Bela awoke in the night, and for a moment, she didn’t remember where she was. Her skin had been hot with a sweat beyond her spent passions, but her breath rose as fog in the frigid air of her cabin.
Her cabin. Yes, she thought, her eyes making out the familiar details of the walls around and ceiling above. The Sandcrow.
So very far from home.
Nestled in her arms, Oni stirred and shifted at Bela’s movement. The loose curls of the shipmaiden’s long black hair had spread out across Bela’s chest—darker against her more olive tones than they were against Oni’s brown skin—and as Bela shivered awake, some of the stray strands tickled at her nose.
As quietly as she could, Bela huffed the hairs away, then stared up at the frost-covered boards in the night, wondering if she could possibly go back to sleep.
And with dreams of fire, did she want to?
After a few minutes, Bela sighed and slipped a leg free of the thick wool blanket that was bound up around them. Oni seemed to smile in response, and her cheek settled further into Bela’s shoulder. She purred with sleep.
Bela smiled too. She’d long known that Oni’s devotion was far more than the duty owed by a maiden to her shipmistress. But it still pleased her to see the happiness writ so plain on her sleeping face.
But Bela couldn’t stay in bed all night. Memories of the war had her awake now. And she wasn’t about to spend the remaining long hours of the night being a pillow.
Carefully, she hugged her maiden, feeling the tight cords of her muscled back as she rolled her over and slipped her arm out from beneath the maiden’s head. When Oni eased back into the warmth of the blanket, Bela shifted it up around her, tucked her in.
Free from the blanket and her maiden’s arms, Bela swung her feet to the fur rug on the floor and stood, naked to the cold air. She stretched her limbs in the small but comfortable cabin that was her home.
Not for the first time, she found herself bothered by the lack of a rolling sea beneath her feet. She was Seaborn. Her life had been the sea. Even before she became mistress of the Sandcrow, she had experienced happiness only when she’d ridden the waves and known the rise and fall of the Mother Sea like her second breath. The stillness of the room this past month—the unrelenting immobility of the ship around them—made the world seem off-balance and wrong.
Bela shivered, the cold sliding over her skin beginning to override her body’s heat. As quietly as she could, she gathered up her clothes and put them on: the sea-grayed shirt and pants that she’d worn since she was salted, then the layers upon uncomfortable layers needed to fight back the horrifying cold of the Sea of Ice.
They’d come a long way from the warm and sandy shores of the Fair Isles.
Taking one last look at the beautiful Oni sleeping, Bela pulled on her boots and stepped into the corridor, then up the stairs and out into the bitter night.
The four lanterns strung about the deck illuminated a pool of frozen white around the ship. There was so little to see, but Bela knew that even the sun when it rose would bring nothing more to their view. The world around them, once a terror of waves, had become an endless blank canvas.
If Tewrick was right, no one had seen anything like it in a thousand years.
Malaika was on watch, and Bela saw her standing against the frost-painted mainmast at midship, a black figure against the pale beyond. For a moment, the fog that was rising around the grizzled woman made it appear as if she was smoking through some of the last of her prized stash of shred, but when Bela came down from the rear deck, she could see that it was only the steam of her breath.
Malaika looked over at the movement and nodded. “Mistress.”
Her nod was curt, hardly a proper mark of respect for the shipmistress of a vessel—any ship, but certainly not one so magnificent as the Sandcrow—and for a moment, it crossed Bela’s mind to reprimand her. But the night would be long and cold, and she saw no sense in adding to the woman’s discomfort. She knew, too, that Malaika was surely holding back much more that she wanted to say. More than any of the sparse crew they still had left, Malaika had not been quiet about questioning the sanity of their mission. And now that the winter’s frozen sea had locked them all in place, she’d come to have a kind of morbid humor about what she saw as their inevitable demise.
Bela would never say it out loud, but she suspected the woman was probably right.
The ice floes that had locked them in, that had stormed up against their sides as the snows spun and the sea went white with freeze, had been grinding against the Sandcrow’s hull for weeks. The ice had even broken through in places, leaving poor Sanyu to work ever harder at keeping the ship afloat in one piece. And winter would last many months more.
