Alexis Glaciermage's Arc

Chapter 13 of 13

Alexis stayed at the high perch beside the rainbow dragon as the wind held east by north. Then the horizon changed. A wall of dark cloud climbed out of the sea ahead of them, shot through with veins of pale lightning that branched like cracked glass. The flashes were not white. They were pink and blue and faint green, colors no storm should hold. She tasted the air and got nothing back. No pressure drop. No pull. The sky had gone silent under her nose. She dropped to the deck and went straight to the map room below. She spread the old parchment across the table, the one with shimmering runes around the edges, and ran her claw along the heading. No mark. No warning. She pulled three more charts from the shelves around her and laid them over each other. The storm sat on none of them. For the first time since she had taken the post, the sky had given her a page she could not read. She climbed back up. Rikki was already at the prow, watching the cloud wall grow. "I can't read it," she said. She did not soften it. "It isn't weather I know." Rikki nodded once. He did not ask her to try harder. He turned his head up toward the masthead instead. The rainbow dragon had not moved. The dragon's gold scales caught the last clean light. Its rainbow wings half-opened, then settled. Its horns tilted a degree to starboard. The head followed. Not east by north anymore. East by north by a hair. Alexis flew up and tapped the collar at its throat. The box clicked. "Through," the dragon said. "Hold my line. Do not correct." She called the heading down. Raihan adjusted the wheel by that hair. The Roaring Dragon slid into the wall of cloud, and the colored lightning broke open above the sails without touching them. Wind hammered the canvas from angles Alexis could not have called. The dragon's horns moved. She read the horns instead of the sky. Two degrees port. Hold. One starboard. Hold. The ship cut a seam through the storm that no chart had drawn. They came out the other side into flat water and a clean sun. The crew stood at the rail in silence, soaked and standing. Rikki looked up at her on the perch. He did not say it, but she saw it land in his face — the bet he had made the day he hired her had just paid in full, in front of every sailor who had waited for her to fail. Alexis folded her wings and sat down beside the dragon on the masthead. She was still the sailmaster. She still read the wind. But today the wind had stopped speaking, and a smaller creature had spoken for it, and she had been the one who knew to listen. That was the job now. She looked out over the clean horizon and found, for the first time in a long while, that her name on the ship felt like it fit.