Glaciana Frostcall's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The lantern was turning, but the ship was still a speck. Glaciana held her note above the shelf while her dragon beat slow circles in the cold air. The sky at her back had begun to thin. Grey was creeping into the black. Dawn was coming, and dawn would strip her song of its hold on any man who heard it. She judged the distance. The ship crawled. The wind that carried her voice did not carry the hull. At this pace the sun would break the horizon before the captain crossed half the open water. He would blink, shake off the pull, and steer away with a story about strange singing in the north. She stopped singing to think. Her dragon dipped a wing, waiting. Below them the shelf glittered — miles of frost, and every ridge studded with the sharp crystal plants that had first taught her how to throw a note. One plant had hummed her breath back sharper than her throat. A field of them, struck by the right voice at the right height, might do more than carry sound. It might pull. "Down," she said. "Low over the shelf. Skim it." The dragon dropped. His belly scales grazed the crystal beds. Glaciana drew a full breath and sang a single, low note straight into the field beneath her. The plants caught it. Every cluster along the dragon's path rang. The note doubled, then tripled, then ran ahead of her like a wave through glass. It rolled off the edge of the shelf and out across the water in a sheet of sound she could feel in her teeth. Far out, the lantern jerked. The ship heeled. It came about hard and drove toward her, faster than wind alone could push it. The sea itself seemed to lean. She held the note until her chest burned. The dragon banked. The ship closed a mile, then another. The grey behind her deepened toward pink. The hull struck the ice at the shelf's outer lip just as the first true light touched the horizon. Wood cracked. Men shouted. The lantern tipped and went out. Glaciana let the note die. Silence rushed back. Her dragon carried her down to the shelf, and she stepped onto the ice on legs that shook. She had him. The ship was hers, grounded on her frost, its crew stumbling out onto the shelf in the raw new light. She scanned the figures for the one she wanted — the captain, the fabled one, the reason for three nights of failed song. She found him at the rail. He was not looking at her. He was staring past her, inland, at the pale spires of her castle rising from the ice. His hand was on his pistol. Dawn had come. Her song was done. And the man she meant to keep had seen her home before he had seen her face.