Captain Richard's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

Richard sat on the stump until his breath slowed. The watcher lay bound at his feet, awake now, eyes moving from the open shaft to the gray water beyond. Richard knelt and searched him. He pulled a small burlap sack from the man's coat — gold coins stamped with strange marks. He weighed it in his palm, then tied it to his own belt beside the bribe he no longer needed. The sea past the rocks had gone strange. The waves rolled in soft, even lines, too gentle for the wind. Beneath them, dark shapes moved — long backs, pale manes drifting like weed. Seabreeze's kin had come. They circled slow under the calm, waiting. The watcher saw them too. He began to talk. Names, coin, the man who had paid him. Richard listened and did not answer. He had what he needed. He hauled the watcher to the shaft's edge, where Seabreeze's blue head rose from the dark water below, patient. "You found a place that isn't yours," Richard said. He cut the cord at the man's ankles, kept the wrists bound, and pushed him in. The splash was small. The gentle waves past the rocks broke their pattern. The dark shapes turned inward. Then the surface went still again. Richard dropped the capstone into the ring himself. He packed snow around it with his boot until the seal held. No second door. No cracks. He climbed down the rope to Seabreeze's back and the kelpie carried him under, toward the moon pool and the shore where Kovu waited with Alexis. The cove was closed. The man who paid the watcher would send another, but tonight Richard was going home.