said as she went by. “Come with me.”
He looked down the steps, stretching his senses toward the brig. Had she left the other person down there? No, a door slammed, and he found the mage hunter alone in the cell. She was lying on the deck, probably in pain, but Yanko wasn’t a healer and couldn’t do anything about that.
He turned to obey Pey Lu, or at least to go up on deck with her. Perhaps he might still get his chance to escape.
An explosion roared, the power of it hurtling him against the wall. Booms came from the deck, cannons being fired. More people shouted, some voices full of command, some voices full of fear.
From his passageway, Yanko couldn’t see any sign of fire—the explosion sounded like it had come from the rear of the ship. He stumbled his way up the stairs to daylight as something else slammed into the side of their vessel. When he came out onto the deck, he gaped at the rear of the ship. Flames spat, pouring smoke into the air, and the railing was gone, as well as a large chunk of the decking. It was as if the wolf god had descended from the heavens and taken a huge bite out of the ship.
Pey Lu stood at the railing, looking overboard. Yanko did not see any enemy ships, though he did spot the island. A green smudge with a flat mountain in the middle, it lay about two miles ahead of them. The same four ships that had been flanking them the day before remained in their positions. He didn’t see any smoke coming from them. Only the Prey Stalker had been targeted.
“Dak?” Yanko wondered. All he could imagine was that the underwater boat was attacking. Would Dak dare to do so against his mother? If it was Dak, he knew who he was dealing with.
Pey Lu flung a hand over the railing, as if targeting something in the water below the ship, and Yanko remembered her claim that she could lift an entire vessel out of the sea to drop it onto its side.
Something else slammed into the side of the craft, this time near the bow. The deck quaked under Yanko’s feet.
“How do we target them?” someone yelled from the gun deck.
“Turgonians,” someone else yelled. “The mages need to do it.”
Yanko wasn’t sure what his mother was doing or if he should run to help her. If this was Dak, Yanko surely did not want to help. If it was some other Turgonian underwater boat...
Another explosion went off, the deck heaving under Yanko. It flung him into the air, boards being ripped from their nails all around him. Something clubbed him in the back of the head. He sailed several feet before landing, then fell through a hole where the deck should have been. Flames ate at the boards, and light and heat surrounded him. He slammed down to the gun deck, the sky a pale blue through the hole above him, a hole ringed by fire. Someone screamed nearby.
Yanko felt useless, but he didn’t know what he could do.
Another scream came, and he climbed to his feet. Smoke that hazed the air smelled of gunpowder, and he squinted through flames at the rows of cannons lining either side of the deck, their barrels thrusting out through open ports. Some of the cannons were missing, having tumbled through the hole in the deck. What had struck the ship? He had no familiarity with such powerful explosives.
“We’re shielded now,” Pey Lu yelled, her voice coming from somewhere on the deck above. “Drop some charges off our port side. They’re over there now.”
Yanko stumbled to a corner of the gun deck that wasn’t on fire, at least not yet. He helped pull out a pirate who had been trapped under a cannon rolling backward, his leg mangled. Yanko wasn’t sure he should be thinking of these people as allies, but he couldn’t leave someone screaming in pain.
It quieted somewhat, no more attacks striking the ship. Yanko covered his mouth and nose, trying to keep himself from coughing as he reached out with his mind to the port side. He sensed the underwater boat out there, much closer than it had been the last time he’d touched it. His heart leaped into his throat. There was Dak’s familiar aura. And Arayevo. And Lakeo.
“Yanko, where are you?” Pey Lu yelled. “Get up here to help.”
To help? Against his friends? He clenched a fist