With our sideways race across the Dreadwall, no one felt sick, and hands could walk across the deck as if righted. That was fully illusion, and I appreciated even more, now, the power of the Worldrune and the web the suns had spun. More than on paper, it was drawn in the sand, in the stars, and in the sea.
And I knew in my bones now what it meant to serve the Ship of Spells.
TheTouchstoneneeded my chimeric, so I kept a hand on her at all times, but after the first several hours of traveling this way, I grew bone-weary. The roar the Dreadwall made was deafening, the constant cold spray leaving me numb. Smoke had to tie my hands to the mast to keep me in position. Even in sleep, I stayed this way, arms wrapped around the main, palms flat,cheek pressed against the old, old wood, and one bare foot atop a chest of chimeric. Because of this, I couldn’t help but plumb the lure of theTouchstone’s mirror. Memories flooded through me of a different time, a different life, and I knew it was Kirianae of the House WoodRaven. I could feel the things she had felt as a thousand years of memory became mine.
I was blessed by the suns and called by the moons from my birth in the Heart of the Cloud. I stretched forth my fingers to touch the stars, buried my toes deep into the heart of the world, pulsed the chimeric through my veins like sweet syrup. I guarded my people for one thousand years, with shelter, with shade, with wisdom, with rune. I met a young boy with eyes like the sea, and I kept him, I saved him, I taught him, set him free. Along my branches, the winter hawk slept. He hunted, he preened, he shielded, he soared. I lived, I died, I loved as KirianaeLindurithain, Goddess of the Island InBetween. Oh, how I loved.
I was reborn as theTouchstone, mythical, dreaded, fast, and free. I sank enemy ships. I raised sunken wrecks. I sailed the oceans. I took cannon fire. I lost men, and I saved them. I weighed anchor and closed breaches and followed my hawk through the seas. Storms, calm, water, sky. I was a seabird and a warship. I broke, was rebuilt, and I loved as theTouchstone. Oh, how I loved.
And I plucked a wretched, wayward girl from the waters, set her feet upon my deck, until she didn’t know if she was deck or girl, ethereal or wayward, and time settled like a river over me. Or did it set me like a pebble into it? I didn’t know anymore. The crew was my eyes and my ears and my heart, while Honor Renn, Ensign Bluemage of the Kingship FrigateDawn Watch, grew as thin as a veil or an island InBetween.
I was losing myself to her mirror. Willingly.
Thanavar appeared at some point to speak to Fahr at themoonswheel. He was about to leave the ship, go ahead of us to find the Cloudgate and the surrounding waters where we would land. We would need to be prepared for it when we hit, else we’d plummet to the sea upon leaving the madness of the Dreadwall. He saw me then and crossed the deck, towering over me like a gaunt giant. I gazed up at him, trying to push her thoughts from my mind, but she was all I knew.
He laid a hand on the mast and leaned for a long moment before looking down at me.
“Tell her not to forget,” he said. “Tell her we’re almost home.”
“She knows.” And I smiled up at him.“Kel’yion.”
He lingered a long moment before turning and throwing himself over the bulwark. There was a white flash, and he was gone.
From night until morning, we traveled like this, flying on the side of the Dreadwall. Nan brought meals to all hands on deck, including me, but food meant nothing. Echo worried, so he fed me like a baby. Not that I cared. The Dreadwall and theTouchstonehad swept all pride from my bones. I was nothing now but a conduit for magik. I could be a swift. I could be a tree. I could be anything I wanted. I was magik. All of it. All of me.
I was a mirrormage, and I was the mirror. My father, Thanavar, Kirianae, Renn. Aro’el, the chaser. The chimeric runescars had near claimed me whole. I could feel them across my chest and back, my throat to my cracked lips. I could read them in my mind’s eye, could feel them in my blood. I was a different creature than any other creature in either helm, as lost as a woman could be, but as deep and found as the erthe.
Runechaser.
Last night, someone had touched my shoulder, and it took all of my power to come back to the mast. It was Neale. He held out a cup.
“Can’t forget your ration, Blue,” he said.
Slowly, my eyes flicked down to it.
“It ain’t poisoned,” he said. “You’re one of us now. You deserve it.”
And he knuckled a salute.
I would gladly drink any grog he brought me after that, poisoned or not.
At some point the next morning, Thanavar was there. Perhaps I awoke to the strum of his fingers on the Worldrune, perhaps to the beat of his heart in my veins. He stood beside Fahr, brows dark, lips tight.
“We have a problem,” he said. There was something in his voice, but I couldn’t tell anymore. It was the roar of the Dreadwall. It was the song of the ship.
“Meet me in the cabin,” he said to Dev. “Bring Messrs. Smoke, Buck, Broom, Kobe, Echo.”
“And Blue?” said the mate.
“Leave her with me.”
Before I knew, only Thanavar was there, and Dev was not.
He knelt down beside me.
“Aro’el,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
“I’m in the whale,” I murmured. “Half fish. Half bird. All sea.”
