A loud popping sound from the mast caught his ear and he looked to see the wooden pole bending more and more with each gust.

  “The sails!” he shouted, not even aware that they should have dropped them before the winds picked up. A visible split was starting to show deep in the wood. He reacted as quick as anybody could have but it was already too late and it would have been better to simply stay away from them.

  The mast bent and split with a loud crack, sending a sizable chunk of lumber springing right into Tic’s face and sprawling him onto his back. His head rang and his vision fogged, he heard Tia screaming his name as she rushed toward him.

  “No! Get on the rudder!” he shouted as the ship leaned, sending him rolling into the port side rail leaving a trail of blood. He wanted to grab at some rope or something that he could tie himself off with but his hands weren’t functioning in concert with his mind. Through a bloody fog he saw the mast slip into the water dragging the boat to the starboard side, pulling the skiff broadside into the waves. The skiff leaned hard to starboard and scooped a huge draft of water from the sea almost capsizing her completely. He couldn’t see Tia anymore and he thought it was starting to rain but it could just be the spray from the sea.

  “Tia,” he shouted knowing she was gone, she had to be gone. No one could have stayed on board after that, he thought, not realizing that he himself had stayed on board.

  The uninvited water flowed in through the floor and down through the bilge area before it slammed into the opposite gunwale causing the skiff to lurch to port side. Ropes still attached to the now submerged mast pulled tight in a snap that splintered wood from the rails and yanked at the still attached portion of the mast, causing it to twist and destroy floor planking as well as frame work and Tic knew that it was over for him.

  Tic was suddenly rolling head over heels toward the port rail which was never going to be enough to stop him, so he straightened his body, trying to plant himself to the deck. Instead of rolling he slid and he slid fast with the only option for a bumper being his head.

  No! his mind screamed and he reached for his magic, cursing himself for not thinking of it before, but his stone was…gone.

  He pulled his face down and took the impact on top of his skull, instantly seeing stars. He didn’t know if the seas had calmed or what, all he knew is that he couldn’t feel it rocking anymore. A large wave came over the stern or maybe it was the side, he didn’t know…for all he knew he had fallen in and was slowly sinking toward the bottom of the sea. His only regret was that he didn’t take the stupid apprenticeship in the capitol. His world went black.

  * * *

  Tia never told him how long he was out but when he awoke, he felt like he was suffocating within the built-up heat of the ship’s berth. He crawled out soaking wet and waded through the cabin to find the stairs up to the rolling deck. The sun was so intense that it blasted through the hatch, blinding him as he searched each step before putting weight on it. The deck was empty. The mast had broken clean off at five feet up from the planking in a splintered mess, the broken portion gone; however, it might still be attached to the end of the rope that pulled tight into the water. If he would have been of his right mind, he would have realized that the mast would float so it more than likely was not on the bottom of the sea.

  Not seeing anything immediately in the stern he took a walk around the cabin to the bow and called out. “Tia!” Nothing… “Tia!” he called again and heard something back by the wheel. The sea was rolling but by no means dangerous, but Tic still held on to the cabin wall as he made his way back to the stern. The deck was empty, no sign of Tia anywhere. It wasn’t until he rounded the back of the wheel that he found her sprawled out on the floor.

  “Tia!” He rushed over to her ignoring the strained muscles from his ordeal, with the exception of his head which pounded with each step. He didn’t know if she was alive or not, her skin was baked to a crisp in spite of the cooler northern air temperatures and her lips were chapped and split to the point of bleeding.

  Bleeding? She can’t be dead if she is bleeding right? She lay sprawled on her back with one hand on the wheel in some sort of attempt at keeping the drifting skiff on course.

  Her eye’s opened halfway and tried to focus on Tic.

  “Water.”

  “I’ll get you some,” he said and started to go, but her hand on his arm stopped her.

  “Got fouled in the storm.”

  “Well let’s get you down stairs then.”

  “No, just wait; wait, sit. Just sit for a bit,” she said, her voice trailing off into whispers. She was exhausted and he was injured and simply did as she asked and slumped down beside her. Tic was injured and exhausted to the point where it went from mid-day to night in a blink of an eye. He would have kept sleeping but something had hit his face.

  Rain, praise the gods it was starting to rain. Quickly he got up and swished the fouled water around and through it off the side so that he could put the pails under the collection points. There were four, two were gray water collected below deck.

  If the rain would hold steady for two hours, he felt that he could get enough water to keep them going for a couple of days longer. He scooped out a mug and went over to Tia. He shook her awake and she just stared dumbly at him as if she didn’t get what he was trying to tell her. The rain splashing on her face seemed to register to her more than anything he said and finally she opened her broken lips to take the water he was offering.

  “Let’s get down in the hold and out of the sun. I’ll watch the water supply and get us stocked up,” he said, not realizing that his own head still bore the remnants of dried blood and his hair was caked with it.

  “I, I can’t move, Tic,” she said as a wave of pain crossed over her face. “Something inside near my hip is broken or crushed. The mast came back up and rolled over me at the end of the squall after I got you tucked away.”

