The Duchess and the Dragon by Jamie Carie Read Free Book Online Page B

and wait to see if, come morning, they were among the living.

    FOURTEEN WEEKS AND five days in the pit of a vermin-infested hold. Fourteen weeks of soul-robbing hope. Fourteen weeks of living minute by minute, and then—as a rainbow appearing—a shout was heard, echoing though the hold.
    “Land!”
    The word lifted them out of their desolate places.
    “Land . . . ho!”
    It awoke them from the depths of their despair. It was the sweetest word they had ever heard.
    Drake opened his eyes, scarcely daring to believe. Land. Had they really reached it? Sitting up slowly to avoid the constant dizziness that tormented him, he listened, hoping to hear the word again—hoping he hadn’t dreamed it. Others around him roused, looking like walking, crawling corpses with fanatical excitement on their faces. It was true, they’d all heard it.
    Staggering to the ladder he waited in the sudden line, men and women with crazed expressions and sudden energy pulsing through their gaunt frames. They climbed the ladder with legs that shook and then stumbled across the deck to the railing. Drake recoiled from the bright dawn, their new dawn, pain shooting through his head until he thought he might collapse, but his spirit rose within him, urging the frail flesh to the rail. Behind them, a glorious sunrise pinkened the sky, washing the deck of the ship in a rosy glow. But no one spared much energy to appreciate it. They focused, as one desperate being, toward the dark line of land on the western horizon. Drake tried to hold his emotions in check as his shipmates fell apart around him—women and men wept with relief, falling to their knees in raptures of joy, grasping at the rail, unwilling to tear their gaze from the land, thanking God in loud voices that belied their weakened state. They’d reached land. They’d reached their promised land.
    Drake felt a tear trickle down his hollow cheek and blinked to rid the water from his eyes so he could focus on the dark blur approaching. He found his mind repeating a lunatics’ litany. Have we really made it? Have we really found it?
    Suddenly he was kneeling. The sunlight sent bolts of pain through his eyes and into his head, but he squinted, staring at the dark coastland, willing it to arrive as nausea and excitement rolled deep in his belly. Not much sea left, his mind reminded him in a muddled fog. After so many weeks on water, land seemed a new anomaly. All he could remember now was the sea. Gray, deep, dark, unfathomable water.
    He pulled himself up, clung to the rail and licked his dry, cracked lips. He watched the gentle, gray-green waves lap the ship’s hull. To drink full and deep of clean, cool water. What did that feel like? Thoughts of water tormented him, memories of crystal goblets brimming with it was a dreamy image in his head, not that he ever drank much water. But now, now that he couldn’t have any, he obsessed about it—its thirst-robbing authority, its crystal clarity. It even dogged his dreams. That it was all around him, and he couldn’t drink it had nearly driven him insane.
    Daniel McLaughlin walked up and put a hand on his shoulder. “How you be feelin’ now, Drake? Fever gone yet?”
    Drake squinted up from his hunched position at the only man on board he had really liked, the red-headed Scotsman, and the kind of man you would want covering your back in a fight. Drake was glad he had taken the risk and gotten to know the man.
    “Not gone yet, Daniel,” he croaked out, “but as soon as I can get some water, I shall recover. That is all this body needs.” Drake’s fever had burned hot for the last three days.
    Daniel grinned, showing white teeth against an auburn beard. “Some decent food wouldna hurt much either, would it now? With land in sight, I think we just might get off this floating hell and get a little of both.” He swept his hand toward the hazy coastland, his voice turning soft with conviction. “Freedom and a good life are just over those waves.