me Sha'Kar," Kimmie told her.
	"That's it?  I thought you were whispering secrets or something," she winked.  "I did see you two watching Camara Tal."
	"We were watching the Tellurians run away from her," Tarrin chuckled.  "I didn't realize Tellurians were so priggish."
	"If I were a human man, I'd be intimidated no matter what race I was if I saw those heading in my direction," she said with a naughty little smile.  "Didn't you notice that every man that talks to Camara for the first time talks to her chest?"
	Kimmie laughed delightedly, and Tarrin had to smile.  Miranda was right.  Camara Tal was certainly well endowed in that department, and even Tarrin had to admire her chest from time to time, just for its perfection.  "She'd better keep them in the haltar, or they'll be hanging down to her navel by the time she's sixty," Kimmie said with a sly grin.
	"She's a Priestess, Kimmie," Tarrin said mildly.  "I'm sure she knows some kind of spell for, well, bounciness."
	"You mean firmness," Miranda grinned.  "Well, as much fun as it is to stand here and gossip about Camara Tal's breasts, I'm getting hot again.  I'm going to go back to Kerri and stay in her cooling spell.  I'll see you later," she said with a wave.
	"I really like her," Kimmie told him as they watched her leave.  "She's very funny."
	"Alot more than that," Tarrin agreed.
	"You're right there.  Alright, explain to me why there are four separate forms of the same verb again.  I don't understand that."
	The sun set and the stars came out as Tarrin and Kimmie continued their lesson.  The ship began to throb and rumble under them as he continued teaching her Sha'Kar, as they tried to ignore what was going on to finish the lesson, reach a good place to stop.  All his friends came up on deck, gathering around Keritanima near the bow, and Tarrin and Kimmie stopped their lesson and joined them.  They looked up where Keritanima pointed towards the southwest horizon.  "There it is.  The Diamond Crown," she announced.  "And it's fully above the horizon.  We made it."
	"Thank the Goddess," Dolanna sighed in relief.
	Tarrin didn't see the constellation, but he was confident that Keritanima did.  "And now we sail southwest," Tarrin mused.
	"Forty days," Camara Tal added, putting a hand on his forearm.  That told him how much she liked him, for Amazons didn't often touch others.  "Let's all pray it's an uneventful trip."
	"Amen," Tarrin agreed, patting her hand.
	They all stood there for a long moment in silence, pondering the events that had brought them to Vendaka.  They were on the ship, and the Diamond Crown was now visible.  They were ready to go, ready to sail to where the Firestaff was located, ready to embark on the last leg of their long journey.  Not all of them were there to give thanks for that moment, and those absences pained Tarrin greatly.  Faalken, solid, dependable, funny Faalken, such a good friend, gone.  Never to stand by Dolanna's side again.  Sarraya, returned to her colony so she could rest and recover her strength.  They'd see her again, but it would be after it was all over.  She'd miss the most exciting part of the journey, when they faced this guardian and claimed the Firestaff.
	Either way, it would be good to see her again, because to Tarrin, seeing her again meant that it would all be over.  The next time he saw Sarraya, the Firestaff would be safely hidden away and wouldn't pose a danger to anyone.  He'd be free to return to Jesmind and Jasana, keep Kimmie close to him so he could be there for the birth of their child, and start a new life for himself far away from the craziness that had so altered his life.  Soon, it would all be over, and he would have his life back.
	The ship's anchor raised, and then there was a strange rushing sound.  Tarrin realized that it was the paddlewheel attached to the side of the ship, beginning to turn. The sound of the water beaten by the wheel was audible to them, and then the ship began to slowly move forward.  They were under way, under way for the hiding place of the Firestaff, under way on the last leg of their long, arduous journey.  Soon, now, very soon, they'd have the Firestaff, and his life would be his own again.
	Soon.
 
Chapter 8

	It took Tarrin a while to get used to the novelty and difference of the mechanical ship.  There were many things different about it, only a few of which the others could appreciate.  Those problems were really annoying at first, but time and a little ingenuity solved them and made them either no problem at all or nothing to really worry about.
