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Eleven: On Falcon Wing

Marc awoke with a start, panting frantically, as if he'd been holding his breath while asleep. When he opened his eyes and saw a panther staring him in the face, he jerked away from it in surprise and momentary confusion.

"You okay?" the panther asked. "You looked like you were having a bad dream."

Marc blinked at her, trying to figure out how a panther could speak to him until memory filtered through his sleep thickened thoughts. "Dola?" he said slowly, and cursed mentally. The pins and needles still tormented his face, and the base of his tail felt even worse than it had before. He rested his head back on his forearm and closed his eyes again. "I had begun to think this was the dream," he muttered.

"So you still think you're this Marc person?"

He just nodded against his arm, not bothering to argue that he wasn't delusional. Then, abruptly, a new sensation made itself known to his body, an urge that was all too familiar. He propped himself up on his elbow and looked at Dola, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes. "Um, I think I need to use the rest room."

"Oh." She leaned away from him as though he suddenly stank, then reached for something beneath the foot of the bed. "Right. Here you go." She pulled out a small, empty wooden bucket and offered it to Marc.

He just stared at it uncomprehendingly until he realized what it was for. "You've got to be kidding me," he groaned.

"Human comforts," she said in a wry tone of agreement. "You'll find no lavatories on this ship. The sailors all just go over the side." She laughed when Marc wrinkled his nose in disgust, the expression sending a spike of prickling up his muzzle. "There's more than one reason I've been spending all my time in here with you, you know."

"What, you mean besides the captivating conversations?" Marc said, sitting up and taking the bucket from her hands, carefully touching it only on the outside. He found he had somewhat more strength than he'd had the previous night, and was able to push himself upright without needing her support. When Dola just watched him, blinking sleep out of her own eyes, he cleared his throat. "I think I'll be able to manage this much on my own."

"Oh!" She shot to her feet, stumbling toward the door as the floor rocked underneath her. "Sorry. I'll, um..." She had to catch herself on the door's handle when the floor began tilting in the other direction. "I'll be out on deck, then."

As soon as the door closed behind her, Marc tossed the blanket off his legs. This was the first chance he'd had to examine his new body without someone else inside the room with him, but his full bladder trumped his curiosity at that moment. Once he was finished, and the bucket was sitting on the floor beside his bed as far as he could scoot it while leaning over the bed's edge, he took the time to look himself over carefully.

The light from the room's lantern was no brighter than it had been the night before, but his eyes, at least, finally seemed to have adjusted fully to his transformation. His white pelt covered him from head to foot, each strand of hair about as long as his thumb. While the fur conformed to most of his body, it stuck out in tufts from his shoulders, elbows, and knees, though that could have been due to all the time he'd spent asleep recently. He laughed quietly to himself at the concept of waking up with bed fur, and wondered if he was supposed to use a comb or a brush to groom himself. For that matter, when he washed, should he use soap or shampoo? Either way, it would take a while. How long would it take him to dry off after a bath, for that matter? He doubted he'd find any hair dryers nearby, if the locals were using knives for mirrors.

Pins and needles coursed up and down his legs when he moved them to sit as close to cross-legged as was possible. He knew now why he hadn't been able to straighten them out while lying down before. They were digitigrade. It was a wonder that he hadn't noticed that Dola's legs weren't quite human when he'd seen her standing; she wore trousers, true, but those wide, thick cat paws in the place of her feet should have drawn his attention like scales on a Dalmatian. Then again, they were just one more set of feline features on a half human body, and he'd had plenty of other things on his mind at the time.

Marc's new legs were much the same as Dola's. Aside from the white fur covering them, his thighs and calves looked almost human, if perhaps a little bit shorter, but it was his feet that seemed most out of place. They extended the length of his calves from heels to big cat paws, just like the last appendage in a lion's hind legs, or a tiger's, and made up the distance from the inches missing from his calves and thighs. He tried to wiggle his toes experimentally, but could barely move one digit without the rest following suit, and the attempt sent sparks of pin pricks up his feet. That was enough of that, for now, at least, though he did have to wonder if sheathed claws waited hidden inside those big cat feet.

For that matter, did they wait inside his fingers, too?

He held his hands up to his face, careful not to accidentally bump his muzzle. Thick, leathery pads of bare skin covered his palms and the undersides of his fingertips in a half human mimicry of feline paws. He had no fingernails, but neither could he see any sign of holes where claws might be waiting in his fingertips. Still, when he rubbed at his forefinger with the thumb of his other hand, he could feel that familiar tingling in both digits that told him that something was different, and he didn't think it was due to the leathery pads. He tried flexing his hands in a number of different positions, but if he had claws, they remained sheathed.

Then there was his tail. It had curled around his knee of its own volition while he sat and lay with its end draped limply over the bed's edge. Marc guessed that it was just long enough to touch the floor if he were to stand upright. He still couldn't feel it, save for the persistent aggravation below the small of his back. Even when he reached down and stroked it as if it were a lap dog lying beside him, he couldn't feel anything. It might as well have not even been connected to his body. He had no success when he tried to make it move, unsure what muscles in his back he was supposed to flex to control it. He felt a sliver of encouragement when he twisted his lower back and a twinge of increased pins and needles assaulted the base of his tail. He thought he could almost feel that first vertebra that extended past his spine, but his tail never so much as twitched.

Scooting forward on the bed, he swung his legs over its side, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as his feline paws pressed down against the cool floorboards. The more weight he put on his feet, the more they tingled, until they were almost as numb as his tail, but he didn't want to stay cooped up in the little room for yet another day. Slowly and carefully, he pushed himself up off the bed, keeping his hands braced behind him on its low surface until he was confident in his balance.

That confidence was a little premature, he found. As soon as he lifted his hands off the bed, the room's floor tilted forward and sent him stumbling into the wall in front of him, next to the room's door. He tried to steady himself with his hands against the wall, but his legs gave out underneath him, and he fell backward to land sitting on his tail. That, he felt.

