at the observation post all the way atop the topgallant mast. "Let's go!"
Zelgadis briefly looked up from his notebook, in which he'd been scribbling letter combinations amidst dragon-scouting. Based on the way he kept crossing things out Amelia assumed it wasn't going well. "It has to be up there," he said. It wasn't a question.
Because Amelia was full of newfound energy and strength, she climbed all the way up. Every exertion was like a song. Looming peril aside, the heat of her muscles moving and responding the way she knew they could made her want to cry out with joy. I'm alive, I'm alive, I'm healthy and I'm alive and it feels so good. She had only just broken a sweat when she reached the top and wished she could have kept going.
"So Daddy's meeting us in Ruvinagald?" she asked, pulling herself up alongside someone who had Levitated because he wasn't any fun. As a grown woman she'd been making an effort to say 'Father', but sometimes it was too easy to fall back into old habits.
"Yes, we sent him a message. Given the emergency and what happened to you I'm sure he's on his way. Do you know what you're going to do?"
She watched a narrow V-shaped flock of gulls skim the surface of the somber water. "I think so. I won't let us fail Calliope like we failed Taforashia...Our ideals as a kingdom demand that we help!"
"Seyruun didn't fail Taforashia for lack of ideals," Zelgadis said. "Maybe Seyruun could have committed more than money, but it's not surprising that nobody wanted to send manpower into a plague. Nations don't exist to help each other. They're there to provide stability for themselves."
That's not true at all! He's so cynical. "But you can't have any stability if your neighbors don't share in it. Otherwise it's an illusion."
"Do you think that solves things? More money, more foreign involvement? That just recreates the dependencies that put Calliope in a bad place to start with. And the bigger the commitment, the more likely it is that things will be wasted or abused."
"But we can't turn away, Zelgadis-san. And when you have more resources to spare, you have a duty to share them. We can provide food, money, and supplies, but we also have to help Calliope build a new government that supports all its people, because that's what states are supposed to do." She leapt into a precarious pose with one foot atop the mast. There was no sun to shine on her directly, but that only inspired Amelia more. She would have to be the justice that burst through the clouds. "We're supposed to enter every diplomatic engagement with honest hearts and love for our fellow man, and a commitment to create justice for all! If we never waver from our sacred responsibility, we're sure to achieve the best possible outcome!"
"The best possible outcome may still be a bad one."
"Zelgadis-san," and here Amelia swung around, turning her Index Finger of Justice into the Index Finger of Scolding, "you can't think things like that! There are too many people who are hurt. If we don't believe with our whole hearts that we can make things better for them, even just a little bit, we're doing them a disservice."
He tilted his head, then went back to his notebook. "Maybe."
There were some days it seemed like all she had in common with Zelgadis was a similar sense of battle tactics and a fondness for hot pot. He was still her favorite person to talk to, doom and gloom aside. Besides, all the gloom made it even more of a special surprise when he said something nice, like finding a butterscotch candy in your pockets.
Amelia stepped down again. "Any luck with the letters?" she asked brightly.
Zelgadis scratched out another entry. "This might be easier," he grumbled, "if car was a word."
xOxOxO
Zelgadis sighed and massaged his temples. Even by their standards it had been an inane day. They had tried TRACK MAST IDS, which almost sounded like it could have been something except of course the masts had no identifiers other than "big" and "small". STACK DIM ARTS had been just as worthless, because the urgent message from Seyruun was shockingly not about interior decorating. IRK MS SCATTAD had only ended in the unwelcome harassment of a very pleasant and baffled young associate minister. Their last attempt of the day was START MID CASK, which they took as an excuse to polish off some gin the crew had left behind at dinner. This hadn't worked either, but after a glass or two of navy strength gin they no longer cared.
He sat alone perched atop the bowspirit, watching the boat part the grim and hazy seas. Neither Amelia and Sylphiel were sturdy drinkers and they'd retired to bed, giving him a rare moment alone. Not that he minded all that much. It wasn't as though he had anywhere else to be, and it wasn't even all that different. He was used to following her around. They'd shared sleeping quarters plenty of times, too; when the four of them had bedded down in Radok's storage closet, they'd been close enough that his breathing ruffled her hair.
