The Etsey Series 1: The Seventh Veil (63 page)

Madeline gripped his arm tightly. “You are on water! The sea is too unstable! You cannot ground—”

“There is earth beneath the sea,” Charles replied, his voice thick and strange even in his own ears.

His eyes were open, but he opened deeper eyes as well, drew a breath from Life itself, and stretched his magic all the way into the heat of the sun. He fumbled through the veils—six now—and reached for her gown, her hand, a lock of her hair.

A rough, masculine hand caught his. Soft lips brushed his fingers before pressing his palm flat against a hairless chest full of scars.

“Quiera.”

“Timothy,” Charles whispered and stepped forward into his embrace.

But his body, anchored to earth and blocked by a guardrail, could not follow. Tears streaming down his face, he fell back from the sun, fell out of his magic until he was only a man again, not a god, standing on the deck of a ship, arm outstretched over the sea toward the horizon.

“Follow the sun. Follow the sun, and see him again.”

The voice seemed to be coming from below. Blinking, Charles looked down at the waves lapping lazily against the side of the boat. He heard soft laughter, and when he looked more closely, he thought he saw eyes. And hair. And wicked smiles.

“Follow the sun,”
the waves whispered. They laughed once more, and then with a sharp flap of a fin against the water, the eyes disappeared and the voices ended.

“Charles?” Madeline asked, taking his hand in hers. “Are you all right?”

Charles turned to Jonathan, his heart still beating hard and fast. “We have to go west. I’ve seen him. He’s in the west.”

Jonathan frowned at him. “There’s nothing to the west but ocean.”

Charles looked out at the setting sun in despair. “But we have to follow the sun,” he whispered.

To his surprise, Jonathan laughed. But before he could be angry, Jonathan put a hand on his shoulder. “Come,” he said, his voice as mischievous as it had been when they were young boys. “If you want to follow the sun, you’re staring at the wrong horizon.”

He led them forward down the deck of the ship, clearing a path for them through the crew, who doffed their caps and tugged their forelocks as they passed. Jonathan kept his eye on the very front of the ship, and once they were there, he stationed Madeline and Charles at the most forward point of the bow. He himself stood behind them, his left arm around Madeline and his right dipping between them as he gestured out across the water.

“Monitor Island is there,” he said. “We will pass it in a half an hour; watch how long it takes for her to come into sight. That speck, just below that spidery cloud—that is an army ship. It is taking troops through Perjory’s Casket to Hain.” He swung his arm around Charles’s back, gesturing even farther away. “We will catch the coastal tide that will take us south. You will feel the waters shift, growing stronger, and the winds will be warmer almost as if by magic. These are the tropical winds, and they come up all the way from the southern and tropical coast of Catal. It is from there that all western traffic from the north must begin.” His hand squeezed Charles’s shoulder. “Etsian sailors call it ‘following the sun.’”

The water was laughing again, but Charles didn’t look down. Hope swelled in his heart as the chalk white island came closer and closer into sight, and when they turned into the strait and their ship found the shifting waters Jonathan had spoken of, his heart seemed to grow wings.

When the warm southerly breeze hit his face, wet and thick and unlike any Etsian air he had ever known, Charles gasped out loud with delight, and then he was laughing too.

Madeline took his hand in hers, and he squeezed gently back in answer. Jonathan brushed a kiss against Madeline’s hair and rested his hand more firmly on Charles’s shoulder. They stood there all together, watching the sea crest and roll away before them, lapping at the sides of their ship and of their weary hearts.

As the ship swung around to ride a gale, Charles drew a deep breath, lifted his face, and looked boldly into the sun.

Loose Id Titles by Heidi Cullinan

Nowhere Ranch

THE ETSEY SERIES

The Seventh Veil

Heidi Cullinan

Heidi grew up in love with story. She fell asleep listening to Disney long-playing records and read her Little House On The Prairie books until they fell apart. She invented stories of witches and fairies and enchanted trees and spent hours imagining the lives of the settlers who had inhabited the homestead log cabin and two-story late 1800s home on her family farm. She created epic storylines for her Barbies until age ten and then started writing them down. Her first novel, The Life and Times of Michelle Matthews, was published when she was twelve in the school anthology and took up nearly half of it.

Though Heidi continued to write novels through high school, she stopped in college, deciding it was time to grow up and do something meaningful with her life. When Heidi ended up in grad school to become a teacher, she rediscovered her love of romance novels. She began to write again on the side, and when she quit teaching to have her daughter, she took up writing with more seriousness.

Eight years and many million pages later, Heidi has learned a lot about writing, more than she ever wanted to know about publishing, and most importantly, finally figured out that writing IS the meaningful something she wants to do with her life. She has been a member of many writing organizations including Romance Writers of America and moderates on Jennifer Crusie’s online reader and writer forum.

A passionate advocate for LGBT rights, Heidi volunteers as often as she can for One Iowa and donates with her husband as a monthly partner to the Human Rights Campaign and Lambda Legal.

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