Page 51 of Hijack the Seas: Tsunami

“I was hungry—”

“And she’ll be worse than that if we go ahead with your plan!”Enid broke in angrily.

She was wearing a plain gray tunic like me, which wasn’t much different than the slave outfit she’d had on earlier.But as with the other, she made it look like something a couturier would have envied.Her bright red hair had also been washed and was glowing under an orb of spell light set into a wall, with each strand varying slightly in color for a cascade that might have been made out of pure fire.

She looked like a Renaissance painting come to life, and I felt my face soften just from looking at her.When we first met, I’d thought she could have graced the cover ofVogue, but I realized now that I’d been wrong.Voguewouldn’t have any idea what to do with her.

Their models looked good because of makeup, lighting, and airbrushing the final result to glossy perfection.

Enid didn’t need any of that.

Enid looked better than any airbrushed image, and she wasn’t trying.Even with the facial scarring a jealous fey woman had given her as a child, which she wasn’t wasting magic to hide as we’d all seen it anyway, and with some new abrasions on her chin, probably from fighting her way through the storm, she was stunning.And completely unfazed despite three gods chasing her, pieces of dark mage raining down all around her, and the earth swallowing her whole!

I laughed suddenly; I couldn’t help it.

“What?”Enid asked, turning from glaring at Æsubrand to stare at me.

“I know how to pick allies,” was all I said, and for a wonder, I heard Bodil echo my amusement.

“Prince Æsubrand is your ally, too,” she admonished mildly.“But we should discuss it.”

“Discuss what?”

“You really haven’t been listening?”Enid asked.

“I ...tend to get focused around food.”I saw it so seldom anymore.

“She’s listening now,” Alphonse said, eyeing me.And then he looked at Pritkin.“You wanna do the honors?”

“No,” Pritkin said, eating mutton stew.

“Yeah, ‘cause you know how much fun this is gonna be,” Alphonse said heavily.“I thought war mages were supposed to be brave.”

“Not a war mage anymore, and this doesn’t take bravery.”Pritkin tilted up his bowl, which appeared to be part stew, part pickled eggplant dish, part couscous, and drained it dry.

“Well, what does it take?”Alphonse demanded.

“Tell her and find out,” Pritkin said, leaning back on one elbow like a man settling in for the after-dinner entertainment.

“Tell me what?”I asked, glancing around.Only to find that everybody suddenly became really interested in their meal, even though most of the spread was now missing.

After a moment, Bodil took the hit and started filling me in.“Jonas Marsden and the others were caught during a raid at their HQ, attempting to steal power from their dark mage counterparts.The one called Caleb was taken while trying to rescue them.”

“The Circle sent one guy?”I asked, surprised.Jonas was their leader.I didn’t know why he’d been on that raid in the first place, but I thought he merited a little more consideration!

“The Circle doesn’t have many left,” was the grim reply.

“It was thought that one man might be able to go unnoticed while a larger group would only get themselves killed,” Pritkin added.

“And they picked Caleb?”Most of the mages I’d seen earlier had looked young, some of them enough so that they might have been born after the Apocalypse.Yet they sent in one of the oldest guys they had left?

“He sent himself,” Pritkin said dryly when I asked.“And he was the best choice.Almost everyone else who knew those tunnels was already inside them.”

“But he was caught—”

“He wasset up,” Æsubrand put in, with an odd amount of emphasis.“Something you should—”

He broke off when Bodil shushed him.

---