Stormcall
OLIVER
The storm found them before the sea did.
By noon the eastern sky had gone the color of old pewter, and the wind had begun worrying at the pines above the road with the persistence of a creditor.
Captain Kelm rode ahead with one hand on his hat and the other on the reins, muttering at clouds that had failed to consult his timetable.
Oliver approved of the sentiment. He approved rather more of the smell beneath the rain, salt coming inland hard enough to cut through wet earth, horse sweat, smoke from the relay lab, and the medicinal reek still clinging to his coat.
The Sable Strait waited beyond the next ridge.
Oliver felt it before he saw it. The awareness had no words and no clean boundary.
Water had always occupied a different place in him than stone did, though he had spent years calling the difference sailor's instinct because sailors were permitted an unreasonable number of superstitions if they also knew how to reef canvas in the dark.
The Strait pressed against that old instinct now.
Wide water. Bad weather. Too many vessels moving with reasons to hide.
His pulse lifted. Marin noticed from two horses away. Of course she did.
"You are smiling."
"The weather has improved."
She looked toward a sky preparing to throw part of itself at them. "You have an eccentric relationship with improvement." Rain struck his cheek. Oliver turned his face into it. "You knew that before agreeing to keep me."
"I did not agree to keep you."
"No?"
"You keep returning."
The distinction warmed him more effectively than the wool beneath his coat. Kelm glanced back. "If either of you starts flirting while I am trying to save my district, I will put you on separate boats."
"Cruel," Oliver said.
"Practical."
The ridge fell away. Below them, the Sable Strait had lost every civilized color.
Green-black water shouldered itself into long white seams beneath a sky too low for comfort.
Rain blurred the opposite coast into a rumor.
Three harbor masts leaned against the wind at the mouth of a fishing inlet, and beyond them a signal tower snapped two red pennants above a black square.
Kelm swore. Marin narrowed her eyes. "Meaning?"
"Outer channel closed. Naval restriction and gale warning together." He kicked his horse forward. "Which means someone saw enough trouble to become cautious after it was already expensive."
The road descended into Eastmere, a fishing harbor too small to deserve the word town and too stubborn to admit it.
Half the waterfront appeared to be moving.
Fishers dragged skiffs above the surge line.
Militia runners carried sandbags toward a warehouse door.
A woman in an oilskin coat stood on a bollard screaming at three men who were attempting to secure the same rope in three incompatible ways.
Kelm dismounted before his horse stopped. Oliver followed less gracefully than he would have preferred. His ribs objected to the landing. His right hand tightened once inside the glove and then released. Marin's eyes flicked toward it.
"Functional," he said.
"I hadn't asked."
"You were about to."
"Arrogance remains functional too."
"Reassuring."
A militia lieutenant met Kelm at the quay. "Captain. Harbor authority shut the eastern cut fifteen minutes ago. Patrol cutter Lark is still inside. Two customs launches missing."
"Any sight of a black convoy?"
The lieutenant's expression shifted. "Three low-profile hulls crossed Needle Reach before the closure. No colors. One heavy transport, two escorts. Eastbound." Oliver looked at Marin. Halvek had bought himself less than half a day. Kelm asked, "How far?"
"If they held speed, past the Reach by now. If they didn't, the weather owns them."
A horn sounded from the signal tower. Three short blasts. Then two. The lieutenant went pale. Kelm's head snapped toward the harbor mouth. "What?"
"Lark is answering a distress flag outside the bar."
"In this?"
"There is a passenger packet on the north shoal. Steering gone."
Kelm closed his eyes for one second. The choice arrived without ceremony. Pursuit east, where Halvek and the Maw convoy were disappearing into weather, or civilians stranded where the sea could kill them before any theory became useful.
Oliver knew what Kelm would choose. That knowledge carried no magic at all.
"Take me to Lark," Kelm said.
The lieutenant hesitated. "Captain, the convoy..."
"Will still be criminals if thirty people drown. Move."
Time left them at once.
They ran.
The patrol cutter Lark was forty feet of shallow-draft stubbornness with a single steam screw, a reefed auxiliary mainsail and enough patched planking to suggest every storm in the Strait had already tried to kill her.
Her master, a broad-shouldered woman named Teren, took one look at Oliver, Marin and Kelm coming down the quay and developed the expression of someone receiving bad news in human form.
"No."
Kelm stepped aboard. "Yes."
