Chapter 11 The Worldrune #2
“I can do that,” I answered, shifting my weight. “But if I do, if I allow you to spike this ring into my ear, will you teach me what you know? Will he?”
“The Touchstone’s not a teaching vessel,” he said, then paused. “I can’t speak for the captain, but if you join the crew, everything we know is yours to learn.”
That.
Was appealing.
“The captain said I have mutiny in my bones,” I grunted, folding my arms across my chest.
“Don’t you?”
“We’re a nation at war, and he’s still the enemy,” I said, and I gestured in the direction of the captain’s cabin below.
“He’s not the enemy,” Fahr said. “He’s the captain of the Touchstone, and she’ll have no other master save him.”
I bit my lip. “Because she loves him.”
“Just so.”
Not even a beat skipped. I turned, my chest tight.
“How? How is it possible she’s alive? What archaic magik has he plumbed to forge this?”
“It’s deep magik, true,” he said. “But Thanavar didn’t cast it.”
I glanced back at the rail, then up to the sails. A living ship that loved a Rhi’Ahr man. It was beyond my imagination, but dammit, if it didn’t make me all the more curious. And more than a little bold.
“Is it chimeric, then? Does it power all the magik in the world now?” It was a guess, with the Tree gone.
“Suns, you really do want to know everything, don’t you?” He glanced at me, his dark hair spilling over his thick brows.
“There isn’t enough knowledge in the world to satisfy me,” I said. “There isn’t enough of anything.”
“Nothing?”
I grinned. “And no one.”
“Not even a prince?”
And there it was.
He was too fine, too bright, too gifted to be a common swab.
“As wretched as I am,” I said with a wicked grin, “I don’t fog above my station.”
He laughed out loud, and I was happy to have caused it.
“Poor sot,” he said. “Well, I suppose he’ll have to commiserate on the pup. Come on!”
Swiftly, he turned and made his way up the steps to the quarterdeck. I followed, brushing past Smoke at the wheels.
“Walking the plank?” he asked, raising a thick brow. “No? Alas, I live in hope…”
In the Navy, only senior officers walked the pup, but I reckoned rules were different here, being that the Touchstone was a privateer and Fahr a fogging prince.
Still, I had to admit it was a giddy thing as my boots stepped onto the polished wood.
It was smaller than the quarterdeck or the main but big enough for a lesson or two.
Besides, the view was unparalleled, and all of the ship lay before me.
“Casting stance,” Fahr said, bending at the knees and sliding one foot back. I did as he did, hands up, fingers flexed, remembering then to pull the gloves with my teeth and spit them onto the deck.
“Everything is rune,” he said. “From the tiniest of seeds to the moons in the sky.”
His fingers sparked. Mine did, too.
“All is connected by the Worldrune and the patterns that it forms. Ships, men, rocks, air, even the clothes on your back—all are shaped and bound by rune.”
He drew his hands apart, creating a standard Carmen line. It crackled and flared.
“And thoughtspinning?” I said as I mimicked him.
“Thoughts are how we understand the rune patterns,” he said.
“Some mages are so good at thoughtspinning that casting becomes illusion. Ironmages can make you imagine a bridge and, even if you’re stepping off a cliff, you’ll walk without falling.
You believe the runes are holding you up, and so, they do. That’s the power of the Worldrune.”
One hand made a circle, his fingers bending to a peculiar design.
“But that’s application,” he said. “You also need theory in order to spin.”
“Wylde mages don’t need theory,” I said, the chimeric crackling through my skin.
“Ah, you’re wylde, now? Praesidium Lumiere and all that?”
“Saved your life.”
“They wouldn’t shoot me,” he said. “Bracebridge wouldn’t let them.”
“Bracebridge shot his own man.”
“Not the first time.”
“One of these days, your luck will run out,” Smoke called from the wheels. He didn’t bother to look at either of us.
“Truer words have never been spoken, my friend,” Dev said, tossing the words over his shoulder at Smoke. “But until then, I’m going to live like I’m the luckiest man on the sea.” He turned back to me. “Now, what exactly do you know of the Worldrune?”
“Not enough.”
“Well said. Runes are the language of the suns. When Ember and Forge fashioned the world, they spun it like a giant spyder’s web between them.
At every knot in the web, they burned a rune.
Everything that exists or has ever existed, every thought and every heartbeat, is a rune in their net.
Not only is every rune tied to one another, but the spinning of each rune reflects every other on the spyder’s web. ”
“There are spyders in Norresthan that are the size of cows.”
He laughed again.
