Excerpt
Stormy Seas
The deck of the naval sailing ship creaked under Chelsea Hewitt's boots as she stepped up to the railing in the chill sea air. She didn't mind the cold. For one thing, they had sailed out of the Winter Court's seas and along the unclaimed shores between Winter's and Summer's lands, where only the damp cool of autumn now reigned, and she was dressed in her usual thick winter finery, suffused with enough faerie magic to keep her warm in even the bitterest cold. For another, her heart fluttered with enough warmth and contentedness to keep such physical discomforts a mere inconvenience.
She had just emerged from belowdecks, where she and the Winter Queen, known to Chelsea as Rimewing, to whom Chelsea was Consort, had been passing a lovely afternoon exploring efficient uses of their tiny, shared cabin.
She had a fine shawl of worked wool drawn about her shoulders, but she left the hood down so the scant fresh sea breeze could play about her brown hair and cool her overheated cheeks.
All around her, the winterling sailors bustled to and fro, tying off ropes and lugging sailcloth and following the barked orders of the dryad captain. Water the color of stone slapped against the hull and the oars working below her, and a few gulls swooped among the rigging, calling forlornly, but the world remained otherwise still and quiet. The breeze had been thin enough for the entire day and a half of their journey thus far that they'd had to resort to rowing.
Beyond the extra, backbreaking work this meant for the sailors, it made everyone anxious. It meant the Storm Folk were not patrolling these waters, or if they were, they were being extra stealthy about it.
Hard to hunt prey that showed no sign of itself.
But hunt they must, if they ever wanted to draw the Lady of Tempests from her fleet. The once-mortal leader of the Storm Folk — still roaming free on the seas of the Faerie Realm after Chelsea's failed attempt to banish her back to the mortal world — must answer for the destruction her unnatural storms had wreaked along the coast of the Winter Court and in the lands of their allies in the Summer Court.
Chelsea leaned her elbows against the railing and stared out to the east, over the expanse of the sea. She drew in a deep lungful of salty air, held it for a few heartbeats, then let it out slowly. This lull of any notice from or sign of their new enemy was making it hard for her to keep up her usual mindset of alertness, her drive to keep her winterling Folk protected at all costs, which was her actual job as Consort to the Winter Court.
Rimewing's enticing presence on board didn't help matters, either.
Instead of keeping her mind on the task at hand — hunting down one Storm Folk ship, luring them into a false sense of security by looking weak, and then overpowering them in a surge designed to let a ragged crew limp home to deliver the news to their leader — Chelsea'd found herself slipping into thoughts of vacations and luxury cruises more and more often.
Which was, of course, dangerous as heck. She'd personally seen the ragged state of some of their ships as they limped back into port at the Winter Court's ice-ringed shipyard. Masts torn to splinters, sails shredded, sailors lost.
Really, Chelsea thought, feeling a little disgusted with herself. What had happened to her focus? She needed to get her head screwed back on straight.
To that end, she took another of those salty breaths and put one hand to the jewel that hung from a fine silver chain around her neck, the treasure of the Winter Court known as the Snowstar. As Winter's Consort, it was her right to bear it, and to work with its protective magic if she could.
