Mary Herbert: Dragon's Bluff

“Ulin,” Challie’s voice cut through his reverie. “Come play cards with us. I think Lucy’s cheating.”

With a groan and a stretch, Ulin pulled himself out of his musings and moved over to join the two at their card game. “Lucy doesn’t have to cheat,” he told Challie. “She’s too good at the game.”

Lucy looked up from dealing the cards and smiled at him—that spicy, slightly devilish smile that could melt his insides. She was not a beautiful woman, not like his mother or even his auburn-haired sister, Linsha. In fact, she had been given the name Plain Lucy at the Academy, an appellation Ulin detested. While it was true she was stocky, her features were rather large, and her face was too round for conventional beauty, she had gloriously green eyes like sunlight glowing through jade and a smile that radiated humor and joy. Several days in the clear spring sun had brought out bronze highlights in her chestnut hair and intensified the galaxy of freckles across her nose and cheeks. To others she was plain, but to him she was the light that kept back the darkness in his heart.

“Are you going to sit there gawking like a moonstruck calf, or are you going to play?” Challie demanded. The dwarf slapped down two cards, face down.

Her comment startled him out of his thoughts—this seemed to be a good afternoon for daydreaming—and he belatedly looked at his cards. A lousy hand as usual.

They played for several hours, keeping score on the ship’s railing with a piece of chalk.

Challie played with a dwarf’s stubbornness and a careful eye for detail, and she won several important hands. She was organized, neat, quiet, and introverted to the point of coldness. It was little wonder to Ulin that she was a lawyer. Dwarves were known to value law and order, and this one practiced the essence of order from her perfectly packed bags to her simple rugged clothing. She wore no jewelry or bright colors, only a well-made tunic, brown pants and boots, and a thick coat of knobby wool. Her long brown hair fell in a tight braid down her back and the only weapon she carried was a steel axe polished to the sheen of sterling silver.

It was probably a good thing she did not carry the axe all the time, Ulin thought as he watched her toss her cards down after Lucy won a hand and left her stuck with too many cards.

“Where did you learn to play so well?” she asked Lucy.

Lucy shook her head, flipping her ponytail over one shoulder. “My father. It was about the only thing he taught me.” She said nothing more, but simply picked up the cards and dealt another hand.

Ulin tried to concentrate on his game and could not. The air was too pleasant, even for the last days of Rannmont, and the ship’s gentle roll over the waves was too soothing. Lucy and Challie quickly cleaned out his few coppers and smugly suggested he return to his bale of fleeces for a nap. That didn’t seem like a bad idea, so he stretched out his long, lanky frame, crossed his ankles, and closed his eyes.

The sleep that seemed so close didn’t come. The sun still shone clear, the noises of the ship sounded the same, and yet something seemed different, something gently persistent that he had not noticed while sitting upright. He could not explain what it was, only that it set off a small alarm in the back of his mind. His eyes opened, and he sat up. Ulin had not survived numerous journeys across Ansalon by ignoring his intuition.

Wide awake now, he climbed to his feet and went to stand by the bow rail where the wind tugged at his clothes and raised goose bumps on his arms. Salt spray kicked up by the bow splashed across his face. The ship was nearing the narrowest part of New Sea where Sable’s swamp encroached so far into the shallow sea that it created a strait into the northeasternmost end of the body of water. To his left he could see the green, hazy hills of the coast of Throt, while far to his right lay a low, dismal line that marked the beginning of the swamp created by Sable out of what had been New Coast and Blödehelm. Ulin scanned the southern horizon and was very relieved to see no sign of the great black. With luck, she was in her lair, dabbling in her vile experiments or snacking on a few hapless swamp creatures.

Puzzled, Ulin looked around the ship. The crew must have noticed a change, too, for their activity had increased in just a few minutes. More sailors were topside, clearing off the deck and scrambling into the rigging. Captain Tethlin shouted orders from the wheel, and in the crow’s nest, the lookout stared fixedly to the west.

A sudden gust of wind caught the ship, and its lurch to the right threw Ulin off balance. As he braced himself against the rail, it occurred to him what he had felt: a change in the movement of the ship. Instead of a rhythmic rise and fall over the swell, the ship was taking on a decided roll sideways over a changing wave pattern. The wind and waves were swinging around to the northwest.

“What’s the matter, Ulin?” Lucy called.

He studied the western horizon and saw with a twinge of alarm that the sky was no longer clear. “It looks like our good weather is about to end.”

Lucy and Challie joined him at the rail, and together they watched a formidable line of cloud gathering across the sky in an angry gray wall.

“Move it, folks!” a seaman shouted. He and another sailor grabbed a bale of fleece from the pile on the bow and hauled it toward an open hatch.

“Captain says clear the deck,” the second man ordered. “That means you.”

There was nothing to do but obey. Lucy and Challie picked up their cards and cups. Ulin pulled up the blanket they had been sitting on, and the three followed the other passengers down into the small cabins under the raised upper deck at the stern.

As soon as they were in the small cabin he shared with the women, Ulin went to the porthole and threw it open. They were lucky to have one of the few portholes on the passenger deck, even if it was small, hard to open, and showed signs of too much rust. Ulin craned his neck to get a better view of the sky and was not reassured by what he saw. Already the clouds had overtaken the western sun and turned the afternoon light to gray gloaming. The roll of the sea increased noticeably.

“Can’t the captain pull over or something?” Lucy asked. There was a tremor in her voice.

“Pull over?” Ulin repeated, turning around to explain that ships just can’t pull over like a wagon. He saw the look on her face, leaped for the chamber bucket, and shoved it under her chin just in time.

Her greenish look of apology silenced the remark he was about to make about weak stomachs. He had forgotten she’d never traveled on a ship before.

With Challie’s help, Lucy climbed into her bunk and crawled under the blankets. Ulin emptied the bucket out the porthole and tied it securely to the safety rail in easy reach.

Challie looked on with a grim expression then crawled into her own bunk. For a while Ulin sat beside Lucy in silence and listened to the growing fury of the storm. Thunder rumbled like a charging cavalry, and the wind wailed around the ship and through the rigging. They heard thumps and strange bangs, shouts and running footfalls as the crew hauled in the sails and battened down the hatches. As the rolling motion of the ship grew worse, so too did the darkness until their cabin was darker than night. Outside they heard the rain begin to fall in battering torrents.

“We’re so close to Sable’s swamp,” Lucy breathed. “What if we’re blown aground?”

Ulin tried not to think about being at the mercy of the treacherous black dragon. “If Captain Tethlin is as good as I think he is, he’ll use the wind to blow us through the strait.”

“I hope you’re right,” she said weakly.