“Let me be the first volunteer. You take Sea Louse and then find another ship. Your expertise is invaluable to what we do. Please, let me take Tide Child north.”
Meas shook her head and reached across the table, grasping Arrin’s hand. “Snarltooth will be fixed for Brekir, and Sea Louse will need a good shipwife; those who believe in us will need a good shipwife.” She smiled, “And do not doubt me, Arrin.” She let go of his hand and sat back. “Kyrie is my sither and was my deckkeeper before she was shipwife on Hunter. I know how she thinks; I know how she fights. I have advantages you do not.”
Arrin glanced at her then shrugged.
“If any can beat her, then it is you.”
“Ey, that is true,” said Brekir.
“Then let us get to work. Every moment spent talking here the wakewyrm makes into distance between us.”
Many turns of the glass later Tide Child left Snarltooth and Sea Louse behind him in the gathering dark, the two ships illuminated by the burning hulks of Cruel Water and Sunfish Rising. Something ached in Joron. Not because he was watching a jointweight of bone that would have made every woman and man on board Tide Child and Snarltooth rich beyond imagining go to the bottom of the sea, but because he was leaving behind people he had come to like, and though he knew Meas had spoken bravely, he also knew it was a mask. Brekir and Arrin had known it too. Tide Child was no match for Hag’s Hunter.
“We should throw the bolts overboard,” said Joron as he stood with Dinyl on the rump.
“Bolts?” said Dinyl.
“For killing the keyshan. If Hag’s Hunter takes us and finds them, the keyshan is theirs. And all we have done will be for naught.”
“We have a duty, Joron,” he said. “We can lead Hunter a pretty chase, lose it among the storm isles, then do what we must when Hunter is behind us.”
“Look to our ship, Dinyl,” he said. “You think it is possible we will lose Hunter?”
“To be fleet is not to do what is possible, it is to do what you must.” Then he walked away, wrapping his thick coat about himself against the cold.
“Joron Twiner.” He turned to find the gullaime. It was like a different beast now. Still thin, still delicate-looking, but the feathers on its head were glorious – black in the night, but in the daylight blue and gold and red.
“I am sorry they took your people away,” he said, nodding towards the ships slowly vanishing into the glow of bonefire behind them.
“Not sorry,” it said. “They will live.” Then it made a sound, a repeated yarking, bobbing its head up and down. Joron thought it was going to vomit for a moment before realising it was laughing.
“You don’t think we will?”
“Who knows? You know? Meas know? No one knows.”
“All this,” said Joron, “to save us from ourselves, and yet we do not even want to be saved.”
The gullaime stopped moving, became utterly still, and Joron thought he heard the echoes of the windspire song carried on the wind.
“Sea sither knows you protect it, Joron Twiner. Sea sither knows much.”
“Can you speak to it?”
“Speak?” It did it again: Yark, yark yark. “Not speak. Not talk. We are small, quick. It is big, slow.”
“Can you make the keyshan understand? Tell it to hide from Hag’s Hunter? To join us later?”
“You hide from insect?”
“No.”
“Hide from a million insect?”
“Yes.”
“This” – it tapped the smashed rail of Tide Child – “make you a million insect. But sea sither not understand that.”
“Can you make it understand?”
The gullaime fixed him with its painted mask.
“Gullaime think fast. Like you. It is slow.” And then it turned on the spot and vanished into the underdeck.
“I think that was a no,” said Dinyl from where he was tying rope across a break in the rail so none fell overboard.
“Ey,” said Joron. And in his mind he heard the song of the windspire.
They sailed for three days before they sighted the arakeesian. Three hard days where the weather changed and Aelerin was forced to chart a stormfoul course, the wind never in the right place and the courser hearing no hint in the windsong that it would change. So Tide Child tacked seaward and tacked landward, chasing the wakewyrm through a series of zigzags, and each time they came about Coxward would disappear into the bilges of the ship, knee deep in stinking water, listening to the bone and hearing the creaks and sighs and cracks of the ship as surely as any other heard the words of the lover they clung to in the darkness in hope of warmth. Each time the ship turned he came up to the slate, soaked and filthy, his face more drawn, his sores looking rawer, and he could give Meas no good news.
But still they flew on.
The weather became colder and wetter. Rain became a constant, sometimes thin – little more than a wetness in the air – at other times a deluge, rain so thick you could not see your hand before your face. There were not enough stinker coats or cold-weather clothes on board so when the watches above deck came below clothes had to be exchanged, leaving those below shivering together in little groups, or huddling under thin blankets in their hammocks. All was misery. Gone from the islands they passed were the cheery colours of the warm months; no bright purple gion or pink varisk grew this far north. Instead the islands were covered in grey, low, densely growing plants that shuddered in the wind, making it appear as if the islands moved gently from side to side.
It felt both unreal and unsettling.
However, the crew held up well. Whereas Meas, Joron and Dinyl knew how little the chances of the battered and broken Tide Child were against Hag’s Hunter, the crew seemed oblivious. Their victory over the Gaunt Islanders had sealed Meas’s reputation with them. They did not see any way they could lose with Lucky Meas on the rump, they talked away the size of Hag’s Hunter and callled him slow as a seaslug. Said Lucky Meas would run rings around her sither.
Joron wished he could share their confidence
But he could not.
There were small pleasures. The gullaime had taken to walking on deck, often accompanied by a squawking and swearing Black Orris, and though neither of them was of any help they shared an intense curiosity in the workings of the ship. The crew, who had first been scared, then awed, by the windtalker, had accepted and finally welcomed its presence. It became quite normal for Joron to pass the gullaime, mask fixed on some deckchilder as they explained some arcane part of the ship’s working or routines. Twice Joron asked Meas if they should not use the gullaime to gain speed and stop the constant tacking. The first time Meas patiently explained they would need everything the gullaime had to stand a chance against Hag’s Hunter. The second time he was, less patiently, informed that he had no place questioning her on the deck of her ship.
His friendship with Dinyl continued, though their conversations always ended up at the same place. The end. The coming battle with Hag’s Hunter, and Dinyl refused to humour Joron’s doubts; he would talk only of the duty of a fleet officer. So when they spent time together, they read books on navigation or studied maps of the Scattered Archipelago, because there was nothing else to be said and no comfort to be had.