Tilting to the side as it was, the ship had veered wildly off course. He appeared to be the last person onboard. The deck continued to tilt below him, and he slipped toward the lower railing. They were so close to the neighboring ship that Ian could almost reach out and touch it.
Above him, he heard shouts of alarm from the taskers on the second ship, but it was too late to stop the collision.
Ian scrambled away from the railing just before the burning ship plowed into the neighboring one with an alarming crash of splintering wood. He pulled himself across the deck, reaching out to anything he could find for stability.
The ship rocked beneath his feet, tilting fully to its side as it began to sink.
And then the fireworks started.
The sound of splintering wood turned into the crackling of lightning and booming of thunder as energy streaked across the deck, originating from the hull of the ship next to them.
Smaller fires ignited on the dry wood everywhere the lightning struck. Both ships were on fire now.
Ian found himself holding on to the far railing—now above him—caught between a sinking ship and the explosion of chaos magic beads on the ship next to him.
He needed to make it to the water without getting crushed between the two ships. He climbed across the deck, using his hands on the railing to inch himself over, hand by hand until there was nothing left to grab on to.
The fire had surrounded him, licking up from below him and pressing in on him from the side.
With a final effort, he lifted himself by his arms to clamber over the railing of the ship so that he was standing on the now-horizontal side of it. He ran forward as far as he could and dove into the ocean, its icy-cold water a refreshing change from the sweat and heat of the fire he had been fighting amidst for a quarter of an hour.
Pushing away from the ship, he swam out for several long moments so as not to be caught beneath falling debris.
The ocean around him was littered with broken pieces of wood and filled with the bobbing heads of swimming Majis.
Ian looked around, then reached for the nearest person and dragged their head above water. He dragged them to a piece of wood, and they both grabbed on to it. When the man coughed up water, Ian realized it was the tasker who had tried to stab him only moments before.
Leaving the tasker to fend for himself on the floating wood, Ian swam out to the next bobbing head, then repeated this until he had helped all the people he could see.
Grabbing on to the nearest piece of floating debris—the hatch cover that Sol had forcibly removed—he oriented himself toward the shore by putting the ships behind him. He kicked his legs to propel himself forward, using the debris as a flotation device for his hands.
Chapter 47
Robin knew it was too early for the glowing sky on the horizon to be the first light of dawn. But she watched it closely, foolishly hoping for the orange light to fade and spread into the cold purple array of the morning sun.
No, that was a fire.
Something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.
She looked at Ulli without a word and ran down the mossy overlook toward the shoreline.
Robin knew she had no reason to rush. If something was wrong on the ships, then it would take nearly half an hour for anyone to make it back to the shore.
But she had to be there as quickly as possible to be the first to know what had happened.
She ran through the forest on the western side of the monastery. Movement at the gates told her that she was not the only one who had noticed the now-visible inferno on the horizon.
As the cliff softened into a bluff, she left the safety of the trees and made her way to the sandy shore. She continued to move away from the monastery, watching the waves.
The first rowboat appeared shortly after. Robin saw the shape bobbing over the waves, and her stomach fell. She knew something had gone wrong, but seeing the small boat, overflowing both inside and out, confirmed it.
She rushed into the waves, ignoring the stabbing pain of the icy water on her feet, and grabbed the nearest person, an exhausted young man who had been clinging to the side of the boat. She wrapped her arm under his lower back and supported him, half dragging him to the dry sand. “What happened?” she asked.
“Fire,” the young Majis replied. “Ship sank.”
“The others?” Robin asked, the words leaving her mouth though she knew this man would have no answers.
“I do not know.”
