Anne Dray's Arc

Chapter 16 of 28

The alliance held the cut's mouth, but Anne slept badly. Grimjack was the only reason her fleet had crossed the Shelf. He was the only reason it could ever cross back. One old man carried the whole route in his head, and the Crown knew it. She found him at dawn on the far deck, alone. Grimjack had guided the fleet through waters where every compass needle spun useless. He trusted his memory over any instrument. But he was old, and his hands shook on the rail this morning. "Fever came in the night," he said. He did not soften it. "Dr. Caldwell says it may pass. May not." Anne felt the trap close. "If you go, we're sealed in here. Every ship. Forever." "Then don't wait on me." Grimjack looked at her straight. "Learn the route while I can still speak it." Anne sent for Emily. The exiled shipwright came fast, still wiping tar from her hands. Emily had built the hull that led their line through the Shelf, and she had watched the water the whole crossing. "You saw more than you let on," Anne told her. "I saw enough," Emily said. "Not a chart. A memory. His memory. That's not the same as mine." Grimjack talked through the morning. He named no bearings, because bearings failed in there. He named the water itself. The pale patch that meant deep rock. The place where the current pulled left, then hard right. The three swells that came before the narrow cut. Emily marked none of it on paper. She listened, then repeated each stretch back to him in her own plain words. When she got one wrong, he corrected her. She said it again until he nodded. By noon Grimjack's voice thinned. His eyes closed between sentences. "That's all of it," he said. "Now it's in two heads instead of one." Anne would not gamble the fleet on a memory neither could test. She took one ship out to the Shelf's edge that afternoon. Grimjack could not stand, so Emily read the water alone. Anne watched her call the pale patch, then the left pull, then the hard right. The hull answered. Emily brought them a mile into the spinning nothing and back out the same seam, clean. Emily stepped down from the rail. "I have it," she said. "Not his way. Mine. But it works." Grimjack lived through the night. The fever broke by the third day. But he was not the only door out anymore. Emily could read the Shelf now, and the route lived in two minds the Crown could not chase to a single old man. That night the local captain rowed over with word. A Crown sail had been sighted at the far reef, alone, searching. They were hunting the one navigator who could follow Anne through the Shelf. They did not yet know there were two.