	The first was the smell.  The smell of the coal and the smoke was always in his nose, causing him and Kimmie and Keritanima as well to sneeze quite a bit and have trouble with breathing.  The smell was pervasive and insidious, and it irritated his nose quite a bit.  The wind sometimes blew down and from astern, blowing the smoke across the deck and giving everyone the same problems they had.  Tarrin's answer to that some days after they began to was erect a Ward over the deck the penetrated down as far as his cabin within the ship, that kept out the smoke and blocked the smell from entering.  Kimmie and Keritanima both kissed him liberally for that, but nobody was as relieved about the clear air and the ability to breathe without sneezing or choking as Tarrin was.
	The second problem had been the sound.  The steam engine wasn't quiet, and its rhythmic thrumming went on and on and on.  It was audible everywhere on the ship, to a faint thrumming on deck to a deafaning cacophony when one was inside the engine room.  It was so loud down there that the Tellurians and their Wikuni companions had to put cotton in their ears to avoid being deafened by the sound after prolonged exposure.  It really bothered Tarrin at first, making it hard for him to sleep for the first few nights, but then he began to grow accustomed to its sound.  Tarrin learned to stay out of the bowels of the ship, where his exceptional hearing made the sound painful to him, staying on the deck and the one level below it where the galley and his cabin were located.  He wouldn't go any deeper into the ship than that, and everyone learned not to ask him to do so. It became less and less of a problem as the ship travelled southwest over the days, until it became a part of the background noise that Tarrin learned to ignore.  The only time he took notice of it was when it changed or when it stopped, as they shut down the steam engine occasionally to grease gears or check something, or to inspect the pipes, which were too hot to inspect while the steam was going through them.  The stoppages when the steam engine was shut down usually only lasted a few hours, and then they were on their way again.
	The third problem was the rolling of the ship.  Despite its great weight, the ship wasn't balanced in the water very well, for a great deal of its weight was in the bow, in the form of the huge quantities of coal that had been loaded for the journey.  That made the ship unstable in the water, and it had a tendency to rock excessively back and forth in the wind or the waves.  That caused seasickness, even among the Wikuni, until hard decisions were made.  Some of the coal was jettisoned into the water, for they'd packed the hold to the rafters to make absolutely sure they had enough for the trip.  They didn't do this until after Donovan went over the amount of coal the engine had been using for the first six days of the journey and deemed it safe to drop some of their weight.  The rest of the coal was smoothed out and distributed equally through the hold, and that helped balance the ship and make it much more stable.  The ship did still tend to wallow a bit, but that was because it was a little shallower in the keel than a clipper, and shallow-drafted ships were more prone to the rocking action of the waves and wind.
	The fourth problem was the cramped conditions.  Nobody could really do anything about that, but Tarrin didn't think that anyone realized how crowded the ship was until about the fifth day. The ship had twenty engineers on board to deal with the steam engine, and also had twenty-three sailors on board to help with the rigging and to maintain the ship as needed.  Add to that the twelve of them who were strictly passengers, and that was quite a few people.  The ship was big, but so much of it was taken up by the steam engine and the supplies that it left very little space left over for the people.  There were always at least twenty people on deck, some of them working in the rigging or on the deck, but there were always people around.  It was hard to find privacy on the ship, because the cabins were so small that one got claustraphobic after only a few hours in one.  The air was hot, the climate was hot, and the boiler under the ship radiated its heat all through the insides of the ship and even made the darkest, coolest hole hot.  And since it was so hot, the cabins below were almost unbearably stuffy.  Even in the pounding, pouring rain, there were people on deck, just sitting in the rain because it was better than sweating to death below decks.
	The ship had its share of problems, but Tarrin had to admit one thing.  It was fast.  The paddlewheel didn't stop turning, and it pushed the ship steadily on their course, sometimes having to slow down for their escorting ships when the wind slacked and robbed them of propulsion.  The steamship more than easily kept up with the clippers, sometimes outrunning them and having to slow down so they could catch up, and that seemed to irk the men on those clippers to no end.  Tarrin could see it in their faces when they tied up with the steamship when it made one of its brief stops for inspection or repair.  They had expected the outlandish contraption to fail, and now that it was outperforming their precious clippers, they were getting resentful.
