Dax and Perri agreed wholeheartedly.
She smiled. It truly was a miracle.
Thank you, universe,she thought. For once, it had been kind.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Halfway back to Alyssium, Marin spotted the purple clouds.
Everywhere else, the sky was blue, the kind of unblemished robin’s-egg blue that only a cloudless sky can be. The sea was calm, a nice breeze keeping them sailing at a clip. But those purple clouds were there in a knot, looking like a bruise on otherwise unbroken skin.
That wasnotgood.
Ordinary storms rolled in with wind and rain and roiling waves, with darkening clouds that spread across the sky. They still weren’t anything to play with—they could be deadly, especially for inexperienced sailors. But at least they were predictable. You saw them on the horizon; you stayed in port. These were not ordinary storm clouds.
“Oh, that’s pretty,” Ree said.
She looked down at the shrub. “Um, yeah, I suppose so.”
Joining them at the starboard side, Dax looked out at the mass of purple clouds. “Never seen clouds like that. Are they supposed to be that color?”
She hadn’t thought about the fact that neither of them would have seen a magic storm. Ree hadn’t left his greenhouse, and Dax had been sheltered inside his conservatory. Magic storms were the result of an imbalance of magic use. The emperor had issued a slew of lawsin the last several years—the worst being no more traveling sorcerers and no more magic use by non-university-trained civilians—that resulted in a lot more magic concentrated near the capital. The emperor had commanded that sorcerers limit their spells to imperial priorities, and as a consequence, the storms had worsened in frequency and intensity, especially in the outer islands. It was one of the factors that had led to the revolution and the whole defenestration episode.
Yarrow’s family had talked a lot while they were sailing to Belde about everything the new government was trying to change. But even the most well-intentioned provisional government couldn’t fix years of damage in just a few weeks.
So the storms continued.
This one was far closer to the heart of the Crescent Islands than she’d ever seen. Perhaps because the city was in disarray? There weren’t enough sorcerers tasked with doing things like making sure hugely destructive and unpredictable storms filled with horrors kept away from the inner seas. Staring at it, Marin thought this one was entirely too close to Alyssium.And to us.
Surely, the sorcerers would disperse it before it grew too large.
“Have you ever been through a magic storm?” Marin asked.
“No,” Dax said. “That’s what they look like?”
“Yep.”
“What’s a magic storm?” Ree asked.
“Hopefully, you won’t find out,” Marin said. “They’re unpredictable. It could disperse or head in another direction. If we’re lucky at all, a helpful sorcerer will decide to tame it before it becomes a problem.”
They watched the purple undulate, as if it were eating itself. She shuddered. She guessed it was pretty in the same way a deadly jellyfish was pretty. The sea below it was wine-dark.
“Keep an eye on it,” Marin advised. “We don’t want to get caught in it.”
All of them stared at it some more.
Ree asked, “Should we sail faster?”
“Sure,” Marin said. “You want to blow on the sails?”
“Rude,” Ree said.
Marin winced. “Sorry. Magic storms make me nervous. They shouldn’t exist, and it always feels like they’re really mad about that fact and want everyone to know it.”
“I’d heard theories that they are naturally occurring,” Dax said.
“Sure, maybe, but if that were true, why did they get worse after the emperor decided to hoard magic?” Marin asked. “I guess it could be a coincidence. I’m not a sorcerer. Never went to the university. Never even read a book on magical theory. And anyway, the politics of why it’s here doesn’t matter. The fact that it’s heredoesmatter.”