Wincing and laughing at himself at the same time, Marc rolled forward awkwardly. Planting his hands on the wall, he climbed slowly up it to get back to his feet, his legs trembling more with each step his hands took up the wall. By the time he was fully upright again, he felt like he had just single-handedly lifted a station wagon. He panted, letting his head hang between his shoulders, and wondered why he wasn't sweating.

Maybe he should call Trent and ask the big man to carry him outside. He laughed again, and made himself pull his hands away from the wall. It might come to that, he decided, but not until he was wearing clothes.

With stiff, jerking steps, he slowly turned himself back toward the bed, feeling like he was walking on stilts. With the floor rocking back and forth beneath him, it was all he could manage to stay upright, and it didn't help that his feet could feel little except the blaze of pins and needles tormenting them. Dola had told him that his clothing was under the bed, which was only two strides away. Surely he could manage that.

It took him six tiny, halting steps instead of two, but he made it, lowering himself to his knees carefully once he was beside the bed again. Unable to straighten out his ankles, his weight pressed his knees uncomfortably against the hard floor where he would have spread the pressure along his shins if he'd had human legs, but he did his best to ignore the discomfort. Leaning to the side and scooting the used bucket against the wall at the head of the bed, he peered beneath the mattress boards and found a short sleeved shirt, tunic, and leggings folded neatly within arm's length.

The shirt and tunic were easy enough to put on, the sleeveless, pale green tunic fitting over the shirt like a loose vest, long enough to reach his knees if he were to stand up. The trousers were a little trickier, if only because he couldn't tell at first their front from their back since they had a button down fly on each side of the waistband. Once he figured out that one fly was designed to button the waistband over the root of his tail, though, he had the pants on without much trouble, even if that back clasp rubbed against the prickling area below the small of his back irritatingly.

Marc took a deep breath, the process of dressing having tired him more than he'd hoped it would, and began to clamber back to his feet, but he had to stop himself. Something didn't feel right. His tunic was draped loosely over him like a short robe, parted by a slit in the back for his tail. He bent and looked under the bed again, and sure enough, there was a dark brown leather belt that he'd missed when he'd collected the rest of his clothing. He pulled it out, and was surprised to see two long, sheathed knives attached to it. The sheathes were a part of the belt itself, extending down from the leather band near both ends so that each dagger would rest against a hip once the belt was buckled. Looping the belt around his waist, he found that it rested easily over his hips and the root of his tail without needing belt loops to hold it up, and it held his tunic against him so that the fabric wasn't fluttering loosely like a tent around his body.

Curiously, he unsheathed one of the daggers and held it in front of his face, his cat-like eyebrows rising in surprise. Instead of iron, steel, or some other metal, the slightly curved blade was made of some kind of shiny black stone. Onyx, maybe, or obsidian. It caught the lantern's light and reflected it as a golden, curving line from the slight ridge along its center when Marc tilted it from side to side. He could see his own green, diamond-pupil eyes glowing dimly back at him in its polished surface, the rest of his face too dim to make out in the black stone.

When he pulled out the other dagger, he found it to be a twin to the first, exactly the same in length, weight, and shiny darkness. They were very cool looking, but he felt a little unsettled as he re-sheathed them. He could think of few agreeable reasons why Tolinom would have felt the need to carry weapons on him. The Oncan whose body he was borrowing was probably in the habit of hunting monsters, or fighting off swarms of bandits, or something along those lines.

Well, with Marc, they would just have to remain decoration.

Bracing his hands on the edge of the bed, which he now realized was little more than a long table with a thick blanket for padding, he pushed himself to his feet. He had a slightly easier time returning to the room's door than he'd had staggering from it to the bed. Staying upright wasn't quite so difficult if he just imagined that he was walking on the balls of his feet rather than on alien cat paws.

He had to wince his eyes closed when he pushed open the door, the bright sunlight blinding compared to the dimly lit room. Squinting out into the brightness while his eyes adjusted, he could hear little except wind and flapping canvas, though he smelled sweat, and saltwater, and...was that fish?

Marc stepped out into the morning sunlight, keeping a hand on the door for balance as it shut behind him. Once he felt it was safe to open his eyes fully, the sight that met him took his breath away, and he slid down beside the doorframe until he was sitting on the ship's deck with the wooden wall against his back.

The closest he'd ever come to seeing the ocean before was a fishing trip on Lake Erie, north of Ohio, and he'd thought at the time that the open sea couldn't be all that different than the Great Lake. The waves over which the ship now danced, though, were a brilliant, crystalline blue that made Lake Erie's opaque, brownish water look like a swamp in comparison. A few wispy clouds floated high in the sky, but the air was otherwise clear, a slightly paler blue than the waves beneath it. Marc could see the horizon line in every direction save behind him, with the wall at his back, a perfectly straight line between the two shades of bright blue broken only along a short strip in front and to the left of the ship, where a distant green blur parted sea and sky. He supposed that must have been land.

"Tolinom! You're up!" Walking carefully down a staircase to Marc's right, Dola squatted next to him and handed him a wooden bowl and spoon. "I was just about to bring breakfast in to you. I hope you're hungry."

His stomach began rumbling as soon as the bowl's aroma hit his nostrils. "Very, thank you," he said, looking into the bowl and stirring its contents with the spoon curiously.

"Fish stew," she explained. "I'm not sure what kinds of fish. The crew caught a few last night, big, ugly things, but they taste pretty good." Marc had to agree with that as he awkwardly fed himself a spoonful of the stew, trying his best to get the spoon inside his muzzle without spilling it over himself or drooling. "Sure beats salted pork, at least," Dola went on, then stood and stepped around Marc to the cabin's door. "Oh, did you leave the lantern lit? Captain Lebram laid into me for that our first night here. I'll take care of it." With that, she disappeared into the cabin, leaving him relatively alone to enjoy his breakfast.