	Sometimes Tarrin would stand at the rail and just watch the paddlewheel turn, amazed that such a strange looking amalgamation of iron tanks, pipes, gears, and rods, maintained with liberally applied grease and a whole lot of careful attention, made the wheel turn, and turn so steadily.  It just whooshed right along, merrily churning the water and pushing the ship forward.  It was almost as amazing as magic, that a group of men and Wikuni had come together and designed something that could move such a large ship using nothing more than boiling water.  It was pretty remarkable, and they'd done it without magic.  It just went to show that there were no limits to the breadth of their ingenuity and inspired creativity.
	One could stand and watch what looked like a waterwheel for only so long, but fortunately, Tarrin had other things to do.  He kept working with Kimmie, teaching her Sha'kar for half a day, and in twelve short days she had achieved a level of fluency that satisfied him.  Which meant that she was as fluent as he was, both in written and spoken Sha'Kar.  She even had his accent, though that was perfectly understandable, given he was her instructor.
	Very little happened during that time, as they all got used to the crowded ship and its unusual noises and smells, as it steamed steadily southwest, turning gradually more and more southward as the constellation above them shifted by the slightest of degrees each night.  Keritanima had them going towards the brightest star in the constellation, which served as the tip of the crown's formation, the middle of it.  Keritanima figured that they couldn't go wrong if they steered by the constellation's center.  More than that, they saw no other ships for those twelve days, having the very empty ocean on the southwest of Wikuna all to themselves.
	That changed on the thirteenth day, when the formation of five ships came across a blasted hulk of another vessel.  It had been attacked and partially burned, the rains putting the fire out before the fire sank the ship, a western galleon.  It was a wreck, with two of its three masts fallen and charred wood decks buckled and torn.  There were bodies on the ship, Allia told them as she looked at the ship with her superior vision, and that was reason enough for the ships to stop and send a search party over to the ship to inspect it.
	Tarrin, who felt remarkably bored that morning, decided that he was going to go to the ship himself, regardless of what anyone else thought.  So he used Sorcery to pick himself up off the deck on a platform of Air and float over to the ship.  He probably startled half the Wikuni on the escorting clippers with his magical display, but he really didn't care.  He set his feet down on the blasted ruin, and felt immediately that it had been caused by magic.  The residue of the spells was still within the wood, and they were strong.  The ship was attacked by magic, and the scattered bodies, many of them burned beyond recognition, told him that the attack came from above.  Magical attack from above, that was classic Zakkite tactics.  He knelt and put his fingers to the deck, relying on good old fashioned woodlore taught to him by his father to detect that the fires had burned about two days ago.
	The first of the Wikuni arrived, climbing up onto the deck using grappling hooks and ropes, and he told the officer in charge of his findings.  The officer, a tiger Wikuni, nodded and pointed to one of the bodies.  "That's the uniform of a Shacan naval officer," he said.  "But what a Shacan galleon is doing all the way out here is beyond me."
	Tarrin knew why, but he figured there was no reason to tell him.
	"I doubt there's anyone alive.  Zakkites take survivors for slaves," the officer told him.  "But let's look around anyway.  Sometimes someone does manage to hide."
	Tarrin helped the squad of six Wikuni search the ship.  It was carrying no cargo, another oddity to the Wikuni, but they did find the captain's log in his cabin, and there was also a small chest with an impressive amount of gold.  In another cabin, they found what Tarrin recognized immediately as spellbooks hidden under a pile of old clothes under a cot, which wouldn't have been found if Tarrin hadn't felt the presence of a magical spell that had been cast to hide the books from magical detection.  There were five of them, and as he looked through them, he saw that they were quite full.  Tarrin claimed the spellbooks as his own, putting them in an empty chest and telling the Wikuni that it would be dangerous for them to even touch the magical objects.  They gave him a wary look and nodded in agreement, not willing to fight the imtimidating Were-cat over something he obviously intended to keep.
	They completed their search, even searching the bilges, then they collected up everything that the Wikuni intended to salvage from the vessel and began loading it into the longboat they'd used to ferry over.  Tarrin took the chest back to the steamship himself, and found himself facing five angry female faces.  Keritanima, Allia, Kimmie, Dolanna, and Camara Tal all glared at him when his spell deposited him softly on the deck with the chest by his feet, and he stared at them all calmly.  "What?"
	"How dare you go off on your own unescorted!" Camara Tal managed to say first, cutting the others off.  "How am I supposed to keep you alive if you run off whenever the mood hits you?"
