Page 10 of Add To Hoard

It is not sympathy. I am clear about that. It is recognition. Considerably more inconvenient.

I climb back above the cloud layer and fly east toward the Spire.

The decision I have made, and I have made one, even if I am not yet prepared to examine its edges too carefully — is this: the vessel will be monitored. It will not be destroyed. Not yet. There are questions to be answered about the route she found and the information she is carrying, and those questions have strategic value, and that is the reason I am returning to the Spire without having ended this cleanly.

That is the reason.

I file it under intelligence-gathering and do not look at it again directly for the remainder of the flight home, the same way you avoid looking directly at something bright, not because it isn’t there, but because looking at it straight on tells you more about its nature than you are currently prepared to deal with.

The Spire rises from the island below me, black against the darker black of the mountain, its upper chambers still lit. Soryth will be awake. Soryth is always awake when I have been out at night, which says something about the elder’s confidence in my judgment that I have never decided whether to find reassuring or irritating.

I land on the upper platform and fold my wings and stand in the cold air for a moment before going inside.

Below, somewhere in the dark water between the fog and the island, a small brig is still moving southeast with its running lamps lit and its hull holding and a woman at the wheel who has come further than anyone should have been able to come and who has a name for the thing she is doing it for.

“Monitor her,” I tell the duty rider inside. “All approaches. Report to me directly. She is not to be intercepted.”

The rider’s face is carefully neutral, a junior officer who has questions and has correctly assessed that this is not the moment for them.

“Understood,” the rider says, and goes.

I stand in the war room with the scout reports on the table in front of me and the name sitting quietly in the back of my mind where my certainty used to be, and I look out the west-facing window at the dark where the water is, and I do not sleep.

5

NERINA

The water changes before the island is fully visible.

I notice it in the feel of it beneath the hull first, the swell flattening, the rhythm shifting from the long open-ocean roll to the shorter chop of shallow water, the way water behaves when land is close enough to interrupt it. Then the color. In the thin gray light before dawn the sea around the ‘Tenacious’ has gone from deep green-black to a color I have no name for that sits below the surface rather than on it, as though the water here has depth that goes further down than depth should go.

Looking at it directly is a mistake.

The temperature has dropped again. Not the functional cold of open water at night but a considered cold, with intent behind it, and the air that comes off the island as I draw closer carries a mineral sharpness — volcanic rock and something older underneath, something that has been here longer than the rock.

Bloodstorm Peak is fully visible now, the fog having pulled back from its immediate coastline the way fog pulls back from fire. It is larger than it looked from a distance. Not surprising, but still briefly terrible. The cliffs that form its outer edge are black basalt, sheer and wet, rising from the water at angles that suggest the island emerged from the sea already angry about it. Above the cliffs the terrain climbs in stages — jagged ridgeline, dense treeline, and above that the peak itself, still crowned in its permanent weather, the clouds turning slowly in a pattern that has nothing to do with the wind at this altitude.

I read the coastline the way I have learned to read everything that might kill me: methodically, without letting myself react until I have the full picture.

The cliffs dominate the northern and eastern faces. The western approach, which is the one the fog corridor has delivered me to, is less sheer, the basalt here has broken down over time into something lower, and at the base of the lower rock face I can see, in the growing light, a stretch of black sand beach perhaps two hundred yards long. Sheltered on both sides by rock formations that curl out into the water like fingers. Accessible.

Barely accessible. But accessible.

I adjust the heading and bring the ‘Tenacious’ around toward it.

The approach takes longer than I would like because I take it slowly, the only responsible way to take an unknown coastline in a damaged brig in the dark. I go to the bow and read the water by the way it moves around submerged rock, nudging the wheel in small increments, feeling for the bottom with everything I have learned about how water behaves when it is running shallow. Twice I feel the hull graze rock beneath the surface and my heart seizes and I compensate and keep moving.

The third graze is the bottom shelving up to meet me.

I run the ‘Tenacious’ up onto the shore at a walking pace, feeling the hull lift and settle and lift and settle as the shallows slow me, and then the bow finds the beach properly and the brig shudders to a stop with the particular finality of something that has arrived and knows it.

I stand at the wheel for a moment in the sudden quiet.

Then I go below.

The patched hull takes twenty minutes to inspect properly and the news is better than I expected and worse than I hoped. The standard result of inspecting things you have been trying not to think about. The repair is holding. The split plank has not opened further despite the grounding. There is water in the bilge but there is always water in the bilge and the level is not rising. The only question that matters. I pump it down to manageable and come back up into the gray dawn and get the lines.

I run two from the bow to a rock formation on the beach’s northern edge — old volcanic basalt, thick around as my waist, going nowhere. Two more from the stern to a spur of rock at the waterline on the southern side. When the tide comes back it will lift the hull and the lines will hold her true and I will not be twisted sideways in the surf and I will not drift. This is the best I can do alone and it will have to be enough.