Stormcall #3
The old man pointed forward.
"Cabin."
Oliver did not waste breath answering. The forward companionway was half flooded. He found the missing passenger wedged between a berth and the wall where a collapsed trunk had pinned one leg. Elderly woman. Conscious. Furious.
"My husband is an idiot," she said when Oliver reached her.
Relief made him laugh.
"I have recently acquired evidence."
The trunk was too heavy to lift cleanly with one hand. Oliver braced his shoulder under its edge and used a broken chair leg as a lever. Power offered the simple solution again. Remove the continuation where the trunk remained stuck.
He ignored it.
"When I lift, pull your leg."
"I know how legs work."
"Excellent. On three."
The packet rolled. He lifted on two because three was for people who trusted boats. She dragged free with a cry. Oliver got her arm across his shoulders and half carried, half shoved her toward the companionway. His ribs had progressed from complaint to active insurrection.
On deck, the old man untied himself without being asked. There was satisfaction in that which no command could have improved. They sent the woman across first. Her husband followed on the next sling, shouting apologies toward her until wind took the words.
Oliver remained for the final crew transfer. He looked east while the packet rose on another swell. For one moment the rain thinned. Three dark shapes moved beyond Needle Reach. Too far to identify. Low hulls. One larger between two smaller. Eastbound beneath almost no visible light.
The convoy. Halvek's road. Oliver felt the chase in his body like another pulse.
He could remain on the packet, cross back, tell Teren to cut the tow and run east the instant the last crewman transferred.
The storm made pursuit insane. Insanity had never been a complete argument against anything interesting.
Then the packet's master pointed north. A customs launch had appeared upside down between the waves. Two people clung to its keel. Oliver closed his eyes once.
"Of course."
He returned to Lark. Kelm saw the convoy before Oliver could speak. The captain stood at the rail, jaw tight, watching three black hulls dissolve back into rain.
"We can make Needle Reach," Oliver said.
Teren barked a laugh from the wheel. "We can die at Needle Reach."
"Can we catch them?"
"If I abandon the overturned launch and the sea stops trying to kill us for ten minutes, perhaps."
Kelm stared toward the disappearing convoy. The choice cut deeper this time because they had already paid for the first one. Oliver waited.
"Launch," Kelm said.
Teren brought Lark north before anyone could make the decision sound cleaner than it was.
The convoy vanished.
Oliver hated it. He also understood. The overturned customs launch drifted into a field of broken spars. One survivor had lost his grip by the time Lark reached them. Oliver saw the empty place where a hand had been and felt exclusion rise instantly beneath his awareness.
He could remove the possibility of the man sinking. Instead he grabbed a flotation bladder.
"LINE ON ME."
A sailor clipped the rope through his belt. Marin caught his face between wet hands before he went over.
"Your ribs."
"Are deeply opposed."
"Oliver."
He saw the fear. Saw something else beneath it, bright and furious and alive. The same heat he had felt when her body hit his on the outbound crossing. What he wanted from her had not vanished because catastrophe arrived. It had merely learned patience.
"I won't use it," he said.
Marin searched his face. "I didn't ask that.
" She hadn't. Oliver kissed her once, hard and salt-wet, because the choice was his and the answer in her mouth was immediate.
She caught the back of his neck, held him for one impossible second while the cutter rolled beneath them, then shoved him toward the rail.
"Go."
He went laughing. The water was brutally cold. It closed over his head and every inherited instinct in him became awake at once. Direction simplified. Up. Keel. Survivor. Rope. He surfaced beside the customs launch and heard Lark's crew only as fragments.
The nearest survivor was conscious but weakening. Oliver got the flotation bladder beneath his arms and clipped the rescue line through the man's belt.
"LARK WILL PULL YOU. KEEP BOTH HANDS HERE."
The man obeyed. The second survivor was farther away, swimming badly toward a spar that moved each time he reached it. Oliver called.
"YOU CAN KEEP THE SPAR OR COME TO MY VOICE. LARK IS SOUTH OF YOU."
The swimmer turned toward him. Then stopped.
He looked at the spar and chose it. Oliver swore.
The man reached the timber on his own attempt and wrapped both arms around it.
He had ignored Oliver and lived anyway. Oliver laughed again, breathless this time.
Lark hauled the first man in. Teren brought the cutter around for the second while Oliver stayed in the water long enough to guide the approach.
His voice carried directions across the waves.
Port five degrees. Hold. Now. The survivor on the spar listened when useful and ignored him when his own grip told him better.
By the time sailors dragged Oliver aboard, his hands were shaking from cold and his ribs had become one continuous ache. Marin met him with a blanket and no sympathy at all.
"Sit."
"You become very commanding after kissing me."
"Sit before I make it less romantic."
He sat. She wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, checked the line of his pupils, pressed two fingers carefully along the worst rib and stopped when he flinched.
"No new instability," she said. "Probably."
"A word of passion."
"I contain multitudes."
Oliver looked at her. Marin's mouth moved.
"I stole that."
"Shamelessly."
"Yes."
Rain ran down both their faces. She was soaked through, hair loose, coat plastered to the shape of her waist. Oliver's body remained cold everywhere except the places it had decided to be inconvenient. Marin noticed that too.
Her eyes dipped once beneath the blanket and returned with forensic composure so exaggerated it became obscene.
"Later," she said again.
Oliver leaned closer. "You have now made it contractual."
"No."
"Cruel woman."
"Alive man."
That silenced him more effectively. The shadow under the blanket was wrong.
Oliver saw it when lightning whitened the deck.
His own outline should have fallen toward the cabin.
Instead darkness clung along his shoulder and down his ribs, close as wet cloth, then extended briefly across the deck toward Marin before folding back under him.
There was no hand, no face and no borrowed voice. Only attention. Oliver's laughter faded. Marin followed his gaze. Her expression tightened, but she did not move away. The customs survivor they had pulled first began coughing seawater behind them. Ordinary noise reclaimed the deck.
Kelm crouched beside the second survivor, who had turned out to be a customs pilot with a broken wrist and enough fury to power a lighthouse.
"Black convoy," Kelm said. "You saw it?"
The pilot spat water over the rail. "Saw the bastards close enough to count rivets. One escort clipped us when we tried to signal them to heave to. Didn't fire. Just kept going."
"Direction?"
"Needle Reach, then east-southeast. Heavy transport was riding too deep for cargo declared at that draft." He looked toward the rain. "If they stay out in this, they're dead. If their master has sense, there's one place to hide a hull that size."
Kelm's attention sharpened. "Saint Orra's Cut." The pilot nodded. "Old quarantine anchorage behind the basalt teeth. Narrow entrance. Bad charting. Protected from south weather." Teren heard from the wheel. "And inside the restricted naval lane." Kelm looked toward the vanished convoy.
They had lost direct pursuit. The storm had taken the clean road and given them a worse one. Oliver found himself smiling at the thought of Saint Orra's Cut anyway, a narrow entrance through basalt teeth where charts became suggestions and every captain had to mean the turn.
Halvek had arranged roads. The sea had just rearranged them.
Oliver stood, blanket still around his shoulders, and looked east into the storm.
The siren inheritance hummed quietly beneath his breath.
Bhodi lay against his shadow. Marin came to stand beside him, close enough that their wet sleeves touched.
"Still smiling," she said.
"Unfortunately."
"Why?"
Oliver watched lightning move inside the clouds over Needle Reach.
"Because we missed them, nearly sank, rescued forty-one people, found another route, and I have just discovered the Strait is offensively good fun."
Marin stared at him. Then she laughed. The sound reached him without magic. Oliver turned toward it anyway.