	"I wasn't in any danger," he told her calmly.
	"That's not the point!" Camara Tal shouted at him, then started swearing sulfurously in her native tongue.
	"The point, dear one, is that we need you," Dolanna told him flintily as Camara Tal continued to swear.  "You are too important to just wander off, as Camara Tal put it.  We are not saying you cannot go, but we would appreciate it if you would let us know first.  It will save us a great deal of gray hair."
	"I don't see why you're so angry," he told them.
	"You explain it to him!" Camara Tal told Keritanima, then she stalked off.
	"She's touchy," Tarrin grunted as he watched her walk away.
	"You forget, she is here to protect you, Tarrin," Dolanna told him.  "It is her duty to keep you alive.  Just because you have been apart from her from a long time does not change that."
	"She didn't act this way at Suld," he said challengingly.  "She didn't have anything to say when I joined the battle."
	"That was a different situation," Keritanima growled at him.  "Don't you dare try to compare them."
	"You were wrong, my brother," Allia told her.  "The next time you wish to go off alone, ask."
	"Alright, alright," he sighed, though he still didn't see what the problem was.  "I'll ask from now on."
	"Good."
	Though he got off relatively easy with his sisters and friends, he didn't get away quite as easily with Kimmie.  She gave him the cold shoulder for the rest of the day, and even refused to talk to him that night as they got ready to go to bed.  That frustrated Tarrin to no end, frustrated and aggravated him, and he found it to be a very brutal and effective means of punishing him.  She had shut him out, turned him away, and all he could feel when he looked at her was guilt over something he did that she didn't like, and frustration that she wouldn't talk to him.  He wanted to talk about it, work it out, but she wouldn't even acknowledge him!  Kimmie knew him better than he knew himself, and he had to admit, she'd found the one and only way to get under his skin, something that even he was surprised was so effective.  It got so bad that he finally grabbed her by the arms and made her look at him.  "I said I was sorry!" he told her adamantly.
	"You didn't mean it," she hissed at him.  "What if there would have been something very dangerous on that ship?  What if it had been burned by survivors of a plague, and there you go flitting over there to catch that disease?  Don't you realize that you're too important to go racing off like that?  Did you see Keritanima in that longboat that went over to investigate the ship?  Allia?  Dolanna?  Phandebrass?  If you'd gotten yourself killed, what would we have done without you?  Would you have deprived your cub to be of knowing its father?"
	If anything, that got him.  He dropped his eyes and blew out his breath, finally understanding why they were all so upset.  He guessed that maybe it was a little rash.  He was bored, and he didn't think things all the way through.  "Alright, I'm sorry," he said contritely.  "I shouldn't have done it."
	"You're right.  You shouldn't have," she said calmly, staring into his eyes.  She pushed his paws off of her arms and rubbed her arm gingerly.  "Now you have to make it up to me."
	"I think I can do some of that right now," he said, turning and picking up the chest he'd taken from the ship, which had been sitting on the other chest at the foot of their bed.  "I found these over on the ship.  When I saw them, I figured you may be able to use them."
	Kimmie gave him a suspicious look as she took the chest, then set it down on the deck and knelt in front of it.  She opened it, and her eyes widened when she saw the leather-bound tomes within.  She picked one up and opened it, and saw that it was written in a strange, glyphic language that Wizards seemed able to read.  "This is a spellbook!" she gasped, looking at it.  "I, I don't know this spell!"
	"They're all spellbooks," he told her.  "I thought you might want them."
	"Might want--Tarrin, you've given me a treasure!" she told him happily, gazing up into his eyes.  "These look like the spellbooks of an accomplished Wizard!"
	She put the book down reverently and carefully, then vaulted up into his arms and kissed him exuberantly on the lips.  "Well, you're doing a good job of making up," she grinned as she pulled away enough to look at him.  "But I'm not ready to forgive you quite yet."
	Tarrin ran a paw down her back meaningfully. "Maybe I can find some other way to make it up to you," he purred.
	"Now you're getting the idea," she giggled breathlessly, then kissed him again, this time quite seriously.
