The Dread: The Fallen Kings Cycle: Book Two by Gail Z. Martin

who still called him by his nickname. It was a fleeting reminder of the time, just over two years before, when Tris had been just a privileged second son with no aspirations to the throne, before coup and betrayal and war changed his destiny and the history of Margolan. “We can try,” Tris said, lending some of his own magic to amplify Beyral’s far-seeing.
    The image sharpened and grew slightly larger. “Look there,” Senne said, reaching out to point and only barely stopping himself before he disturbed the water and might have lost the image. “Are those actually ships?”
    Tris and Soterius bent to get a better look. “Some of them are,” Soterius said slowly, squinting to see better.
    “But look at those ships, the ones on the right,” Tris said, feeling a chill go down his spine. “They look like hulks, as if someone hauled a wreck to the surface and made it float.”
    Soterius met Tris’s eyes. “Could a summoner do that? I mean, you can call spirits back from the grave and make them solid. You have the power to raise the dead, even if Light mages don’t do such things. Can you raise ‘dead’ things like a ship hulk?”
    Tris bit his lip. “Technically, yes. The wood in the ships was living at one time, so once it’s cut, even though it’s ‘dead,’ there is a thread of connection. That’s the tricky part with summoning. If you’re sloppy about how you cast a spell, in theory, you could get not only the ghost you’re trying to summon but all the dead animals, insects, and plants in the immediate area.”
    “Are you telling me that Pashka’s men are fighting ghost ships?” Senne’s voice told Tris that the general wasstruggling to make yet another leap of faith to believe his king. Tris knew that while Senne’s loyalty was absolute, the general wrestled to understand his liege’s magic.
    “Afraid so.” As they watched, larger ships, carricks and caravels, entered the scene in the scrying bowl.
    “Tolya’s privateers are sailing to the rescue,” Soterius murmured. His tone told Tris that Soterius might have accepted the privateers’ help, but he didn’t fully trust their allegiance.
    “Look there!” Senne cried out, belatedly tempering his voice when he realized he had just yelled in the king’s ear. Tris and Soterius shifted their attention. “Those damn ghost ships are ramming the fishermen’s boats!”
    The image in the scrying bowl was smaller than Tris would have liked, though holding even that size of an image required a large expenditure of power. But even in miniature, Tris could see a flotilla of wrecks and hulks with broken masts and shattered sides moving with impossible speed. No wind propelled them, yet they were moving quickly, and the small boats of the fishermen scrambled nimbly to avoid being run down. The bow of one of the ghost ships plowed into a small skiff, breaking it in two. Tris could see the tiny images of men throwing themselves to the side to escape being crushed by the hulk.
    “Not just ramming,” Soterius said grimly. “Someone’s firing on Tolya’s and Pashka’s men from the ghost boats.” Just then, the image rippled again, as Tris concentrated his power to refocus the scrying on one of the ghost ships. He could hold that clarity for only a few seconds, but it was enough to show a skeletal crew aboard the boat sending very real arrows toward the fleet of defenders.
    Tris had no idea what the fishermen and privateers made of the spectral invaders, but to their credit, both groups held their positions. As they watched, the privateers replaced regular arrows with flaming missiles, gambling that even the dead might flee from flames. The battle raged for the better part of a candlemark, with Tolya’s fire missiles scuttling a dozen of the wrecks. Pashka’s fishermen used the smaller size of their crafts to their advantage, attacking near the waterline with pikes and hooked blades fastened onto poles, sinking several more of the attackers’