  “No,” he said and she just nodded, her eyes partially closed. “I’ll carry you,” he said and with great effort he lifted her into his arms and struggled to get her down into the cabin which was half full of water. Luckily the beds were above the water level and relatively dry so he laid her on her cot and started to work the hand pump to get most of the water out. There was a lot of water but he kept pumping until he absolutely had to stop. He sat down as waves of dizziness washed over him and rested for a bit before getting up and continuing with his task.

  Four more times he was forced to rest, but he finally had the level down to below his ankles and he collapsed next to Tia’s bed, the movement startled her awake and she looked at him with pained eyes. He could see her lips quiver and sweat from the pain was etched upon her brow. He wanted to do something to take it away from her but it was beyond him.

  A whimper escaped her lips when he laid his head on her arm.

  “I’m going to die, Tic.”

  “No, you are not going to die,” he replied sternly as if that could make a difference.

  “No, it hurts so much. I want to die.”

  “Here, let me see if I can adjust it or something, I can’t make it any worse, right?” Tic said, feeling more than a little uncomfortable with where the injury was on his sister. He would feel that way with any woman, but his sister…that in some way made it worse but in yet another way made it okay. He unlaced her britches and slowly pulled them down, wincing with every whimper that she made. She kept her awareness enough to cover herself as she went and he could see the bruising where the damage was. It was inside of her hip in what anatomy classes told him was her pelvis. He didn’t know what he could do but he focused like he had never focused on anything before and tried to feel the bone underneath the skin.

  “What are you doing, Tic?”

  “Shhhh,” he whispered as he pressed his hand deeper into her flesh feeling it begin to heat up either from contact or fever from her injury, but he kept on. He closed his eyes and it was almost as if he could see the bone and how it was broken just inside her left hip.

  “Oh my god, oh my god, oh…oh…oh.” Tia was almost screaming, her urine released but Tic ignored it, lost in his focus. With his mind totally engrossed to that specific spot he began to weave, it was like weaving the way he melded the marrow back together discarding any splinters or foreign matter that he couldn’t identify.

  He put one hand on her hip and one on her waist, not even feeling her own hands clasp over his, and he pressed and twisted until what he thought would be an alignment and pressed together. A force flowing from him into her almost hummed audibly as both were frozen motionless for several seconds

  Tia screamed and tried to pull his hands away and even beat him on the head to get him to stop, but he was lost. In his mind he liquefied small portions of bone and pulled them together in a weave like he was working leather for a pair of boots. Ten strands at first, then twenty, then a hundred until he was soon pulling and weaving threads of bone by the thousands.

  Tia stopped screaming and went limp as she passed out. Tic didn’t know what happened. He only knew that he awoke in the same position he was in when he looked at her hip but Tia was gone.

  He jumped to his feet and rushed out of the almost dry cabin to find Tia standing…she was standing in the prow looking out on the sea.

  “Tia!” he shouted and ran to her side where she stood with eyes moist from tears. “Are you okay? What happened?” he asked and it took her a few moments for her to answer.

  “I am. I don’t know how I am okay but I am. I thought you threw that rock overboard?”

  “I did, you saw me do it.”

  “Tic, I don’t know how but there was a wall of water that surrounded us last night from floor to ceiling. It moved around us so fast it looked like a solid wall and then, and then you fixed me. I don’t know how but you fixed me. Maybe I was just imagining it, but it sure seemed it,” she said in a trembling voice now lost for words before reaching out a hand and putting it on his shoulder. She was weak, he was weak, their ordeal had overwhelmed them. He looked out at the sea with her wondering how much he should say.

  “It’s called a cone of power, or at least that’s what I call it. I’ve never talked to an actual wizard to know what they call it or if they even use it. With the stone I could do most things without establishing one but when I want to do something big like manipulate the weather or something like that, I have to establish a cone in which to draw energy.”

  “But…you don’t have the stone.”

  “I know, I thought I needed it, but I guess I don’t. I mean, it is harder to find the energy now, whereas with the stone I could just grab it because it was always there, but it is there still and I just have to find a way to tap into it.”

  “It hurt so bad, I wanted to die.”

  “I know; I could feel your pain.”

  “No, you can’t know. I felt so weak and helpless, and…you, you fixed me,” Tia said and wrapped him in her arms before she started to weep.

  Tic didn’t know if he should tell her that he could actually feel her agony and that he had to compartmentalize it in order to keep going on. He decided to keep it to himself for now. Who knows, maybe he will figure out a way to avoid the pain in the future.

  Over the next two days they slowly began to regain their strength, but soon they were running out of water again and this time they were also running out of food. They sat in a dead calm after not having seen land in over three weeks, regret laced the lines of Tia’s face. Their pathetic attempt at a makeshift sail hooked to the prow lay slack on the deck.

  “Tic.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I feel bad about dragging you out here the way I did.”

  “You hardly dragged me, Tia.”

