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What magik sends up, good men must cast down.
I remember the first time I ever saw the Ship of Spells because, in fact, I didn’t.
my mother had said, back when I would listen.
If we lost this fight, there wouldn’t be anyone left to discipline me,
Our Mother, the Sea. She was mother to us all, her watery bosom a welcome home for weary swabs to lay their heads at the end of our days. I knew it was a blessing, but, as fine as she was, I wasn’t ready to let her welcome me yet.
I didn’t care. Let it take me, I thought darkly. Suns, just let me drown.
A huge winter hawk rested on the water before me, wings tucked across his back. His wingspan was probably twice my size, with feathers as white as salt. His eyes were an eerie white as well, his beak black and hooked for tearing. I could see his talons through the water, paddling with swift, strong strokes. Like the Rhi’Ahr, winter hawks were born in the ice and snow and dread of the Nethersea. Figured that the last creature to see me alive would be Netherborn.
Whitethorn? What are you doing here?
I just drifted there, too tired to care, too numb to fight, yet somehow my feet kept paddling beneath the waves, slow and useless, as if they hadn’t heard I was done.
I heard nothing of flapping sails, the creaking oak, the roar of displaced waves. I saw no face of a woman carved on the prow of a ship. I felt nothing as ropes were let down to snag my hapless body, even less as I was dragged over the side and onto the deck. I believe I was carried below and laid on a surgeon’s trunk, and I remember the face of a young man with black hair and brown eyes. Behind him, another man, this one tall and thin but with the curved horns of a faun. Behind them both stood a Rhi’Ahr man in a captain’s coat, arms folded across his chest. It was a nightmare, clearly. All I
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His accent was fine silver, but his mouth was all sea.
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.
“Can you bridle freedom, Ensign? Can you tame power?”
“Life is a funny thing, sweet like rum and bitter like the lime. That’s why we like it.”
“Listening to fauns is the beginning of wisdom.”
“Remember when you came aboard and didn’t want to say anything?” he said wistfully. “That was nice.”
Pain was as much a part of life as breathing, my mother had taught me.
But I had no weapon save my rebel tongue,
“I hate you,” I snapped. “Good,” he said. “And I will kill you when I can.” “Even better.”
Smoke looked up at the captain and gestured to me. “Do we really need to keep her?” he asked. “I could practically toss her to shore at this point. She’d fry up crisp like a sausage, and we wouldn’t be ferrying a Navy curse in our hold.” “A delightful thought, Mr. Oakum,” said the captain. “But please take your place on the main.”
My heart broke at the sight of a dog tied to a post, trying to gnaw himself free before he was engulfed by the flames. Ships could sink and men could perish, but I broke for the suffering of animals. Regarding people, I had been hard as a stone before I ever set to sea.
A chance on the Ship of Spells. Everything inside me raged at the thought. And yet…
In my twenty-some odd years on the erthe, one thing I had learned to be true of all men—they always want more power.
Whether it was the gaps or magik, he was here, wrapped in moonslight and shadow, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes away.
“The Touchstone is not a schooling vessel,” he said. “And we have no place for an unskilled, wylde Blue. Still, you may have some small part to play in this great game, if you have the bones to play it.”
Thanavar growled, and it was the most terrifying thing I’d ever heard. But I didn’t look away. Nor would I speak first.
I liked Echo, and, despite his gruff persona, I found myself even liking Smoke. Fahr was a puzzle with his bold yet easy manner, but the captain? He was a story in a forbidden book I couldn’t seem to put down.
“Water,” said Echo, handing me a cup. I drank it gratefully, asking no questions. “Rum,” said Buck, handing me another. I drank it greedily, asking even less.
I studied that enemy captain now. A Rhi’Ahr warrior in the coat of a Navy officer, and it set my blood to boil. Tall and lean, he was wrapped in moonslight and fury. Black hair escaping its queue behind those bloody elven ears, and cheekbones that could cut paper. Like a stormshear, he was, all anchor and clash, a whirlpool of shadow and sky. I found myself pulled into that riptide, whether I wanted to be or not. He turned his face, and, for a brief moment, our eyes met. Lightning shot down my spine, and I fought the urge to look away. Instead, I steeled my jaw, refusing to stand down, daring
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Chimeric, Rhi’Ahr, Ship of Spells, war. I was alive with something that I didn’t understand, so I buried it deep down beneath my iron will and the anger that was my lifeboat.
