but I have made you more than you have ever imagined you would be.'
Stung by the dismissal and the knowledge of her own uncertainty, Laaqueel left the room and strode back out onto Tarjana's main deck. She walked to the starboard railing and peered over into the sea. For a moment she wished she could just leap in and swim away to leave all the confusion behind her.
Farther along the railing, a group of sahuagin hauled on a length of heavy anchor chain hanging in the water. Bodies-some of them sahuagin of the inner and outer seas, others sea elves-were hooked to the chain. All of them were relatively fresh kills.
Three of the sahuagin group doing the hauling reached down and began plucking off bodies, harvesting them for meals. Razor-sharp talons sliced through flesh and brute strength snapped joints. Gobbets of flesh were torn free and passed around. Crabs and other sea creatures that had taken up brief residence within some of the corpses, and they became part of the meal.
One of the sahuagin warriors turned to face Laaqueel, regarding her with his black gaze. 'Join, Most Favored One,' he said. 'There is plenty for all.'
He held out a forearm, not a choice section, but not food to be turned away either.
'I am not hungry,' she declared.
The warrior looked at her with consternation. No true sahuagin passed up a meal. A warrior needed to consume huge quantities of flesh to give him the strength to make it through a day.
'I ate the fallen on my return,' Laaqueel said.
She knew the warrior probably wasn't listening and didn't care, but she made the excuse so that she might hear it herself. In truth, she was nearly starving. Since her arrival, days ago, in the Sea of Fallen Stars, she hadn't eaten from either dead sahuagin or enemy. The thought repulsed her, made her stomach twist violently within her.
There was no reason that she could think of for that to be so, no malady that she'd heard of that so plagued her people. Sahuagin, even ill-born malenti, were born to eat.
She watched as the warriors who made up Tarjanas crew ripped at the dead bodies and ate what they wanted. She sighed, trying not to think about what Iakhovas had told her, trying not to succumb to the doubts that filled her. Her faith was more fragile than ever, a hollow shell she wrapped around Iakhovas.
She leaped overboard, longing to find solace in the sea.
Black Champion sat at anchor in the harbor. Jherek stood on the ship's deck and looked up at the Earthspur. The huge tower of rock and windswept land stabbed more than a mile above sea level in the center of the Dragonisle, the island where Immurk's Hold was located. Even in the night, the mountain left a shadow across the black water.
Azla was below with the others, questioning Frennick. The pirate captain laid out torturer's tools on a small table, the metal gleaming from the lantern light.
Jherek hadn't been able to stay, nor did Azla permit it.
He struggled with his conscience, telling himself that Frennick deserved all that Azla could think to give him, but it was no use. Through it all, the young sailor remembered that it was his doing that placed Frennick in her hands.
'Young warrior.'
Turning, Jherek saw Glawinn approaching him, two steaming cups in his hands.
'I brought you some soup,' the paladin said. 'I thought it might serve to warm you some.'
Jherek didn't want the soup, didn't want to pretend that everything was normal. A man he'd captured was being tortured down in the hold. He couldn't help but listen for the screams he knew must come. Thankfully, the crash of the sea's waves was too loud.
He accepted the cup anyway and said, 'Thank you.'
'What an awful place this is,' Glawinn commented quietly.
'There are people in Immurk's Hold who still maintain an innocence,' Jherek stated, thinking of the girl he'd rescued in the tavern.
'That was a brave and good thing you did back there, young warrior.'
'It was foolish,' Jherek grumbled, then shook his head. 'Come morning, the girl will still be on the island.'
'You saved her from a bad night.'
'Delayed, is more correct, I think.' Jherek turned the cup in his hands, absorbing the heat. The soup smelled delicious, full of spices.
'You've got a headful of dark thoughts,' the paladin said.
'I look out there, and I wonder how different I am from those men,' Jherek said. 'Did I ever tell you how I came to Velen from my father's ship?'
IV
5 Flamerule, the Year of the Gauntlet
'I was twelve,' Jherek said. 'My father spotted a merchant ship, heavily laden so she was sitting low in the water and dragging down the wind. That night he announced to the ship's crew that we would claim it as a prize the next morning.'
Glawinn listened in silence.
'My father is a hard man,' Jherek said. 'You know the stories they tell along the Sword Coast of Bloody Falkane, and you know that nearly all of them are true. He's unforgiving and merciless, as able to cut down an unarmed man as he is to fight to the death. There is no right or wrong in his world, only what he is strong enough to take.'
The rattling of the rigging on the lanyards sounded hollow, echoing the way Jherek felt. Glawinn waited silently.
As he spoke, Jherek felt the heat of unshed tears burning his eyes. Still, even though his voice was so tight it pained him to speak, he had to.
'I loved my father.'
'As a child should,' Glawinn said.
'I remember how he laughed. It was a huge, boisterous sound. Even though I didn't understand much of what made him laugh, I laughed with him. As I grew older, I stopped laughing and learned to fear him. Then, one day, he saw that in me. My father told me that I had to learn to be hard, that the world was cold and would eat the weak. I believed him, and I believed I was weak.'
'That's not true.'
Jherek didn't bother to argue. 'He had me taken from the small room off his cabin where he'd kept me all that time and put in with the men. They weren't any more gentle than he'd been, though they were careful not to leave any marks that he could see.'
In the distance, another longboat drew up to a cog and lanterns moved along its length as the passengers prepared to board.
'For the next eight years, I lived in the shadows of my father's rage. There was never a day I felt peace between us, nor anything even close to love.'
'To be the son Bloody Falkane wanted,' the paladin said, 'you'd have to have been born heartless and with ice water in your veins. Where was your mother?' 'I never knew her.'
'Your father never spoke of her?'
'Not once,' the young sailor replied. 'Nor did the ship's crew.'
He stared up at the dark sky and refused to let the tears come. How much of it came from what he remembered, and how much because he knew Frennick was down in the hold, he couldn't say.
'The night I chose to leave,' Jherek continued, 'my father visited me in the hold. He brought a cutlass and placed it in my hand and told me I would take a place in the boarding party in the morning.'
'At twelve?'
