14. The opposite of weakness
14
THE OPPOSITE OF WEAKNESS
Chasing the leviathan meant heading into a storm. Thankfully, this storm wasn’t one of the great hurricanes that battered the Deep, twisting trees and stampeding animals. This was a different kind, something born in the waters to the north, sweeping south with the wind and season. It was still dangerous—especially this close. The thought of flying into it wearing nothing but one of those winged suits made Anahrod’s stomach churn. Fortunately, no one expected it from her after half a lesson.
When the captain gathered everyone together in the galley to explain matters, Anahrod wasn’t the only one who thought this was ill-advised. The rest of the crew wasted no time making that opinion known.
The captain shut them all up with a sharp flip of his hand.
“You came here hoping to pull in a lifetime’s worth of scales, yes? Well, you ain’t getting any without some risk.”
“But what happens when it starts fighting back?” someone called out.
“Zavad’s balls!” The captain gave a hard stare to the newer recruits who, like Anahrod, counted this as their first voyage. “You lot don’t think we mean to kill it, do you?”
The older crew laughed. The newer members gave each other embarrassed looks, because yes, they had.
“It ain’t like that,” Captain Bederigha said. “Dragons hunted leviathans almost to extinction. We don’t do that. We leave them alive. It ain’t in anyone’s best interest to kill a leviathan—or even hurt one bad enough to make it panic.”
“And no, we can’t avoid the damn storm, so don’t ask.” Grexam scoffed. “They live in storms. We always try to herd them into clear skies, but sometimes they just won’t. So what? You afraid of getting wet?”
Anahrod suspected they were afraid of being struck by lightning or blown off the cutter by howling winds. Or maybe falling to their deaths when it was too dark for the crew to notice. But what did she know?
Captain Bederigha ordered the harvesters into their suits and then gave Anahrod a contemplative look.
Anahrod’s heartbeat hammered at her. “No.”
Bederigha made a face. “No. Too soon. You get belowdecks and help any who need it. Stay away from the pinions. Don’t look over the side. Try not to throw up if the cutter tilts.”
She swallowed but nodded. That she could do. It was easier when she didn’t have to look down. Her legs were still shaky from the entire ordeal. She felt heady and weak simultaneously.
She hated it, although what she really hated was her reaction. The brief kiting she’d done had honestly been fun. It was the sort of thing she would’ve enjoyed when she was younger, and the knowledge that she couldn’t now because of this irrational fear, well…
It galled.
She wanted to look at a leviathan with her own eyes. She’d never seen one outside of paintings.
Instead, she headed to the galley.
She’d make sure everyone had something hot to drink when they returned. She didn’t know how long harvesting sky amber took, but she suspected “a long time” was the right answer.
Several hours later, after she’d put a third batch of sour cider on the stove to simmer, Anahrod felt a flare of panic from the leviathan.
They’d been with the leviathan for too long for it to suddenly spook like this. This wasn’t a reaction to pain or discomfort, but a prey animal’s response to a predator. Except leviathans only had one natural predator: dragons.
She cursed. The captain had sent out at least a dozen crewmen in wingsuits and ropes to fly down to the leviathan’s back. If a dragon panicked the leviathan—and it would panic—what followed would be a catastrophe.
The crew might make it back in time—if someone warned them.
If Anahrod warned them.
She sprinted up the stairs leading to the landing scaffold.
It took her a moment to acclimate as she exited the hatch. The rain drove down against the metal hull in wet, ringing splats. The wind screamed. Grexam stood on the platform, directing the harvesters. At first, she couldn’t see those harvesters, but a second later, a lightning bolt lit up the sky.
Anahrod gasped.
The leviathan was six-limbed, as almost all animals were, but where a dragon had wings and four legs, a leviathan was nothing but wings. Three paired sets, diaphanous as veilfly’s, but gigantic. The animal’s head was blunt and wide-mouthed and covered with glowing mirrored beads. The crew members were tiny black specks on the creature’s back.
The sky lit up as a second lightning bolt struck a wing directly. The thunder cracked in a deafening hammer stroke. An arc of electricity raced down the wing and across the beast’s enormous body, racing across a network of glowing capillaries to arc and splash across all six wings, lighting up everything around them.
Anahrod felt a surge of satisfaction from the leviathan, muted as it was by the beast’s growing distress.
“It’s feeding,” she murmured. “It feeds on lightning?”
She had no idea how the crew members on its back were still alive afterward, but they seemed unharmed. Maybe the flight suits provided protection.
Anahrod forced herself to remember why she was there.
“Grexam!” she shouted, leaning against the wind as she forced her way over to the first mate. “Grexam, something’s wrong!”
He glanced toward her, then did a double take. “What’re you doing out here, Stupid?”
“There’s a dragon!” Anahrod screamed. “There’s a dragon heading this way. The leviathan’s going to bolt!”
“What are you on about? There’s nothing out here—!”
Grexam stopped talking as another sound made itself heard above the din of rain, wind, and thunder.
A roar.
“That weren’t no thunderclap,” Grexam spat. “Sucking Zavad’s dick! This is bad timing!”
Before Anahrod could utter another word, she felt the leviathan unleash a second, even more intense wave of fear.
And then it dove.
Countless rope lines connected the Crimson Skies to the leviathan. When the leviathan dove, it pulled the entire vessel with it.
Anahrod cried out as the cutter pitched nearly vertical. She would’ve fallen, except she smacked against the metal railing. She grabbed on to the bars and held on tight.
In her haste to reach Grexam, she hadn’t tied herself off.
She didn’t dare look down.
Screams rang out. Not just hers; at least a dozen people had been thrown from the leviathan’s back. Momentum hurled them through the air. One poor bastard smashed against the Crimson Skies itself.
