Jenna Helland: The Fanged Crown

The rigging partially obscured his view of Llywellan, an older man who handled a sword adequately if not particularly well. Llywellan was more of a thinker than a fighter, but he was on his feet and forcing back a prune-faced sailor swinging a rusty blade. Harp didn’t see Boult anywhere, but the dwarf would manage to take care of himself and find some way to be particularly annoying while he did it.

Harp turned back to his opponent, an unremarkable man of indeterminate age with black hair and pockmarked skin. No longer the self-assured vanquisher, Bootman looked like a run-of-the-mill fellow, someone to have a drink with in a tavern. But as Harp had learned, every man had it in him to inflict pain on the weak and, more often than not, enjoy himself in the process.

“Was there something you wanted?” Harp demanded as he backed Bootman against the wall of the cabin. “Something you felt you couldn’t just ask for?”

Unable to find a better weapon, Bootman made a halfhearted swipe with the dagger. Harp knocked it out of his hand. Ramming his forearm against Bootman’s throat, Harp shoved the man into the wall. Suddenly, hot anger filled Harp’s chest. Why did people insist on taking things that weren’t theirs as if power gave them justification to possess whatever they wanted? And why did they always do it with that smug look of triumph on their face?

“Why us?” Harp demanded. “Why go after us?”

“You’re dead already,” Bootman growled.

Before Harp could respond, Bootman’s eyes rolled back in his head and his skin turned ashen. Startled by the rapid shift in the man’s coloring, Harp jerked his arm away and took a step back. Bootman clawed at his own throat as if he were being choked. Thinking the man was faking, Harp kicked Bootman in the stomach. His body clattered against the wall like a rag doll.

“What the …” Harp said as the man’s skin turned from gray to a sickly yellow. As his fingers went slack and the dagger fell to the deck, Bootman opened his mouth to speak. But whatever words he was about to say were lost in burbles of blood as a crossbow bolt lodged itself in Bootman’s throat. The man slumped to the ground, dead.

“Boult!” Harp yelled, turning in the direction that the crossbolt had come from. He saw the dwarf perched in the rigging above his head. Harp reached down and yanked the bolt out of Bootman’s neck, freeing a stream of thick blood. “Is that your bolt?”

“Who else’s would it be?” the dwarf replied, sliding down a shroud line and landing in front of Harp. Boult was the leanest dwarf Harp had ever met, and the only one he had known who shaved off all his facial hair, including his eyebrows, which accentuated the webbing of lines around his wise eyes. Not a natural sailor, he was sinewy and fast, and easily the best fighter on the crew. He had the long, muscular arms and short, powerful legs of a dwarf, but because he was beardless, his own race shunned him, and many others stared at him, unable to figure out what sort of creature he was.

“Damn it all, he was about to talk.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Boult said, loading another bolt and firing a shot into the back of the last of the boarding party from the Marigold who was fleeing across the gangplank. The sailor grunted as the bolt hit him between the shoulder blades, and he fell into the water with a splash. They heard thrashing for a moment, followed by nothing but water lapping against the hulls of the boats.

“Everyone all right?” Harp asked as he crouched down beside Bootman’s corpse. The man’s yellowy flesh hung on his frame loosely, as if it had been partially melted. Harp checked the captain’s pockets, noting that the man’s sweat-stained shirt had been grubby before it was bloodstained.

“Everyone who isn’t him,” Cenhar said, dropping his axe unceremoniously and inspecting a deep gash across his own bare chest.

“Or his crew,” Boult added.

“So everyone who matters,” Llewellyn said.

“What happened to him?” Harp asked.

“It must have been a spell,” Cenhar said, looking down at the body with distaste. Cenhar had been with Harp since their days sailing on the Marderward , and the graying warrior was uninterested in anything he couldn’t touch or hack in half.

“Who cast a spell?” Harp asked to no one particular. A shadow fell across the body. Verran was standing behind him looking down at Bootman.

“Maybe there’s someone still on the other ship?” Verran said.

“But why kill their own captain?” Harp asked.

“Maybe they’re not a crewman? Maybe a captive did it?” Verran said, blushing.

“Whoever did it, they did us a favor,” Boult said. “And they’re keeping to themselves now.”

“We’ll search the ship,” Harp said, “but not until we take care of the Crane . Drag the bodies to the mast. Verran, get started cleaning up some of the wreck.”

Harp looked across the waves at the Marigold . Her dirty white sail snapped in the wind, and an empty jar rolled aimlessly up and down the boards. There was no sign of life.

He and Boult helped the rest of the crew clean up the Crane and search the bodies, none of which had anything more interesting than pipe weed. As they tied ballast stone onto the corpses and prepared to throw them overboard, Harp saw Boult taking a particular interest in Bootman’s body.

“They were waiting for us,” Harp said. “Someone told them we were coming.”

“Did you just work that out?” Boult said sarcastically, lighting some of the dead captain’s tobacco in his griffon-head pipe.

“Well, you can’t expect me to be smarter than you,” Harp said amicably.

“Yes, but I can expect you to be smarter than a loaf of bread,” Boult retorted. “Why are we here, Harp?”

“In the spiritual sense?” Harp asked. “Or here in the jungle?”

“I want some answers,” Boult demanded. “I know who hired us for the job.”

“Of course you do. I told you,” Harp replied. “Avalor.”

“But do I really know why Avalor sent us to Chult?” Boult prodded. “Or have you just shown me the tip of the arrow?”

“I told you why,” Harp said evasively. “He wants us to check on the colony.”

“Shouldn’t the missing colonists be an official Tethyrian investigation, not some personal request from the only elf on the queen’s privy council?”

“Avalor is a personal friend—”

“No, he’s not,” Boult said. “He’s the father of a personal friend.”

“Liel is not a personal friend, “Harp said.

“Right, she’s a damn sight more,” Boult snapped. “It’s time to confess, Harp.”

Under the unwavering glare of his friend, Harp tried to sort out his jumbled thoughts. He didn’t want to lie to Boult, but he had promised Avalor he would keep some things secret, at least for a while. The Marigold and her waiting captain only proved Avalor’s fears: there were people who didn’t want answers about the lost colony. An ill-considered comment could find any number of ears in a crowded tavern, no matter how dearly Harp trusted his crew. But Boult had traveled with Harp for years. After they had got out of prison, they had weathered hurricanes, gambling debts, and every manner of drunken idiots in pubs from the northern edge of Waterdeep to the southern border of Tethyr.

Still, the Marigold’s attack had raised questions that Harp wasn’t sure Boult would like the answers to.

“You know what the Crane means to me,” Harp finally said.

“She’s a fine ship, all right,” Boult said. “And she’s survived some seriously stupid moves on the part of her captain.”

“Trust me for the moment, all right?” Harp said. “You know I would do anything for the Crane.”