A wrong turn at the seashore

Previously: After taking shelter from a storm, Mira and her companions wake to a new day and find that the structure they spent the night in is not an abandoned home or military outpost, at all. It was a ship: wrecked in the forest, miles from any large water source and empty...


At first I could only stare and wonder if my eyes deceived me. Could it indeed be some form of home whose exterior had sagged to give it the appearance of an upside-down vessel? I thought not, for the ends of it were indeed curved, not broken. The windows were indeed rounded, like portholes. And the shattered limbs nearby were indeed straight and had once been hewn by man into masts.

"Bones of Barnok."

"Indeed." Merrick stood beside me, his arms crossed. "Have you ever seen such a thing?"

"In the middle of a forest...? No. I have not." I whirled, scratching my head. Was there indeed a lake or a river nearby? It would have to be a wide one, deep of water and strong of current to handle such a vessel. This was no plainsman's skiff, this was a sea worthy craft, capable of handling large waves, strong winds and the temperamental creatures that made widows out of so many sailors' wives. "How can this be?"

"Perhaps the cap...tain...got lost," Broo-Fang Tane suggested in his usual, lilting speech.

"Lost? You could run a horse for three days in any direction and not find an ocean or a sea," I said.

Seyhmurh shrugged his massive shoulders. "I dunno. It could happen."

"It could HAPPEN?" I knew he was not the sharpest arrow in the quiver, but the man couldn't be that dense, could he? "How, pray tell, could that happen?"

Another shrug. "If it is possible for a man on a horse to lose his way and find the sea, why is it not possible for the opposite to be true? Why can't a sailor lose his way and find the forest?"

I closed my eyes and shook my head. "Usually, that's because there are a few obstacles along the way. Like a reef, perhaps. Shallow water, most likely. Barring that, a beach. In this case, several towns and two kingdoms?"

"It's still possible."

"Look, you stubborn...."

"Take ease," Tane said. His hand was calm and light on my shoulder. "Why argue the im...possibil...ity of something that is...right...before our........................eyes?"

I had to agree to that logic. Merrick and I walked around the structure, looking for clues. "Perhaps it was dragged to this place," he wondered. "On some kind of huge cart? Or rollers? Could a number of horses do such a thing?"

"Not without leaving a trail," I said. For if such an enormous thing had been hauled over land, it would have surely left some kind of destruction in its wake. but the trees all around it were of the same height. It looked for all purposes to have been dropped from the sky, like the feces of a giant bird. "And an enterprise such as that would require planning and attract attention. Surely, it would be known of and recorded somewhere. I've never heard of anything like this."

"Oh, well, then. It must not have happened," Seyhmurh said. "Odd for such a thing to appear in front of us and not let you know how it got there."

I probably deserved that, but I glared at him, anyway. As Tane had pointed out, the evidence was directly in front of our eyes, solid under our hands, unquestionably there. It only hadn't been recorded...yet. This tale would bring enough coin to have me living comfortably for a long time--perhaps it would even give me the security to turn in my historian's quills and earn a piece of land somewhere where ships would not fall out of the sky.

If, I told myself, I could determine the nature of the vessel and what had happened to its crew.