Grexam shouted something. She wasn’t sure what.
Probably something important.
More cursing and hollering as the leviathan pulled up. Bederigha had done something clever to keep the entire cutter from smashing into the gargantuan creature from behind. The cutter managed a sharp turn with a screech of tearing metal that spoke of the cost: two cracked wings, twisted to uselessness by torque and stress.
The leviathan dove again, this time turning sharply.
Two giant hands yanked Anahrod away from the railing, snapping a spring hook and rope to her belt.
“Get inside,” Grexam yelled at her.
She did, somehow making it to the hatch without being tossed over. The moment the hatch closed above her, she released the spring hook and ran for the observation deck.
[Stop fleeing. Calm down,] she shouted at the leviathan. She wasn’t doing the creature any favors if the dragon really was hunting it, but a dozen people out there needed the chance to be hauled back to the cutter.
A dark shape flashed by so quickly it was only a blur passing between the cutter and the leviathan. The Crimson Skies lurched as the dragon’s passage sheared all the ropes connecting the cutter to the leviathan.
Anahrod stared in horror. She had no idea if anyone had made it back in time or if the dragon had just severed a dozen lifelines.
The leviathan made a piteous cry and flew upward, away from them. The dragon didn’t chase.
The dragon wasn’t hunting the leviathan.
“No,” Anahrod whispered.
A series of lightning flashes illuminated the dragon. He was enormous, the size of the cutter itself, dark blue and silver. The dragon’s wings beat indolently as he turned to face his prize. Anahrod’s breath caught in her throat.
She hadn’t seen this dragon in years, not since she’d last been in Yagra’hai, but he was seared into her memory.
Tiendremos.
Somehow, he’d found her.
Of course the leviathan had panicked. Even if dragons left the harvesting of sky amber to humans these days, the leviathan’s instincts remembered otherwise.
She needed to hide.
[Find her.]
Anahrod spun, wide-eyed, certain that she’d just heard Tiendremos’s voice.
She ran to the galley.
An oppressive silence settled over the cutter. She could only imagine how the crew felt—they’d found a leviathan! They were going to be rich!—only to have those dreams crushed by a creature they didn’t dare rebuke.
Throwing herself from the cutter began to seem like a fine idea, never mind how much that thought transformed her into a screaming ball of fear.
That was what the sky had become to her. Fear.
For other Skylanders, every good thing came from the clouds. For her, the opposite was now her truth. The jungles might be full of blood-pumping danger, but at least she had solid ground beneath her feet. The Deep was a place where she knew the rules, where she was more likely to be hunter than prey. She’d seldom felt fear there, not since she’d discovered that the same ability she’d grown up using to tempt birds to her hand could instead keep the Deep’s fiercest predators at her beck and call.
And if she had felt fear, it was the child of prudence and practicality. If she’d been forced to hide from a predator or enemy in the Deep, she didn’t feel it like a wound. Like a hollowness inside herself.
Like cowardice.
Survival was not a synonym for either courage or fear. In the right circumstances, either response was a blessing. In the wrong circumstances, either was a curse. “Survival” was knowing which option fit the circumstances best.
Somehow, she’d forgotten that. Here in the Skylands, fear felt like failure, like weakness. Whereas fear was the foundation of common sense in the Deep.
Anahrod hid herself in the pantry. If they found her, she’d pretend that she’d been fixing the provisions tossed about during their ride.
The damage in the kitchen wasn’t as bad as she feared: Bederigha kept the stores lashed down tight.
The captain banged the door open louder than normal as he entered the galley.
“—no, no,” the captain was saying. “Cutters like this run on shares. We’re a licensed division, registered with the Sky Amber Guild, not the Travelers Guild. We can’t just be picking up everyone who wants a ride from one city to another on a whim. Crystalspire was a resupply stop, not a ferry run.”
Anahrod felt warmth bloom in her chest. The captain was covering for her. She was unsure why exactly—perhaps Bederigha felt some orneriness, given how Tiendremos and his rider had made the Crimson Skies lose their hunt and cost lives.
Unfortunately, lying to a dragonrider was an excellent way to wind up dead.
“I see.” A man’s voice. Pleasant, throaty, genial.
“What did this person do that’s so damn terrible that you had to mess with our harvest, anyway? Do you have any idea how much money we just lost?”
How had they found her?
Did they have some method of tracking her location? Ris had never explained how they found her last time. Wanted posters were a good excuse for how she’d drawn the dragonriders’ attention in the first place, but not how they’d pinpointed her location.
Anahrod leaned back into the shadows behind a stack of shelves. A second later, the pantry door opened, and light flooded the small room.
“Is this really necessary?” the captain complained.
“As soon as we find her, you can be on your way.” The rider sounded reasonable. “Nice kitchen. I bet your meals are amazing.”
If the dragonrider was fishing for an invitation, the captain wasn’t in the mood. “I’m not some fancy liner traveling from city to city. This is where I live, too.”
The door closed; the room faded back into blackness.
Anahrod remembered to breathe and then pulled her sword out from behind a storage bin and buckled it around her waist.
She didn’t remember the dragonrider’s name. Maybe she’d never learned it. She thought Tiendremos might have had a different rider when she’d been at school, although she wasn’t certain. She’d only seen the dragon from a distance and had never spoken to his rider.
The smart thing to do was to stay right where she was. They’d already searched the pantry, after all.
Just as she’d made this determination, a mental voice cut across her thoughts.
[You’re a simpleton.]
She froze. As before, the dragon wasn’t talking to her.
[Must I tell you how to do everything? The solution is obvious. Tell this captain that if he doesn’t bring out Anahrod in the next five minutes, I will rip his flying vessel apart piece by piece until I find her myself.]