Page 15 of The Sea Witch (Salt & Sorcery #1)

Hot and cold danced over Ben’s skin. His mouth was sand dry, and an incessant throbbing pounded behind his eyes as he stared

at Alys Tanner, his hand wrapped around her strong, sinewy wrist. Beneath his fingers, her pulse hammered.

Despite the manacles binding him, he didn’t relinquish his hold of her, pulling her up from where she knelt.

She allowed herself to be hauled to her feet. Whatever had just transpired between them, she had to be affected by it in no

small measure, else she would have resisted him far more. There was fight and fire in the pirate captain. As it was, she was

unsteady, and in the dimness of her cabin, her face was carved of pale marble.

“What have you done?” His words abraded his throat.

“I didn’t mean to,” she answered.

“You were...” He tried to run his free hand down his face, to ground himself with the textures of his own skin, but the

chain stretching between his manacles was too short for him to hold her and touch his cheek. There was nothing to anchor him.

“I dreamt. And you were there . And you’re...” He was able to press his hand against his chest. “You’re here .”

Uncertainty cut through him, but it was her doubt he felt, her uneasiness and uncertainty and volleys of questions that buf feted him as much as they tormented her. The flame of her energy blazed within him, singeing him from the inside out.

His arms throbbed with the echo of her, a reverberation from his dream. The dreaming remembrance of her sleek and taut limbs

pressed against his vibrated through his flesh. Even as the dreams faded, the resonance of her continued. He could still feel

the sand beneath them, holding the impression of their bodies on an unknown beach, and feel the shadows of passing storm clouds.

“What was that?” he pressed.

“Dreamwalking. I’d planned to,” she confessed, “to learn about the Weeping Princess. But... it’s not supposed to happen...

not unless both people involved seek it.”

“I didn’t seek that.”

“Something... something made it transpire. Something in me sought you out. Something in you... came to me.” Her look

was unsure.

He tightened his grip, her flesh damp and hot within the cage of his fingers. Numbness ebbed, revealing a jagged, rocky shore

of anger.

“I would never come to you,” he insisted. “Not in the waking world, and certainly not in the world of dreams.”

Her gaze met his. “Yet you did. I was in your dreams.”

He grimaced. “And I was in yours.”

There had been a gentle young woman, her hands careful as she had cradled a bird. And Alys’s fear for this girl.

“The Weeping Princess is a waterfall, perhaps where we’ll find the fail-safe,” Alys said after a moment, “but the precise

where of it, that I don’t know.”

“There are corners of my mind that you haven’t plundered?”

“It wasn’t intentional,” she fired back. “And dreams are... the past, the present, history, and omens of things that may

or may not come to pass.”

“The beach. That thing on the beach.”

A shudder coursed through her. “Meaningless images. But there was more, and still, that didn’t give me... everything.”

“Good.”

“There’s something between us now. A... bond.”

He reared back as if she’d elbowed him in the face. “No.”

“Neither of us have a choice, Sailing Master.”

He tossed her wrist away from him, burned by her skin against his. Yet that did nothing to ease the sensation of her, fierce

and alive and determined, inside of him.

“It’s Sailing Master Priestley, or Mr. Priestley,” he answered. “If you’re going to thrust yourself into my mind, my dreams,

have the courtesy to call me by my name.”

“Ben.”

“Only my family and those I call friend may call me that.”

She paced away from him, her feet making soft padding noises upon the wooden planks of the floor. Her legs were still bare,

the high firm shape of her buttocks evident beneath the long hem of her linen shirt. He refused to make himself look away.

She took a long drink straight from a bottle pulled from a cabinet. Then another. The column of her throat worked as she swallowed,

and a single bead of liquid traced from her lower lip to settle in the hollow between her collarbones.

When she held the bottle out to him, he hesitated. Then strode to her to snatch it from her hands. He paused a moment before

putting his lips where her lips had been. Niceties were long gone, drowned in an undersea cavern.

“French brandy,” he said after taking a sizeable drink. “Stolen, doubtless.”

“I’d never pay the doubloons such fine swill demands. The best we could hope for in Norham was cider from Uriah Nash’s apples,

or small beer.”

“That’s your accent. I’d figured you for a colonial. No deference for authority.”

Her lips twisted. “Deference was the coin of the realm back home. A woman couldn’t exist without the proper amount of fawning over the men of that fucking place.”

“Unsurprising that you live there no longer.”

