Page 188 of Keldori By Daybreak

“Sorry, I think a light breeze just brushed my shoulder.” He rubbed where I’d hit him. “Did you feel that?”

I rolled onto my back and watched the clouds pass overhead. “You’re insufferable.”

“You don’t know what you’d do without me, Blue.”

He was teasing me, but I bit my tongue before I could let slip that his words were exactly right.

“When was the last time you slept?” he asked, more gently.

“After Ergoth,” I whispered.

“Wren,” he sighed. “You need to sleep.”

“No.” My voice was too sharp. I swallowed hard. “Sorry. I’m just—”

I broke off to blink at the sky.

“Are you worried about bad dreams?” he asked in my head.

“I don’t want to see Ergoth again. Even if it’s not real,” I admitted. “I don’t want to think about them, dragging you away and-and—”

“No one’s dragging me away.” He took my hand. “I’m right here, and I’ll keep the nightmares away.”

I turned to look at him. Liam used to say those same words to me. I squeezed his hand.

“Okay,” I whispered.

He reached over and passed a hand over my eyes, forcing my lids closed. Then he sang, haunting but soothing, in that same strange language I’d catch him singing in every now and again.

Another whistle from the armada shrieked on the breeze, but I focused on Ciarán’s voice and the rise and fall of Una’s flank until sleep finally consumed me.

Ciarán continued to sing in my head after I fell asleep. The foreign words of the melody slipped across the ridges of my dreams, but it kept thoughts of Ergoth, Barony guards, and rotsbane from sneaking in.

Night had fallen by the time I woke, and the shore had long since receded into the horizon behind us. The ocean surface reflected millions of stars back at the sky so that it felt like we were gliding through space.

Vinia, the captain’s daughter and apparent First Mate, stood stationed at the tiller with a metal tool aimed at the sky as she measured the stars and tracked our trajectory. She nudged the tiller to the left and hummed an idle tune.

A fisherman was showing Iseult and Ciarán new fighting stances near the middle of the deck. His voice drifted back to me in his instruction.

“One foot slightly forward. Yeah, that’s right, so the heel is in line with the toe. Now angle your feet in and bend your knees. Perfect. And that’s how you fight on a boat without losing your balance.”

Ciarán caught me watching and flashed a grin. He shuffled to the side in an attempt to knock Iseult off her feet, but she caught him behind the knee and brought him to the deck using a move similar to the one he’d taught me.

I shook my head and turned to look out the back of the ship at the wake we’d stirred on the ocean’s surface. A dark spot sat on the line between water and sky, and I squinted at the horizon.

“Are there no stars there?” I asked Vinia.

She turned to squint into the night. “No, there are. Something must be blocking them.”

I straightened up. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Probably another ship.”

“Another ship?” My throat seized. “We’re being followed?”

“No,” Vinia laughed. “It’s probably another fishing vessel.”

I gripped the railing. Another fishing vessel wasn’t too crazy of a thought. There had been other boats like this one in the harbor.