The Pirate Queen

Chapter 16

The next morning, Eric awoke with a jolt to someone touching his shoulder. For a second he thought it was Jora waking him up because he'd slept in, but when he opened his eyes to look at the hammock next to him Jora was still sleeping.

"Eric, where are the maps?"

He turned over to look at Ariel standing over him, her face half-shadowed in the grey dawn light. She was fully dressed for the day from what he could see, boots, weapons, and all.

"What?" he asked groggily, rubbing his eyes. He'd gone to sleep too late last night, too distracted with his thoughts to close his eyes. Ariel's singing kept ringing in his ears, preventing him from slipping into unconsciousness. His eyes fluttered even now, overly exhausted from the mental exertion. 

She poked his shoulder again, making his eyes fly open and belatedly he remembered that he wasn't wearing a shirt, just his pants and boots. Jora had left the ovens on to make the biscuits quicker for the morning so they could sleep in, making the kitchen almost twenty degrees warmer. A fat lot of good sleeping in was doing for him now.

"The maps you got in Schilbad. I want to see them, where are they?" she repeated.

With a groan, Eric sat up and rubbed at his face again. He was too tired to think too much as he stood, gently swaying. He shuffled over to his trunk shoved in the corner under a sack of potatoes and struggled to move them off without waking Jora up. 

The chef didn't even stir when Eric dropped them heavily to the floor and the trunk lid squeaked open. Eric pulled out the two carefully rolled maps and a clean shirt, turning to face Ariel. Her eyes trailed down his torso and he glanced down at his chest to where her eyes rested on his left hip. 

Peaked over the hem of his pants was the black outline of a conch shell he'd gotten when he was sixteen. An old sailor Eric had talked to on the docks was selling a table full of them, all shapes and colors. Eric stopped, he still didn't know why, and asked the man why, of all things, he was selling conch shells. 

"Because," he'd started in a rumbling voice like thunder, "they represent the sea. They symbolize courage, power, and sovereignty. They change and grow and travel all over the world, building character. They are good luck charms. Take one, Prince, and may it bring you the luck it brought me."

The small pink and cream shell was still sitting on his bookshelf at home. Christian still had no idea he had the tattoo or the anchor on his inner right bicep. Jora had a matching one, something they got eight months into their friendship after a drunken night out at the bars, a night neither of them could remember.

Her eyes wandered back up and his mouth turned down when her gaze narrowed in on the scars on his upper chest, specifically the X-mark right over his heart. The raised skin was whiter than the rest of his tanned chest. Even though he'd gotten it when he was eight years old it had never faded.

As the silence stretched on he expected her to ask about the scars or say something about the tattoos. Make some sly comment about a prince's unblemished skin and what would daddy say about that? but she just looked back up to his eyes and held out her hand.

"Maps please."

He tucked them against his chest, frowning. "What do you want with them?"

Her eyebrows drew together at his insolence. "Use them for origami. I'm going to look at them Eric," she hissed.

He held them tighter and shook his head, his brain still in that half-awake fog that made decision-making near impossible. "Where my maps go, I go." Ariel tried reaching out a hand but he smacked it away, glaring.