Prologue 2
Seventeen weeks ago
Three hours passed by turns of the hourglass without any sign of the fog's end. Three hours spent in a fog bank a hundred yards long. Only sorcery could explain it, but that made no sense; the Elves had us dead to rights. Why use magic to send us off into the unknown? Assuming it was them, of course, but who else would care about us?
Kerri and I used the lull to extract the arrows and bind her wounds. I'd been fortunate enough to take no more than a few scratches from near-misses and flying chips of wood, and while Kerri was going to spend some time healing, Elf arrows were made for elegant killing. Never barbed, they either killed outright or slid out without any resistance and didn't even tend to leave scars. An Elf would kill to destroy what they considered ugliness, but wound in a way that made more ugliness in the world? Not on your mayfly life.
All this we did in silence, knowing how sounds carried over open water. It was only when I turned the hourglass for the third time that she broke the stillness.
"Bewitched, is we, Harry?" She asked in the hushed tones of hidden panic. She was sitting in the Captain's chair, observing me at the tiller, failing miserably at looking casual. The captain, having been the single most visible target on the ship, had been turned into a virtual pincushion. I salvaged his hat before rolling him overboard with the rest; I'd always liked its jaunty parrot feather.
"Can't see what else it could be," I admitted with a shrug, not looking up from my amateurish handling of the ship. "But we ain't dead and that's a right surprise, so I'm fixin' to do whatever needs doin' to keep it up."
We didn't have much longer to wait. Kerri and I exchanged looks of utter horror at the sound of gravel scraping along the bottom of the ship. Normally, that would be a sign of nothing more than our having come ashore less gracefully than intended. When one is two days' sail from the nearest spit of land it is an altogether more sinister noise.
The fog lifted as our study ship ground to a halt, both Kerri and myself too petrified to move a muscle, staring at each other in wide-eyed terror. Light burned through the rapidly dispersing fog and when the Grasping Wretch came to a full stop and fell gracelessly onto its side, dumping us overboard, it was onto a sun-kissed beach.
Even the most gradual of shipwrecks is a dangerous thing, of course. As I was tossed overboard I was desperately fending off impacts of any loose objects that had been left on the deck and ensuring that I was not beneath the mast when it crashed down like a felled tree.
Finally, the noise ended and the wreckage settled, leaving myself and Kerri on the beach in the midst of a scatter of debris. Battered, certainly, bruised in every muscle, but alive and somehow free of our pursuers. On a tropical beach no less, which given how far north we had been, should have been several weeks' journey at the least.
Having checked that my companion was still alive, I began a more detailed inspection of our new surroundings. We were on a strip of white sand a hundred yards wide, stretching out unblemished in both directions, abutting lush jungle. The only obvious destination was a tower visible over the trees, looking to be some half-mile or so distant, with a path leading invitingly into the green tunnel of the jungle. It was made yet more obvious a destination by the following note, which formed itself from jade fire on the white sand nearby:
To the Travellers
Harold Weller, called Blacktooth, and
Kerriwether Norrwell-Ingotsford, called Knife-Hand,
Greetings, welcome, and congratulations. The answers you seek are in the tower before you, and with them, your reward.