	Kimmie was absolutely overjoyed that he brought her the spellbooks.  Even Phandebrass was impressed by them, as she showed them to her mentor, for the books contained several spells that even he didn't have.  And Phandebrass collected magical spells the way a forest floor collected dead leaves in the autumn.  She spent the next three days with Phandebrass as they deciphered the spells and learned how they worked, and she allowed her mentor to copy the spells into his own books.  But she kept the spellbooks, copying some of the spells she knew into those books and using them as her primary spellbooks instead of her old ones.  Tarrin asked after that one night as he watched her carefully writing in one of the new books, doing so on a very small table and chair Tarrin conjured for her, that took up almost the entirety of the available space in the cabin.
	"It's easier to copy a few spells in here than it would be to copy a few dozen into my old books," she told him patiently.  "I will copy the spells so I'll have more than one set of spellbooks, but for now, this will do."	
	"Why keep more than one set?"
	"These books represent everything I know as a Wizard, Tarrin," she said patiently.  "If they get lost or stolen, I'll lose everything.  Any mage with even half a clue keeps a copy of his spellbooks in a safe place.  Just in case the unthinkable happens."
	"Oh.  That makes sense."
	"I'm so glad you agree," she drawled, then returned to her careful work.
	They saw no other ships over those three days, but the formation was closer and the lookouts were being very alert.  It was well known now on all five ships that Zakkites had attacked the ship they'd paused to inspect, and they weren't going to let their ancient rivals on the sea get the drop on them.  On the fourth day, they did see a plume of smoke appear on the eastern horizon, but no one on any of the ships thought even for a second about changing course to investigate.  That far out to see, the smoke could only be coming from a ship.
	The day after that, they encountered their first live ship.  It was an old, battered caravel, with a few patches in its sails, merrily making its way due west, and was looking to come close to crossing their path as it approached them.  Keritanima went up to the steering deck as the formation around the steamship tightened noticably, as the four clippers moved into a very defensive posture around the unarmed ship that was carrying their queen.  Tarrin and Dar happened to be on deck playing stones when the call of the sighting came out, and the clippers tightened up around the steamship.  They put the game on hold and went to the rail to get a look for themselves, and saw the old ship with its patched sails and a few patches in its hull.  The old ship had seen some action recently.
	Tarrin and Dar watched as the ship slowed as it threatened to cross the path of the clippers, then ran up a white flag.  That meant that they were either surrendering or they were attempting a parlay.  Tarrin looked up at the steering deck, curious about this turn of events.  What would Keritanima do?  Would she attack the ship, which was probably a rival seeking the Firestaff?  Would she stop to talk to them?  Or would she simply pass them by?
	It didn't take him long to find out.  He wasn't quite sure how they knew the order, but the four ships surrounding them opened their formation a little, enough for the steamship to put on a little more speed, and they sailed right by the halted vessel, the sailors upon it gawking at the steamship in shock and awe.  They'd never seen such a thing before.  Keritanima had obviously decided to pass the other ship by without talking to them.  All things being as they were, Tarrin felt that Keritanima made the wise choice.  That fellow was sailing west, not southwest.  He was going in the wrong direction.
	Later that day, it suddenly seemed like it wasn't a very good idea.  Allia came to Tarrin right before dinner and told him that the ship they'd passed earlier in the day was following them.  Tarrin knew about Allia's incredible eyesight, so he didn't doubt her in the slightest, but that seemed a bit odd.  With all that firepower, what in the blazes could that caravel's captain be thinking?  Didn't he realize that if he irrititated Keritanima, she'd send one of her clippers to sink him?  But how could he know that?  As far as the captain of that ship was concerned, he saw a quartet of Wikuni military vessels escorting some kind of bizarre new ship.  Maybe he was curious, and was following along a while to see where they were going, or get a better look at the steamship.  Or maybe he was taking orders from a mage, who thought that the Wikuni knew where they were going.  If that was the case, then Tarrin would be the first to sink them.  He didn't want any company tagging along when they reached their destination.
	All his speculation turned out to be moot, however.  By morning, the caravel was so far behind that it didn't matter anymore.  The steamship hadn't stopped during the night, continuing its steady course just south of southwest, and in the darkness the caravel wouldn't even be able to see the smoke plumes from the smokestacks to guide it as it tried to follow the faster vessels.  Keritanima's boasting about the speed of the steamship turned out to be a critical asset to them now, since they could easily outrun any ship that tried to follow them.
