out his craw, you’d have sixty sermons ready to crack my skull open with and forty lectures to offer my leaking brains.’
His gaze grew intense as she turned away from him. In the instant their eyes met as his advanced and hers retreated, something flashed behind both their gazes.
‘Asper,’ he whispered, ‘what happened to you in Irontide?’
She met his eyes, stared at him with the same distance she had stared through the boat.
‘Nothing.’
‘Liar.’
‘You would know, wouldn’t you.’
‘Well, then.’ Lenk interrupted rogue, priestess and wizard in one clearing of his throat. ‘If we’re spared the threat of drowning, perhaps we can figure out how to move on from here before we’re left adrift and empty-handed tomorrow morning.’
‘To do that, we’d need to know which direction we were heading.’ She turned and stared hard at Denaos, a private, unspoken warning carried in her eyes. ‘And it wasn’t my job to do that.’
‘One might wonder what your job is if you’ve given up preaching,’ the rogue muttered. He unfolded the chart and glanced over it with a passing interest. ‘Huh … it’s easier than I was making it seem. We are currently …’ He let his finger wander over the chart, then stabbed at a point. ‘Here, in Westsea.
‘So, if we know that Teji is northwest, then we simply go north from Westsea.’ He scratched his chin with an air of pondering. ‘Yes … it’s simple, see. In another hour, we should see Reefshore on our left; then we’ll pass close to Silverrock, and cross over the mouth of Ripmaw.’ He folded up the map and smiled. ‘We’ll be there by daylight.’
‘What?’ Lenk furrowed his brow. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘Who’s the navigator here?’
‘You’re not navigating. Those aren’t even real places. You’re just throwing two words together.’
‘Am not,’ Denaos snapped. ‘Just take my word for it, if you ever want to see Teji.’
‘I’d rather take the map’s word for it,’ Asper interjected.
Her hand was swifter than her voice, and she snatched the parchment from the rogue’s fingers. Angling herself to hold him off with one hand while she unfurled the other, she ignored his protests and held the map up to her face.
When it came down, she was a twisted knot of red ire.
The map fluttered to the ground, exposing to all curious eyes a crude drawing of what appeared to be a woman clad in robes with breasts and mouth both far bigger than her head. The words spewing from its mouth: ‘Blargh, blargh, Talanas, blargh, blargh, Denaos stop having fun,’ left little wonder who it was intended to portray.
Denaos, for his part, merely shrugged.
‘This is what you’ve been doing this whole time?’ Asper demanded, giving him a harsh shove. ‘Doodling garbage while you’re supposed to be plotting a course?’
‘Who among us actually expected a course to be plotted? Look around you!’ The rogue waved his hands. ‘Nothing but water as far as the eye can see! How the hell am I supposed to know where anything is without a landmark?’
‘You said—’
‘I said I could read charts, not plot courses.’
‘I suppose we should have known you would do something like this.’ She snarled, hands clenching into fists. ‘When was the last time you offered to help anyone and not either had some ulterior motive or failed completely at it?’
‘This isn’t the time or the place,’ Kataria said, sighing. ‘Figure out your petty little human squabbles on your own time. I want to leave.’
‘Disagreements are a natural part of anyone’s nature.’ Lenk stepped in, eyes narrowed. ‘Not just human. You’d know that if you were two steps above an animal instead of one.’
‘Slurs. Lovely.’ Kataria growled.
‘As though you’ve never slurred humans before? You do it twice before you piss in the morning!’
‘It says something that you’re concerned about what I do when I piss,’ she retorted, ‘but I don’t even want to think about that.’ She turned away from him, running hands down her face. ‘This is why we need to get off this stupid boat.’
They’re close to a fight, Gariath thought from the boat’s gunwale.
The dragonman observed his companions in silence as he had since they had left the island of Ktamgi two days ago. Three days before that, he would have been eager for them to fight, eager to see them spill each other’s blood. It would have been a good excuse to get up and join them, to show them how to fight.
If he was lucky, he might have even accidentally killed one of them.