Jenna Helland - The Fanged Crown

Despite himself, Harp winced. “And to you.”

After a quarter hour of walking along the path through the thicket, the ground opened up, and they found themselves in a stand of towering trees. The ground was nearly devoid of plants between the massive buttress roots, and sunlight filtered down in streams through the ceiling of leaves above them. There was an unnatural silence in the grove, as if the wildlife saw them approach and found places to hide.

“The thickets must have been the outer band of the jungle,” Harp said looking up at the towering treetops hundreds of feet above them. “Have you ever seen trees that tall?”

“Captain?” Verran asked, walking up behind him. “The body’s over there.”

“Could it be an animal carcass?”

“Possibly,” Verran said, but he didn’t sound very convinced. “I didn’t look too closely.”

“Everyone have a look around,” Harp said. “Keep an eye out for more … plant monsters.”

Verran led him to a spot beside a buttress root. When Harp reached it, he could see that the root was partially hollow and someone was tucked inside.

“Can you get Boult?” Harp asked Verran. The boy nodded and headed across the grove.

When Harp bent down, he could see that something had been gnawing on the body and most of the face was gone. And there was something odd about the remains. It was as if sections of the corpse had disintegrated down to the bones while other parts were untouched by decay. A netting of skin bound the corpse into human form, and as soon as those skin-strands broke, the body would fall into an unrecognizable heap. Harp had seen many bodies in various states of decay and dismemberment, but nothing quite as disconcerting as the one before him.

He could see strands of reddish hair tucked under a green hood and a gold necklace hanging around the neck. He heard Boult come up behind him and pulled back so the dwarf could see inside the hollow.

“Let me,” Boult said gruffly. Harp wandered a few steps away and stared up at the towering trees as the light glittered through the spaces between the rustling leaves. He could feel every muscle in his chest as he took each breath. He’d wondered about Liel so often in the past ten years that it seemed impossible that the Chultan jungle would be the place he found her, curled up in a hollow like a frightened animal.

Suddenly he didn’t know if he could take it. He wasn’t a sentimental man. Those who were close to him called him cold. And he wouldn’t have admitted it to another soul, not to Boult or Kitto, who were the only family he had. But the first time he Liel on the deck of the Marderward was frozen in his memory like a painter’s still-life. If it was possible to love someone from the first moment you saw them, Harp had loved Liel starting then.

Harp had been twenty-nine years old when he first set foot on the Marderward , a three-mast ship with a glossy black hull edged with gold. The carving of a raven-haired maiden graced her prow, her painted arm outstretched as if she were leading them across the treacherous seas. The ship’s decks shone, and her sails were as white as snow. The crew’s quarters were spotless, and a collection of well-fed cats kept them free of vermin.

But the ship’s impressive exterior hid a rotten core. After only a few days aboard the ship, Harp regretted the night when he shared a few pints with some of the crewmen of the Marderward . Harp had just ended a charter on a filthy, ill-run boat that ran stolen goods up and down the Sword Coast. He’d been on pirate vessels for nearly ten years and had a vague notion that he wanted a legitimate life away from the pirating that had marked his sailing career thus far. The Marderward’s sailors assured Harp that their captain was a fair man who ran a tight ship. The crewmen paid for round after round of ale, and before the night was up, Harp signed a year’s contract under Captain Taraf Predeau. He woke up with a headache and hoped for the best.

The red-haired, broad-shouldered captain had a deceptively boyish face and friendly grin. On Harp’s first day aboard, the captain shook his hand and personally showed him around the immaculate ship, explaining the tight schedules and rigid discipline that was expected from his sailors. Despite his easy-going manners, Harp felt uneasy around the captain, with his booming voice and biting humor.

From the beginning, Predeau made fun of Harp’s name, calling him Lute or Whistle. At first, Harp thought the captain was trying to get a rise out of him, but he soon realized the captain viewed Harp as a kindred spirit. And after a few tendays on the ship, it turned Harp’s stomach that there was something about him that was appealing to a man such as Predeau. By that point, Harp understood that Predeau’s clean-cut appearance was nothing but a façade. And it was his blood-encrusted whip and his steel-toed boots that told the true story of his depraved nature.

Although he had a joint license from the Houses of Amn, Predeau was far from a merchant seaman, despite what the sailors had led Harp to believe. By the time Liel was kidnapped and brought aboard the ship, Harp had seen how Predeau’s kidnap-and-ransom scheme worked several times over. It soon became obvious that Predeau didn’t kidnap arbitrary people off the street, but he did so at the request of the politically well connected. Mostly, it was perfunctory—haul them out of their beds at night, take them to the ship, and lock them up until their kin paid the coin. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t cruel either. And there was a certain amount of satisfaction in watching a silk-robed nobleman spend a few days locked in the hold until the price was paid.

But Predeau hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d said he ran a tight ship. He issued beatings or withheld the crew’s payment for the slightest infraction. Still, Harp could have tolerated the conditions, except for the fact that Predeau treated the youngest members of his crew worse than the older sailors. Boys as young as eight who were purchased from parents who were desperate for any coin they could get their hands on. The so-called cabin hands were indentured until they were eighteen, and many were weak and ill from untreated maladies.

Harp was expected to organize the boys into work crews, but he wasn’t their keeper. Predeau’s henchmen monitored them constantly and locked them in their quarters whenever the ship made port. The boys slept in a dark, squalid room in the depths of the ship and ate the scraps left from the older sailors.

They’d been on the water for a few days when Harp awoke to the sounds of scuffling above his head. He rolled out of his hammock and climbed the ladder. The sun hadn’t fully risen, but a handful of the boys were on deck, their hair and clothes damp from the spray of the rough waves. They were grouped around a small black-haired boy who was on his hands and knees scrubbing the boards. When the black-haired boy paused in his work, a lanky boy named Merik would kick at him or call him a name.

“What’s going on?” Harp asked Merik. Even though he’d been onboard for less than a tenday, Harp had figured out that Merik was Predeau’s pet. A few of the boys were handpicked as henchmen-in-training, with Predeau taking much pleasure in goading his favorites until they abused the younger and weaker ones of their own accord.

“Predeau said Kitto wasn’t working hard enough,” Merik explained. “He gave us all more shift time.”

Harp looked down at Kitto, who couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. The kid’s arms were shaking with fatigue.

“How long have you been out here?”

Merik shrugged. “Not long enough.”

“He’s supposed to finish the deck?” Harp asked, looking down the length of the ship. Usually it took a crew of five several hours to finish the task.