Marc was a little bit overwhelmed by the other Oncan's energy, but he supposed she must have been caught up in the activity that seemed to permeate the ship. It wasn't a huge vessel, but the six sailors he could see on the deck with him were all busy tightening lines or steadying the two masts' crossbeams. Looking up toward the top of the mast closest to him, he saw a young sailor perched on top of a simple crow's nest, merely a narrow wooden ring that he stood on while clutching the mast's highest point. Of all the crew, he was the least active, merely leaning on the mast and peering out over the sea.

By the time Marc brought a second spoonful of stew to his lips, Dola emerged from the cabin carrying the bucket he'd used earlier at arm's length in front of her with both hands. She hurried to the ship's side and tossed the bucket's contents out over the railing.

"Sorry," Marc began when she stepped across him to return the bucket to the cabin. "I should have..." But she was already closing the door behind her.

No sooner had it shut, though, than it opened again, and Dola stepped back out beside him, wiping her black furred hands on her trousers. "Don't worry about it," she said, leaning back against the closed door and crossing her arms as she looked toward the distant line of land. "Just eat and get your strength up so I don't have to do that again."

Marc thought she was trying to be funny, but he was still embarrassed. He felt useless sitting and eating while everyone else was at work. Even Trent was busy, the big man making his way slowly down the staircase to Marc's left with a stiff bristled brush and a bucket full of soapy water, alternately humming and whistling to himself while he scrubbed the steps. It seemed Captain Lebram was still trying to work Trent back into his right mind.

Marc ate quietly while the crew worked and Dola stood sentinel beside him. She was right. He needed to regain his strength so that he could do more than eat the sailors' food and get in their way.

"So," Dola said after he successfully maneuvered his sixth spoonful of stew into his mouth. "Marc." She said the name slowly, as if having trouble pronouncing it correctly, despite its short length. Marc looked up at her as he chewed. That was the first time she had called him by the right name. "What do you think happened to Tolinom?"

Marc swallowed his mouthful of fish. "Does this mean you believe I'm not out of my mind after all?"

"I never said that," she retorted with a small smirk, but she sobered quickly. "I guess I just don't know what to believe."

He stared down into his bowl, stirring the meat and broth with the spoon idly. "Neither do I. I don't even know what happened to me, so I can't begin to guess what happened to your Tolinom." He laughed at himself wryly. "I've spent my entire life studying science, math, and history, and never thought anything like this could be possible. And here you've been fighting dragons alongside sorcerers. We don't even have any magic where I come from, so if either of us can hope to understand what's going on, it's you."

Dola's laugh mirrored his own. "Until the Veporligh, we didn't have much magic, either. At least, little beyond legends and superstition. It's like Captain Lebram said last night. The one person who might have been able to tell us what's happened was killed by the dragon."

"Except for this magician of yours," Marc pointed out, "and that, um..." He tried to remember what they'd called the diplomat Captain Lebram had mentioned the night before. "The Royal Right? Is that some kind of title?"

"It's not a very creative one, is it?" Dola said with another quiet laugh. "'The Royal Right' means the king's right hand. He's in charge of Eyralia's foreign relations, finding peaceful solutions to disputes between nobles and the wealthy, things like that."

"So, is there a Royal Left?" Marc asked, guiding another spoonful of fish to his mouth.

Dola nodded. "Istriam Deravilla. The Left is the head of Eyralia's military. If the Right does his job well enough, the Left doesn't have to worry about much except the Eyralian Frontier."

"The Eyralian Frontier?" Marc repeated, struggling to pronounce the country's name.

"Or the Gnollands, if you prefer. The northern and eastern half of the continent's gone unexplored for over two hundred years, thanks to the Gnolls. Every now and then they launch a raid over the Jade Hills, but they usually content themselves with killing anyone who stumbles into their territory." Dola was idly tapping the hilt of one of the knives sheathed at her hips, twins to the ones Marc wore at his belt. It was strange that he only noticed she was carrying daggers at that moment, but she wore them so casually, they seemed merely an innocuous part of her outfit until her fingers drew attention to them.

"And what's a Gnoll?" Marc asked around a mouthful of stew.

She smirked down at him. "What, you don't have any of those where you come from, either?"

By that time, Trent had worked his way down the steps and was scrubbing the deck closer to Dola's feet. "They're the dog version of an Oncan," he said, joining their conversation.

"What?" Dola snarled at the man, actually showing her teeth in an animalistic threat, evidently offended by his comparison.

"How do you know that, Trent?" Marc hurriedly asked his friend before Dola had a chance to assault him, verbally or otherwise.

"You've never played Dungeons and Dragons with Brandon, I take it," Trent said without looking up from his work. "Gnolls are in half the fantasy role playing video games out there, too."

Now that he mentioned it, the word "gnoll" did sound familiar to Marc, though he'd never been very into role playing games. "Did any of these games mention Oncans, too?"

"None I ever played," Trent said. He dunked the scrub brush into his bucket, splashing Dola's footpads. Marc was going to have to stand up if Trent washed the deck any closer to him, unless he wanted his pants to get soaked. "Plenty of video games have cat people in them, but I don't remember them being called 'Oncans' in any of them. I'm not sure about Dungeons and Dragons. Brandon could tell you, though. He has that fantasy bestiary memorized frontwards and backwards."

"Bestiary!" Dola shouted, her voice carrying over the constant wind to draw the attention of the nearby sailors. When they saw who she was yelling at, though, they turned back to their ropes and crossbeams, shaking their heads. "We're not cat_people," she berated Trent, who had frozen mid-scrub to stare up at her with wide eyes, looking genuinely astonished by her strong reaction. "That's why you don't remember Oncans from any of your games. And don't even _begin to compare us to Gnolls. They're barely even sentient, unable to think beyond their next meal."

"You're actually looking a little carnivorous yourself right now," Trent quipped up at her.

Dola stared at him, taking deep, rapid breaths, and very deliberately smoothed her snarling features so that she was only glaring furiously at the big man crouching at her feet, carefully showing none of her teeth. Then she growled something Marc couldn't understand and stalked around Marc and up the staircase at his right.

