Chapter 41
Sails in the Storm
Flora
I
‘ve heard of the canvas bags of projectiles the queen’s ships fire from their cannons to shred everyone aboard an open vessel like our birlinn or a Highland galley.
Still, weapons like those are so far removed from the way our warriors fight that it takes me too long to process what’s hurtling towards us.
I shove harder at the wall of wind and water I’ve been driving towards the cutter. It’s too broad to be of any use against what looks and sounds like a swarm of iron bees. The swarm pierces through it, and the force I’ve used pushes back against our ship
The deck bucks beneath my feet, and Sean slams back into the mast. And the swarm is still coming.
Breathing deep to calm myself, arms shaking with effort, I try to think. Then grapeshot hits a wall of air and falls into the sea in front of us. A ball of fear in my throat leaves a bitter rasp behind as it fades into relief.
Glancing beside me, I find Niall with his hands up, as though he has commanded the shot to stop. He has three power runes along the back of each wrist, and one on each arm is glowing. As soon as things stop flying at us, he catches my eye, grins, and steps closer.
“Can you push against her hull to turn her to starboard?” he asks. “If we can fill her sails, we can use them to force her onto the rocks.” His eyes flick from the sail to the skerries and back, measuring the distance.
I can’t speak for fear of losing control, so I nod instead and concentrate on narrowing the wide thrust of water and wind into a narrower fist directed against the cutter’s left.
“Good,” Niall calls. “Keep going.”
It’s an odd sensation when his magic brushes against mine—similar to Chyr pushing the water back for me this morning, but different in the way that one batch of ale can vary from another. My ears fill, and the hairs on my arms lift as his power presses in.
He pushes air into the cutter’s sail. I shift my focus to aiming the ship at a row of rocks that bare their teeth near the point of the island on our right. She starts to turn.
Chyr comes up on my other side and braces against the rail, his right thumb rubbing the pommel of his sword. “Are you two all right?”
“She’s doing well,” Niall answers as the cutter—the one we’re driving towards the rocks—moves beyond the lee into the churn, where the tide turns on itself and enters the churning white water. “A little farther now.”
I can’t let up, but the magic is too eager.
It’s a fight to keep the sea from bucking under my push.
The birlinn slews and oars bang the gunwales.
A horse screams on the cattleboat behind us.
Finally, I adjust the force I need. Unlike Siorai magic that risks running dry, the magic that comes from my Crown of Vines feels like more than I can harness.
The cutter’s crew swarms the deck, desperate to pull down the sails that Niall’s magic has filled with air.
Sheets of canvas plummet from the mast. Then Niall’s magic has little to manipulate.
But Daire moves behind me and places his hands on my shoulders to help me guide the water along the cutter’s beam.
Inch by hard inch, we force the ship to the jagged rocks. Spray stings my cheeks as our birlinn finally slips out from the cover of Loch Moadar into the open sea. Wind whips against us. Daire and I crowd the cutter until she hits with a thunderous bang and the screech of splintering wood.
The cutter shudders, then the whole hull tilts sideways. Men spill from the deck, and the mast snaps with a gunshot crack. The next wave lifts the carcass and drops her again. She grinds harder against the rocks. Bits of railing and jagged sections of beam break off her hull, and she’s finished.
I feel it as each life dies, like threads snapping from my heart. How many men are on the cutter? Part of me doesn’t want to know, but I can’t shed the responsibility. They’re dying by my hand. They have families—someone who loves them regardless of the orders they follow.
A few men crawl up the shore and fall, heaving against the sand.
“Boat!” someone cries.
I whip around, tasting blood from where I’ve bitten into my lip.
All ideas of stealth have vanished now. The crew of our birlinn hoists the sails.
Chyr shouts orders to make a run at a sloop-of-war approaching port side.
The sloop is larger than the cutter we broke on the rocks, but the birlinn heaves around to pursue.
Then someone mutters a curse, and a Cymbeul longboat noses out from a pocket bay on the island.
