Mayhem.

Jevoly watched men perform spider-feats, skittering up, down, across and over rigging, feet ruthlessly avoiding the snares each square of strung netting posed. Some clung, precariously as she saw it, to the yards crossing the masts, shimmying along their bellies with clamped legs and dangling hands, eight or ten, she couldn't tell, all lined up across the yard, imitating crows, she thought, spending an afternoon sitting along a fence.

But they spent no time sitting still and eyeing goings-on around them with black and tainted eyes. The whole ship was a flurry of movement, men drawing up the lower sails, heaving on the halyards to quickly raise the middle sails, and pulling the braces to angle the square sails in a different direction. Jevoly lost track of the one man she had been observing in the scuttle, unable to watch as he crawled up the rigging to walk, walk along a yardarm, toes curled for grip as he hurried along a surface no bigger than her waist. She instead watched the sailors as a whole.

Ants. That's what they were. A mound of ants upset by a careless foot, sending them into harried ideas of move, move, move! But she had trouble envisioning Skadu as the queen, his bald, black head easy to find in the churning mass that had become his crew. The barrel chest and gravel voice, yelling orders so loud now she was sure everyone living below the sea could hear, coddled no imaginings of queenly, courtly stature. He resembled more a boulder, tumbling through disarray and forcing anything in its way to get moving or get trampled.
And all because the wind had changed.

"You found a spot to avoid being swept in, I see."

Jevoly turned to brown hair and burnt-gold eyes, the whites still red from his reported illness, and smiled at Éirim. She couldn't help but notice how pale he still seemed beneath his tan and how the right corner of his mouth trembled slightly when he smiled.

Still so weak, she thought. I wonder what ailed him.

"I trust you are suitably impressed," she replied, putting on all the airs of a courtly woman who is used to being fed puppy adoration and reassertion that everything she does is the most proper and undeniably correct way to do it.

"Oh, without a doubt." He chuckled before getting caught in a cough, wheezing to catch a breath in between each painful explosion of breath. When he was able to again draw a clean inhalation of air, he apologized with a grimace to Jevoly.

"You know, I don't understand why you're on this ship." She pushed hurriedly forward when she saw him open his mouth to spout some explanation. "Oh, I know it has something to do with Arch-Magess Shaftile, but I don't believe all the rumors about her enough to think she wouldn't allow you more time to recover from your illness. This salt air can't be improving you at all."

"You're right on that, but we had to sail because Captain Helder refused to have some of his trades spoil for something as unimportant as transporting three passengers." Another smile, but only with the left side of his mouth now. She wondered if he was conscious of the trembling on the right when he smiled, or if he had always smiled in such a lopsided manner.

"Yes, that sounds like Skadu, but still..." Jevoly shook her head and sighed. "Well, you could at least stay below decks and save your lungs from this air."

"And trade it for the fug below?" Éirim grimaced. "No thank you. Besides, I would be missing all this action if I was below." He waved a vague hand at the commotion still surging on around them. "What happened, by the way?"

"Nearest I can tell, the wind changed. I'm half curious to see if all this will start again if I walk up to a sail and blow on it the other way." With a mischievous grin, she pretended to scrutinize the nearest sail, causing Éirim to laugh again and succumb to another coughing fit.

When he recovered, Jevoly smiled sympathetically, but he pretended not to notice the pity in her expression. "The last thing we need is another trouble-maker on board."

"Oh, true. You're right there." A pause. "Where is she?"

Like always, Éirim's expression became unreadable when Dusty came up as the subject. "Don't know. Probably swimming in the wake again, trying to lure men overboard."

"You really don't like her, do you?"

Another pause, from Éirim this time, as he seemed to think about his answer. "She's interesting, but I don't trust her anymore."

Jevoly knew to leave the matter alone when he started to retreat into some memory, so she smiled and brought him back with a merry voice. "Well, if you don't trust her, perhaps I should go see where she is. Make sure she isn't causing any harm."

He smiled in that wry way again, with only the left side of his mouth, and stared, non-seeing, at the dying carnival of rope-climbing and yard-walking. "I doubt she won't be."

"Then I best hurry before she destroys something." When he didn't answer and his smile faded, she left him quietly to search below decks.

Behind her, Éirim watched the pale figure maneuver her way through waning men, black hair swaying from where she tied it at the crown, leaving pointed ears in plain sight for people to recognize. A few of the men elbowed each other as she passed, certainly trading bawdy comments about her unnaturally pale skin and jade-shard eyes and what they'd like to do with them. But she walked by it all unscathed, indeed, she seemed almost unaware.

"Nice to have you aboard, Jev," Éirim murmured after she disappeared from the main deck. "I'm sure Dusty feels the same."

Unnoticed, or more correctly, ignored by the crew, Éirim allowed his gaze to wander over the side and down to the water until he found the splinter of white he knew would be there just beyond the wake. And when he found it, smiled, knowing full well Dusty was not spending all her time in the water just because she had missed it.

Éirim chuckled, ignoring the knowledge that it would cost him another coughing fit. It was worth it to see Dusty so out-of-sorts.

And jealous, he thought.

Jevoly's addition to the trip had been a surprise to all of them, but Éirim had never so welcomed a woman's company before, and for all the wrong reasons: To see Dusty squirm.

"Very nice to have you aboard." And Éirim smiled, fully, right corner of his mouth trembling as if he were about to dissolve into a fit of laughter.