It was only different now because Zelgadis hadn't forgotten someone in their household was trying to poison her and curse him. He was going to do his job, both the real one and the pretend one, whether Amelia liked it or not. She clearly does not.
So I'm a job to you? Why had she been so mad about that? She technically was, and weren't women supposed to love that whole bodyguard and sworn protector stuff? Zelgadis sighed. The sum total of what he understood about women would get lost in a thimble.
Hard liquor blunted his self-mastery, and his thoughts started to slip and wander out of his control. Years ago there had been a Thing, probably born of boredom and hormones without an outlet. It was nothing like the blissful head rush sometimes provoked by statuesque, classically beautiful women (even if they're not really women) (oh, god, don't), it was just an unwanted and inconvenient urge. He assumed in time it would die of neglect, but it somehow kept going no matter how he tried to starve it.
He kept traveling, and the Thing kept growing in new and unexpected directions. It had reached a bizarre inflection point of being so familiar that he could even forget about it for long stretches of time. I must have imagined it, he'd think, and then it would be something completely trivial, like the tenderness she showed him in a crowd full of hostile onlookers, or how her face shone when she punched the teeth out of a monster, or even just the way she looked while caked in mud and being attacked by peacocks. And then there was the Thing again, now with an extra leg or set of wings.
Sometimes Zelgadis thought the others could see it. He was sure Lina could. She would give him a look like she was really staring right at the Thing that was now large and strong enough to ride on his back and sink its claws into his chest. But she never said a word, perhaps because she knew he could just as clearly see the Thing Lina bore when she scratched angrily at her head in an attempt to shake it loose.
After he'd wound up with a kind-of knighthood, he'd spent his time in Vezendi and Taforashia trying to kill the Thing once and for all. He had begun to wonder if it prevailed through sheer spite. That knighthood was a reminder that she was a princess whose destiny was written in the stars, that he was only one-third human and the other two-thirds were so repellent that they made children cry, that a fundamental aspect of being a knight was standing aside while a princess weds some inbred imbecile whose only claim to relevance was an ancestor that enslaved indigenous tribes, that all of this was so stupid-
Was that why Phil asked me to do this? Because he knows I'm not even a real man anyway and that I've just been a lackey for more powerful people my whole life? Because the only thing I know how to do is get the crap kicked out of me and come back for more?
The Thing was necessarily doomed by its very nature, as hopeless as a mayfly, and yet it still hung on. With no working battle strategy or viable weapons Zelgadis had resorted to ignoring it altogether. And so it just stayed there, impotent, defiantly unacknowledged and howling into a void.
It was nearing midnight and the sea had taken on a strangely alien quality. As the moon struggled behind thick, curling clouds it cast the whole ocean in lifeless shades of gray and white. Something was out there, biding its time until it was ready to strike again. Something large and ominous.
Damn, Zelgadis thought. This would be a really great time to have a guitar.
xOxOxO
Amelia hadn't forgotten how much she missed going places, but she had forgotten just how liberating it felt to be away from princess duties and paperwork, even if it meant being stuck on a ship. Now all she had to worry about were pastries and puzzle-solving (and poison, she thought, getting carried away with the assonance. No, don't think about that right now. It had to be a mistake!). Maybe she could start building regular travel days into her schedule.
Once everyone had properly been fed and caffeinated they trooped back to the shaman's quarters to try the next round of tiles. It was Amelia's turn, and she went about the problem from a different angle: rather than the letters, she thought about what the advice itself was likely to be. They were up against a dangerous dragon in the far seas, so it was reasonable to assume...
Amelia set out the letters for ATTACK, feeling very proud of herself. The others nodded encouragingly. But the only letters remaining left her with…No. Oh no! She tried and tried, to no avail, and was left with a terrible but sort of plausible solution:
ATTACK MR DISS
"All right!" Lina said triumphantly. "That's a lot more straightforward! Hey Zel, your name sometimes has two Ss at the end, right?"
