“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.” He turned back to me. “Now, what exactly do you know of the Worldrune?”
“Not enough.”
“Well said. Runes are the language of the suns. When Ember and Forge fashioned the world, they spun it like a giant spyder’s web between them. At every knot in the web, they burned a rune. Everything that exists or has ever existed, every thought and every heartbeat, is a rune in their net. Not only is every rune tied to one another, but the spinning of each rune reflects every other on the spyder’s web.”
“There are spyders in Norresthan that are the size of cows.”
He laughed again.
“Spyders and cows, erthe and sea, us and other and evenRhi’Ahr. Everything is connected, Blue, and you just have to find your place. It’s like music. When we cast spells, we are pluckingthe strings of the Worldrune’s web and hearing the music it makes. Skilled mages can cast symphonies.”
I had never heard it explained like this. Not in the Yard, not on theDawn Watch. Not even my mother had described magik so simply, so elegantly.
“Praesidium, please,”he said.
Praesidium.The proper name for a protection spell. Two runes drawn in sequence.I made it easily. That, I’d learned well before Berryburn.
His hands twisted, and suddenly, he held a crackling pattern in the shape of a spear. Grasping it with both hands, he swung it at me, striking my rune shield and sending sparks sizzling into the wind. Yet, my shield held and hummed like music. My hands throbbed, my arms glowed, and I felt a rush of strength race through my veins. I growled and pushed forward with it, causing him to slide back along the pup.
He released the spear, and I lost balance, stumbling forward like an oaf. His hands spun, and the air struck me like a fist, flinging me backward across the deck. I bumped the rail and teetered, arms flailing, ready to fall.
“Find your place in the Worldrune, Blue, or you’ll swim!”
His palm pushed those gale winds, and I toppled backward over the side.
Caught the rail with one hand.
Aro’el!
Like the first time my arms hit water, theTouchstoneboomed, and her sails thundered with light.
My toes scraped along her smooth sides, but a plank slid out beneath my boot.
I took a step, then another, and the ship helped until I finally sprang to stand, balancing like a crowman on the gunwale. The soles of my boots barely touched the rail as I called on the chimeric that coursed through her hull. She shimmered andgleamed like polished gold, and her mainmast lit up, crackling from her base with sizzling runes. All hands stopped to marvel at the sight of her, a creature of timber and magik and power and light. She was magnificent, but at that moment, so was I.
Patterns danced behind my eyes. I could see the world connected by runes. It pulsed with energy. It drummed with life. I saw the hawk, white as the moons, beak tucked under a wing, asleep in the branches of a huge tree. I saw a mountain clouded in cinnamon and aRhi’Ahrboy with eyes like the sea, those same branches reaching, holding, keeping, mourning…
“You see!” bellowed a voice. It was Thanavar, rushing up onto the deck. “You see her!”
“Yes,” I said, my own voice barely a gasp. “The chimeric binds all.”
“Itisall,” he said. “For good or for ill.”
“For good or for ill,” I repeated woodenly, and the pup rippled like a pool.“Be good and be swift…”
The captain froze, head cocked like a bird.
Her voice speaking through me, strange and distant yet closer than my beating heart.
“Be still and be strong,”I said.
And for a moment, a brief shining moment, I was her.
“Be wary, be wise.”
He stood before me, black hair rising and falling with the rocking of the sea, lean and sharp and utterly bound in the spell. I could reach out ahand, not my hand, suns moons and seas, ships in the harbor and blood on the stones, people my people, my chaser come home, Kirianae ik thay’ell, Gavriel sil, Kier Gavriel laethe mira, shy’riir, kel’yion, beloved.
Beloved.