Marc called after her, "We're just trying to understand where we are," but she was already out of sight behind the cabin's wall, and likely couldn't hear him over the wind.

"She's awfully touchy, isn't she?" Trent bent back to scrub the deck again, apparently unconcerned with Dola's hostility.

"I think calling Oncans 'cats' is some kind of racial slur," Marc told him. "Or comparing them to animals of any kind."

"Yeah, but she doesn't have to let it get to her like that," Trent said. Finished washing the deck in front of the cabin door, he began moving away from the cabin's wall, starting a loop around where Marc sat. "Don't worry," he said when Marc began to try to stand up. "Go ahead and finish breakfast. I can come back to that spot later."

"It's really not surprising that she reacted so strongly." Marc returned his attention back to his stew. It wasn't quite as tasty now that it was cooling, but he still felt ravenous. "I mean, you of all people should understand how she feels, right?"

Trent raised an eyebrow as he looked up from the deck at Marc's face. "Oh, really? Why should I of all people understand, Marc?" He sounded more amused than offended.

"You know what I mean," Marc said. "Being one of the only black kids in Redneckville, you must have had to put up with a lot of garbage."

"Not as much as you might think." Trent began scrubbing at the deck with renewed vigor, though. "And almost never to my face. The worst thing I usually have to deal with is people getting all quiet and awkward when I go into a restaurant or a store with my parents." He looked at the backs of his hands, only slightly darkened by years in the sun, and his work faltered briefly as he corrected himself. "When I went into restaurants and stores." He dunked the brush into the bucket again, shaking his head. "You're sure this isn't all just a weird dream, Marc?"

"Nope," Marc answered, then swallowed the food in his mouth. "But if it is a dream, there really isn't much we can do other than wait to see how it plays out."

"Easy for you to say. You get to sit there and eat while you wait. I get to give the Mayflower here a freaking sponge bath."

***

Captain Lebram stood leaning over the railing on the left side of Falcon Wing's upper deck, peering intently at the tall, gray cliffs to their left. They had sailed at an angle toward the mainland well into that afternoon, and were now sailing east with Eyralia's formidable cliffs a few miles away. "They should be around the next bend," the captain muttered to herself.

Marc looked at her from where he sat leaning with his back against one of the posts of the upper deck's front railing, staying out of the crew's way as much as he could. "What should?" he asked.

"Dentos Falls," the captain answered without looking away from the farthest jagged point of land.

Dola stirred from where she'd begun to doze beside Marc, leaning against another rail post close to the top of the ship's left stair case. "Is that the same Dentos as Dentos Crossing?" She sat up straighter when Captain Lebram nodded. "We weren't blown as far to the west as I thought, then. Tolinom and I went through Dentos Crossing on our way from Bandarethe to Boendal. It was just a five day walk from Dentos to Boendal. By ship, it shouldn't take more than another two days to get back to the port, should it?"

"More like three," the captain answered. "Sarutia pushes south into the Infuli quite a ways east of the falls, so it will take some time to sail around that. But you're right. The dragon's storm didn't push us off course as much as we'd feared."

"Just seven days off course," muttered the sailor manning the ship's wheel.

"But not so far that we'll run out of drinking water," the captain went on. "Not when we'll reach the falls by evening."

"Will we be able to get to them past the reefs?" Dola asked.

Lebram turned away from the ship's left rail and paced across the upper deck to scan the clouds gathering in the sky upwind of them, behind and to the right. "There's a narrow channel of deeper water through the reefs south of the falls," she called back in answer. "It's enough for a small vessel like Falcon Wing to navigate safely in calm weather, with a middling tide."

"But will the weather be calm enough?"

"Calm enough, yes." The captain paced back toward them, stopping beside the helmsman to survey the crew manning the lower deck. "We may be kept awake by rain tonight, but I expect we'll be through the reefs and anchored before then. Rias!" she shouted suddenly in the same breath, making Marc jump in surprise. "If you can't re-teach your addled brother to tie a knot that won't unravel when both ends of the rope are pulled, I'll have to have you triple check every rope you've lashed today to make sure you haven't forgotten how to tie them yourself. Show him again. And then, Herald, you're to tie another fifty in that practice rope." It wasn't the first time the woman had leapt from conversation to command without breaking stride since Marc had been awake, but it still caught him off guard.

Both Rias and Trent groaned at Captain Lebram's orders, and Rias crossed the lower deck to where the other man was struggling with a long, tangled rope between the ship's prow and its first mast. After Trent had washed both the upper and lower decks twice over earlier that day, Lebram had set him to practicing tying and untying knots with a spare rope a sailor had retrieved from the cargo hold. For the past few hours, Trent had been unable to satisfy the captain with any of his knots, and Marc suspected she was still just trying to work the insanity out of him.

"What's Sarutia?" Marc asked Dola in the momentary quiet.

She pointed toward the cliffs to the north, past the railing to their right since the Oncans were facing the back of the ship. "That's Sarutia," she said wearily. Marc had tried not to pester her too much with questions that any toddler should know the answers to, but he just didn't know enough about the world he'd stumbled into. She already seemed tired of explaining the obvious to him.

Nonetheless, he disliked being so confused all the time enough that he was willing to risk annoying her. "I thought that was Eyralia."

"Yes," she said before letting out a long yawn. "It is." She seemed to be trying to ignore his perplexed stare, but she yielded with an exasperated sigh when he refused to look away from her. "Look, those are the cliffs of Eyralia, but Eyralia is just a country. Sarutia is the continent made up of Eyralia, Bandarethe, and the Gnollands."

"Oh," he said inanely. He felt a little stupid, but how was he supposed to have known that? Then another question came to him. "But you said this morning that the Gnollands are also called the Eyralian Frontier. Shouldn't they be the Sarutian Frontier instead, if that's the name of the continent?"

"There are really only two countries in Sarutia. Eyralia's laid claim to all the land outside of Bandarethe's borders. The Gnolls northeast of the Jade Hills just haven't let the humans settle the Frontier."

