Captain Richard's Arc

Chapter 1 of 13

Captain Richard sat alone at a low table, mapping ports in his head. Somewhere out on the water waited his ship, the one with the ice dragon prow. Somewhere far from here waited Alexis. He needed a hiding place with no second door, no cracks, no other name on its lips. He had been stalling for weeks. He hated himself for it. The tavern door banged open. A man fell through it and hit the wooden plank floor hard. Blood pooled between the rustic boards. He had dragged a small chest behind him, its golden fox lock scraped raw from the road. Richard was on his knees beside the stranger before he could think. The man was barely breathing. One hand clutched a rolled scroll, edges burned, gold lettering still bright beneath the soot. "He said," the stranger whispered, "the three coasts. He said you'd know the hiding hole under the third stone." Only one dead man had ever spoken those words. Richard's chest went cold. The stranger pressed something into Richard's palm. A leather collar, brown and worn, with a small black translator clasped to it. Richard knew the stitching. He had watched his mentor buckle it on a parrot a hundred times. He had buried the man wearing it. The stranger's hand went slack. Richard closed his fingers around the collar. The stalling was over. His mentor had reached past death to send him a map, a name, a chest — and someone, somewhere, had killed a messenger to stop it arriving. Richard stood. He had to get back to Alexis before whoever did this found her first.