Men in the queen’s crimson coats mix among the blue and green Cymbeul plaids, rowing on the open seats.
“I’ll take the longboat,” Daire says as the sloop fires a broadside at us.
I shake my head. “Let me. You and Niall are more used to working together. You’ll defend against the cannons better.”
The thirty-foot longboat is low and wide, built for twelve. No sail billows from the narrow mast, nothing to catch any wind that I could send. But here I don’t need precision.
I raise a swell of water, pulling it higher and higher. It towers above the longboat, kelp fronds streaming from it like grasping fingers.
A handful of the rowers scream and dive out of the boat, swimming back towards the island even before I let the wave break down onto the longboat’s spine.
The longboat is done. It plunges underwater, then shoots back to the surface in three separate pieces. Water plumes back into the air around it, and the churn tumbles men and wood. An oar pops up as if the sea has spit it out.
The sloop-of-war hammers a second round of cannons at us.
Chyr and Niall stop the swarm of iron before it hits us, but a few stray bits of grapeshot pierce through.
An oarsman grunts as he’s hit, and splinters fly from the mast as iron embeds in wood.
The rest of the stilled balls hail harmlessly into the froth around us.
I step onto the gunwale between Niall and Daire and wait until the sails of our birlinn carry us past. Then we work together to turn the sloop broadside. We’re farther out from shore, but rocky skerries at the mouth of a sea loch crush the sloop as we push her against them until she sinks.
We can’t make a run for Muilean; we need to defend the cattleboats.
But the cannon fire has alerted Vheara’s fleet, and I have only a short breathing space in which to draw the grapeshot from the injured oarsman and heal the wound.
As we clear a point of land that juts out into the sea, a second sloop-of-war bears down on us with little warning.
The second sloop is close enough to land that we’re able to break her and beach her in a matter of minutes. But a new group of sails coming hard across the open water raises an alarm from the lookout.
“Frigates! Two of them—40-gunners at least. Approaching dead to starboard.”
“Push the cattleboats ahead into the bay where that second sloop was hiding,” Chyr orders. “We’ll cover them and draw the frigates close to shore where it’s easier to sink them.”
A shot cracks from a new longboat that’s appeared from behind a jut of rocks along the shore, spitting splinters from the rail of the closest cattleboat. I hear one of the Shadehounds yelp, and I run to the back of the birlinn. Chyr runs with me.
Shade is down, blood seeping onto the planks beneath him. Shadow stands over him, her hackles high.
My ears ring, and a paralysing stillness fills me. I can’t lose anyone or anything else. I won’t.
But I can’t think how to reach him. Shadow whines loud enough that I can hear her above the ocean’s wail.
“Sean, get over here,” Chyr orders. “Pick the hound up and bring him here.”
Sean sets his jaw in a stubborn line. “It’s a Shadehound. Not worth the magic. You want him here, you do it.”
“You have the rune—it will cost you less.”
“Still not bloody worth it. You want to appease the witch, do it yourself.”
Chyr steps towards Sean to stand chest to chest. For a heartbeat, the crash of the ocean is the only sound.
Sean doesn’t move. He’s taller and broader, his body built to intimidate. But Chyr’s strength is in his mind as well as his muscles. Force of will blazes from his eyes with an air of command that Sean can’t match.
My eyes flick from the two of them to Shade, and I feel useless. Despite all the magic I can summon, I can’t trust myself to use it. Not with Shade’s life at stake.
Then Sean loses the stare-down between him and Chyr, and with a muffled curse he steps to the aft railing of the birlinn and activates one of the runes along his temple.
But there’s no gentleness in the way his air magic picks Shade up and carries him from the cattleboat to drop him onto the birlinn’s deck.
“Thank you,” I grit out as I drop to my knees and reach for Shade. But Sean is already striding off to cope with the two frigates. Chyr squeezes my shoulder, then follows him to help.
My hands pressed lightly above Shade’s haunch, I use my magic to sense for the iron that’s not supposed to be there.
