It felt good to be talking. I wasn’t sure why.
“There are mages who can call animals,” I told the bird. “But there are others, mirrormages, who canbecomeanimals. If I were a mirrormage, I would become a bird like you and never have to work a ship or live with people ever again.”
He didn’t blink, this great winter hawk, just stared at me with his strange white eyes. Then he opened his massive wings and launched into the sky without a splash. He didn’t even circle. He just flew away.
And I was alone once again.
Rise and fall, ebb and swell.
And so, I floated like that, clinging to the scrap of a ship that had once promised better. But after a time, the sun called Forgecurved across the sky and brought stars in his wake, only to rise once again hours later, chased by his brother, Ember the Pale. Still, I clung to the beam, exhausted. I didn’t freeze in the cold ocean waters. No sharks came to eat me. No whale swallowed me whole.
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 aRhi’Ahrman in a captain’s coat, arms folded across his chest.
It was a nightmare, clearly. All I needed was the whale.
“Welcome,” said the enemy.“To the Ship of Spells.”
And like a whale, the nightmare swallowed me whole.
2. The Ship of Spells
Turned out the Ship of Spells had a name.
Touchstone.
She was an old three-masted frigate, smaller even than theDawn Watch, and she sailed under no flag. It made sense, I supposed, as she was technically a privateer in the employ of the king. I knew little of privateers, except that they weren’t actually pirates. They were the bane of the Navy, threading a lawless cord through legal waters and flaunting the rules of warfare whenever it suited their needs. Still, her lines were sound, and she smelled of linseed oil, pine soap, old oak, and the sea.
“So, what happened to your hands?” asked the faun. He was the ship’s surgeon, and he’d said his name was Echo.
I didn’t answer. I’d never spoken to a faun before. Hels, I’d never even met one. Berryburn Yard was a remote naval academy, and there’d been less of them on the roster than minotaurs or dworghs. Still, had I not just been plucked out of the ocean after losing my ship and my hands and my future, I’d probably have bought him a drink. Or vice versa, considering he was employed and I was not.
“Whatever it is,” he went on, “it’s having a curious effect on your healing. Your hands were little more than bones when we dragged you aboard, but now…”
He tugged the gauze around my thumb.
“…the flesh has healed. Curious.”
He was right. I should have been happy about it. I should have been grateful.
“Clearly, it’s a by-product of the chimeric.” The faun continued. He seemed to enjoy talking, so didn’t need my response. “But not one I’ve seen before. Does it hurt?”
I bit my tongue. It hurt like hooks, but I wouldn’t admit it. Heturned my hand over as he bandaged, and he frowned. At least, I think it was a frown. His forehead was wrinkled because of the horns, so it was hard to tell. He looked like he was always thinking. I didn’t care. I’d said nothing since I was brought aboard, but Echo talked enough for both of us.
“Well, I’ll try to be careful,” he said.
He had very long fingers. Funny—of all the things I noticed, the one I found the most interesting was his fingers. Not the horns nor his short, smooth hide of tan; not his wide nose, goatlike nostrils, or the rectangular pupils in his soft, brown eyes. His ears were large and pointed, and he wore a golden hoop in one of them. He also wore a thin golden ring around one of those long fingers, and I wondered if, like the earring, it was the mark of a privateer or if it was something more. No, it was his fingers that captivated me, and I watched them as, carefully, methodically, they wrapped my hands and wrists in gauze.
He peered up at me.
“You must be a Blue, yes?” he asked. “Most of your sash is still intact. Charred at the bottom, but with all that chimeric, it’s to be expected, I suppose.”
Blue threads mixed with undyed and wan, the rank of a junior officer and midshipmage. Not that it mattered now.
“Were you casting or holding?”
“Both,” I grunted, my first word in hours. Or days. I wasn’t sure. I vaguely remembered a hawk on the sea.
“Hmm,” said the faun, and he bent back to his work.