He shook his head. It didn’t matter where she came from. All that signified was what she’d done.

At the least, the brandy had pushed back memories of her in his dreams. Dreams of people and places he’d no desire to share

with her—or anyone. Ever.

Yet he’d been in her dreams, felt her love for the young woman. And terror at what lay ahead.

She took another swallow of brandy, then handed it back to him. He drank. It was excellent quality, tasting of apples and

vanilla and wood, far better than a warrant officer could afford for himself.

Bound to her. She would find her way into his mind, whether or not either of them desired it. His secrets were not his own.

Not any longer.

“You won’t find the Weeping Princess on a white man’s map,” he said after a moment. He gestured with his free hand toward

the table covered with charts, the manacles clinking heavily. “Scarce people are alive who remember it, and they hold tight

to the knowledge.”

“They’re few in number?” she asked.

“Disease has reduced their ranks to next to nothing,” he said, grim. “A legacy of the Spanish.”

“The English, too, I’d wager.”

He fell silent, unable to refute this.

“The rest of it,” she continued. “If you please.”

“There is a small island, off the westernmost coast of Hispaniola. It’s lush, abundant with flora and fauna.

Legend has it that a princess fled there with her lover, a man her family had determined was unworthy of her.

The princess and her lover thought they were safe, but her family gave chase and found them.

He attempted to protect her, yet her kinsmen attacked and killed him, and he fell dead at her feet.

Her tears were so copious, so eternal, that the nature spirits took pity on her and transformed her. Into a waterfall.”

She was quiet, and then nodded. “Tell our navigator where to locate this island.”

“And have my throat cut for my service.” He shook his head. “I’ll guide us there, step by step.”

“You aren’t in control here, navy man—Mr. Priestley.”

He stepped closer to her, into the halo of invisible energy that surrounded her. The nearer he came, the more it resonated

in his own body. There was courage in her.

And doubt.

He started.

This brazen buccaneer... uncertain? Yet she was. Beneath the hard carapace of her identity as a witch, and a pirate captain,

it was there.

There was sadness in her, too. The bleak reverberations of loss.

She drew in a sharp breath, and he felt it then, the resonance of himself within her . All the parts of himself that he kept tightly locked away, they’d seeped into her. Desires and fears and hopes and sorrows.

A thirst for things he dared not name, not even to himself. But now he’d become part of her, just as she had become part of

him.

God damn it.

“We’re neither of us in control,” he growled. “Not anymore.”

The navigator for the Sea Witch was summoned, a woman named Luna. The lone lantern cast wan light on her fair but tanned skin. She appeared at the door to

Alys Tanner’s cabin. Luna’s long sandy hair lay in sleep tangles around her shoulders and her gray eyes were drowsy but keen,

yet she was alert and eager to listen to Ben’s directions on how to reach the island of the Weeping Princess.

She and Ben consulted as the captain looked on, nursing a tankard of rum.

Fortunately for his sanity, Alys Tanner had put her breeches on.

If he’d had to look at her bare legs a moment longer, with the dream memory of them wrapped around his body.

.. The limits of his self-control could be tested for just so long, even if he still reeled at the way the sanctity of his dreams had been shattered.

He rubbed at the center of his chest. She’d said only one who desired the connection could make it happen. The last thing

he wanted was to be linked to her. And yet he’d done it, anyway.

The task of guiding the ship’s navigator to the island made for a welcome distraction.

“For years, I’ve sailed these waters,” Luna admitted, her hands braced on the table as she studied the chart, her Scottish

accent round and rolling, “and I never knew of this island or its whereabouts.”

“It likes to keep itself hidden,” he answered.

The navigator nodded. “All places have their own will, their own minds. I felt it in the Hebrides, where I was born, and strongly

here, in the Caribbean.”

“Is it not safer for you at home in the Hebrides? Aboard a ship such as this one, your life cannot last long.” Unexpectedly,

he liked Luna. Ghastly to think of her at the end of a noose, or splayed dead upon the top deck.

A corner of Luna’s mouth turned up. “Where I’m from, they gave me the wrong name, the wrong clothes. It was only when I sailed

away and found my true home on the Sea Witch that I could be who I was always meant to be. There’s no safety in that, and the life I led there... it was hardly the

one I wanted for myself.”

Ben gazed at her, and then at Alys Tanner, who looked at him with a challenge in her eyes. He was filled with her protectiveness

for Luna. For all her crew.