I pull the metal towards me until the misshapen shot works free, leaving broken bone and torn flesh behind it.
I mend the damage, knitting bone and muscle and skin a piece at a time.
The sensation is familiar now, more controlled.
The magic pours from me almost as if it follows a channel I’ve already carved in my mind.
As if he knows not to move, Shade lies still on the deck, head flat but his one moon-pale eye watching me. Trusting me. Then it’s done, and his tail thumps once against my boot.
I pat him on the head. “I’m not letting you go. You’re mine. You and Shadow and everyone else.”
He licks my hand, then lurches to his feet and gives himself a shake. A broadside from one of the frigates screams towards us only to be stopped by a wall of air.
Ships and battles blur together. Between the skirmishes, we sprint as fast as the cattleboats will let us along the coast to Muilean.
At some point, Lorcan replaces Daire beside me, and Sean comes to take Niall’s place.
Chyr’s magic is more familiar when he works beside me, but he’s better at sending a whipcrack of air to break a mast than he is at filling a sail and moving a ship towards shore.
We’re clear of the patrols eventually. Those we can see, at least. What lurks in the Sound, or approaches from the direction of Eireen or the western isles, we cannot guess.
Chyr and the Riders have spent most of their magic and need to rest, Niall so much so that Chyr has given him the extra Veilstone.
He’s white and trembling, his short, ash-blond hair damp with sweat and seawater, plastered against his skull.
Apart from the muscles, the six discrete runes on his wrists, and a quiet aura of deadly power, he has none of the affectations of some of the other Riders.
He doesn’t play with knives the way Lorcan does, hoard weapons like Chyr, or wear his hair in complicated braids.
He doesn’t complain. He’s steady and solid, and I find that I like him very much.
And without him or the other Riders to help me fight in case we need to, and with nothing immediately threatening us, I decide to take a risk.
As Muilean’s western cliffs come into sight at last, I ask Niall and Daire and the other Riders to help me understand the process of raising a storm.
I don’t have an existing cloud to bring down rain, but I understand water enough now to know that I can use salt to seed the droplets and create the dark sheets I need above the water. And the wind—I can create that already.
“How do I make lightning?” I ask.
Chyr smiles down at me, that crooked smile that makes my heart swell.
“Fierceness, lightning is so far outside my skills I’ve never dreamed of it.
But you wear the fire of the sun in your crown.
It’s there inside you already, and from what I’ve seen of your magic, you need only to understand how lightning relates back to that. ”
“But it doesn’t, does it?” I ask. My voice comes out thinner than I like, and I rub the gritty salt from my fingers against the damp fabric of my skirt.
Ronan comes up behind me, with Rua once again a warm band of red fur and watchful eyes wrapped around his shoulders.
“Fire is a memory of summer’s heat—of life itself.
It’s in the heart of the earth and the food we eat, in the warmth of our breath rising on a cold winter day. Think of it like that.”
“Lightning builds in the pressure of warm air racing up and cold air pressing down,” Cathal surprises me by adding.
“I’d imagine the Crown of Flame gives you heat enough.
Push it out into the air, send it up, and you’d make lightning.
” He counts the steps off on his fingers—one, two, three—as precise as if it’s all logic and study and nothing else.
“I don’t know how to make air cooler.”
“If you can add heat, you can take it away,” Chyr says.
I nod as if that doesn’t sound overwhelming. Maybe that’s the biggest difference between my magic and Tirnaeve’s. The land and the gods have already given us all the gifts we need. They’re already there, waiting for me to understand how they connect—and what they give and what they cost.
Creating a storm is too much at once, but I manage to form a cloud bank out of nothing, and I drag it along the water.
The clouds are thick enough to conceal us from any more of Vheara’s patrols and cover our run up the long, narrow sea loch that takes us as far inland as the western shore of Muilean allows.
We all breathe a sigh as we clear the thin sliver of channel and approach the end of the loch. We slide past the small island that sits dead in the centre of the natural harbour.
Then we see six longboats pulled up onto the beach.