"Huh," Marc said noncommittally. It sounded a lot like the old conflict between European settlers and Native Americans, but he didn't know enough about Gnolls to have any confidence in the comparison. "You must know this area really well," he commented after a few moments, resting his head against the railing behind him. The summer sun and the motion of the waves rocking the ship lulled him to a sleepiness that he had a hard time fighting off, especially after having been an unconscious invalid for three days. He supposed the crew might have all been so active just so that they could stay awake.

"Why, because I know the difference between a country and a continent?" Dola asked wryly, though her grin took the sting out of her words.

"No, no. Because you knew about the reefs around the falls, and about Dante's Crossing."

"Dentos Crossing," she corrected. "You and I, or..." She gestured obscurely with a hand in front of her face. "...Tolinom and I passed through the town about a week ago. That's how I know about it. As for the reefs, they surround all of Sarutia. The only place I know of where most ships can pass safely over them is the bay south of Boendal."

"So this Boendal is the only port in the entire continent?"

Dola nodded. "That's why Sarutia was never explored until the Great War; and because of the cliffs, of course."

Marc twisted his neck to look across the other Oncan at the gray stone walls and jagged pillars stretching like broken fangs from the ocean, the waves crashing into spray against them still too distant to be heard. "You're saying those cliffs circle all of Sarutia, too?"

"For the most part. There are a few beaches here and there, but the reefs around all of them are impassible."

"With Dentos Falls being one of the few exceptions," Captain Lebram finished for her.

Dola looked up at the captain, surprised. "You mean there's a beach underneath the falls, too?"

Lebram shook her head, her multitude of thin, black braids swaying with the motion. "Not under them, but there is a small sandy area at the base of the cliffs to one side."

"You Oncans are really lucky, getting to see the falls on your first time aboard a ship," the helmsman told them, glancing at them occasionally as he spoke while scanning the waves ahead of them for boulders, coral, or other dangers. "They're at their prettiest at high noon, when the sun's shining straight down on them, but I expect they'll still be a sight at dusk. Most ships never risk the reefs to get to them, even the ones small enough to make it through without much trouble. The need for fresh water's not so great, what with Boendal being a few days away."

That was the longest speech Marc had heard any of the crew members make. After the helmsman finished speaking, they all fell silent again, and Marc scooted around in place where he sat so that he could watch the protruding bend in the cliffs they were soon to pass, hanging his legs over the edge of the upper deck with the railing post beside his thigh. "So," he began after Dola stretched and turned to face the front of the ship as well, leaning back with her hands braced on the deck behind her. "What was that Great War you mentioned?"

She sighed and shook her head. "Don't ask me to recite history. I was a terrible student."

"Well, you must know something about it."

The dark furred Oncan shrugged her shoulders, her ears giving a brief flick, apparently embarrassed. "The Great War is just another name for the War of Liberation, which raged across the old Tsuravi Empire more than two hundred years ago."

"The Tsuravi Empire?" he asked.

She rubbed at her forehead with one hand and groaned to herself, "A new question for every name and title he hears."

"Sorry," Marc said, feeling chagrined. "You can tell me some other time."

"Some other time," Dola agreed, and turned her attention to the jagged land to their left.

The ship was crossing the blunt peninsula in the cliffs, a distant, rumbling roar growing louder with each wave it passed. Marc's fur bristled as an unexpected heat washed over him. The air had been warm all day, but the constant wind kept him from becoming uncomfortable. This new heat, though, felt like he was sitting an inch too close to a campfire, and it grew more stifling the louder the falls' roar became. Marc wasn't the only one who felt the abrupt change in temperature. Every sailor on the lower deck had broken into a heavy sweat, their unclothed chests and backs dripping.

"Why aren't I sweating, too?" he muttered to himself. As hot as he suddenly found himself, there should have been a puddle of sweat forming around him.

Dola laughed at him incredulously. "You'll be drowning if you sweat any more than you are." When he gave her a bemused look, she rolled her eyes and tapped her glistening pink nose.

Marc touched his own nose, and his finger pad came away drenched. He laughed at himself, even then feeling a trickle of moisture flow down the cleft in his feline upper lip and tasting his salty sweat against his tongue. Of course. Not all animals had sweat glands over their entire bodies. He wasn't about to make that observation out loud, though, not anywhere that Dola would be able to hear him. At least, not using the word "animal." Strangely, though, now that he thought about it, he could almost remember Brandon telling him once that cats could sweat normally. Something else he was sure Dola didn't need to hear, but maybe Oncans weren't exactly cat people after all.

By that time, they had passed the protruding cliffs, and the distant Dentos Falls were finally within view. The sight of them made Marc forget the strange furnace they found themselves sailing into. The cliffs around the white curtain of water had to be at least fifty feet high, but that curtain stretched in a hollowed arch three or four times as wide as it was tall. The only thing he could think of to compare it to was footage he'd seen of the Niagara Falls back home.

A heat haze made the broad torrent of water shimmer as though it was a mirage, and Marc coughed when the air he was breathing seared his throat and sinuses. "Is it always this hot here?" he asked hoarsely.

Beside him, Dola shook her head wordlessly, and he heard a curt and grim, "Never," from Captain Lebram over his shoulder.

"Look!" Trent shouted from near the ship's prow, but when Marc followed the line of the big man's pointed arm, he saw nothing but the broad waterfall.

"Yes, very good, Herald, you discovered Dentos Falls," Captain Lebram said sardonically while rolling her eyes, loud enough that Trent would be able to hear her from across the ship.

"No, above the falls," Trent explained, ignoring the captain's sarcasm. "I thought I saw something flying, something big...but it's gone now."

"I saw it, too," Rias added, and a third sailor nodded urgently. "It looked like it could have been a dragon," Rias went on, "but it was too far away for me to be certain."

"Was it the same one that killed the sorcerer?" Lebram demanded.

"You think there're more than one of those things?" the third sailor who had seen it exclaimed, a youth no older than sixteen or seventeen.

Rias was shaking his head. "This one looked green to me, before I lost sight of it."

