"Port line's loose!" Pell's voice, loud enough to cut through the rain.
"Then tie it down!"
"I'm trying — Orick, grab that cleat —"
The lightning hit the water thirty yards off the starboard side. Not the columnar strikes from before but a lateral crack that spread across the surface and discharged into the hull with enough static to stand Rafe's arm hair on end and make every tooth in his head ache. The Ashvane lurched. Something snapped on the upper rigging with a sound like a gunshot and the port-side rope ladder came down in a tangle of frayed endsacross the deck. Rafe kept the wheel. Then the storm turned toward them.
The wind reversed hard off the lake and slammed into the port side with enough force to tilt the deck. Rafe heard the cargo shift below, a deep grinding lurch of weight moving and Orick's shout from the hold was not a good sound. The rain had gone from sideways to nearly vertical, the kind of pressure that came from something feeding itself, and the Ashvane was no longer cooperating with the approach so much as being driven toward the dock by a storm that seemed personally invested in putting her there.
"We're going in too fast!" Dex had both hands on the bow line and his feet braced against the rail and it still wasn't enough.
"Hold it!" Rafe cut the throttle and turned the wheel hard and the Ashvane swung bow-first toward the dock moorings with all the grace of a fist hitting a table. He saw figures running down from the bank through the rain. Two men, one of them moving fast with a heavy coil of rope off one shoulder, heading for the end of the pier at a rushed pace.
The hull hit the dock, and not a clean mooring impact. A collision, the bow rail shrieking against the dock cleat and the whole ship shuddering stem to stern, and Rafe grabbed the console to stay upright and heard something in the hold go over with a crash that turned his stomach. The storm hit again immediately after, as if the pause had been deliberate, driving the Ashvane sideways along the dock face and grinding the hull against the pilings in a sound like the ship being slowly taken apart.
The man with the rope was already on the pier, moving without hesitation, throwing a line around the forward cleat and dropping his weight against it with both hands. Dex caught the thrown end and got it around the bow cleat in three fast wraps. Another line came from the bank, then another, and between thefour of them they hauled the Ashvane's bow in and held it while the storm threw everything it had left at the stern.
It lasted four minutes. Rafe knew because he watched the clock on the console and concentrated on that instead of the sounds the ship was making.
Then, as suddenly as it had turned on them, the storm moved. Northeast, up the river channel, the rain thinning to a hard pour and the wind dropping from violent to merely unpleasant. The lightning continued upriver, striking in that same precise pattern, but it was someone else's problem now.
Rafe let go of the console.
"Lupeus." The man with the rope came aboard without waiting for an invitation, his dark hair plastered flat by the rain, water running off the shoulders of his jacket. Tall, broad, moving with the contained physicality of a wolf shifter who'd been through worse than a rough docking and was choosing not to make a thing of it. He looked at the rigging, the bow rail, the state of the deck, and his jaw set tightly. "Corwen called ahead. Said you were coming in rough."
"Baneville." Rafe had met Rowan twice before on previous runs, once during dock expansion work, once at the dockside tavern over a practical conversation about load limits on the new moorings. "Rough is generous."
Rowan looked at the bow rail, bent outward at an angle that would need a smith and probably new hardware underneath. He looked at the port side where the hull had ground along the dock face then at the rigging. "You got a splice kit?"
"Orick." Rafe didn't raise his voice.
Orick came up from the hold looking pale. "Lost the wool pallet completely. Three crates of Mercantile dry goods are wet, maybe destroyed depending on what's in them. The hold partition seam split when we hit." He stopped. "And the secondary cargo rack came off the wall mounting."
"How bad."
"The Vanewright order is in pieces."
Rafe was quiet for a moment. The Vanewright order was eight weeks of negotiated contract and the largest single delivery on this run. He looked up at the sky, at the storm moving away from him upriver like it had somewhere better to be, and something in his chest went very cold and very still.
"How long for repairs?" He directed it at Rowan.
Rowan walked the deck slowly, checking what he checked, not rushing. "Rail needs Silas at the forge. Hull seam needs caulking and a day to cure. Rigging mount is a half-day job if I've got the right hardware." He stopped at the bow. "A week, maybe. Depending on what else we find when we pull the interior partition."
"A week."
"Could be less if we find the right materials fast."
Rafe looked at the water. The scent was still there under the rain smell, wild and silver, sitting at the back of his throat like something he couldn't clear. It had been there since the first column went up and it hadn't moved. It was coming from the western bank.
The harbourmaster's man had appeared at the dock edge, orange vest visible in the gloom, making notes on a clipboard. "She'll need a full dock assessment before we can clear the mooring extension. Standard procedure after an impact."
Rafe didn't answer him. He was watching the western bank.
"Storm came in unusual," Rowan said, beside him now, his voice even. "Town's had some weather lately."
"That wasn't weather."
A pause. "No."