“I don’t know what to think.” “Did you ever?” Recriminations from a faun. “I used to.” I shrugged. “No, maybe never.” He sighed.
“He said you have mutiny in your bones.”
I glanced at Smoke. “Mr. Oakum, I’m sorry I never did get to try out that dory.” “I won’t tar the holes, then, in case you return.” “Kindness all around. More than I can bear.”
An image of the captain as a boy sprang into my mind. Laughing turquoise eyes, wild black hair, mischievous grin. Rowdy, impetuous, free. He would have been a handful for any parent or priest, no doubt. But to be that young when his friends, his mentors, his only family, were slaughtered… I shook my head. Grief cut out pieces of the heart, seared itself into the mind in ways that never truly healed.
The silence stretched, but it wasn’t uneasy. It was a balm, and I wanted it to last. A space between two people where words weren’t needed. Where the simple act of living was enough. Finally, he looked away, and, for a fleeting moment, I missed him.
“How can I still be Navy if I’m a privateer?” “That is your course to chart.”
“I belong to the crew, to the Touchstone.” “You do,” he said. “I’ve never belonged anywhere,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. “I have belonged only one place,” he said. “But that place is gone.”
No longer a wayward girl swept out to sea, no more a wretched woman from a lost frigate. I was a runechaser, a wielder of chimeric, and now I’d become a weapon of war. It was time I stopped running and learned to fight.
Life, death, war, duty. It felt good to be back on the Ship of Spells. I wondered if she felt the same.
From the main, Devanhan Fahr stepped beside me, hands clasped behind his back. “I believe I am to sorry up, Blue,” he said. He didn’t look at me but set his gaze on the horizon. I grinned at his discomfort. “Square me a rum, and I’ll let it slide.” Fahr smiled back, relieved. He was fetching when he smiled. Eyes gleaming, cheeks like apples on erthe. Young and happy and free, or at least he looked it. He couldn’t be more than a few years behind the captain. The kind of man you’d fog in the dark, no strings, no fuss, no longing glances before the dawn. The kind I used to enjoy. But safe wasn’t
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“Why did Smoke say they wouldn’t shoot you?” “Fusiliers couldn’t hit the side of a barge.”
“Everyone has a story, Blue,” he said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his breeches. “You want to know people? Ask them. They aren’t runes to be studied and chased.”
“There are patterns in everything, Blue,” he went on. “And the patterns are everything. Do we control the magik, or does the magik control us? We only see what the Worldrune allows us to see.”
He laughed out loud, and I was happy to have caused it.
followed, brushing past Smoke at the wheels. “Walking the plank?” he asked, raising a thick brow. “No? Alas, I live in hope…”
“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.”
All hands stopped to marvel at the sight of her, a creature of timber and magik and power and light.
“It helps to take the mind off things when the mouth is otherwise engaged.”
“Isn’t your mother a greenmage healer?” Echo turned to ask me. I glanced at Smoke, the rum finally warming my chest, and shrugged. “I’m not hiring her mother,” he said. “Unless she’s pretty and cheap and at a port nearby.” “I have no apprentice,” said the faun. “You have Neale.” Sitting on a far bunk, Neale raised his cup. “While Neale is nearby, he is neither pretty nor cheap.”
Smoke waited until he was gone and the crew had turned their attentions to their cups and their dice before pulling out a pipe and leaning into me like a plotter. “Come upside and let’s see if I can’t sway you,” he said. “The helm’s a far portlier ketch than a dead man’s chest with a faun.” I nodded but looked away before he could spot the stinging of my eyes. Smoke would probably cancel the offer if he sniffed out emotion, and I respected that about him.
“I still don’t understand what I’ve agreed to,” I said. “But I know I want to find out.”
