Chapter 3

Just before the break of dawn, Sunder, Yeng, and Hui raised Artemis’ sails and began waking up their still-hungover crew.

“Everyone come up here before I start throwing men out to the sea!” screamed Yeng as she fought with the sail’s ropes.

“We are not missing this morning wind!” continued Sunder.

The groggy men began tumbling up the stairs one by one, most being dragged up while still half-asleep.

“Why couldn’t I have stayed with them at the tavern?” lamented Hui.

“You were born drunk,” commented En-Lai, a slender man with a dreadfully tired expression and skin nearly as white as Sunder’s hair, on some days it was hard to tell if he was still alive. His voice was even raspier than usual from the night of drinking, coupled with having just woken up. “Let us have a turn every once in a while.”

Hui could only muster a slight huff in response as he finished tying his sail down before throwing himself to the floor, ready to fall asleep once more.

As the sun began peeking through the horizon, everyone on board had just about finished preparing the ship, and as the wind began to kick up, Artemis flew out of the port and began her way toward the next stop.

“Hui, take the helm,” said Sunder. “I need to speak with Yeng.” and before he was even able to complain, another crewmate, Lieh intervened. The crew’s living armory, he wore a shirtless vest that showed the myriad of scars around his arms, each done to test the ship’s blades.

“I can take it, I barely drank anything yesterday!”

“Easy there,” said Hui, groggily getting up from the floor. “I don’t want to work, but even in my drunkest I wouldn’t put this ship in your hands.”

“Even if the last drink you had was as a baby - that would actually explain a lot - but I would still never put my ship in your hands.” joked Yeng.

“You mean my ship,” said Sunder, pumping his chest.

“Yeah, that,” she responded, looking up at the sky.

Lieh turned and mumbled to himself as Hui switched places with Yeng, who patted him on the belly before following Sunder over to his quarters.

“What do you need, Princess? Calling for a ride in the jade chamber so early in the morning? I like it.”

“Shut up. How long do you think we still have before reaching Alexandria?”

“With this route, maybe another five months, four if the wind’s on our side.”

“Crap, that’s too slow. My mother is using up a lot of resources to make sure we get there safely. If anything happens back at home, I don’t want her to have to choose between the people or us.”

“You know your mother would let the entire kingdom and herself burn to the ground before anything would happen to her children.”

“That’s exactly why I’m worried.” Sunder threw his head against his bookshelf, letting out a giant sigh.

“No, you’re right, realized that just as I said it.”

“I know how important this mission is, but she is burning through too much money just constantly checking up on me. I could have never sent her a single letter since the moment we left home and she would still know exactly where we are. I know she wants to make sure I’m safe, but she’s just too paranoid.”

“We all know the extremes she can reach for you, this is still tame for her. But if everything the papers say is correct, you might just be able to grab those powers yourself and fly us all back home” Sunder huffed, his eyes narrowing like a lion focusing on its prey “Easy there, I was joking.” Yeng leaned her head to the sky, biting her tongue for a moment before looking back at Sunder “How willing are you to kill us all?”

“What do you mean?”

“If we were to follow that path, we should have started after this last stop, but we can still make it if we dock at the next town.” Moving to the table in Sunder’s room, facing a small window with a view of the sea, she placed her hands over a map that was already spread out, consisting mostly of their route from home up to the northernmost part of Egypt. Their path always hugged land, making it so that their stops could be frequent and quick. “Here.” She pointed to the next stop that they would take and ran her finger through the hard paper, ending in a town that they wouldn’t reach for the next four months. “We skip the next ten stops and travel straight to here.”

“That’s suicide.”

“Might be, might not. A lot of people talk about a current that can fly us through this stretch. We see land again in less than a week.”

“Who can guarantee that current even exists?”

“Oh it exists, that’s not the problem.”

“Then what is?”

“The current changes and that change is…significant. The wind around there is chaotic and the waves can just change their path from out of nowhere, and if that does happen, we could die of starvation, completely lose our direction, or maybe even sink, if we’re lucky we might even be able to choose from the three.”

“And if the current doesn’t change?”

“Then we suddenly are four months ahead of schedule. But are you ready to risk our lives on a maybe?”

“I don’t know.” Sunder lost himself in thought for a moment, before turning his back on Yeng “I’ll decide that during our next stop.”

