Druthers turned the captain on her back and pulled her up by her shoulders. Her flesh was white with death. Her clothes were sodden and heavy as stone. She was beautiful. Druthers had never met anyone more beautiful in all the ways that mattered. A little hard on herself, perhaps. She thought not wanting a husband or children made her broken, meant she needed to repent with such relentless service to the crown. The Queen had never had such an ardent servant as Cap'n Cath.
She deserved a better gremlin.
Druthers sat by Cath's body. The cold didn't bother her, or the wind. Gremlins had an inner stillness. They went only where they meant to go, they felt only what they chose to feel. But they commanded only themselves and could bring nothing else with them.
Her thin fingers twined in Cath's long red hair, always of a tangle no matter what she did with it. She looked across the wide angry water that separated them from the land. There was turbulence in a strip across the water that suggested something just below the surface. Maybe at high tide, there would be a way across but it would only solve half the problem for anyone trying to get from here to there or back again. From here the cliffs did not seem so high, but that was the distance. Far away and towering tall, the cliffs of Keathness. And beyond them, the wilds and moors and badlands where lived the gracie that wanted no truck with civilized sapie ways. Only a few towns and royal forts until all the way to Antipobium and the beginning of the road to the Queen's Seat.
The closeness of Cath's body was too much. Druthers stood. She picked her way around to the other side of the small island, just a big pile of rocks really. She kept her true form for now. Finding footholds on the sharp and shifting stones. She'd take on some other shape when she really got down to waiting.
"Damn you anyway, Cath."
That woman had changed her. It had been over twenty years ago when the Queen was at war with the otherkin and the Neanders all at once. The gremlins were sent to bring the dirigibles down. But they were torn between their mission and the innate nature of the fey, to bond with the thing they inhabit. Nymphs to the sea, dryads to trees, gremlins to the creations of man. They were between worlds, and it turned out to be a bad strategy, some went each way and the battles only become worse until the Queen's forces were finally triumphant and forced peace upon the sovereign forests of the fey. The fight with the Neanders going on to this day.
The turned fey were left with no other home to go to. So with the boats they stayed.
It was almost full dark and the storm was fading away. It was still but for the lapping of the waves and the distant hiss of the shoreline. And then a new wind. Not storm-strong but steady and into the shore. Too steady, too straight.
Magic again.
Magic like this was rare. The fey had very specific ability and innate skills. This was human magic, free and crazy and tearing the natural order apart. A wind coming straight this way could be bringing someone to the wreck of the Ophinicus. A sail, a kite… a dragon was not entirely out of the question, a few of them still lived.
It made no sense. Druthers had assumed the storm had been sent after something else, someone else, someone important. Cath and her crew and the Pinny were precious, but they were not important. The queen had three score boats in her service, two dozen larger than Phinny and a handful of real armored gunboats. And besides, the tech was moving on to motorized kites with tiered wings and the ability to fly any way against the wind.
Was that a light on the horizon? Down on the face of the sea? It flickered between the waves but was steady on its bearing. What could they want? What would anyone want from a Queen's dirigible? And what could a lone outcast gremlin do about it anyway?
#
It was a ship, a fast one. But it was coming a good long distance and it was dawn before she could make out the shape of it and the sails. A cutter with a fine sharp prow that cut through the water with grim determination.
Druthers spend the night bracing herself and digging the closest thing she could to a hole, and sealing the gyroscope up inside it, setting the stones to look like they'd never been moved. That was her best guess as to the reason for it all. The Phinny ran courier to the palace sometimes. The arcane defenses there recognized her by a talisman sealed inside the globe. If the pirates could travel back faster than the news of the wreck, it might just get someone as far as the landing lawn outside the palace, for whatever good that would do them.
A second hole she excavated for the captain. It seemed callous but it was the best chance of seeing off the looters, if they thought they faced a living captain, not a stray fey. Druthers careful removed Cath's clothing and possessions and laid her pale body in the shallow grave.
"I do this for you, Cath," she said. "I hope you'll not be wrath with me from the beyond. And I'll try to do you credit. And whoever killed our boat, they'll suffer for it. This I swear."
She carefully mimicked every aspect of the captain's earthly form. She put on her clothes: chemise, pantaloons, shirts and corset, cravat, good wool jacket, and her dark blue gloves that leaked dye into her cuffs. Last, over it all, the sash that went around her waist and over her left shoulder and from it hanging her short saber. It was a good weapon, unfussy but strong and sharp all along its length. She felt the captain's blessing on her as sure and heavy as the light of a Sunday sun up above the clouds on a clear day. Cath would not resent the borrowing, so long as she carried it off in the captain's own inimitable style.
Druthers covered the captain up. Wincing to place rocks over her bare body. But it would not do to have two captains found on the rock.
She stood and watched the ship come up and anchor. The runabout was rowed by two stout men and carried three others. There'd be at least a dozen more they left behind. So she'd not be achieving anything by force of arms. A bluff, a lie, whatever would serve. She was pursuing Catherine's interests. That was the only way she could justify taking her form. They would not have the gyroscope.
Cath would want to protect the Queen. Druthers wasn't sure what she felt about Queen Quinten. No longer an enemy but for sure not a friend. Druthers just knew it was important to Cath. Had been important to Cath. And damned if anyone was going to have any part of the Phinny when she could do something about it.