Six, seven steps.
She spread her arms, her chi rippling like a bird yearning to be free.
Nine, ten steps.
With a small leap, she was airborne, winds howling around her like a pack of invisible wolves, loping by her side, carrying her forward and upward. Beneath her was a stretch of sea, the pale cloaks of the Imperial Patrols jutting out like a memory.
Help me,she’d cried out to them the first time she’d seen them as she’d disembarked from the trafficker’s ship.
Eight years she’d spent in captivity, her power and her freedom taken away from her. Made to feel helpless and weak.
Linn was a Kemeiran windsailer. A fierce warrior. A free bird.
She was the girl of wind and shadows.
And today, she fought back.
Ana had heard tales of the Silent Sea of the North in her childhood. That it was a forbidden location. That it was cursed. That it was a place even the Deities dared not touch. The Salskoff Library had held records of ships that had gone missing on expeditions to the northernmost ocean. To this day, no sailor had survived to tell the tale.
Out here, the silence was heavy, muted, broken only by the sound of waves lapping at the edges of their boat. The sky was the shade of ashes and endings, the water around her a granite gray. Even her siphon looked colorless, veins shifting across the surface like smoke. The only color came from her cloak: a piercing shade of crimson. The color of blood. The color of her.
Ana’s breath crystallized in the air. Ice clung to her lashes, to strands of her hair exposed beyond her hood. Before her at the wheel, between sprays of mist, Daya wove in and out of sight like a ghost.
Yet in the midst of all this nothingness, something seemed to stir inside Ana. Somethingwasstirring, on the surface of her siphon. The little tendrils of darkness writhed, seeping deeper intoher veins. And, inside her, there was the strangest feeling: like an ancient fragment of a puzzle coming alive.
Frost flowered on the wooden token in her gloved hand. She wiped it clean, peering at the jagged patterns leading from the curve of Cyrilian shores to the dent of the heart-shaped relic in the center.
A flash of color caught her attention and she looked up. Ahead was a crop of white-blue glaciers knifing to the sky. Goose bumps rose along Ana’s skin. A strong wind had picked up, seeming to pummel their sails and pull at her cloak, relentlessly tugging them forward. From all around her came the echo of an eerie song. Silhouettes darted in the water by her sides as she drew closer to the glaciers.
Daya cast Ana an uneasy look. The girl’s lips were wan, herknuckles straining against the wheel. “Ruselkya,” she whispered.
Ana stood and crossed over to Daya. She put a hand on her friend’s shoulder and squeezed. They were approaching the glaciers, faster now; the wind and water seemed to move in harmony, with a mind of their own, sweeping their little boat along the currents. The world darkened as they entered the glaciers’ tall shadows.
“Hang on to your hats,” Daya gritted, and she swung the wheel as they entered the field of glaciers. Walls of ice rose on both sides of them, forming a vast tunnel, the sky a mere sliver far above. The rush of water reverberated all around them. Overhead, the Deities’ Lights looked subdued; light seemed to lance out of the glaciers themselves, refracting in the walls of ice all around them to become ghostly apparitions. Shapes and shadows darted between the ribbons of light: silhouettes of snowhawksshifting to foxes, wolves swooping into great whales, deer bounding into flocks of sparrows.
She’d seen this with Linn once, back in the Syvern Taiga: the great Deities’ Lights wending overhead like an otherworldly river, snow and ice spirits darting from beneath it.
Yet Ana realized it was not the sky that glowed, but thesea.Up above, the clouds in the sky undulated like waves; below, the waters swirled incandescent. The effect was unnerving, as though the world had flipped and they were sailing across the skies. Her breath misted before her as she took it all in, her bones aching with cold. The lights swirled around her, spinning faster and faster, shapes swallowing shapes, until all of a sudden, they flickered out.
Far ahead, between the narrow opening in the maze of glaciers, was a flat stretch of ice. It appeared like an oasis in the midst of a desert, soft blue and unnaturally smooth.
The waves were now lunging at their boat in a relentless beat, as though the Deities and elements themselves conspired to draw their boat forward. Wind dug into her bones. The disembodied singing grew louder, rising from the depths of the sea.
An explosion sounded across the ice, and a shock wave of force slammed into their boat. Ana lurched, catching herself against the mast; Daya hung on to the wheel. Below the translucent surface of the ice, the ruselkya scattered like startled fish, their song rising in pitch and volume, thrumming with urgency.
Ahead, the landmass of ice drew closer, and Ana saw something that made her blood freeze. Smashed against the glacial walls, drifting in the pounding waves, were the remnants of Morganya’s ships and men.
“Daya.” Ana’s voice was low, urgent. “You must leave. Dropme off, and sail back. Get reinforcements, a bigger, sturdier ship.”
Daya began to protest. “Ana—”
“Listen to me,” Ana said, gripping her friend’s arm. “If you stay here, you will end up like those men. And both of us will be lost.”
Daya’s eyes glittered as she turned the wheel, hard. The cutter slowed as it turned, then, with a groan, it knocked against the mass of ice. She pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’ll be back, Ana.”
Ana crossed to the gangway. “Don’t make me wait too long,” she said, and with a brief smile, disembarked. Her boots scuffed against smooth ice. She stood back and watched Daya steer the cutter back through the tunnels until the shadows and the sea swallowed their silhouettes.
Ana turned. From ahead came a pulse of warmth, of blood, flickering like a candle in the awareness of her Affinity. Massive glaciers rose jagged before her, yet there was only one path through.
