Sineater

We were out on the open sea.

We’d made it back to the ship without an issue. The crew had been ready to cast off the moment that we’d gotten on board. Despite my urging, Starna had refused to let me fix her shoulder, relying instead on her frozen bandage. After two days, I’d yet to see the cranky mage or the princess. The general mood of the crew wasn’t as sour as I thought it’d be, given that their shore leave had been non-existent. There hadn’t been much time for complaining though. Garm had been pushing the sails as much as he could to get as far away from the Golden City as fast as he could. It was almost like he knew that we were going to have ships chasing us.

I climbed up to the crows nest where Vin was napping again. He was using the pretext of needing to stay away from the mage as an excuse to have himself permanently on watch duty, though I wasn’t sure how good of a job he was going to be doing if he was always asleep.

“Hey!” I punched the Camadt in the upper shoulder. “You’re supposed to be watching the sea, not your eyelids!”

My brother opened one eye. “I can do both.”

I scanned the sea. There wasn’t anything that I could see, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t anything out there. Pirates would use invisibility spells to cloak their ships all the time Though that only cloaked the ship, not the disturbance the ship made in the water. It made it harder to spot them, but not impossible.

“You know dad will have you scrubbing the deck by yourself if he catches you napping up here. He’s serious about getting the princess to safety.”

“You mean Alessa?” The giant feline grinned. “She’s not a princess anymore, so you can drop the title, you know.”

“She’s still a princess even if her kingdom has been taken.” I folded my arms on the edge of the giant basket he was laying in. “She can always come back with an army and reclaim her throne.”

“I could take an army to any city and claim the throne.” Vin chuckled. “Does that mean you’re going to start calling me Prince Vin?”

“You wish.” I sighed. “I just can’t get myself to think of her as a regular person, you know. She’s royalty, not some common orphan like you or me.”

“Who are you calling common?” Vin covered his eyes with his upper left arm. “I’m a lord of the sea!”

“Right. And I’m a prince.”

“You could be a king.” He lifted his arm to look at me. “You’re a one man army. You could walk into most cities and the people would simply kneel because of what you are.”

“That’s the whole reason the kingdom outlawed people like me.” I turned to look out at the sunrise. “After the king died, too many Sineaters tried to claim the throne or other cities. You remember what that was like.”

“So do better.” Vin yawned and stretched, then a smile broke his lips. “I think you’d make a great king and there just so happens to be a princess on board…”

“Hey!” I punched him in the chest. “I don’t think about her like that.”

“Right. You just fawn over ‘the princess’ because your parents were part of the royal guard.”

“Exactly.” I puffed out my chest. “It’s my duty to…”

“Quiet!” Vin stood up and started squinting at the water to the south. “There!”

I turned to look at where he was pointing, but the Camadt’s vision was much better than mine. I grabbed the spyglass off the floor of the crow’s nest and peered through it. Where my brother was pointing, there was a very clear parting of water.

“Storbek!” I pointed in the direction we were heading. “Pirates!”