Navigating the port seemed an impossible job with the number of ships waiting to dock, but Daya managed it with effortless skill. A clerk greeted them as soon as they docked, asking their order of business and diligently jotting down all of the words Ramson spewed.
“Land ahoy!” Daya hollered when the paperwork was finished. She leaned against the wheel and tapped her forehead in a salute. “Pleasure doing business with you.” She winked at Ramson. “And you can expect to hear from me soon.”
“Hear what?” Ana asked as Ramson ushered her off the gangplank.
“Just a little reconnaissance,” he said vaguely.
When Ana stepped onto the docks, Kaïs was waiting for her. She approached him warily. Their exchanges had been mostly through his lessons on her Affinity use, but over the past two weeks, something between them had thawed.
Ana was surprised when he sank to one knee. “Kolst Imperatorya, please allow me to accompany you. My swords are yours to command.”
Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw a lithe figure step off the gangplank. Linn approached them from beneath the shadows of the boat.
Ana turned to follow Ramson away from the ship. “You’d better pray those swords of yours are sharper than our enemies’,” she called over her shoulder.
They wound through docks crowded with merchants and crew unloading their goods, the air filled with soaring gulls. Ramson pointed out seadoves, the Bregonian messenger bird, their bodies flashing gray and the signature teal of their iridescent wings as they dipped through the crowd to deliver letters.
They passed rows upon rows of ships flying flags from all over the world. Ana spotted several from the Crown of Nandji, bearing multicolored sails arching over their hulls covered in gold decorative patterns. A few others, she noticed, had narrower hulls with sharper prows and sails that resembled fans.
She sensed Linn stiffen by her side.
“Are those…” Ana hesitated at Linn’s expression.
Linn nodded. Her eyes were black pools. “Kemeiran,” she whispered, “and other Aseatic kingdoms. Zeishin Ko, Chi’gon, Chomingguk…”
Chi’gon.A thread tightened in Ana’s chest as she looked at the ships, wondering whether they carried people from the kingdom that had been May’s birth home. She looked to Linn. Despite her firm muscles and the daggers tucked in her belt, Linn looked utterly lost beneath the shadows of the ships.
Ana threaded her arm through Linn’s and squeezed.
“Cyrilian ships,” Ramson said, his voice low. He put a hand over her shoulder and pointed. “That’s where I’m starting my search.”
A chill ran through Ana. Sure enough, she spotted several ships emblazoned with the distinct script of her homeland and the tiger insignia.
The crowds had thickened, converging at the end of the wooden docks. Beneath the hulls of great ships carrying goods and products from around the world, the ocean tapered into a river.
No, not a river, a canal.
Slim wooden gondolas glided up and down, turning to deposit travelers and immediately picking up more.
Ramson gave the group a mock bow. “Meya damas, mesyr,” he said, “on our schedule is a short gondola ride, where we’ll see the famous winding canals of Sapphire Port. We disembark at the Crown’s Port, an inland trading post”—he lowered his voice, leaning toward Ana—“that’ll take you directly to the Blue Fort.”
With that, he flung out a hand, and it wasn’t long before a gondola steered by a man in a ruffled white shirt and navy-blue breeches pulled up. The man exchanged some rapid-fire Bregonian with Ramson, some of which Ana caught from her childhood tutoring. The Bregonian language was sharper and cut harder than Cyrilian, its vowels short and brusque whereas Cyrilians drew their words out in lilting tones.
Ramson turned around and gestured to them, which they took as their cue to board. And then they were off, their gondola gliding smoothly through the waters, away from the hubbub of the port.
They turned into a narrow alleyway and passed beneath a stone bridge. For a few moments it grew dark, and when they emerged, Sapphire Port opened up to them like pages of astorybook.
Ana had only seen Bregon—and most of the world, she supposed—in the pages of her books. She’d read about the kingdom of stone and metal, surrounded on all sides by vast stretches of ocean and perilous cliffs that made foreign invasion near-impossible.
Compared to the vibrantly colored architecture of Southern Cyrilia, Sapphire Port was a city of muted colors. Buildings carved of gray stone rose on either side of them, tall and angular, windows narrow and evenly spaced. Here and there were drops of brass and edges of bronze, burnishing the sign of a pub or the frames of houses.
Yet the city was alive; it opened up before them, pulsing with crisscrossing canals that ran through it like veins. The waters here were colored a deep, striking shade of sapphire, and glittered like jewels where the sunlight hit it. The stone buildings reflected the light so that it looked as though their stern façades were undulating to the rhythm of the water.
Their gondola followed canals that wound through the entire city, cleaving through stone castles and slipping under bridges, sometimes opening to large expanses of water wide enough to fit an entire Vyntr’makt in the center, at other times turning through alleyways so narrow that only one gondola could squeeze through at a time.
“It’s beautiful,” Ana breathed.
Ramson turned from his seat to look at her. Something in his expression had changed, his hazel eyes dimmed and his carefree laughter gone. “I’m not sure I’d call it that” was all he said.
