On the hunt for another ship to capture, Pels guided the Harmony through a wall of ashy fog on Muspellar’s northern coast.
He had captured three frigates, a sloop, and a man-of-war, all in the past two months. Part of him itched, knowing that if he had chosen, he could have built his own pirate fleet with all the ships he had stolen.
But, as per the arrangement, he had given them all to the resistance. Their small fleet hid in the cove, given a make-over by Perron’s people. She didn’t have enough crew for them yet, but she did have plenty of people willing to learn. Any day, Pels expected to be dragged away from his privateering duties to teach, but it hadn’t happened yet.
They lingered on the edge of the gray-black fog, hidden from all but the most discerning gazes, but with a decent view of the sea.
“Captain!” Lieutenant McHyll shouted from the main deck, pointing out northwards, and slightly to their stern. “Fighting tops spotted something!”
Pels ran to the stern railing of the quarterdeck and brandished his spyglass. He flicked it open and pointed it in the vague direction that McHyll had pointed. He hunted, sweeping his spyglass back and forth across the horizon.
He passed a dark shape with bat-wing-shaped sails, and for a second, kept moving, until he inched the spyglass back towards it.
The ship was a black junk with dark red railings, and an enormous red lantern hanging off its stern. His heart immediately began to beat faster. He snapped his spyglass shut and yelled, “All hands! Beat to quarters!” He turned to the coxswain. “Easy to larboard. Get the wind quarter astern.”
“Captain?” McHyll called back. “What’s wrong? We could tack back and pursue—”
“That isn’t prey,” Pels said. “Our best hope is to outrun them.”
“Into the fog, then?”
“We don’t have a good map of these shores. Unless you want to impale us on an obsidian spire, our best bet is to go fast and keep to the edge of the bank.”
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Myrrir had finally caught up. A short ride back to the coast, and then a few days of hunting aboard the Hyrovao.
He stood on his ship’s quarterdeck, holding up a spyglass towards his target. The Harmony sloshed through the water ahead, its sails full of wind and its cannons bared like a wolf’s teeth.
But it was running.
Myrrir pulled off his glove and tapped his fingers on the railing. The starsteel veins rattled, and his wooden fingertips clacked against the railing.
His prize lurched onwards, steadily broadening the distance between the two ships. The Harmony was faster, and though the wind was favourable to a square-rigger, Myrrir was a Commodore now.
Flag Officers, when advancing from Lieutenant to Captain, gained much stronger control over their domain. Captains…were just breaching the surface. A Commodore?
He held out his hand, summoning his gunpowder from his hip flask, and opened his palm outwards. His Commodore-stage Arcara swirled up into his arms, and he shut his eyes to concentrate better.
He had impeccable control of the formations of gunpowder, better than ever before. His body leaked out waves of Arcara, which in turn latched on to the gunpowder and spun it like a whirling nebula. It grasped the wind and thrust it outwards, sending it surginging towards the sails in a concentrated stream.
“Tye,” Myrrir whispered. “Tye, steer the ship. Bring us astern of them.”
“Yes, captain.”
“Be careful not to harm them,” said Myrrir, barely able to split his concentration enough to speak with his first officer. “I can’t threaten the Mediator if her crew is dead.”
The extra wind that Myrrir conjured blasted into the sails. He heard them fluttering and luffing, until Tye began to shout muffled orders at the sailors, who adjusted the sails. The fluttering stopped, replaced only by the occasional rumple of fabric and groaning of wood. But if the Hyovao could handle the winds of the Stream, she could handle this.
He heard musketfire before long, and he opened his eyes just a crack. They were almost precisely astern. He shut them again and continued to funnel wind into the sails.
To stop their foe from running, Tye ordered a hard turn, then a blast from the starboard battery. The shots sailed through the air, but Myrrir didn’t hear a collision or an impact. They had missed, or—more likely—the Harmony had taken evasive action.
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Tightening his fists, Myrrir gave one last push of wind into the sails, then opened his eyes.
The Harmony turned into the wind, pulling into an emergency stop. On a normal ship, one designed for just the atmosphere, the masts wouldn’t have been able to handle such a maneuver. But a Streamrunner was built to handle stronger winds, and its stays were tougher. The Harmony halted, its sails fluttering awkwardly and its masks creaking. As soon as its main battery faced the Hyovao, it fired.
Myrrir was already bounding to the prow, and he arrived just in time. He pushed a shield into the bow’s wood.
Gunpowder wasn’t known for its shielding properties, and Myrrir’s Gray Veil technique was one of the hardest for those who walked the Path of the Darkflag to learn.
He concentrated on the little dark beads, urging them to wrap around the wood and shield it. It wasn’t the same as a technique like the Mediator’s defenses; hers filled the wood, turning it briefly as hard as stone. Myrrir’s protected the outside.
When the cannonballs struck, he clenched his fist. The first few ripped through the prow, scattering wood chips and splinters into the air. The rest, he held back. They tumbled harmlessly into the water.
