31. Maelor
MAELOR
The Varak Fog does not fight me on the way out.
It is still the Varak Fog, still gray and dense and old, still the kind of weather that has swallowed ships and kept its opinions about it, but the barrier currents that hammered the ‘Tenacious’ on the way in are quiet on the way out, and the inner corridor opens ahead of my heading as though it has been waiting, and I sail through it with both hands on the wheel and the compass needle running true west and the knowledge, in my body if not yet in words, that the island is letting me go.
I am alone on the water.
I have been alone on this water before and I know what it feels like and this is different.
On the way in the alone was the whole of it — one person and one brig and the dark and the storm and the arithmetic that had to work out because there was no other option.
On the way back the alone has a shape to it that it did not have before.
A specific absence. The warm weight on the other side of it.
I put it aside. I sail.
The stone is in my coat pocket, still warm after twelve days and a crossing and a storm and everything in between.
I take it out at one point and hold it in my palm in the flat gray fog-light and look at the thing moving inside it that behaves like light without quite being it.
Bren’s treatment. The healer. His face doing the thing it does when something delights him.
I am going to ask about the book. I am going to sit on the edge of his cot in Sevraine’s back room and listen to him tell me about whatever is in it, about beetles or birds or weather systems or whatever the natural histories have given him this week, and I am going to ask every question I did not ask the last time because I was already somewhere else in my head.
I put the stone back in my pocket.
The fog thins in the mid-afternoon, patchy at first and then in longer gaps, the gray opening to show the flat pewter of the Blaecwater under an overcast sky.
No storm. The sea is working its ordinary register — long swells, nothing hostile, the indifferent patience of a very large body of water that has places to be and is getting to them without any particular urgency.
Blackwake sits ahead of me. The dock. The weight of cargo crates and the smell of fish and the merchants with their hot drinks watching from doorways and the ordinary grinding daily work of a life that keeps people alive when nothing more interesting is available.
I have been doing that work since I was sixteen and I am not ashamed of it and I am going to go back to it, at least until the healer confirms the treatment is working and Bren has color in his face again.
And after that.
The thought I wouldn’t finish on the warm day arrives now, out on the open water, not complete, not decided, but present.
Undeniable, the way things become once you stop looking away.
I know what the address was for. I know what the carving was for.
I know what ‘fix the shutter so I can find it’ was for, said in the flat gray morning light of a volcanic island by a dragon lord who has not left his island in two centuries and was certain about it in a way I have learned means something specific.
The Blaecwater spreads out ahead of me, gray and wide and indifferent, and somewhere behind me in the fog Bloodstorm Peak sits in its permanent weather and the western beach is empty and the shelter wall holds a question I carved into it this morning with a good knife and patience.
I already know the answer. I think he does too. The answer is a direction, and we are both already moving in it, and the space between us is just water.
Just water. I have crossed worse.