“Had yourself some sport,” another voice said from the dark.
Bela caught what looked like a smirk on Malaika’s face as they turned in the direction of the sound. “Onyeka,” Bela said, nodding respectfully at the older woman’s approach. Few of the salted women had wanted the evoker aboard for the voyage. Magick, they thought, had no place on the waves of the world. Bela had been nervous, too, especially after the betrayal by one of her order had cost Bela’s mother her life. But there was no question that her magick had been useful more than once.
“Heard your rubbing all the way up front,” Onyeka said. “Woke me up.”
Malaika had turned to look back out at their blank surrounds. “Jealousy is a terrible thing,” she muttered.
Onyeka’s eyes narrowed on Bela, as if she were expecting her to reprimand the salted woman for her disrespect.
But Bela ignored it. “It’s no doubt for the best that your devotion to your magick takes away the distraction of such things.”
The evoker’s expression showed she wasn’t certain if Bela was mocking her or not. “So it is. Distraction with the Char is death.”
Bela nodded, though, of course, she didn’t know from her own experience. To the women who could ingest it, the Char opened them to the ability to weave. It brought them magick. But everyone knew the stories of the evokers who, in haste or hope or fear, took too much at once.
Their deaths, the stories said, were the same as those who had tried to ingest the Char and failed: contorted agony and bloody screams. Bela knew the sight of that pain. Her mother had breathed in the Char that night. She’d breathed it in, and the result was so terrible that Bela had taken her life to end her pain.
Onyeka stifled a yawn in the cold air.
“I am sorry to have woken you, though,” Bela said. “You need your strength.”
It was no mockery. The evoker’s magicks had brought them heat on the coldest of nights and shattered shafts of ice when they’d burst through the hull. Her presence might’ve made life aboard the Sandcrow difficult for Bela at times—to command magick, as the saying went, was to command the world—but Bela couldn’t question her usefulness as the winter had set in. And there was no greater truth than the fact that what was useful was prized. It was the way of the Seaborn.
Onyeka sniffed and straightened her back. “I’m strong enough still, girl.”
Bela gritted her teeth and nodded to the woman’s authority.
Malaika sighed. “I miss the sun.” It wasn’t a complaint, just a statement of honest truth.
“The sun and palm-shaded sand,” Bela said, smiling. “I’m not meant for this cold.”
“No one is,” Onyeka said.
Bela expected a rejoinder from Malaika—likely something about the unspoken truth that the ship wasn’t built for it either—but the woman was staring out into the night. Her shoulders had tightened.
“What?” Bela asked.
“I don’t—” She shook her head as if she were trying to make sense of what she’d seen. “I—I thought I saw something.”
“Nothing lives here,” Onyeka said. “Nothing.”
“We do,” Bela whispered.
Malaika pointed a grubby finger out into the night. “There!”
The word had hardly left her lips when there was a roar upon the cold air, and a white shape surged into the feeble light of their lanterns.
The evoker yelled. The white thing sped closer, a four-legged run, then leaped up and onto the deck. It roared again, and beneath its obsidian eyes were long teeth, pearl white against black gums. Daggered claws slashed through the air, and Malaika’s blood arced across the decking—hot red on frosted white.
The veteran sailhand was falling away. The mouth of teeth turned to Bela. It roared, and its breath smelled of old fish.
A bear. White as snow, and bigger than any two of them.
In the corner of her vision, Bela saw the glitter of gold flecking the air. Char. Thank the Mother, the evoker actually had her pouch with her. Bela could envision Onyeka inhaling the shimmery yellow haze, then twitching her old fingers through the rest of the falling cloud to thread it and weave it into raw power.
It would be a beautiful sight, she knew. But she didn’t turn to look. Without thought, her hand found the cutlass at her hip, and a moment later, she was holding the familiar weight of a claw of her own.
The bear roared again.
This time, Bela roared back.