Maddin rowed with both hands on a single oar, matching Belladin’s frantic pace. The dark patch in the water swam closer, gaining speed. Bony protrusions breached the surface of the ocean like a series of black knives. Those alone would tear their boat asunder, thought Maddin.

  And there was no outrunning them.

  “Belladin,” he growled, as if the bard could mollify the sea beast with a well-told parable.

  “This is as fast as I row, Second, if you can do better without my help, by all means!”

  Maddin swept his arm to the side, striking Belladin in the chest and knocking him onto his back. He took hold of the second oar and spun the dinghy parallel with the creature’s spine.

  The protrusions grazed the starboard side of the boat as the beast made another pass.

  Belladin scrambled to the bow to watch them sink back into the depths. “Very close, Maddin. Very, very close.”

  “I don’t expect it’s over, he’s just made it harder to anticipate his next move.”

  “Her,” Belladin corrected. “If it was a male, we’d have been dead already.”

  “Females, ever the more forgiving sex.”

  Belladin turned back, his face ghostly pale. He shook his head. “The females are known to play with their prey before they eat it.”

  Maddin’s shoulders stooped. “What do you call this animal?”

  “The word for them is filandin, but most sailors call them the belly of the sea.”

  “The belly of the sea?”

  “So named for their ravenous appetite.”

  “Marvelous.”

  The boat yawed suddenly to the right and rolled to the left like a horse attempting to buck its rider. The men lurched to starboard to keep balance, slid back to port to even out the action.

  It was swimming circles beneath them, churning the water into a gyre.

  “We have to paddle out of this,” said Belladin, as if Maddin were unaware.

  Working the oars with tireless speed, Maddin tried to escape the vortex threatening to swallow them. But no matter how hard or fast he paddled, he could not manage to get free of it. The sea would suck them down into the filandin’s domain, where she could snatch them up like two slow anchovies.

  Maddin had crossed the impermeable barrier between worlds just to become a morsel of fish food.

  As the water underneath them sank into a concavity, a rippling sound pulled Maddin’s attention to the sky. A dark shape soared overhead, a human body held aloft by two broad sets of wings. They folded inward and the man they belonged to descended into their boat.

  The wood cracked beneath his bare feet when he landed, boards buckling under the weight of his brawn. He stood seven feet tall with a frame loaded with muscle, bared for them to see. He had short-cropped dirty-blond hair, scars all over his body, and pale gray eyes that presently came to rest on Maddin. “Pay to be saved?” he asked, the four words bleeding into one another with rote delivery.

  “What?” Maddin asked.

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  “Yes! We’ll pay, just lift us out of here,” Belladin pleaded.

  The man extended his bottom set of wings and Belladin took hold of the left. “Grab on,” the bewinged man instructed, his voice flat, devoid of emotion.

  Maddin followed Belladin’s lead and latched himself to the other wing. The white feathers felt soft under his palms.

  The boat plunged into the eye of the vortex as their rescuer lifted them skyward, sweeping his unladen wings against the sea and climbing to safety. Maddin looked down and saw a mouth snap the boat in two before diving out of sight.

  “What man has wings?” Maddin wondered aloud, watching the ocean drop out beneath him.

  “Celestial,” answered the man in question. “Epthim.”

  Maddin wondered whether the celestial had just attempted to spit a hair until Belladin replied, “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Epthim. And pleased to employ your services.”

  “Fifteen each,” Epthim said. Whether disinterested in the bard’s cordiality or incapable of parsing it, Maddin couldn’t be sure. It seemed that beyond the wings and the muscle, this celestial possessed few other talents. Yet these appeared to be enough, battle-tested, going on the menagerie of scars marring his pale flesh.

  “Duly noted.” Belladin replied in a tone containing a note of mischief, which Maddin assumed their celestial transport lacked the faculties to detect. Maddin cut a warning, sidelong glance at the bard, who willfully ignored it.

  “Where are you taking us?” asked Maddin.

  “Elinda.”

  “Where or who is that?”

  Epthim merely pointed to a dark shape in the distance. Maddin could only distinguish it from the sea because it failed to reflect the trace amounts of light threading the dark. A black shape was all it was for several minutes, until they flew close enough to make out the sails.

  It was a ship, painted black, with black sails and rigging, the perfect nighttime stealth vessel. As Epthim slowly descended, Maddin saw that even its crew donned all black uniforms. They gathered on the main deck, forming a semicircle. Epthim came to rest in the center of it. Maddin and Belladin released his wings and dropped to their feet on the black wooden boards.

  They looked up into the eyes of the ostensible captain, a man with a peg leg, a wiry beard, and black garb. One hand rested on his belt, the other stuffed into his jacket. He grinned back at them, baring rotten teeth. “Pay up or swim,” he said, his voice aristocratic, a poor match for his appearance.

  Epthim gave them both a shove forward. Maddin scowled up at the celestial, then turned to Belladin, prompting him to settle their debt. But the bard returned his gaze with one of apology. Maddin grit his teeth. “Would those be our only two options?” he asked the captain.

  “A fighter, eh? Well, given your state and the slightness of your companion’s figure, I very much doubt you’d like your odds. I think they’d be better if you tried your luck in the sea. You’ve a better chance of slipping past the filandin than defeating my entire ship.” The captain raised his peg leg, wrapped his fist around it, then plucked the wood away from his stump to reveal a shiny silver blade underneath. With perfect balance, he leveled the point on his guests. “Not that you’d even make it past me.”

  “We have something else to offer,” Belladin said with a bow.

  The captain turned to his crew. “A barter!”

  They all laughed.

  “What have you to trade with value equal to your lives?” He flicked his jaundiced eyes at Maddin. “Or life, depending on the degree of loyalty you feel for your green friend.”

  With a twinkle in his gaze, the bard replied, “A story.”

  The persistent nausea roiling Maddin’s stomach suddenly doubled.

  The captain guffawed. “Are we children in need of a bedtime fairy tale?”

  “Some of the finest stories are those we share with the inchoate minds of children. Despite what some philosophers may tell you, intellect doesn’t digest story, imagination does, and it’s strongest in the young. A storyteller must fine-tune their craft to sate such a ravenous appetite.”

  The captain lowered his sword-leg to the deck and let the tip stick in the boards. “Is it your intention to compare us unfavorably to children?”

  “We were all children once, were we not?” Belladin cut his eyes at the towering celestial behind him. “Well, nearly all of us. Thus, we all possess the same imagination. Age merely obfuscates the faculty.”

  Maddin saw in the captain’s face a measure of respect for the venturesome bard, betrayed by the angle of his lips, the tightness around the eyes, a thoughtful rather than dismissive look. “A story, then, hm? Well, bard, it may very well be your last, so let it be a good one, eh?”

  “You are very gracious to hear it, captain, though it isn’t mine to tell.”

  Belladin turned then to Maddin who might’ve spewed the contents of his stomach had there been any.

  “A Second’s story,” the captain said. “Well, this ought to be good.”