“Come on!” Commanded Harpe. He handed her his spare lance and spurred his pony to a trot. This would be their opportunity, she saw, while the knight of the Cross was distracted with Blackheart. Jael leveled the twelve-foot shaft aside the head of her mount. She watched the rounded tip waver, felt her forearm burn like a smoldering torch. Leave it, she chose, drawing out her wooden sword and letting go of a second lance. At a gallop, she caught up with Brandon’s charge.
Just then, the knight and Harold clashed together. It was loud as thunder, the two lances shattering on the paladin’s shield and Blackheart’s breastplate—and the impact was lightning. Like a finger of God, it crumpled the steel and lifted the aspirant out of his saddle. His horse ran on, and his body went limp as a fallen ragdoll.
He could be dead, Jael thought, but they were too far to turn back. The paladin had already drawn his sparring sword and was charging the two of them. And he was laughing; she could hear it even through pounding of hooves and the visor of his helm. They’d cross weapons any moment now—any second and Brandon would reach him first, his lance so much longer than the sword. Yet as he thrust, his point hit the corner of knight’s shield and slid into the air. Then it was Jael’s turn to face down the enameled horseman. But her instincts were all wrong. Her right hand moved awkwardly, and she missed her mark. Yet the knight did not miss his. She felt the whip of her neck as the wooden sword took her helm, flipped it into the air; and like her dreams, she tumbled, crashed to the ground.
Ninth Verse
The ocean roiled bleakly that morning, grim and frothed like a veined abyss; seeming to go on forever, Adam thought while he watched the sun rise white on the horizon. Yet the new day shone brighter than expected. He looked away soon as he realized—turned his gaze from the light toward his feet dangling dangerously over the side of the ship. I could just fall in, he considered. His hands felt differently. They had the old carrack balustrade locked in a death-grip. And his heart was in agreement. Its beat meant more now than it ever had. Every pulse, a pain—both his and not his own.
Briefly, his fingers brushed the scabs on the back of his neck. The brand of a slave. Ba’al had done it personally the day before they left the port south of Pareo. A strange symbol below and behind the right ear, out of sight but ever a reminder every time he moved his head. He was scarred now, just like his father, but he would never live up to David’s honour. Am I even a man? Adam asked himself often. He considered jumping again, but the other pain stopped him. Her pain.
Her name was Magdalynn. She was a girl of eleven, strawberry blonde, pale as the wind, and freckled. The tips of her toes and fingers, even her nose, were raw-pink from exposure, and knobby knees, wrists, and elbows all spoke to her forlorn conditions. She was three years sold into Venicci’s service, the worst of which was the first. It was torture, truly. The jaundiced creature had used her as he had Adam until at last he grew bored. Magdalynn had hoped she’d be sold to another ship after that—anything to escape Venicci’s grasp—yet the captain had kept her on as a cup-bearer. The pastor’s son shuttered at the thought.
They’d been on the sea more than a week, and still, every time Adam caught glimpse of the smuggler his whole body began to shake. His eyes and nose poured, and he tore with his nails into the skin along his ribcage. It was sinful mutilation, but nothing short would stop the tremors. He was weak, weaker than a little girl who, despite all she’d been through, never once bent to the temptation.
“My family’s waiting for me,” she’d confided in him one stormy night when the captain was too seasick to continue his binge. She had been taken, stolen away one church day morning from her quiet harbor town south of the Wild Isle. There had been others with her, all pretty young girls with light hair and bright eyes—lazuli like hers, or turquoise, or tourmaline. None of them remained once they’d arrived on the Pearl Sea. The others were shipped off to some distant land while she was left behind as payment for the transaction. That’s what Venicci said to her the first night she’d been brought to his cabin. She had no reason to doubt it. He’d never lied about what his plans were for her. “But I’ll make it back home, to my Mama and Papa and my brother, Bernard, even if it takes twenty years.”
Those had been the words of a little girl spoken to Adam who lay curled in a corner below deck, shivering in sweat from the latest night terror, whimpering and weeping no less than the storm outside. The pastor’s son only wished he could muster such courage. For in that very moment, this stranger—this Magdalynn—came to be his entire will to life. He had no family waiting for him; no amount of time would resurrect his father. But, the Messah thought, If everything that happened to me was to bring us together so that we would meet and I might be a part of returning her to her family. If this—if I am truly part of God’s plan. Then maybe I can go on, he had faith to cling onto in the middle of the ocean with no land in sight.
Adam sat up straighter and looked again from his feet to the horizon. The white-gold sun was nearly in bloom, and he could