	The sighting of the attacked galleon and the encounter with the caravel galvanized the Wikuni and the Tellurians even more.  They realized now that they were sailing on a crowded ocean, and they had to be ready for anything.  The lookouts were doubled, and they scanned the seas and the skies both at all times during day and night.  The ship no longer stopped for periodic inspections of the steam engine, running at all times to keep the ship moving, keep the ship from becoming a target.  Tarrin saw that the cannons on the accompanying ships were being cleaned and inspected and the materials they used to fire were brought up from below decks, ready to be loaded and fired at a moment's notice.  At night, the gunpowder was taken back below decks, why Tarrin wasn't sure, but he was sure it hadn't been taken very far.
	Things got a little quiet and a bit tense on the ship after the two encounters.  The sailors weren't quite as talkative as they were before, and the engineers working on the steam engine were all business, spending almost all their waking hours tending the invention carefully, even as it operated.  The tension, added to the heat and the intermittent rain, made many of the sailors short-tempered, and there were a few fights on board the ship that caused a momentary distraction for everyone else.  They kept it running continuously for two days, and the five ships hurried towards the southwest, towards their ultimate goal.  At sunset on the second day, however, everyone knew that something was wrong when a sudden grinding sound rattled the ship, so loud and strong that the deck beneath their feet vibrated with the sound.  The ship began to slow very quickly, so quickly that the ship trailing behind had to execute a sharp turn and drop its sea anchor to avoid ramming the stern of the steamship as it drifted to a relative halt on the choppy seas.  As if the halt wasn't bad enough, the cloudy skies opened up on the ship almost as soon as it drifted to a halt, sending pounding rain down onto the deck and irritating people who were already nervous and flustered.
	Tarrin decided that the best thing to do in a situation like that was sleep it away.  He and Kimmie retired to their cabin and went to bed early.

	It was approaching morning, a few hours before sunrise.  Tarrin had awakened to relieve himself, and didn't feel like going back to sleep quite yet.  He instead laid in bed beside Kimmie and watched her sleep, pondering doing something he promised her he wouldn't do.  Though she wanted to keep the sex of the child a secret, that missing information had been eating at Tarrin over the last few days, up to where the need to know was reaching a fever pitch.  Just like any cat, or Were-cat, once Tarrin's curiosity was piqued, it was almost impossible to deny satisfying it.  He would have done it days ago if not for the promise he made to  Kimmie not to do exactly what he was considering doing.  Promises were not things taken lightly among Were-cats.  To break a promise was to lie, and lying to another Were-cat was a cardinal sin.  It was so much of a transgression that him lying to Jesmind was what put her on him and made her try to kill him.  Oh, there were little white lies, the kinds of lies that a Were-cat wouldn't find offensive, for they were spoken when the speaker honestly believed he was doing the right thing.  But this was much different than saying something not quite the truth to avoid a fight, or trying to hedge in a vain attempt to hide information from Triana.  This was a promise.
	Sort of.  He hadn't explicitly told Kimmie he wouldn't do it.  She had simply told him not to do it, and he had agreed with her.  If he did do it, he could raise that as a valid argument against Kimmie, but there would be consequences.  Kimmie had proved that she could get to him, get to him in ways that Jesmind could not.  That silent treatment was a torture, worse than anything Jesmind had ever done to him, and he didn't want to face the next few rides with nothing but Kimmie's back for company.
	That was the punishment he would face if he did it.  He'd satisfy his curiosity, but he'd infuriate his mate in the process.  But his curiosity was so strong that he seriously weighed those two things against one another, trying to decide which one was the lesser of the two evils.  To leave his curiosity unsatisfied or get the silent treatment from Kimmie.  He was going to have to suffer through one of them.
	The Cat finally barged into his debate, quite effectively settling the argument.  It saw a good thing here, a receptive female that kept it quite happy.  It saw no reason to jeopardize a good mating, so it buried his curiosity beneath an instinctual impulse to protect his unborn child.  He shouldn't do anything to upset or aggravate Kimmie until after she gave birth to the cub.
	And that ended that.  Blowing out his breath, he put his paw on Kimmie's bare belly, wondering at what was going on in there.  He was sure that Triana could give him a day by day accounting of what went on inside a female after she conceived, but she wasn't there, and he wasn't going to peek.  It w