“Spyders and cows, erthe and sea, us and other and even Rhi’Ahr. Everything is connected, Blue, and you just have to find your place. It’s like music. When we cast spells, we are plucking the strings of the Worldrune’s web and hearing the music it makes. Skilled mages can cast symphonies.”
I had never heard it explained like this. Not in the Yard, not on the Dawn Watch. Not even my mother had described magik so simply, so elegantly.
“Praesidium, please,” he said.
Praesidium. The proper name for a protection spell. Two runes drawn in sequence. I made it easily. That, I’d learned well before Berryburn.
His hands twisted, and suddenly, he held a crackling pattern in the shape of a spear.
Grasping it with both hands, he swung it at me, striking my rune shield and sending sparks sizzling into the wind.
Yet, my shield held and hummed like music.
My hands throbbed, my arms glowed, and I felt a rush of strength race through my veins.
I growled and pushed forward with it, causing him to slide back along the pup.
He released the spear, and I lost balance, stumbling forward like an oaf. His hands spun, and the air struck me like a fist, flinging me backward across the deck. I bumped the rail and teetered, arms flailing, ready to fall.
“Find your place in the Worldrune, Blue, or you’ll swim!”
His palm pushed those gale winds, and I toppled backward over the side.
Caught the rail with one hand.
Aro’el!
Like the first time my arms hit water, the Touchstone boomed, and her sails thundered with light.
My toes scraped along her smooth sides, but a plank slid out beneath my boot.
I took a step, then another, and the ship helped until I finally sprang to stand, balancing like a crowman on the gunwale.
The soles of my boots barely touched the rail as I called on the chimeric that coursed through her hull.
She shimmered and gleamed like polished gold, and her mainmast lit up, crackling from her base with sizzling runes.
All hands stopped to marvel at the sight of her, a creature of timber and magik and power and light.
She was magnificent, but at that moment, so was I.
Patterns danced behind my eyes. I could see the world connected by runes.
It pulsed with energy. It drummed with life.
I saw the hawk, white as the moons, beak tucked under a wing, asleep in the branches of a huge tree.
I saw a mountain clouded in cinnamon and a Rhi’Ahr boy with eyes like the sea, those same branches reaching, holding, keeping, mourning…
“You see!” bellowed a voice. It was Thanavar, rushing up onto the deck. “You see her!”
“Yes,” I said, my own voice barely a gasp. “The chimeric binds all.”
“It is all,” he said. “For good or for ill.”
“For good or for ill,” I repeated woodenly, and the pup rippled like a pool. “Be good and be swift…”
The captain froze, head cocked like a bird.
Her voice speaking through me, strange and distant yet closer than my beating heart.
“Be still and be strong,” I said.
And for a moment, a brief shining moment, I was her.
“Be wary, be wise.”
He stood before me, black hair rising and falling with the rocking of the sea, lean and sharp and utterly bound in the spell.
I could reach out a hand, not my hand, suns moons and seas, ships in the harbor and blood on the stones, people my people, my chaser come home, Kirianae ik thay’ell, Gavriel sil, Kier Gavriel laethe mira, shy’riir, kel’yion, beloved.
Beloved.
“Shy’riir,” said the Touchstone. “Kel’yion.”
He was holding his breath as if seeing me for the first time, lost in my magik, adrift in my seas.
“Beloved,” I said.
Kier Gavriel. Honor Aro’el.
But the voice and twin sight blew away like summer in the Spits. I was a bluemage once more, standing on the gunwale of a pitching ship, and I began to fall backward over the rail. Fahr lunged, catching my tunic, and he hauled me onto the deck.
There was little in my stomach, but I fell to my hands and knees and brought it all up on the boards nonetheless.
Fahr knelt beside me, rubbing my back but saying nothing. I lifted my head and locked eyes with the captain, the mirrormage, the Priestlord, the hawk. I fumbled for the earring in my pocket, held it out in a trembling palm.
“I’ve made my decision,” I gasped. “I choose to stay with the Ship of Spells.”
For good or for ill, I’d made my decision. I prayed I wouldn’t regret it, and I held my breath, waiting on a word from this powerful man.
Be wary. Be wise.
He stared at me for a long moment, brows drawn, eyes haunted, searching. Bewildered. Breathless.
Suns, what was happening?
Beloved.
Without a word, he whirled and disappeared from view.
I looked up at Fahr. He tried to smile, but I didn’t know if it was happy or sad.
I didn’t know anything anymore.
“Well, that’s disgusting,” said Smoke, and Buck dropped a bucket and brush under my nose. “Get to it, then, Blue. You know what they say. ‘You mess the pup, you swab ’er up.’”
I didn’t know anything.
My hands were still shaking as I reached for the brush.