Trent nodded his agreement. "Definitely green."

Captain Lebram peered intently at the sky above Dentos Falls while they sailed parallel to the distant cliffs, and after a few minutes of watching her grim expression in anticipatory silence, Marc directed his gaze above the white curtain, as well. The falls were mostly in shadow behind the wall of stone that jutted into the ocean to their west and blotted out the setting sun, but the sky above them was still a clear blue. If Trent and the others had seen something flying from so far away, miles to its south, it had to have been very large. Marc certainly couldn't spot anything now.

"If they lost sight of it, it must have flown inland," Dola noted, but she sounded nervous, unsure.

"Right," Lebram yelled with a great deal more certainty. "We're coming up on the coral gulf, lads. Furl down the mainsail and lash it tight; we'll make the crossing with just her fore and aft. Herald! You're to tie the sail secure once it's down, understand? Show us what all that practice has taught you."

It didn't take long for the sailors to lower the central, triangular sail and wrap it tightly around its cross beam. With Rias's guidance, showing him where to loop coils of rope around the furled sail, Trent began slowly tying it down while the helmsman turned them in toward the mainland. The few sailors not manning the fore and aft masts took up posts at the ship's sides, squinting down into the dark blue water around them as they passed into the shadow of the jagged peninsula to their west.

"We could use another pair or two of eyes on the port side, if you Oncans feel rested enough," Lebram suggested with a small bite to her tone.

Dola smirked at the human woman, but she got to her feet and helped Marc to his own. With Dola's hand on his shoulder to steady him, they made their way down to the side of the ship where the lower deck met the left staircase, where they leaned against the railing, staring down at the waves lapping at the ship's hull. Marc was glad Dola knew which side of the ship was the port side, because he hadn't had a clue which way to turn.

Marc frowned down at the waves beneath them, nearly opaque in the cliff's shadow. "I don't like this," he muttered. "By the time we see anything, we'll have already run into it."

Dola nodded soberly beside him, but a sailor on her other side, the young man who had glimpsed the flying shape near the falls, was shaking his head. "It's really just a precaution, scanning the waters," he told them. "As long as we steer close to the buoys, we'll be fine."

"Buoys?" Marc repeated.

The youth gestured toward the ship's prow, past which Marc could see a faded red flag flapping at the top of a wooden post bobbing in the water with a circular, wooden base. The flag was little more than a tattered scrap of canvas. "This safe channel was only discovered some twenty years ago," the young sailor went on knowledgeably. "Since then, someone's kept it marked. Not sure who. Probably someone up from Dentos Crossing."

Shortly after the young man finished his explanation, Trent appeared at Marc's left, crossing his arms over his big chest and wearing a huge grin. "I lashed down the main sail," he announced proudly.

Marc laughed and clapped the big man on his shoulder. "Congratulations."

They crept along slowly with the main sail down, the waterfall's roar and the unnatural heat both gradually increasing as they approached the cliffs to the right of the falls, but it only took ten or fifteen minutes for them to sail clear of the reefs, following the staggered line of flags bobbing on the waves. Marc and Dola returned to the upper deck once they were in safe waters again so that they could have a better view of the white aquatic curtain. Trent followed on their heels.

"I thought you said there was a beach here," Marc mentioned to Captain Lebram as he leaned wearily against the upper deck's front railing.

The captain was glaring at the cliffs in front of them with a terribly angry expression. "There used to be," she whispered through gritted teeth.

Marc followed her gaze to the base of the cliffs to the right of the falls, and realized that what he'd thought before were plumes of spray from waves crashing against breakers was actually a long band of steam rising from a strip of shining amber stone sloping up out of the water at the cliff's feet.

"It's been melted," Lebram finished grimly.

Dola craned her head to look back at the captain's frown. "You mean that's glass?"

"That would explain this heat," Trent said, wiping sweat out of his eyes as he stepped beside Marc and scanned the base of the cliffs in front of them. "But what could be hot enough to melt a beach?"

"I bet a dragon's breath could," Dola said in a low voice, as if afraid that dragon might be lurking behind the trees lining the cliffs' ridge and listening in on their conversation.

"But why?" Marc asked. "Do you think it was trying to keep us away from the falls so we can't get more fresh water?"

Captain Lebram strode forward to join the three of them behind the upper deck's front railing, planting her hands on the wooden rail on Dola's other side, standing directly in front of the helmsman. She shook her head slowly. "If it's smart enough to plan something like that out, it has enough brains to know that we'd just wait for the glass to cool before collecting the water. When the tide comes in tonight, the water will drown the beach and cool it down in a matter of minutes, if there's still any heat in it."

Marc leaned forward to look at the captain past Dola. "So again, why?"

"I've no idea," she answered curtly, "and I don't intend to stay long enough to find out." She picked up her voice, addressing her crew once again. "We're close enough, boys! Let slack the sails and drop anchor. Rias! Is the Talon loaded and ready?"

"Yes, ma'am," was Rias's crisp reply.

"Make ready to lower it, then. We'll have our water and be back to sea before nightfall."

Rias hesitated where he stood next to the furled main sail. "There's not much time before it gets too dark to see the reef flags, Captain."

"Then you'd best hurry, hadn't you?" Lebram shouted back at him, then turned to Marc and Dola. "You two, follow me," she said, and walked briskly down the deck's right staircase with Dola, Marc, and Trent all trailing behind her obediently to meet Rias where he was untying a series of ropes that held a small, narrow boat to the ship's side. Four large, wooden kegs were strapped to the little boat, two on each side, which were to be filled from the waterfall's edge.

The captain stopped beside Rias to inspect the ropes binding the barrels to the 'Talon,' as she'd called it, then looked over her shoulder at Dola and Marc. "This is where we part ways, Oncans."

"Part ways?" Dola repeated.

"Not that your company hasn't been entertaining, but a free voyage can only last so long," Lebram said. "Between three days' journey by sea from here to Boendal, and another five by land back to Dentos Crossing, you'll save eight days' time on your journey to this magician of yours near Bandarethe by following the river up to Dentos Crossing tonight. Rias will row you ashore, and you can make your way from there."