"The bar is breaking."
"Packet on north shoal."
"I know why my signalman is trying to murder me. Who are they?"
She pointed at Oliver and Marin.
"Trouble," Kelm said.
Oliver offered her his left hand. "Oliver Hawkins."
"That improved nothing."
"I get that often."
Marin boarded behind him, caught the shroud as the cutter rolled and adjusted to the deck without losing a step.
Her coat was already soaked dark at the shoulders.
Wind pulled strands of hair free across her mouth.
She shoved them back with the heel of her uninjured hand and looked toward the harbor mouth.
"How close can you get to the packet?"
Teren's annoyance converted into professional attention. "Depends how much hull they still have when we reach them. North shoal breaks sideways in a gale. If their steering is gone, they'll drag broadside."
"Tow?"
"If we get a line aboard before they roll."
"And if you don't?"
Teren smiled without pleasure. "Then I become very unpopular with the sea." Oliver liked her immediately.
Lark cast off.
The harbor walls protected them for perhaps three minutes. Oliver used all three to strip off his long coat, secure his sword belt beneath a borrowed oilskin and tie his injured right wrist close enough that he could use the hand without pretending it was healed. Marin watched him knot the leather.
"Loose enough?"
"For circulation or bad judgment?"
"Either."
"Yes."
She stepped closer as the cutter pitched. The deck rolled beneath them and Oliver caught the rail with his left hand. Marin's fingers went to the fastening at his throat instead of his wrist. She pulled the oilskin closed, knuckles brushing the skin above his collar.
"If you tear the ribs again, I will be annoyed."
"How annoyed?"
"Clinically."
Rain ran from her lashes. Oliver became briefly, inconveniently aware of her mouth.
The cutter rose under them. Marin's body came against his for half a heartbeat, hip to thigh, one hand flattening against his chest for balance.
Heat went through him despite the cold water running down his spine.
Recognition sharpened her eyes when she felt it.
"Later," she said.
Oliver smiled. "A cruel word."
"A promising one."
Then Lark cleared the breakwater and the Strait hit them.
The first wave struck hard enough to remove flirtation from the practical world.
Water came over the bow in a white sheet.
The deck dropped. Oliver's stomach remained where the deck had been and considered filing a complaint.
Teren shouted an order. Sailors moved without needing the sentence repeated.
One hauled the mainsheet. Another fed coal into the compact boiler housing.
Kelm clipped a safety line through his belt and began doing the same for everyone who had arrived too important to remember survival gear.
Marin took hers without argument. Oliver raised an eyebrow.
"I enjoy living," she said.
"One of your more attractive qualities."
"Clip in."
He did. The packet appeared through rain as a lantern mast tilting where no mast should tilt.
Then the hull emerged beneath it. Two-deck coastal passenger boat, perhaps sixty feet, caught sideways against the edge of the north shoal.
One paddle housing had been torn open. The remaining wheel thrashed uselessly whenever a wave lifted it clear.
People crowded the lee rail in bright scraps of coats and shawls.
Lark's signalman raised a speaking trumpet.
"PACKET! SHOW YOUR TOW POINT!"
The wind stole most of it. Teren swore. "Closer."
"You'll be in the break," Kelm said.
"I know where I keep my boat, Captain."
Lark drove forward. Oliver felt the water change beneath the hull as pressure, depth and motion rather than prophecy.
The shoal turned the incoming waves crooked.
Each crest reached them already having argued with stone.
Lark climbed one and fell into the trough hard enough to drive Oliver's knees into the rail.
The packet's passengers screamed. Their voices vanished in the gale. A crewman on the packet waved both arms and pointed aft. Tow ring, Oliver guessed. Half submerged. Another man was trying to pass a line through it while the deck rolled beneath him.
"He can't hear us," Kelm said.
Oliver could not make out the words, only the pattern of panic across open water. Breath carried strangely in weather like this. Sound should have broken apart. Instead the sea seemed to offer it a surface. His inheritance woke beneath his tongue.
Bhodi noticed. Cold spread between Oliver's shoulder blades.
Lightning opened the sky to the south. For one white instant his shadow climbed the wet deck behind him in a shape too long for his body, black along the rail, black across the sail, fingers of darkness laid over his shoulders as if another traveler had leaned close to see what interested him.
Marin saw it. Her gaze held his across the deck. She neither nodded nor warned him; she simply watched. Oliver looked at the packet.