"H-hold on! Shouldn't we put the tiles in the statue first to be sure?"
Lina looked back at her arm, wound up and ready for a Fireball, and obviously decided it was too much effort to withdraw. "Nope!"
Zelgadis took a Fireball, a sword strike, and a guilty Visfarank-enhanced punch that launched him through two levels of cabins. Even after such an unambiguous assault the statue just spat the tiles back at them. It seemed attacking Mr. Diss was not the order from Seyruun after all.
As usual it fell to Amelia to smooth things over (and after all she had been the one to start it). She found Zelgadis, or at least from the chin up, poking out of the top deck. The rest of him was stuck in wooden beams and flooring below.
"That was unnecessary," Zelgadis said, but there was no hostility in it. They had the sort of relationship that could survive the occasional hand-to-hand combat or body scissors.
Amelia sat down beside him and began picking long splinters out of his hair. "I'm sorry, Zelgadis-san. The 'attack' part really did make sense."
Zelgadis yelped suddenly and disappeared, pulled down under the deck. Amelia peered curiously into the hole he left. Gourry had grabbed him by both ankles from the floor below and was now holding his legs like the straps of a backpack. Zelgadis's head smacked hard into the ground, dragging up new splinters.
"Hey, Amelia!" Gourry said. "We're going to ask for Sylphiel's help. Meet us in the kitchen?"
Amelia suspected this had less to do with Sylphiel's competency in word puzzles and more about the delicious caponata she was making. But they might as well, since it would still be a few hours before the statue was ready to accept the next answer. Sylphiel was delighted that her friends had brought the action to her. After feeding everyone a fifth breakfast and briefly putting them to work on clean-up, she tried her hand at the tiles too. She set out the letters:
SACK
Then, after some hesitation, "Hmm...I know he's a fellow white magician, but…" and she spelled out:
SACK DRAMITTS
"Dramitts-san, the oracle and palace shaman?!" Amelia said worriedly. "That can't be right."
Sylphiel wrung her hands. "I know, Amelia-san! I'm so sorry, but the letters fit!"
The letters did indeed fit, and they pointed towards the likelihood of a heretofore unnoticed villain (and more importantly, a scapegoat), so they were all inclined to accept Sylphiel's convenient genius.
"Hang on, hang on!" Lina interrupted, making a wide chopping X gesture with both arms. "Whaddya mean by 'sack'? Is that sack as in fire him, or sack as in throw him overboard in a sack and hope for the best?"
Everyone paused to contemplate this important linguistic ambiguity.
"The second one technically encompasses both," Zelgadis reasoned.
Airtight logic thus considered, the shaman Dramitts was ensackulated and tossed into the gray and roiling seas.
"I hope that doesn't come back to bite us later," Gourry said.
Lina was unconcerned. "Nah. He's a shaman, right? He'll figure it out."
"He'd better...because look at that!"
A hazy shape massed and pulsed in the distance like an undulating mountain. The wind had picked up and was growing stronger. Sorcerers and guardsmen were squabbling with sailors and crewmen, with no one sure what to do or where to start.
"If they'd just let us cast spells…" Zelgadis clenched his fist. The shape drew nearer, approaching in long, rippling motions, creating a wake that set the boat wobbling.
Gourry stepped forward, ready to do what the sorcerers couldn't. He swung with his left hand, a warning to get back. "Is…is that the dragon? It looks dead!"
Amelia gazed at the beast with confusion that quickly became concern. It was a grown sea dragon, but it looked more like a limp, overgrown snake, with its drooping whiskers and flesh so pale she could see the spidery lattice of its veins. She tried to extend astral magic in search of its spirit, but got only base impulses: sad, sick, confused. It drew up against the side of the boat and began to gnaw idly on the foremast.
"It's not dead, it's hurting! Please don't kill it, Gourry-san!" Amelia cried.
