Pirate Wars by Kai Meyer

he thought with a melancholy smile, that it was definitely not her way to wait for anyone at all .
    The door was not locked; he could enter unhindered. The bedclothes were all roiled up.
    “Looks as if Jolly had nightmares during her last night in Aelenium,” said a voice behind him.
    Griffin whirled around. “So I did hear steps.”
    Soledad shook her head with a smile. “Certainly not mine. No one hears me if I don’t want them to.” That sounded a little arrogant, but Griffin knew that the princess was speaking the truth. Even when she was just walking along beside you, her movements were fluid, catlike.
    With a suppressed sigh he turned again to the empty room. “I think Jolly often had bad dreams—not only last night.”
    It was an odd moment in which they both merely stood there, staring at the disordered bedclothes and focusing their thoughts on Jolly.
    Griffin cleared his throat. “We’re talking about her as if she wasn’t coming back.”
    “She’ll come back.”
    “Yes,” he replied softly. “She will.”
    “No one goes on a journey like that without playing it through in her head a hundred times beforehand,” Soledad said. “In dreams, too, whether she wants to or not.”
    Griffin shuddered at the thought of the terrors that Jolly must have painted for herself, and shivered still more at the idea of what she might actually expect down there. His imagination exhausted itself in pictures of grisly monsters before he came to a much more obvious terror: the loneliness in the black wasteland of the deep sea.
    The same thoughts seemed to be worrying Soledad. “The greatest fear she had, I think, was not the Maelstrom.” She turned and stared at him until he returned her gaze. “But Munk, don’t you think?”
    “Yes,” he said. “I do think so, for sure.”
    “Is he a danger to her down there?”
    Griffin was amazed that Soledad had thought about that. Until now he’d believed that he was the only one who saw Munk as a threat to Jolly. “If only I knew.”
    “That night on the Carfax , they almost fought with each other. He wanted to force her to remain in Aelenium.” Soledad’s eyes looked more shadowed than usual. It made him uneasy to see her that way; perhaps because he’d hoped she could dispel his own worries. Instead her words only confirmed what he’d secretly been fearing himself.
    “Why did you come here?” she asked. “Into her room, I mean.”
    He hesitated. “For the same reason you did, right? To be close to her. To say good-bye.”
    She walked past him to an arched window. The room was very high and narrow, almost like the inside of a tower. Many rooms in Aelenium had such odd dimensions, evidence of the fact that the city had grown and not been constructed.
    Griffin followed the princess and looked over the steep cliff into the city below, over the furrowed slope of lanes and roofs that led down to the points of the sea star and the water. Not much longer and then nothing would be as it once had been anymore. Death and destruction would strike the city.
    The image tore at his heart. For the first time he felt a real bond with this wondrous place, and something like a feeling of responsibility rose in him. If Jolly was ready to sacrifice herself for Aelenium, then he must ask the same of himself.
    “What are you going to do?” Soledad asked, as if she’d just asked herself the same question and already found an answer.
    “Fight,” he said. “Like Jolly.”
    She nodded silently.
    “And you?”
    Soledad shrugged. “They won’t let me ride the rays because I’m a woman, those idiots. And no one seems to know yet whether they’re really going to use the sea horses against the kobalins.”
    He nodded.
    “I’m going with the divers,” she went on. “I’ve been taking lessons the last few days. I was down at the anchor chain. The kobalins will try to cut it to detach Aelenium from the sea bottom.”
    “If they really try it, no one can stop them. The divers