1. Nerina #2
I stay until Bren wakes, and I feed him the broth Sevraine has left warming on the small iron stove, and I listen to him talk about the book he has been reading — some collection of natural histories that Sevraine found in a box of donated goods, already falling apart at the spine, and I laugh at the right moments and ask questions and hold his hand when the coughing comes.
I leave when he falls asleep again. Not long. I pull the door shut carefully behind me and stand in the cold outside Sevraine’s apothecary with the rain coming down steadier now, thicker, and the harbor spread below me with its lights and its noise and the black water beyond.
I think about the number Sevraine gave me. My daily wage on the docks. I do the arithmetic I have been refusing to look at directly for months, and I look at it now.
It doesn’t get better when you look at it directly.
The drunks are at it early near the harbor end. Not unusual. What’s unusual is that they’re zagfer.
Dark elves in Blackwake are not common, the settlement is too poor, too grimy, too far beneath the kind of place where dark elf merchants and officials prefer to conduct their business, but occasionally a ship puts in carrying crew that doesn’t match the port, and occasionally those crew find their way to the harbor-end taverns with their superior bearing and their arrogance still on them even when they’re drunk, the particular achievement of a people who have decided they remain better than you under all conditions including unconsciousness.
There are two of them, leaning against the wall outside the Anchor and Rot with the unsteady certainty of men who have been drinking since the afternoon.
One is tall with the characteristic silver hair that all the zagfer seem to have, and the other is laughing at a joke with his head thrown back, and I would have walked past them entirely if I hadn’t caught the word.
Bloodstorm.
I slow without stopping. Keep my eyes forward. Let myself drift close enough to the wall that I can hear them over the rain.
“—can’t be real,” the laughing one is saying. “No ship has ever come back.”
“That’s not proof it doesn’t exist.” The tall one’s voice is lower, thicker with drink.
“That’s proof no one who’s found it has come back to say so.
Different thing.” He tips his head back against the wall.
“Bloodstorm Peak. Beyond the Varak Fog. The old charts call it the Ashenreach, before they stopped including it at all.”
“Why would they stop including it?”
“Because,” the tall one says with the reverence of a man repeating a story he only half believes, “the dragons asked them to.” He pauses.
“A single jewel from a dragon’s hoard. One jewel.
They say it could buy an entire harbor town.
Not the docks. Not a warehouse. The whole thing.
The land, the buildings, the people in them. ”
The laughing one has stopped laughing.
I keep walking.
I make it to the end of the dock before my legs decide they are done moving and I stop with my hand on a mooring post and the rain on my face and the black water spreading out below me toward the harbor mouth and the open sea beyond.
The Varak Fog. I know the name. Every child in a coastal settlement knows the name the same way they know not to touch the wrong mushrooms or wade too deep at low tide.
It is the kind of knowledge that exists for the purpose of keeping you afraid, and it works, because the sailors who talk about it talk about it with the register of a place you never want close enough to describe properly.
Ships go in. Nothing comes out.
That is the whole of what anyone knows about Bloodstorm Peak.
That, and apparently, dragons.
I stand there in the cold while the rain comes down and Bren’s borrowed months tick past one by one underneath everything, and the number Sevraine gave me runs underneath it all, the tall zagfer’s voice saying a single jewel, and my brother’s face when he sleeps, still somehow not out of hope. More than I can say for myself.
Then I stop thinking and start deciding.
I move quickly once I start.
I know the dock schedule by heart: the customs chain goes up at midnight. The night watchman on the south end takes his fire break at half past eleven and doesn’t come back for twenty minutes. The harbor-end stalls are shuttered by ten. I have three hours. Enough.
I go to the apothecary first.
Bren is still asleep. I pack what I can without waking him, the spare blanket from the chest, the sealed tin of salt crackers I have been keeping for emergencies, the small knife I have carried since I was sixteen and the world informed me it had opinions about my vulnerability.
I take two minutes I don’t have to sit beside him and memorize him: thin and pale and alive.
“I’m bringing it back,” I tell him silently. “Whatever it costs. I’m bringing it back.”
I don’t say it out loud. If I say it out loud it becomes the kind of promise you have to keep.
I already know I’m going to keep it.
I leave the apothecary without waking him and go back down to the harbor.
The ‘Tenacious’ is where I left it. Of course it is.
I untie the mooring lines with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be, and haul in the gangplank, and check the hold by lantern light — water casks full enough, salted provisions, a coil of rope that has seen better years but will hold, a spare sail that someone stored and forgot about.
A small mercy. I take the mercies where I find them.
I go up to the wheel.
The harbor is quiet at this hour, just the creak of rigging and the water working at the hulls and the distant sound of glass breaking inside the Anchor and Rot.
The rain has settled into a pattern that no longer feels incidental.
It feels deliberate, the kind of weather that the night wears when it is trying to communicate.
The lanterns at the harbor mouth are dim orange points in the dark.
Beyond them: nothing. Black water. The Blaecwater rolling out toward whatever lies past the edge of what anyone has mapped and come back from.
I look at it.
I am not brave. I want to be clear about that, at least to myself, in the last moment before I make this irrevocable.
I am not a sailor. I am not an adventurer.
I am a woman who guts fish and carries crates and has been failing to save my brother for three years by every available legal means, and what I am doing right now is what you do when every other option has been exhausted.
The harbor chain is still down. Five minutes, maybe less.
“For Bren,” I think. “Just for Bren.”
I release the last line. The ‘Tenacious’ moves immediately, caught by the outgoing tide, and I take the wheel and let the harbor carry me out toward the mouth because this is the part I can still undo, technically, if I turn back now.
I do not turn back.
The harbor chain passes beneath the hull in the dark, and then there is nothing between me and the open Blaecwater but the rain and the distance and the cold.
The temperature drops the moment I clear the harbor mouth.
I feel it on my face, immediate and intentional, like the sea deciding to make its position on this journey known.
The wind picks up. The deck tilts. The lanterns of Blackwake pull away behind me in the dark, shrinking into orange pinpoints and then into nothing, and then the rain swallows them entirely.
I grip the wheel and sail into nothing.
The dark ahead is absolute and old and does not care about me at all.