that you stop him?”
“My duty and my honor demand that I follow orders.”
“What are your orders?”
“To keep you away from the rock.”
“And let him sit in his cabin and fondle it?”
“Actually, he’s sitting on the bridge and fondling it.”
“Haven’t you ever disobeyed orders, Dak? For the greater good?”
“Yes.” Dak pulled a blank sheet of paper over the atlas and started writing, or perhaps drawing. “It did not go well.”
Yanko slumped against the doorjamb, feeling defeated and alone. He told himself he was too old to cry. Besides, Sun Dragon would probably pop into his head to mock him for it. Still, he couldn’t help but let his chin droop to his chest. How was he supposed to best Sun Dragon and the mage hunter on his own?
“I’ll watch your back, Yanko. So long as you don’t try to set me up with any princes. Or pyromaniacs.”
Yanko blinked and looked up, but Dak was still working and didn’t bother glancing back. It didn’t matter. The words drove the feeling of defeat out of Yanko’s heart. He smiled at the rest of the comment, though he’d barely heard anything after the offer of back-watching.
“Your problem might be that you’re too picky, Dak.”
“Undoubtedly.”
Yanko went back to the bunk, heartened that if Sun Dragon started a fight with him on the deck tomorrow, he wouldn’t be alone.
Chapter 23
The sea stretched in all directions, the surface undulating outward from the Turgonian fleet, empty of continents and islands. Or so it appeared from the surface. Yanko let his mind stretch out as he stood by the railing, delving below the waves, brushing past fish and crabs and octopuses going about their simple lives, eating and basking in the sun, in water made shallow by land below the surface. A lot of land. Yanko could sense valleys and canyons, ridges and mountains, the tops of those mountains sometimes within a few meters of the surface and shallow enough to provide obstacles for ships sailing through the area.
Dak had called this the Deadly Shoals. The Nurian name was the Wrecked Reaches, probably because the words rhymed in Yanko’s language and lent themselves to song, songs that warned sailors to stay away, promising that many ships had crashed upon the rocks hiding beneath the surface. To Yanko’s mind’s eye, there was far more down there than rocks. Even without the lodestone, he knew they had found the missing Kyattese continent. What he didn’t know was how to access it or how his people could possibly farm land that lay under the sea. There were Nurian dishes, especially along the coast, that featured seaweed and kelp, but he couldn’t imagine such edibles supplying millions of tables across the Great Land.
Yanko wasn’t ready to give up on the idea that this landmass, however buried in water, might be the solution his people sought, but the first inkling of doubt gnawed at his belly. What magic had the Kyattese used to sink their continent seven hundred years ago? And could it be raised again?
Even as a lover of earth magic, he struggled to grasp how that might be possible. Once eroded away, a landmass could not be built up again. Was it possible that the Kyattese hadn’t used magic to hide their land at all? That the seas had simply risen over the years to cover it? Had it been flat, the whole continent near sea level, he might have believed that, but there were mountains down there, mountains that had somehow been pushed a mile or more into the earth’s core, so they wouldn’t break the surface now.
Lakeo appeared at his side, nudging him in the ribs. “Should you be standing there with that vacant expression on your face when there’s an assassin on board? One who may even now be fantasizing about sticking a dagger in your back?”
“She prefers throwing stars.”
“Well, that makes it all right then.”
Lakeo leaned against the railing, facing the deck of the ironclad rather than the sea, and rubbed her bare arms. “I guess we’re not in the tropics anymore.”
“No, the Kyattese reputedly came from a more temperate climate with a less intense sun.”
“I’ve been thinking of snagging a Turgonian sailor to keep me warm at night.”
She gave Yanko a speculative look that he wasn’t sure how to interpret. His conversation with Dak was fresh in his mind, but all he could think was that Dak had been mistaken, especially if Lakeo was fantasizing about Turgonians.
“Don’t you and Arayevo have a guard on your cabin door?”