Before he could leave, she grabbed him, her mischievous smile replaced with a stern and worried expression, “You can’t delay these decisions, you have to choose now. There are no guarantees of what is waiting for us at that current, but if you can’t act now, you won’t be able to act when Artemis starts to sink.”

Sunder clenched his teeth hard enough to nearly break them. “What would you do?”

“No. This is the captain’s decision. The crew and I will trust you made the right choice, regardless of which one.” Yeng gave him a hard smack on the back before returning to the deck, popping her head back into view for just a moment. “If you do choose to go through with it, I would give the crew a morale check, just to prepare them for what’s to come.”

With the sails wide open, and Artemis sprinting through the seas, everyone else was relaxing, besides Hui, who kept the wheel steady. Yeng, however, wasn’t even given the time to sit down before Sunder screamed the men into attentiveness.

“Everyone, listen up! We are very behind on time, and unless we are extremely lucky with the wind, when we eventually get to Alexandria we might find an empty library at best, and at worst someone who’s already stolen The Elements.”

“Your mother told us she’s making sure no one is racing us there,” said Lieh.

“That might be true, but that war she created is taking a toll on our country, the faster we do this, the faster it ends.”

“That thing is not a war,” said Ang-Shi, “what Rhea has prepared is barely a skirmish, she just sent enough soldiers there to scare Greece into believing that more are coming. She had already planned to give Anatolia back when she captured it last year, all is still going according to plan.”

“And if we take too long, hundreds of lives are going to be lost, not counting the ones already lost when she conquered that kingdom in the first place.”

“That’s just how war is, child,” continued Ang-Shi, “we sacrifice however many lives we need to make sure ours aren’t included.”

“You took your first life when you were forty,” said Yeng, stepping up to Ang-Shi, her eyes fuming with anger. “Who the hell are you to say how many lives we can sacrifice?”

“And how many people do you think Rhe-” Ang-Shi stopped himself short, “Diplomats don’t need to experience the blood on their hands to know that the weight falls upon them.” he turned back to Sunder, expecting a furious look, but seeing him lost in thought. “Your father has taken hundreds of lives by himself, but that is not what makes him Khan. He is our leader because he is able to carry the entire kingdom on his back, he takes in his sins and ours too, without flinching, because that’s his duty. You’ll need to learn how to do the same one day.”

The crew stood silent as Sunder leaned his back on the ship’s door down to the quarters, looking up to the sky in search of an answer.

“I can’t always do everything in the same way as him. We’re cutting a straight line through the ocean, saving ourselves four months.”

“You want to go through the Fool’s Current?” asked Lieh, “That’s a death sentence for everyone.”

“We aren’t going through there-”

“Yes we are!” roared Sunder, interrupting Ang-Shi. Everyone took a silent breath before he continued. “I am your captain, my decision is final.”

“What happened to not wanting to sacrifice people?” screamed Ang-Shi, stepping up to him.

“You said my father would carry everything on his shoulders, didn’t he? Well, if we die, all your sins will sink with me, I’ll make sure of that.”

“I think we’re all getting too agitated,” said Yeng, “let’s just try to calm down-”

“Anyone who doesn’t want to follow me can leave on our next stop. But remember what my mother hired you to do, if you fail her, you probably know what’ll happen.” he turned his back on the crew before they had a chance to respond, leaving an air of confusion and fear amongst them.

“Sunder,” said Yeng, chasing him into his quarters. “What the hell just happened out there?”

“You said to give them a morale check, and I did,” throwing himself down into the chair he had next to his table, he rubbed his eyes with a sigh.

“You do remember you still have an entire trip to reach Alexandria and come back home with them, right?”

“They’re grown men, if I can handle them being how they are all the time, they can certainly handle me acting imposing once in my life.”

“Yeah, you’re lucky not to wake up carrying something hard and sharp on your back tomorrow.”

“My mother hired them knowing nothing like that would ever happen. And besides, we’re still a crew, if something like this was enough to have them do that, you would have run out of space in your back long ago.”

“I’m still not sure from what part of the family you got the crazy from.”

“We all know that was a joint effort.”

“Hm,” snickered Yeng, “well let’s hope you inherited their luck too.”