Page 8 of Add To Hoard

The ‘Tenacious’ says nothing. The repaired hull holds.

I take that as agreement.

By late afternoon I am running on the far side of energy, the thin, flat state on the other side of exhaustion where the body has spent everything available and is now running on the memory of what it felt like to have reserves. I have been at the wheel or in the hold for the better part of a day. My shoulders are a single continuous statement of grievance. My hands have stopped registering the cold as a sensation distinct from their general condition.

My mind goes to the docks. The cargo runs that started before dawn and ran until my arms stopped working. About the fish crates and the rope burns and the merchants with their hot drinks watching from doorways.

“I have spent my days gutting fish,” I tell myself, or possibly the fog, or possibly whatever is behind it. “And my nights lifting cargo. This is a holiday by comparison. Bring whatever you have left.”

The sky above seems to consider this.

And then — incrementally, almost reluctantly, a long-held fist unclenching. It begins to change.

The fog thins overhead first. Gray becomes lighter gray becomes the pale washed-out white of cloud with actual sky behind it, and then the clouds themselves begin to separate, pulling apart at their edges, and through the gap comes light. Real light. The kind that has traveled from somewhere warm to reach me and arrives still carrying the warmth of the distance.

The first ray catches the water and turns it gold for three seconds before the cloud shifts again.

I stand at the wheel with my soaked coat and my aching hands and my face tipped up toward it like something that has been underground for too long, and I breathe.

The fog continues to thin. Not uniformly. it retreats in patches, the way retreating things do when they have not quite decided to commit to the retreat, and through each gap the light comes differently, angled and fractured, turning the water around the ‘Tenacious’ from black to deep green to near-silver at the edges.

One of those gaps is where I see it.

At first I take it for cloud. The scale is wrong for anything else — too large, too dark at the base, too — permanent. Cloud does not sit on the water. Cloud does not carry the permanence of a landmass that has been in one place for a very long time and intends to remain there. Cloud does not rise from a base of black rock visible even at this distance like a wound in the surface of the sea.

It is not cloud.

It rises from the water in stages — cliff face giving way to jagged ridge giving way to peak, and the peak disappears into its own weather system, a permanent crown of dark cloud that turns and turns slowly, almost breathing. Around its base the water is a color I have no name for, darker than the Blaecwater even at its worst, and the light that touches it seems to do so reluctantly, as though it knows it is not entirely welcome.

Bloodstorm Peak.

I have heard the name my entire life the way you hear the names of things that exist to be avoided, and now it is in front of me, real and vast and ancient in a way that makes the ‘Tenacious’ feel very small and my own certainty feel like a thing I assembled in a hurry from materials I found lying around.

The pull in my chest, the one I have been navigating by for hours without admitting that I was navigating by it — goes very still.

As though whatever has been herding me here has let go, now that I can see where I am going.

I keep my hands on the wheel. I keep my eyes on the peak. I do not let myself think yet about what comes next, because what comes next is the part I have no plan for and thinking about it will not improve the situation.

I sail toward it anyway.

I have come too far, and Bren has too little time, for anything else to be a reasonable option.

4

MAELOR

The second report arrives three hours after the first.

The rider lands while I am still at the table. The scout is one of the younger patrol dragons, barely a century old, with the wide-eyed quality of a junior officer whose understanding of how the world works has just been substantially revised.

The vessel is still moving, the report says. Still southeast. Still intact.

It has passed through the inner fog corridor. It has passed through the barrier weather. It has, according to the scout’s account, taken significant damage to the hull at some point during the crossing and continued anyway, which suggests either that whoever is sailing it does not fully understand how damaged it is or that they understand perfectly and have decided this is not sufficient reason to stop.

I read the report twice, set it down, and pick up my coat.

The night is clear above the cloud layer, the one reliable mercy of the upper air above Bloodstorm Peak. Below the clouds the island is all volcanic shadow and the permanent churn of the barrier weather, but above them the sky opens into vast cold salted with stars that have been burning since before the wars and will be burning long after every dragon currently arguing in my council hall has turned to ash.