Chapter 2 #2
“She’s a mage,” said Fahr.
“A mage who can’t foggin’ spin. What the hels’s she gonna do on my ship?” he muttered. His accent was fine silver, but his mouth was all sea.
“Smoke…” said Fahr.
“She can’t haul. She can’t braid. She can’t hoist. Hels, I doubt she can even scrub.” He began to hunt around the surgeon’s pit, lifting packs, moving blankets. “And I, for one, ain’t no mother hen. If she don’t work, I have a dory just her size that’ll do.”
“Ensign, this is Smoke Oakum,” said Fahr. “Our quartermaster, coxon, and Magister of Magiks.”
“I do everything,” the quartermaster grunted.
“Except beat me at Able Whacks,” said Echo.
“Foggin’ impossible to beat a clearseer at Able Whacks. Pretty, prancing hornswaggler, you are.” The quartermaster shoved two barrels to the side. “Ah, there it is.”
He pulled a boot from under a shelf and shook out the sand. I noticed he was also wearing an earring and a thin gold ring around the same finger as the doctor.
“Forge-damned fauns. More like thieving fae, I say.”
“Don’t leave your boots in my pit,” said Echo with a flick of an ear. “I don’t ask much.”
The dworgh grunted again, but I could have sworn he blushed. Suddenly, I knew the identical rings meant they were more than mates, and as close to married as one could get on the sea.
“The question is, lads,” said Fahr, “where do we drop her? Hodgetown is not on the captain’s books.”
My heart pounded in my chest. I was nothing without a ship.
“As I said, Dev, I have a dory…”
I sat forward, ignoring the bite from the chimeric.
“I can stay.”
“Bells, no,” said Fahr.
“I may be only a bluemage, but I’m a damned good one,” I insisted, my gaze darting between all three men. “And this is the Ship of Spells! The things I could learn! The spells I could cast!”
“Not without your hands,” said Fahr.
It cut me to the quick, and I fought the tightening of my throat.
There was silence for a moment when Echo looked up.
“Perhaps the Touchstone chose her?”
“Rubbish,” said Oakum. He slid the boot over a nubby, callused foot. “She’s a sea-soaked, spit-licked Navy castaway. Bad luck on all counts.”
But the first mate folded his arms across his chest and studied me.
“The captain says the Touchstone was drawn to the chimeric patterns in the water.”
“And she,” Echo said with a wave of his hand, “was the cause of them. Those patterns are repeated along her fingers and palms.”
“It was probably just echoes from the Endorathil,” said Fahr. “Next to the Touchstone, she’s the most arcane bird in the sea.”
“I’m afraid I disagree,” said Echo. “Her scars are still spinning.”
I felt a rush of gratitude. I would buy this faun a drink now, regardless of my state of employ.
“Into the sea,” muttered Oakum over his shoulder. “That’s what we do with flotsam and the peels.”
And he disappeared through the canvas that served as a door.
Fahr studied me for a long moment.
“Well, maybe the Touchstone knows something we don’t,” he said. “I’ll take her to the captain. He can decide.”
I nodded swiftly. I would not beg. Not now. Not ever. But I didn’t want to go back to Hodgetown, broken as I was by the sea.
“The captain’s a hard man, but he’s fair,” he said, holding my gaze. “His decision will be binding. Is that understood, Bluemage?”
“Aye, sir.”
I moved to hop off the surgeon’s trunk, but the cabin spun as my boots hit the deck. I was forced to clutch the table’s edge so that I didn’t fall.
No one tried to catch me, for which I was grateful.
We moved to leave, and I threw a glance over my shoulder at Echo. He smiled at me, and I knew I’d found more kindness in my few hours on the Touchstone than I had in months spent on the Dawn Watch. Then, I was out and into the dark hold of a companionway.
I paused at the sight of the stepladder and looked at my bandaged hands, unsure if they would hold. The mate was already up, and he glanced down at me from the rungs. I could have sworn he was smirking.
“They have ladders on a Navy ship, Blue?”
I swore at him and reached out to take the rung.
Fire. Fire and wood. Fire and wood and ships and trees and snow and feathers and branches and rings and flash and boom and blackness—
“And the ladder?”
“Like wisps of patterned char.” I recognized the voice, but it was speaking as if underwater. “Buck and Ben have begun repairs.”
I opened my eyes, blinked to clear the ripples from my mind.
“Are you certain she is not simply a firespinner?” came a voice to my far left, soft-spoken but deep, the kind of voice that didn’t need to raise itself to be obeyed.
“No red threads in the sash. Besides, the runes are still burning,” the first voice replied.
Fahr. That’s right. His name was Fahr.
I was in another cabin this time, large and well-lit, and I knew it was the captain’s quarters.
The great cabin, it was called, with fine furniture, ornate lanterns with sweet-smelling wax.
Dozens of maps were spread out across an old wooden desk.
Books and journals were crammed on shelves between the bones of the ship’s hull.
I noticed a cyr propped in the corner—the fabled golden pikestaff of a Rhi’Ahr warrior.
Odd. At the far end of the room, there was a wide bank of port windows with mullioned glass and a man with his back turned, silhouetted in sunslight.
“She’s awake.” Fahr peered down at me. “Ensign Renn, did you mean to set fire to the hatch?”
I was seated in a wooden chair, my arms wrapped across my bosom in slings. I had no idea how I’d gotten there or when.
