He tried to smile at me. I tried to smile back. It was a brief moment, a fleeting moment, but for now, it was enough.
He turned to Broom and Dev.
“Regarding theMarelethan. Without the rogue chimeric, you will need to rely on more conventional methods and traditional magik to take her. Even with a skeleton crew, she is formidable, but it’s all moot unless we survive the Dreadwall.”
And that was a sobering fact.
“Thank you, gentlemen. You are dismissed.”
“In other words,” said Smoke, “get to work, ye lice-crowned, lily-winkled swabs.”
I rose to my feet.
“A moment, Ensign?”
Dev’s gaze darted between us.
“See you on deck, Mr. Fahr,” Thanavar said.
Brow dark, Dev slid the door behind him, and we were alone. Alone together.
The captain moved to stare out the mullioned windows and clasped his hands behind his back. He was almost a silhouette in the Dreadwall’s furious light.
“It was strange to see the Cloudgate once again,” he said. “It is not the place I remember. The Heart of the Cloud is a miner’s pit. My people are killing it with the ice and the cold. The beaches of sand are as hard as stone, and the air is stale and cross. No, it is not the same place at all.”
Suns, I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to see it after all this time.
He paused, released a long breath.
“But perhaps, after ten years a-sea, I am not the same man.”
My body still ached from the chimeric and the mast. I couldn’t move and couldn’t feel.
“I have been lost for all these years, searching for a way forward, desperate for a way out, and when you came aboard, I thought I knew. You were a gift from Moons, from our Mother the Sea, the key toLindurithain, a weapon of war. I thought I had been given that weapon to wield for my patterns, but more than this, I was delirious at the thought that I myself had been given yet another chance to save her. We would bring her back to the Cloudgate and restore her timbers to health. With your power, we would wrap the island in Dreadwall so that it would never be breached again, and she would guard the Cloudgate in safety for the rest of her days.”
The roar of the Dread. The thunder of the wall.
“But you are not mine to wield, nor are you hers,” he said finally. “You are your own.”
My heart had stopped beating. My breath had stalled in my chest.
“I do not know what awaits us once we leave the Dreadwall,” he said. “TheMarelethanis a threat, and we will be sorely damaged from the flight. There will still be a crew on the island that will stand in our way. We will need to navigate the books and the incants, the ironmages, and finally, the Dreadwall. But if we survive, ifIsurvive…”
He turned.
“Somehow, someway…”
Moons. Suns. Forge fog a faun.
“I may need a kedge.”
I was numb and drained of chimeric. I’d channeled a chaser,a tree, a goddess, a ship. I hadn’t eaten in days and could barely hear a thing he was saying. And yet, my thoughts were not spinning, and my mind was perfectly clear. The world had shrunk down to this one thing, but I was not afraid. Magik flowed through my very veins.
“I serve the Ship of Spells,” I said.
He turned slowly. I could see the muscles of his jaw work.
“That is not what I am asking,” he said.