One struck the shield, and the metal against gunpowder sparked. Myrrir pushed his arm forwards, guiding the following explosion outwards as best as he could.
And that was all of his gunpowder. He dropped flat to the deck; a troop of Redmarines ran to the Harmony’s railing and fired a volley at him. The shots spattered harmlessly against the hull.
Myrrir scrambled back down his ship’s main deck, then sprinted up to the quarterdeck. “Hard to starboard,” he ordered. “It’s a broadside.”
The coxswains pushed on the tiller, and Tye ordered the sailors to let the sails loose. They swung into the wing, pushing the junk onwards.
“Sir,” said one of the coxswains. “I thought we weren’t trying to kill them!”
Myrrir scowled. He ran to the front railing, then, flooding his throat and voice box with Arcara, shouted, “Gunners, aim at their deck! Once volley; take out the marines!”
If it had been an even fight, he knew he would have been outmatched. Pels was a better captain; he’d seen it before.
But Myrrir didn’t intend to let it be fair.
As soon as the gunners let off their volley, shattering the railing and tearing through the marines, Myrrir forced Arcara down into his legs, fuelling his enhanced body. His body was as standard as they came, and functioned as it should. It served his purposes well enough.
He jumped up onto the railing, but he would need an extra burst of strength to leap across the gap between the ships. Drawing the smallest beads of gunpowder he could out of a nearby soldier’s flask, he imbued his Arcara with them and sucked it into his body as well. It stained his veins black. Incomprehensible tattoos writhed beneath his skin.
He forced it to flow down to his legs, then sprung off the railing.
He landed on the main deck of the Harmony. The gunners scrambled to operate the deck guns, and any sailor without a duty was holding a musket or a pistol. About half of the marines were still standing, and they converged on him.
He wasn’t here for them. Bracing his arm with gunpowder, he swatted aside one. It paved a path for him to run to the quarterdeck.
An officer tried to stop him on the way up the stairs. Myrrir drew his sword, a heavy saber fashioned from jade, and hacked the officer’s musket in half with it—to wield it with such speed, he had to Brace both of his arms. Then, he pushed the man down the stairs and leapt over his body.
As soon as Myrrir took the last step up, the ship’s captain pointed his pistol at Myrrir and fired. The shot fired, and it caught Myrrir in his shoulder, sending him sprawling back a few feet. The shot penetrated through his robe and coat, and it bit an inch into his skin, but he continued on.
The captain, Pels, flipped his pistol over in his hand and swung it at Myrrir. Myrrir caught the pistol’s handle, unwilling to be caught by surprise again. He ripped the weapon out of Pels’s hand, then slipped behind him and held his sword against his throat.
“Nobody move!” Myrrir shouted, again strengthening his voice box. His words boomed down the ship’s deck. “Drop your weapons, and you will all live! I have your captain!”
“Capturing us, eh?” Pels raised his eyebrows. “Wasn’t the play I thought you’d go with. Mediator isn’t here.”
“I am aware, Captain,” Myrrir said. “I’ve heard many things about you—ever since you bested us on Naebel.”
The rest of the Harmony’s crew dropped their weapons, and the gunners snuffed their linstocks and stepped away from the cannons.
“A wise choice,” Myrrir hissed.
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Wren couldn’t flutter over the mountains in a single flight, but she could leap from peak to peak, slowly traversing the range as fast as she could without straining her muscles or body too much.
Every so often, a volcanic eruption blocked her way, or slowed her progress, or forced her to backtrack. She stayed as close to the river as she could, but once it dipped underground, there was little she could do.
Eventually, she arrived on the other side of the mountain range, and it only took her a few more days to find the river again—she had drifted further west than she had intended. She glided as far along the river as she could, then took to the banks and walked the rest of the way.
Finding Nathariel wasn’t the hard part. He would know how to hide his spirit from someone like her, but he had the Mediator, and she would be easy to find so long as Wren got close enough.
As soon as Wren felt a tingle building in the back of her mind, she stopped and began to test which way she had to travel for it to get stronger.
Her senses weren’t nearly as tuned as someone like Myrrir’s would be, but the Mediator’s strength had grown, and she was exponentially easier to find.
That, and Wren had been to Nathariel’s hovel many times before.
She paused at the edge of Nathariel’s pasture, tempted to rip off a chunk of the fence and skewer his horses with it.
But that wouldn’t be nearly good enough vengeance. She glanced around. Nathariel was inside, and he wasn’t expecting visitors. If Wren kept her core still and tightly veiled, no one would notice her.
Nathariel had taken a new student. If Wren wasn’t able to succeed under him, then neither could Vayra. She’d hurt Nathariel and Myrrir, and claim her prize. The ploy kept getting better…
Wren paused at the edge of the woods, staring out towards the edge of the river. No one would notice her, except for the Mediator, who was currently cleaning herself in the water.
Wren stepped out of the shadows.