“Ensign Renn?”
I looked up at him.
“No, sir. I—I don’t know what happened, sir.”
He turned to the silhouette. “Shall I stay?”
“I will call for you when we are done,” said the man in that same low voice. “And please, have Worley bring in a bottle. I aim to sleep tonight.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Dismissed, Mr. Fahr.”
Before turning to leave, the mate held my gaze again. His eyes spoke volumes, but I just didn’t know the words. Quietly, he slipped from the room.
I sat, simply breathing in and out, marshaling my thoughts, deadening my fear. There was a rap at the sliding panel of the door, and a thin man slipped in. He set a bottle on the desk, poured a glass, and passed it to the man at the window.
“Only one, mind, sir,” said the steward. “The spirit’s right savage.”
“Thank you, Mr. Worley.”
The man named Worley did smile at me on the way out, however, and I took some small measure of comfort in that.
It was hard to make out the captain in the distance because of the sunslight and the deep, deep shadows cast, but I could tell that he was tall and lean, his coat the deepest blue.
But then he shifted in the sunslight, and my heart thudded as he took shape, clear and sharp, like the sea carving out a coastline.
“Honor Renn,” he said, not turning. “Bluemage, is it?”
Perfect posture. Regal air. Broad shoulders, narrow waist. One hand behind his back, the other holding the wine. Both hands were elegant, just the hint of a gold in his skin, making them rare for one who lived for the sea.
“Aye, sir. Of the Dawn Watch, sir,” I said.
“Wan to Blue in eight months, I’m told.”
His voice was deep and lyrical, beating my blood like an ancient drum, but his accent was unfamiliar, and my mind tried to place it.
“Aye, sir.”
“That’s fast. Were you cheating?”
“I’m good, sir.” And I swallowed back my nerves. “Very good.”
He seemed far too young to captain a ship like this, no more than five or six years my senior, but I couldn’t be sure.
Arcane power rolled off his shoulders. Ancient runes whispered in my ears.
The runescars on my broken hands ached in his presence, as if he were a balm that was needed to heal or a blade that was needed to slice.
Regardless of age, I knew in my bones that I was in the presence of a powerful mage. I’d have to be very careful now.
“Better than all the others,” he said.
“Aye, sir. It’s the truth.”
“I believe you.”
But there was something else.
He raised the glass of spirits to his lips, and I fought the urge to sit forward. I wanted to see his face, to get a bearing, but this angle was all wrong.
“And now you are tangled in chimeric.” His voice held a hint of something that made my skin bristle. Amusement? Sarcasm? Disdain? “What do you know of chimeric, Ensign?”
I swallowed, using the pause to steady myself. These were deep waters, dark and dangerous like a riptide.
“Only what I learned in the Yard, sir,” I said.
“And what was that?”
“It, it’s…” I struggled to recall the Navy’s words. The teachings were vague because no one knew a damned thing about chimeric. “It’s an arcane, alchemical powder used with unbridled liberality by the Rhi’Ahr fleet. It gives their shot an unstable, unstoppable flame.”
“Unbridled liberality.” He hummed. “Can you bridle freedom, Ensign? Can you tame power?”
He shifted his weight onto his heels, and the sunslight hit the back of his head fully, making my breath catch in my throat.
His hair tumbled across his shoulders, cut in jagged lines as if with a dagger. But it wasn’t the way he wore his hair that alarmed me. No, it was the color.
“And were you taught where this ‘arcane alchemy’ comes from?”
Black with shifting undertones of blue and violet and dark green, like oil on water just waiting for a match.
“No, sir,” I said, my stomach growing queasy.
His hair was dark as night. Dark as the deep. Dark as the colors the sea keeps for itself.
“Indeed, the erthe trembled when it was spun.”
I could see the pointed tips of his elven ears peeking out beneath the tousled strands. In one of those ears, an earring.
“But the moons…” He turned now, squared himself before me, and the suns gleamed off his sharp, angular face. His brows arched over eyes both green and blue and shot with gold. They looked like an undersea reef, ebbing and flowing, and panic began to rise up my throat.
“The moons,” he said, holding my gaze, “they sang.”
I’m sure I looked like the powder boy, caught up in the rigging and sinking into the depths. The dory was sounding good. In fact, the dory was sounding great. I would slip away and never look back. Wayward girl, just waiting on the whale.
“I am Gavriel Thanavar, captain of the Touchstone. I understand you wish to join my conjury.”
My heart thundered in my ears. But I couldn’t look away from his eyes. Light as the surface, dark as the deep, gold like the treasure scattered under the sand.
It’s subtle, my mother had said a lifetime ago. You see other things—the crowds, the clouds, the colorful fluttering of guild flags. Even the dance of shore birds. Anything and everything except the thing you’re not supposed to see.
He smiled thinly, dangerously, like a cat about to eat a mouse, and all my boldness melted away like a sugardrop on the tongue. I was that mouse, small and insignificant, awaiting the fang of the sleek black cat. I was a fish in the talons of a winter hawk.
“But the answer to your question is no,” he said. “You will not now, or ever, be permitted to do so.”
I wanted to flee. I wanted to hide, but I could not look away from his terrifying, ethereal, enemy face.
“You are far too proud for the Ship of Spells.”
Fear seized the back of my throat. For, standing before me in the boots of an Oversea captain, was a Rhi’Ahr.