"You expect us to cross a molten beach and climb up that cliff?" Dola protested.

"There's a ladder that leads up the cliff face on the falls' end of the beach, so the waterfall should have cooled the glass enough for you to cross it without injuring yourselves, if you're quick."

"What about Trent?" Marc spoke up before Dola could argue further.

Captain Lebram looked at the big man beside Marc with an expression of distaste. For the first time since Marc had woken up aboard Falcon Wing, he saw a flash of indecision on Lebram's face.

Rias put a hand on the older woman's shoulder. "Captain..." he began, but didn't seem to know how to continue. Finally, he dropped his hand to his side. "The hex might be like you said last night, Captain: nothing that some hard work can't remedy. Just look at how much Herald's improved today. None of the hysterics from yesterday or the day before."

"I wasn't hysterical," Trent protested.

At that moment, the ropes securing the furled mainsail to its cross beam came loose and the sail began unraveling rapidly while nearby sailors leapt to catch it. Captain Lebram didn't turn away from Trent until the commotion died down, three men setting about tying the sail up properly. Then she turned her attention back to Dola. "Your magician is outside the border of Bandarethe?"

"Of course. He's human," Dola replied, as if the magician's species was significant.

"And you're certain he can lift the dragon's hex from Herald and your friend?"

"Not certain, no," the Oncan said, "but it's still the best idea I can come up with."

Lebram took a deep breath, seeming to weigh and measure Dola with her gaze. "Herald will leave with you, then," she said, and went on without acknowledging Rias's complaints. "As soon as he's cured, send him back to Boendal. I'll have someone waiting there for him until he returns."

"Captain, you can't!" Rias shouted angrily, startling everyone around him. "You can't just send him away. He's my brother."

"Don't think I've forgotten that," Lebram snapped. "Herald's best served by getting his memory back, and since it's magic that's gone and scrambled his brain, it's magic that will have to set it to rights. Now get in the boat, all of you. We don't have time to discuss this."

Rias opened his mouth, but the captain shouted, "Now!" so harshly that he nearly bit his tongue before he could argue any further. He led the way into the Talon, clambering over the keg nearest to him, and Trent, Dola, and Marc all followed suit, not wanting to test Lebram's patience.

"Hold a moment," the captain told two sailors who stood ready at a pair of wenches to lower the four of them down. She reached inside her tunic and pulled a square, golden coin from a hidden inner pocket. She tossed it to Trent, who snatched it out of the air an instant before it flew past his head to be lost in the waves below. "Your take from the sorcerer's pay, Herald," Lebram said, then turned her back on them and returned to the upper deck without another word.

The two sailors at the wenches took a moment to gawk at the coin in Trent's hand before they began lowering the talon down the side of Falcon Wing's hull, shaking their heads in astonishment.

Trent regarded the gold coin curiously. "I take it this is worth a bit?"

Sitting in the narrow boat's end in front of Trent with his back to the prow, Rias gave a low, appreciative whistle while he pulled a long oar out from under their feet. "That's a chaquil, Herald! It's enough to buy your own fishing vessel, at least a small one."

"Huh," Trent said, seemingly unimpressed. "I guess I must have done a pretty good job washing the deck."

"If that's the cut we're all getting, we could have our own fleet once we get back to Boendal," Rias continued excitedly. The long boat landed in the waves beside the larger ship's hull, and he deftly untied the rope lashed to the small boat's prow with one hand while balancing the oar on his shoulder. "I knew the sorcerer was paying us a great deal to sail during the Veporligh, but I'd had no idea it was that much."

Marc followed the sailor's lead, turning and working at the knot tied in the rope linking the back of the boat to the small wooden crane overhead, and after considerably more fumbling than Rias had needed, they were free. Seeing a second oar lying in the belly of the boat between his white feet, he pulled it out without being asked to and helped Rias row them away from the ship, dragging the little boat through the waves like a canoe with the empty barrels acting as outriggers to balance them.

"Your captain might have taken more money from Jiam before you tossed his body overboard," Dola pointed out as they bounced over the waves.

Rias had turned on his little bench to face forward so that he could paddle, but Marc could hear the indignation in his voice. "We stored all of his belongings in the cargo hold, and I'll have you know we fully intend to deliver them to whatever family the sorcerer had, if we can find them. Everything save the dagger the captain claimed, at least. He wasn't carrying any money except what he paid the captain before we set out."

They rowed a short time in silence before Trent said, "So you just dumped the sorcerer's body into the ocean?"

"We gave him a proper sailor's burial," Rias replied irritably. "There's no place on Falcon Wing we could have stored a corpse without it sickening the crew or rotting our stores of food."

"Okay, okay, I was just asking," Trent said, holding his hands up placatingly even though Rias's back was turned to him.

They paddled onward, the salty waves seeming enormous to Marc now that they were sitting so close to them, gliding up and down the ever moving hills and valleys. The waterfall roared ahead of them and to their left, and the stifling heat was only made bearable by the occasional wave splashing up one of the kegs beside them and soaking his fur and clothing. Marc had taken short canoeing trips on some of Ohio's lakes and rivers growing up, so he should have been able to paddle the small distance from the ship to the glassy shore without any trouble, but between the furnace-like heat and having been bedridden before that morning, he was exhausted by the time the boat's shallow hull scraped against the beach's solid surface some thirty feet to the right of the edge of Dentos Falls' wall of white spray. He was pretty sure Rias had been doing most of the work, too.

"There's your ladder," Rias said, nodding to a column of narrow wooden planks climbing up the cliff face past the smooth beach. It was actually a series of three ladders leading up between the beach, two narrow ridges, and the top of the granite cliff. The boards bolted to the stone wall closest to the bottom of the cliff were scorched a dark gray, almost black, but the ones above the height of Marc's shoulders looked sound.

