Read Online Deborah Hale by The Destined Queen - Free Book Online

kept him below. And the conviction that Maura needed him.
    “There, there, aira. ” He held her head as her belly gave another violent heave and she spewed what little she’d eaten into the hold of the Phantom. “You’ll feel better once you get it all out.”
    He didn’t have enough experience of the sea to be certain of that. But right now, he’d say any daft thing if it might ease her. He wished their places could have been reversed. He would rather endure this himself, than watch her suffer. No doubt she’d have tended him better, all deft and gentle and reassuring—unlike his rough, awkward efforts on her behalf.
    She subsided against him, gasping for breath. “I’m sorry, Rath…should have listened to you and gone home to Windleford. What good will we do anybody…dying out here on the ocean?”
    “Hush, now. We’re not going to die!” Had he ever spoke words he believed less ? “Mind what you told me about believing in our destiny? Why, you were dead, or near as. Yet you came back to me.”
    Somehow, his faltering effort to convince Maura began to have a true effect upon him—as if someone had thrown him a rope to cling to in this storm-tossed night. He did not know where the other end might be anchored. But as the night wore on, a feeling of certainty grew in him that it must be somewhere firm and true.
    At last Maura fell into an exhausted doze, a blessing for which Rath muttered a garbled but grateful word of thanks, that somehow lulled him to sleep when the storm was at its worst.
    He woke some time later, astonished to find Maura and himself alive. For a while he sat holding her, savoring the simple luxuries of quiet and calm, and the soft light of dawn streaming through the open hatch. A powerful sense of belief took hold of him, as it had in the mines and on midsummer night in the Secret Glade. Though he knew it would not last, he welcomed it just the same.
    A while later, Maura stirred, stretched and opened her eyes.
    “It’s so quiet,” she whispered. “Are we in the afterworld?”
    Rath chuckled and dropped a kiss on the crown of her head. “Your ears might make you think so, aira, but your eyes and nose will tell you the truth.”
    He grimaced at the reek of bile that had been spewed in the hold last night—not all hers by any means. “Shall we go up on deck and get a breath of fresh air?”
    She gave a weary nod then leaned heavily against him as he helped her aloft. There they found the crew making repairs to the ship and going about their other duties in a mute daze. Most looked as if they had not yet recovered their wits from a hard blow to the head.
    Only Gull had a relaxed, well-rested appearance, though Rath doubted he had left the deck all night. His clothes and his hair still looked a bit damp, though the cat lolling around his neck seemed dry enough. Rath wondered how it had weathered the storm.
    Gull perched on a raised platform near the front of the ship that was girded by a waist-high railing. He scanned the horizon through a long tube that might have been carved from very pale wood, or perhaps ivory. Rath guessed what he was looking for.
    “Any sign of the Ore Fleet?” he called to the captain.
    “Not a glimpse, inlander.” Gull lowered the tube from his eye and leaned back against the platform railing. “I reckon it is too much to hope that the storm might have blown them east into the warding waters around the Vestan Islands. They were likely long past the Islands before it hit.”
    Maura sighed. “I wish we’d reached the Islands before it hit.”
    “We have a saying where I come from, wench.” Gull climbed down the short ladder from his perch with a jaunty step. “‘ The worst wind is better than none at all’. This one blew us toward our destination all the faster. By my reckoning, we might make Margyle before nightfall.”
    “The sooner the better,” Maura muttered under her breath.
    After the tempest of the night, the day passed quietly. Late in the