Page 71 of Tempest

A pond filled with sharks, Cat thought, eyeing too many sails and flags to count.

While Fell consulted his harbor charts, reading the currents of the busy docks, the helmsman turned the wheel, and the Fledge responded, bearing to port. Wood clacked as oars were racked below deck, ready to help maneuver the ship at Fell’s command.

As they approached, Cat squinted, eyeing the closest lighthouse. Her gaze narrowed, tracing the tower, its stone whiter, cleaner. Newly built.

Next to her, Fell did the same. With a snap of his wrist, he unfurled a collapsible spyglass and peered into it.

“Is that—”

“A song tower,” Cat finished for him.

Fell glanced sidelong at her, suspicious. He tipped the spyglass, offering the lens to her. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve seen song towers before, Fell,” she answered dryly. “I know what they look like.”

But I’ve never seen them beyond Arcayo.

She turned the new information over in her mind as the Fledge sailed closer. The tower was unmistakable now, not rounded like the Esperese lighthouse but squared off at the corners, every inch of the white stone carved in intricate whorls.

To match the wind and the tides, the sky and the sea, Cat knew. And the song within it all.

Her eyes ascended, tracing the carvings as they twisted upwards. There was a room at the top, open on all four sides, like the crown of a bell tower.

With no bell.

“Can you see inside?” Fell muttered, shading his eyes to stare at the shadowed belfry. “What do they keep up there?”

Cat resisted the urge to remind him he held the spyglass. Instead, she shook her head.

“Priests, mostly. But the sun is high, the sky clear, the sea soft and calm. There is no need for a priest today,” she explained, her eyes darting between the waves and the heavens. Then back to the top of the tower, searching for a glimpse of an indigo-dyed sleeve.

Fell collapsed his spyglass and stowed it.

“I did not know Esperin believed in island superstition,” he scoffed, shaking his head, though his eyes remained on the tower as they passed. Down the deck, most of his men seemed to show the same skeptical sentiment.

Superstition. Cat did not share the faith, but she would hardly categorize the Arcayan religion as such. Though she doubted Fell would care.

“They did not use to.”

Against the Esperese port, bustling with continental warships and merchant sailors, the song tower seemed terribly out of place. Peculiar. And foreboding too.

“Singing off hurricanes—what a joke,” Fell muttered, turning his face back to the city.

After a long moment of staring, too many thoughts swirling in her mind, Cat did the same.

Like Archenport, Alvaris was only a few decades old. Most of its buildings were pale-pink stone, built to withstand the storms of the Furies. The streets climbed up the first heights of a green volcano presiding over the island. Cat spotted the burnished bronze steeple of an Esperese church and battlements of a walled fort overlooking the harbor. Cannons glinted in the noon sun, bright as black stars. They did not give her pause like the ships at anchor. She counted a dozen warships, and three times as many merchant vessels, in dock or anchored in the shallows. Most unloaded cargo for the market, carrying wares to the flat plaza alongside the docks, half of it shaded by striped tents.

But the bustling dockside was not her concern. Cat looked above the city, tracing up the volcano looming over Alvaris. The fiery mountain was long dead, the jungle ridges overgrown, with only birds rising from the highest peak. Her brow furrowed as she searched, hunting for another church spire, another flash of stone amongst the trees.

Somewhere, a bell began to toll, counting off the noon hour.

It took six strikes for Cat to find it, the simple church tower amongst the trees, half consumed by the jungle. Not shimmering bronze but worn stone, a sentinel for many decades. She stared at it without blinking, tracing the path from harbor to tower a dozen times, until she felt satisfied.

Out of habit, Cat reached for the watch at her belt, checking the time against the bell tolls. Her lips twisted, the hands of the clock well behind the hour.

“You should sell that old thing if you aren’t going to have it repaired,” Fell muttered, eyeing the face over her shoulder.

“I shall add that to my list of things to do,” she replied, snapping the watch closed before Fell could tease her about the faded rose. “We start with the Esperese navy, and work our way down.”