"Do you need any help with the water?" Marc asked wearily, dropping his oar into the bottom of the Talon, his arms and hands feeling like they were made of lead.

Rias seemed ready to accept Marc's offer until he looked back at him. "That's all right," he said. "It won't take me long to fill these kegs. You look like you'll need all of your energy to get to level ground."

Marc hated to admit it, but he wasn't sure if all of his energy would be enough to carry him up the fifty foot wall. He nodded, agreeing with Rias's reasoning, and swung himself over the little boat's side. The depth of the water surprised him, reaching up to his waist where he'd jumped into it from the back of the boat, and its chill was a shock to his heated skin. The waves were frigid from his hips to his ankles, only the weak undercurrent flowing back over his feet comfortably warm, heated as it was by the melted beach before it blended again with the cold sea. He waded to shore behind the others, the sand growing more solid under his feet as he crossed onto land that had been unprotected by water when the beach had been melted. He wondered if they could figure out roughly when the dragon had melted the beach based on the depth of the line where sand became glass beneath the shallow waves, since it had been done at a slightly lower tide.

If he'd had any doubt of the cause of the unnatural heat and the transformed beach, it vanished when Dola pointed at the glass's center, some twenty yards to their right. In an area some thirty feet around, the beach's glass was displaced and contorted in tiny dunes radiating out from a wavy middle, as if the sand had been getting flung outward at the same instant that it had been melted. All throughout the tufts and ripples of glass were long, parallel rows of deep gouges, the marks of clawed feet as wide as Marc's forearm was long tearing at the sand while the dragon's breath had been fusing it into solid sheets.

"What could it have been doing?" Dola asked breathlessly, her eyes wide in uneasy wonder. She had to shout over the roar of the waterfall on their other side.

As Marc took in the sight of the torn glass, wisps of steam parted enough that he could see more claw marks closer to the rent depression's center, smaller and shallower than the others, the parallel gouges close enough together that they could have belonged to a lion, or a bear, or some other large predator. He thought he briefly spotted even smaller trenches raked through the uneven glass before a large wave washed higher up the beach than most and rose with a hiss into a thick shroud of steam, blocking his vision. "There must have been more than one of them," he said nervously. He wouldn't want to come face to face with any creature that could scratch at the fusing sand beneath it while sitting in the middle of a furnace hot enough to liquefy that very ground, let alone a creature that was the source of the furnace in the first place.

"You all had best get going before any of them decide to come back," Rias said, breaking their unnerved silence and turning to untie one of the kegs from the Talon's side. "You Oncans will take good care of Herald," he told them as they shook themselves out of their momentary stupor. Dola turned toward the cliff face and its ladder while Trent and Marc faced the sailor to say goodbye. There wasn't a hint of question or request in Rias's tone; he sounded remarkably like Captain Lebram when he spoke with such certainty. "If anything happens to him, the captain won't rest until she sees you answer for it."

"Are you sure about that?" Trent asked. "She didn't seem all that broken up about me leaving."

"Trust me, sending you off with these two was one of the hardest things she's ever had to do."

Marc tried not to take offense at that, but Trent replied before he could decide whether or not he'd just been insulted. "What makes you say that?"

Rias just stared at the other man for a short while, the half untied barrel forgotten under his hands. Finally, looking down at the barrel and tugging the last knot roughly free, he said, "She's our mother, Herald."

Trent blinked. "Whoa," was all he could evidently think of to say.

Seeing that Rias was setting about his task with unnecessary passion, his face set in a stony mask to hide the emotions boiling beneath its surface, Marc took Trent by the big man's arm, trying to turn him toward the ladder as Dola began crossing the beach, testing each step carefully before she put her weight onto it. "Come on, Trent," Marc said, "we should go."

"Just a sec. I'm having a major soap opera moment here."

Rias turned away from them toward the nearby edge of Dentos Falls with the barrel in his arms, and Marc started to follow Dola, leaving Trent to join them in his own time. The smooth glass was hot under his feet, but not unbearably so. As Captain Lebram had guessed, the waterfall's spray had cooled the molten beach closest to it enough that it didn't burn them. Marc was more concerned about slipping and bruising his knees, the glass's slick surface complicating his already unsteady footing. He still hadn't gotten used to walking around on big cat paws.

"Hey, Rias!" he heard Trent call behind him. "Safe waters!"

Marc crossed another quarter of the beach's width before Rias called back, "Safe waters, Herald!" His shout was hoarse with emotion.

By the time Marc had reached the foot of the cliff wall, Dola was already scrambling up the ladder, well on her way to the first ridge some fifteen or twenty feet above. The first two planks had crumbled under her feet, nothing left of them but ash, and as Marc stretched his leg up to the third and lowest step at the height of his waist, it, too, buckled and snapped in half under his weight. Taking a deep breath and gathering his strength, he planted his hands on the two lowest stable boards and jumped, trying to bring a foot up to the plank at his chest's height while he grabbed the third board. He kicked at the cliff face, but was unable to raise his legs high enough to plant a foot on the lowest plank, and he ended up dangling limply from the third board, the two wooden boards below his grip bumping against his upper arms and chest.

Just as he was about to let go and drop down--the ground was only a few inches below his feet--a burly arm wrapped around his waist and heaved him upward until he reached the fourth and fifth planks and finally stepped up to the lowest, wide rung. "Thanks," he said down to Trent, pausing to catch his breath.

"Don't mention it." Trent grinned up at him, the task of lifting a full grown Oncan evidently a negligible effort for the big man.

Marc panted and clung to the ladder, wishing he had taken to his new body as well as Trent had to his. "So," he said, gathering his strength all over again. "Is 'safe waters' some sailor's farewell that you heard on the ship?"

"Nah. Just seemed like the right thing to say at the time." Trent poked Marc's heel to remind him to start climbing. "Now get moving. This glass is turning my feet into bacon."

Dola leaned over the lip of the narrow ridge above them and peered down at them. "Are you two coming?"

With another deep breath, Marc reached for the board above him. It was going to be a long climb.