Chapter Twenty-One: Wager
"Damn!" the seer shouted furiously as yet another attempt at scrying failed. It was proving impossible to find the bounty hunter, though he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Devon was still alive. If he had been dead, there would simply have been nothing to see, but as it felt like he was trying to push through a heavy drape, he knew that Devon was alive. If only he could get a glimpse of where Devon was now, perhaps where he was headed to! He damned the woman that he couldn't see for her innate protection against such apparently pitiful attempts as his. His ego had been greatly shaken by his inability to see someone so young.
Although he had seen her. He had been to the isle that she lived on with her father and her mother and some elves, and he had seen her. She was beautiful, strong, and quick to anger. He had left in such a hurry after slitting Jack's throat in order to avoid her. Her mother had provided no trouble for him--the woman always seemed to be drunk nowadays, for which he was immensely grateful. If she had been sober, she would have likely seen through his façade to the man he really was.
She had power, he knew. How could she not when she was difficult for him to see? Jack had had power too, but it hadn't done him any good against the marksman's poison. The seer smiled. He was quite happy to have killed of that Jack Sparrow. The man had been a great bother to him. What with killing Barbossa and the entire crew being taken prisoner to be hanged. Jack had known everything about him, and he couldn't bear the thought that Jack might some day reveal his secrets to the known world.
He tried his scrying again, searching out Devon. For the first time, he saw something. Flashes of light showed him an angry sky, furiously throwing lightning bolts and roaring thunder. The seer grinned. So, the girl was concentrating on something else to the detriment of her protective shield.
He only prayed that it would last long enough for him to discover where they were.
**
The wind was fabulous today, Reanna couldn't help but thinking. It was blowing the right direction, for once, and she was taking full advantage of it. The sails were billowing, the oarsmen hard at work (though it couldn't be that difficult with a tailwind), and Devon was no longer looking mutinous. Apparently it was getting a little bit easier to take her orders. She smiled, then laughed. It was a good day indeed, far better than she had thought it would be at three-thirty this morning.
One black mark on the day was that it was overcast, and the wind smelled of rain. There would likely be quite a squall before too long, but she hoped to outrun it as long as she could. She sent an order for the oarsmen to move faster. Her highest hopes were that they would beat the storm to St. Maarten, but that was still nearly a full day away, even with the excellent time they were making.
"Devon!" she shouted, and was forced to shout it again, and louder, before he could hear her. When he realized that she was calling for him, he trotted--carefully--over to her. "We're not going to be able to outrun the storm much longer, prepare the crew and yourself for a long night! If there's anything I can do about it, we'll get through this without even a ripped sail."
"But the storm probably won't even be serious!" Devon said with some contempt.
"Darling, I've been on the sea since I was a newborn babe. I can taste a storm on the air before it's within a hundred miles of me, and I can gauge how serious it will be. Mark my words, this one will last for a good six hours and it's going to be a tough one to get through intact. Should be quite the challenge, eh?" she asked, her eyes sparking with excitement.
"Well, if you're so sure about it, would you care to lay a wager?" Devon asked, smirking.
"Yes, I would. If I'm right, you get no pay for two months, how about that?" she replied.
"And if I'm right?" he asked.
"You won't get thrown into the brig for your disrespect and distrust in your captain! Now go and do what I ordered you to!" she shouted over a particularly gusty blast of the wind. Devon left her side then, undoubtedly sure that he would win this bet hands-down. Reanna smiled again, knowing better. She had a knack for gauging storms, she was better at it than anyone she had ever met. Her father had learned the hard way to listen to her when she said that a bad storm was coming, and it appeared that Devon would now learn the same hard lesson.
Ah well, it was his own fault for disbelieving her and making a wager on his erroneous assumption about the storm.
**
Three hours later, Devon would have cursed himself for arguing with Reanna if he hadn't been so busy keeping himself from falling overboard. It was raining hard, the wind whipped about as though it was trying to tear everyone and everything up from the ship. There was deafening thunder and blinding lightning.
The crew had all lashed themselves to the rail after the sails had been tied down and the anchor dropped. The only one still not secured was Reanna, who was apparently making sure everyone was still alive and well--even the man that had once been Devon's spy, who was still down in the brig.
When she had run--not walked--past Devon, she had had a sort of excited and happy expression on her face. She seemed to be enjoying this! Briefly he wondered if her excitement would change as the storm wore on, but then his thoughts were consumed again by keeping himself alive and on board the ship.
**
The fury of the sea was beautiful to Reanna. In her eyes, the sea was only trying to claim its due, and she was the only one that stood in the way of its doing so. She ran about the ship, repairing small leaks that popped up here and there, making sure every last person on board her ship was alive and well--especially Haramel and Pur'a'ti, who had never been on board a ship during a gale such as this one. They appeared to be handling it fairly well, but they were elves...their constitutions were considerably stronger than the average non-seafaring human.
When someone shouted for her to tie herself to something secure, she shook her head. She couldn't just sit somewhere tied up and hope that her ship survived the storm, she had to make sure that nothing went wrong, or broke beyond all repair. She had to make sure that everyone stayed alive, and she would do that if it killed her. This was by far the worst squall she had ever come across in all of the voyages she had made with her father, but she felt confident that she could handle it just as well as he would have done.
Hours later, when it was only raining--and that nothing compared to the needles the raindrops had been earlier--and patches of the stars could be seen through the clouds, she told the crew to untie themselves and to make sure everything was alright. She would have done it herself, but she was so exhausted that she was having a hard enough time keeping herself on her feet at the helm of the ship.
In the last hour of the storm, she had held to the wheel, unable to do anything else in her exhaustion, but confident that the storm couldn't do much more damage as it waned.
She looked up, seeing the full moon playing hide-and-seek in the clouds, and whispered, "Happy birthday to me," wryly.
She didn't realize that there were black spots swimming before her eyes, and she was slightly surprised to feel herself falling, though she never felt it when she hit the deck, having fainted dead away.
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Hmm, and Devon still doubts Reanna...what a fool for betting on a storm with someone who's been on the sea most of her life! Lol, I hope you guys liked it, and thank you very much Elkengrove and Rin for your reviews on the last chapter, for the first time since I started this story there were more reviews than chapters! Let's keep it that way! Lol! I love you guys!