The Princess and the Blood of Eternity

Chapter 15: Heart of a Lionfish

A day passed, and Quinn found herself crawling inside the ship's bilge swathing huge globs of pitch on the inside of the hull. Lightheaded and covered in sweat, she tried to ignore the brown, foamy water that sloshed around her knees and feet. The acrid aroma of smoky tar mixed with stagnant seawater made her eyes water.

A year before she had arrived to work for Marius and Cleo, she'd often done similar work, patching the hulls of those huge galleons in the Southern outlets, west of Ara'fel. Not the most fun of work, not to mention those bilges had been large enough to swallow just about any light source, leaving her to feel lost inside the gloom of a watery cave with just her weak lantern to keep her company.

Her life before had been spent in her father's shipyard, in Mont Qerath, where she had worked on all manner of craft. Being able to see so many ships from all over the world had been a dream.

Her only annoyance had come from the work in the bilges. Many of the crew lacked proper waste disposal habits. And after months of travel, it often left them with a small pool of sewage sloshing around in the bottom of their boat. Not the greatest of environments to work in. Mostly, she didn't understand how the crews lived with the smell.

Finishing her task of sealing the hull, Quinn kissed two fingers, then pressed them against the wood, saying a silent prayer to her ancestors. She'd done what she could and wouldn't discover the extent of the damage until she could get the boat in drydock or careened. Hopefully everything would hold together till then, and her inspection proved correct. There was no telling what sort of damage the tsunami or maelstrom had caused.

Bent over, she grunted from being in a tight space for so long. She gathered her tools and started inching backwards on her hands and knees toward the stairs. Sometimes, being tiny had its perks.

It was too bad that staying busy had failed to keep her mind occupied. Recent events notwithstanding, life was not supposed to be this complicated. What would her mother think about her mooning over a man, a man who saw her as little more than a shipmate? And then there was her father. Quinn knew how he'd respond. He'd promptly call the man a fool, then bash his face in. Subtlety had never been in his wheelhouse.

Typical shipbuilders, her parents were a pair of sundried, salty sea dogs. Grizzled hands and feet that were discolored and stained with resin from a lifetime of working on boat hulls. Her mother had always been easy to pick out in the shipyard with her deep grey, wrist thick braid hanging down her back, and clipboard covered with numbers and prices for supplies and orders. Then there was her father, the loudest man she'd ever met, issuing commands to all the people who worked for him. The pair should've been able to retire happily by now, instead they were working in a port in the southeast. Unfortunately, her current route never went that close to the divide, meaning it'd been some years since she'd seen them.

It sucked. But that was life, she thought bitterly.

Ascending the stairs, her shirt snagged on the handrailing, tearing a hole in the bottom. Why didn't Cleo look at her the way he looked at the princess? Until recently, it'd seemed like he might develop feelings for her. Quinn had never pushed the issue, choosing friendship first and hoping romance would develop naturally. And then he goes and finds a princess in the middle of the ocean. What were the chances?

Pursing her lips to stop her teeth from grinding, she turned and entered the cabin. Her thoughts were all over the place.

The quaint living space shared the ship's interior with the captain's quarters, a square closed-off space barely large enough for a single bed and desk, and a much larger cargo hold. Bulkheads or walls separated the three uneven sections, but only the captain's quarter came with a proper door.