Free Wren the Fox Witch (Europa #3: A Dark Fantasy) by Joseph Robert Lewis Page A

opened fire on the Turks. Wren dropped to the deck, her hands wrapped around her head, her eyes squeezed shut as the huge pistols thundered again and again.
    The lead balls screamed through the air and the men screamed as they fell to the deck or overboard into the sea. Wren heard wet slapping sounds and thumping sounds all around her, and she tightened her body up into the smallest ball she could imagine.
    Lord Woden, I’m sorry I said anything about your fog. It’s a wonderful fog, and you’re a wonderful god, and please don’t let me die here like this!
    A moment later the pounding of the guns subsided, and the screams of the men retreated into a few half-hearted moans. As the ringing in her ears faded away, Wren began to hear someone calling her name. Slowly, with her hands still clenched on her hood and her belly still a bundled of knots, she half-rolled onto her side and peeked up at the voice.
    Omar.
    He was squatting right beside her, leaning toward her, but not touching her, and as her eyes readjusted to the light after the darkness inside of her arms and hair, she saw why he had not come any closer. All around her, in every direction she looked, there was a wall of aether. It swirled and drifted and bubbled in a perfect dome over her, like a watery current moving around and around a vortex but never being drawn down into oblivion. As she relaxed her hands and exhaled, the protective bubble of aether broke up and drifted away, vanishing into the fog, and Omar shuffled forward and helped her sit up.
    “Are you hurt?” He moved his hands over her arms and back quickly and roughly.
    “I don’t think so,” she said. “Did you see what I did? That shield—”
    “Yes, yes, very impressive. But there is something else—”
    “Where did your friend go?” Wren squinted at the railing where the armored woman had been standing, but both she and her gunboat were gone.
    “Wren, listen to me.” Omar gripped her shoulders. “We’ve been boarded by the Hellans and—”
    The Aegyptian was wrenched away, lifted and pulled back, and Wren felt hands hauling her up to her feet as well. She looked around at the young men in gray, at their dark staring eyes and dark curling hair and the corded muscles of their bare arms glistening with sweat and sea water. She licked her lips and said, in Rus, “Hello?”
    One of them reached out and yanked off her scarf. The cold morning air ran over her tall fox ears, setting the tiny hairs on them to tingling and tickling. A shiver ran back over her scalp and down her neck, and she shuddered as she stared at the young men staring back at her.
    “Omar? Omar? What do I do?”
    Her mentor cleared his throat loudly and began speaking in what she guessed to be Hellan. In their months together, he had quickly taught her to speak Rus, which was very similar to her native Yslander, and she had learned a bit of Eranian, which she would need in the empire. But all other southern languages were mysteries to her.
    The Hellan youths barked a few questions at Omar, and he answered them with a polite smile, but the two men pinning his arms behind his back did not relent, and Wren felt the hands on her arms tighten their grip.
    “I don’t think that’s helping,” she said.
    “It would help more if those ears of yours would stop twitching like that,” he answered.
    “I can’t help it.” Between the breeze tickling her ear-fur and her instinctive need to focus on the sounds around her, both of her ears were dancing left and right as quickly as they could to follow the sounds of the men all over the deck.
    Omar let loose another torrent of Hellan, and the young men babbled back. Wren glanced left and right, seeing the fascination and revulsion and amusement all mingling in the eyes of the Hellans.
    Then they threw a sack over her head and start shoving her forward with her hands twisted around behind her back.
    “Omar! Omar!” she shouted. “Help me!”
    She tried to summon up the aether