  “Yeah, whatever. I just didn’t want to go alone, you know. Besides, Dad said I couldn’t go without you.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t have wanted you to go alone. Wait, what? Dad said what?”

  “Dad, he wanted you to have a life before you settled into the shop for a life of drudgery. He told me I could go and even set up the boat for me. When you said no, that you wouldn’t go I decided to steal the boat anyway and go on my own.”

  “So that was the coming clean conversation we never had?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry that I deceived you.”

  “Oh forget it, I guess I knew you guys had set me up. It was either this or the apprenticeship.”

  “Yeah, we weren’t very sneaky about it and he did want you to go and see the world. I bet you didn’t know that we were going to die though, did you?”

  “We’re not dead yet.”

  “No, not yet but…” He could see that she had something to say that was really bothering her so he just waited and let her say whatever it was in her own time.

  “Hey, ah…” Tia started after a few seconds of deep thought. “If I go first…you can eat me,” she said and kept her face pointed toward the deck. Tic looked up at her incredulously and almost laughed when he saw how serious she was.

  “Gee, thanks, Tia,” he replied sarcastically, but she didn’t notice the sarcasm. They sat there silently for a few minutes more before she spoke again.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “What about if you go first? Can I…um.”

  “No.”

  “No? Really?”

  “No, you cannot eat me. I am pretty firm on that point too,” Tic replied, abashed that they were having this silly conversation. “You cannot skin me, cook me, or eat me, okay?”

  “Wow, thanks, bro,” she said, as if she was hurt and more than a little disgusted with him before she turned her head away and looked up at the stars that were just starting to show in a cloudless night. She started to giggle. It became infectious at the absurdity of the conversation they just had and soon had them holding their bellies and laughing hysterically. Soon though reality set in and they settled down to look at the stars.

  “I’m gonna do it anyways,” Tia said.

  “I know,” he replied, and the laughter started again.

  “Tia, set the jugs to catch water if it should rain again and let’s go down stairs and crash for a while,” Tic said.

  “Sounds like a plan, at least we can go out on a good night’s sleep.” They fell instantly into a deep slumber that was enhanced by their lack of rations.

  * * *

  Tic lay half-awake as the skiff rolled with the waves, neither of them deigning to man the tiller as it had just become too much for the young duo, not to mention they were in a dead calm. Maybe in the morning they could do more, make another stab at finding land or praying for water, possibly landing a fish or two, though the ones hooked so far were way too big for their puny gear. The fact was, they simply were not trained nor cut out for the venture that they were attempting. As most runaways typically found out, the world was a lot bigger and harsher than either of them could have guessed. They were overwhelmed and at their physical and mental ends and they hadn’t even met other people yet.

  They would have given up if they could have figured out how to actually do it without making things worse. Tic was enjoying the natural bobbing of the small boat to the natural rhythm of the waves. Then suddenly it changed, no…it hadn’t been sudden. It had changed a while ago and he just hadn’t noticed it. It was like the bow was being held stable as the stern continued to move naturally with the waves. He turned his head to the side and looked at Tia who was already staring back at him, her eyes wide.

  “Land,” she mouthed and Tic sat up, thinking to run up on to deck and see, but he wouldn’t see as it was still very much night out. Then they heard something that both frightened and excited them as well as had them freezing still in their bunks.

  “Voices,” he mouthed back and sure enough gruff male voices started to sound back and forth across the bow outside of their cabin, and they didn’t sound like very nice voices. Tic looked around for the short sword that was a part of the ships accoutrements but it was nowhere to be seen. It wouldn’t have done much good seeing as neither of them had ever used one before.

  Heavy footsteps rang out on the deck as whoever it was started to go through their things and Tic jumped out of his bunk looking for his boots. One of the voices screamed with rough joy as if he had found something tasty and the cabin door flew open and three men, so large they shouldn’t be able to fit inside the small structure, rushed in.

  Tic started to say something but a man with a dark, beard-covered face threw him down on the bunk and bound his hands behind his back from his elbows to his wrists. He could hear that Tia too was struggling with an assailant but was being thrown around as if she were a rag doll. They stood him up and he looked at his sister, horrified by how they were handling her. A cloth bag that smelled like old fish was thrown over his head before he was dragged up on to the deck.

  He was hoisted over the shoulder of one of the giant men and struggled to catch his wind back when the man jumped over the side and into the shallow water with a thump. Not for the last time Tic wished that he had taken the apprenticeship in the capital or he had his stone where the magic was instantly there.

  5

  Twins

  I worry about him, though he is right here beside me, smiling brightly, face flushed from the excitement of the hunt. His glacial blue hair framing an almost translucent face, an entire being almost hidden in the snowfall, making him out to be part of the glacier itself. I wondered if he saw me that way, so striking yet still an obvious product of the surrounding environment. Is that why he smiles when I look at him like this? He appears as visual perfection for those who are a part of the Spires, so being his twin…wouldn’t I too then look so remarkable? This thought made me smile.

  “Here,” Juin said as he handed a squirming bag to his twin. Juil tied them on to the back of her saddle before asking, “More lokai pups?”