Gourry gave her a pained look as if to explain that swords weren't really designed for light wounding. "I can try to distract it-"
The tip of the foremast broke off in the dragon's teeth, causing the creature to screech and lash out with its tail. The boat lurched dramatically to the side and they all fell together in an awkward, pointy pile against a railing.
"Where's Dramitts?" shouted the panicked chief of the sorcerer corps. "Can we open fire? Do we have the oracle's blessings?"
It seemed like a good time to be somewhere else. Lina, who was done being bossed around by an inanimate object, charged ahead of them and jumped through the convenient Zelgadis-shaped tunnel back down below deck. Amelia could feel a familiar electric energy as they all raced and leapt after her, preparing for her unexpected and brilliant idea that would save the day at the absolute last second, because that was what Lina always did. They waited as Lina crouched over the tiles and got to work.
Zelgadis stepped in front of her. "Wait, I've got it!" he declared, sounding aghast. Amelia thought it was like the voices she imagined while reading mystery dramas with twist endings, where the hero realizes his brother is the villain. What's he so upset about?
"You do?!" said Lina, who had spelled out ASS TAT MR DICK. "Hang on, I didn't get a chance-"
Zelgadis angrily grabbed the tiles from Lina and all but flung them one by one at the Phil totem:
CAST DARK MIST
At last the enchanted fire turned white and winked out, and the letters on the tiles disappeared. The tiles remained fixed in the statue's mouth like creepy gleaming teeth.
"That's great, Zelgadis-san!" Amelia cheered. "Now we know to cast Dark Mist to get away from the dragon!"
Zelgadis turned around to face her. His mouth was a wide, flat line, and his brows twitched like dying caterpillars. She could feel the temperature of the air around him sink twenty degrees.
"This is the most meaningless day of my life," he said.
xOxOxO
Hidden in the safety of a large Dark Mist, with wind spells propelling them far away from any pursuers, the Gracia Eternal was nearly to Ruvinagald. Zelgadis was on his way out of a much-needed washing up when he sensed someone waiting for him on the other side of the door. It was a thing you developed over years of training, like a palate for wine. You learned the feel of absence and presence, silence and motion, life and death. As a chimera he could practically feel it in the farthest tips of his ears.
He looked across the hall and saw the chief maidservant, Marjan, standing by a side table. She was a bowed old woman whose highlight of fifty years in service was personally delivering both princesses, for which she had amassed influence second only to Phil's, and she wielded this influence like a scythe. One of the first things Zelgadis had learned in Seyruun was the importance of staying out of her way.
"Sir Greywords," she said, in a tone that somehow disrespected each letter individually, "I know what's happening here."
Was this a warning? A threat? Is she the one cursing me? He could see her drawing up star charts and numerological hexes. "And what's that?"
Marjan drew closer, one hunchbacked and strained step after another, until he could smell her sour caponata breath. She jabbed a knobbly finger to his chest, bone against stone making a hollow tap tap tap sound. "You're a threat to the princess's virtue!"
Zelgadis stopped cold.
"...say that again."
"You heard me, you scoundrel," she snarled. "You may have fooled the others, but not me. I know a rake when I see one. You're a threat to the princess's virtue!"
It was with great difficulty that Zelgadis stopped himself from asking her to say it a third time. The part of him that knew this accusation was unfair and insulting went to war with the part of him that wanted to engrave it into his brain. A rake? A scoundrel? Me? Because he did really care about Amelia's reputation, his integrity put up a good fight; because he was still one-third human male, it lost.
He growled and curled his lip at her, a purely theatrical sneer he'd perfected that left lesser opponents quaking in their boots. Sometimes it behooved him to play the monster other people thought he was. "Believe whatever you want," he said, deliberately dialing up the menace factor. "But the crown prince overrules you."
So Zelgadis Greywords, threat to the princess's virtue, pushed brusquely past her with an extra-dramatic cape flourish to hide the spring in his step.
xOxOxO