Read Ozark Trilogy 3: And Then There'll Be Fireworks for Free Online Page B

they weren’t whiners. They’d been offered a fair sum of money badly needed, and they’d do the job it was offered for. Still, it was a sorry time of year to take to sea in a boat this size and age, Troublesome or no Troublesome. Had the boat been newer, that would of been a help; had it been larger, they couldn’t have handled her with only the five, and that would not have been a good thing. It would cause a certain amount of fuss and feathers to drown five good men, for sure—but if they drowned a daughter of Castle Brightwater they’d set every Granny on Ozark whirling like a gig ... that happen, they’d better hope they all drowned with her. It’d be more comfortable in the long run.
    Behind the men, Troublesome chuckled under her breath, and Gabriel John jumped like he’d been pinched.
    “Knows what we’re thinking, that one does,” he said flatly.
    “And so does the Mule, and that doesn’t bother you.”
    “ She bothers me,” insisted the man doggedly, “considering what I was thinking just then when she laughed.”
    The captain turned back and grabbed Gabriel John’s shoulder in his fist. “That’s one word too many,” he said through his teeth. “ One word too many! You guard your thoughts and keep ‘em proper; and you sail this boat and keep your mind on your business. I don’t intend to have to say any of this again.”
    As they’d said, there were certain stands he was obliged to take.
     
    It happened that Troublesome did know what they were thinking. But not because of any telepathic powers, such as the Mules had, or the Magicians of Rank. No special powers were required to read those stiff backs with the muscles knotted round the necks—whopping headaches they were going to have, later on!—or the rigid shoulders, or their muttering back of their hands and out of the corners of their mouths. It amused her mightily to think that they could believe she had special skills and still be fretting about their hides; it showed a lack of common sense. After all, if this boat went down, she’d go down with it. Or perhaps it was their souls that they were really worried about, and not their hides; perhaps they thought the wickedness might blow off of her in the seawind and stick to them forever and ever more. She chuckled again, and watched the muscles in their backs twitch to the sound, before she turned her head to look out over the water.
    She wasn’t sure of what she’d seen out there, not yet. Might could be it’d been only a trick of the light slanted on the water, such as had ages back made men think dragons swam in the oceans of Old Earth. Might could be it had been the squint of her eye against that light, or her irritation of mind. There was not a single reason to believe that a creature never seen since First Landing—seen then by a group of exhausted people that might have been over given to imagining—should choose to show up a thousand years later and swim alongside her to Kintucky. It was as unlikely a happenstance as had come her way within memory, and she wasn’t going to assume it for gospel too quickly.
    First, she’d wait for another sight of that great tail split three ways. And then probably she’d wait for the royal purple of the thing’s flesh to show up clear in the gray of the sea. And when both had happened, assuming they did happen, she’d think it over—and might could be she’d go below and swallow a dose to cure her of her mindfollies.
    The Teaching Story had not one word extra to spare on the subject of the creature she half thought she’d seen. The fuel on The Ship had gone bad. Every last thing had been going from bad to worse. The time had come when it was land or die; and then just as they made a desperate plunge toward the planet below them the engines gave up completely and The Ship fell into the Outward Deeps. At which point, as the Grannys taught it:
     
    Even as the water closed over the dying ship and First Granny told the children to stop