Page 9 of Add To Hoard

I find this, on most nights, either humbling or clarifying depending on my mood.

Tonight it is neither. Tonight I am flying west with the stars at my back and the cloud layer below me and something in my chest that I cannot name sitting where my certainty usually lives, and I am trying to decide what I intend to do when I find this vessel, and I cannot get the decision to settle.

The answer should be simple. It has always been simple. Ships that breach the fog boundary are turned by the barrier currents; ships that survive the currents encounter the storm systems; ships that survive the storm systems do not, in my six centuries of experience, survive what comes after. The system is not cruel. It is not designed to destroy. It is designed to discourage, and it discourages with increasing insistence the deeper a vessel penetrates, and at no point in the history of that system have I needed to make a personal appearance to resolve the situation.

The situation has always resolved itself.

I drop below the cloud layer.

The water below is black and heavy, running the long swells that build in open ocean when weather has been working on them for days. I fly low enough that my wingtip would touch the crests if I tilted, low enough to feel the cold spray rising from the wave faces, and I follow the corridor bearing southeast with the night sky as my cover and the island at my back pulling at me with its old magnetic certainty, the pull of home that six centuries have not dulled.

I find the brig twenty minutes out from the inner approach.

It is smaller than the report suggested. Or perhaps it simply looks smaller out here, alone on open water at night with the vast dark of the Varak Fog behind it and the vast dark of the open sea on three sides. A working vessel, not built for this, not equipped for this, deep-hulled and sturdy, built for coastal runs and short crossings. The sail is up and drawing. The running lamps are lit. Someone is at the wheel.

I circle at altitude, wings angled flat to silence the downstroke, and watch.

The figure at the wheel is human and slight and wearing a coat that has been soaked through and dried and soaked through again by the look of it. Dark hair, rope-braided back from a face I cannot read at this distance. She, and it is a she, I can see that much — has both hands on the wheel and her weight braced against it and is sailing with the focused economy of someone running on the last of what she has.

I watch her correct the heading twice in quick succession as the swell shifts beneath the hull. Small adjustments, precise ones. Not guessing. Reading the water and responding to what she reads.

She knows what she is doing.

The thought is unwelcome. It would be considerably easier if she didn’t.

I bank wide and come around from the north, dropping lower, the cloud cover thinning at this altitude to a layer I can move through without losing sight of the brig below. The instinct that has been running beneath everything since the first report sharpens into specificity now that the vessel is directly below me and not an abstraction on a piece of paper. End it. One pass, one strike, the hull opened below the waterline, the sea closing over it in minutes. Clean. Final. The island secure, the barrier intact, the precedent maintained.

My claws flex involuntarily against the night air.

I don’t dive.

I tell myself I am gathering information. That destroying a vessel without understanding how it got this far would be strategically wasteful — there are questions that need answering first, about charts and routes and who on the mainland knows what about the fog corridor, and a dead sailor answers none of them. This is a reasonable position. It is the position a dragon with six centuries of strategic thinking would take.

I stay with it.

Close enough now to hear the creak of the rigging and the water working at the patched hull when she speaks.

Her voice carries across the water with the particular clarity of sound at sea, no walls, no echo, nothing to absorb it, and she is not speaking to anyone aboard because there is no one aboard. She is talking to the ship. She has been talking to the ship, I realize, for some time, in the low continuous way of a sailor who needs the sound of her own voice to confirm she is still present.

“We are not sinking,” she says. Her voice is rough with exhaustion and salt and something underneath both of those things that lives next door to desperation. “I am telling you that directly. We are not sinking and we are not turning around. I have not come through that—” a gesture, presumably at the fog behind her, “—to stop now. So whatever is ahead, we are going through it. Together. You and me.”

The brig says nothing. The hull holds.

I watch her lean her forehead briefly against the wheel, just for a moment, just the weight of it, and then straighten again and put her eyes back on the horizon.

“Bren,” she says, quieter now, not to the ship but to herself or to the night or to someone who cannot hear her. The name lands differently than everything else she has said. Stripped of the defiance, stripped of the performance of someone talking themselves through something impossible. Just a name, said the way you say a name that holds everything you are doing this for, you need to remember why you started. “I’m coming. I’m going to fix it. Just— hold on.”

The wind takes the words and disperses them.

I am still.

I have been observing humans, at various distances, for six centuries. I have watched them from clifftops and from the upper air and through the scrying pools in the Spire’s lower chambers, and I understand them the way you understand a weather system — their patterns, their tendencies, the things that reliably predict their behavior. I have never found this understanding to be a particularly emotional experience.

The name Bren is doing something to my chest that I have no framework for and do not want one.

Someone, on the mainland, is waiting. Someone is sick, or in danger, or both, and the woman at the wheel of this battered, impossible brig has sailed through the Varak Fog in a storm with a cracked hull and no crew because the arithmetic of staying home did not work out and this was the only remaining option.

I know something about remaining options. I know something about being the only thing standing between what you love and what threatens it.