Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 589 of 619

The tide turned at dawn. Ajax had his crew, his ship, and blank water ahead. What he did not have was a way past the reef. Marcus Tidewater knew the northern shoals, but no one aboard had read the water west of the bay. Before they sailed, Ajax needed a pilot who could steer the Seraphine through rock no chart named. He found the answer in a woman he had never leaned on for the sea. Elara came to the dock as the crew loaded stores. She wore her new band, the one the Emissary gave her, and it caught the low light. She had run the seals alone for a season while these men sat idle. Now Ajax needed her again, not for a door, but for a promise. "You go west into water no one has crossed," she said. "If the hull opens, you drown before I hear of it." "Then I want a way to call you," Ajax said. Elara pressed a small token into his palm. It was warm, a curl of moonlit metal she had shaped from her own working. "Break it under the sky and I will come by moonlight," she said. "Once. It holds one call. Spend it when the choice is drowning or living." She closed his fingers over it. "Not before." Ajax turned to the problem of the reef. Marcus stood at the rail, arms crossed, reading the swell the way other men read a face. "I can hold her off a reef I can see," Marcus said. "I can't guess a gap I've never crossed." He said it flat, then jerked his chin toward the gangway. "That's why I bought us one." A captain came aboard behind him, weathered and quiet, hired at the port two nights past. He had run wreck-strewn coasts for thirty years and named his price in silver. He walked the deck once, felt the boards, and nodded. "I read shoal water by its color," he said. "Green over sand. Brown over rock. Where it goes white, we die." Marcus watched him with grudging respect, one seaman weighing another. Chalam set his hand on the mast and marked it with lodestone dust so the seer could track them home. Rowan checked his bow and his water skins, saying nothing. Kael and Torren stowed the blades below, then took their places at the rail. The crew was set. Ajax gave the order. The pilot took the tiller from Marcus, and the two men found a rhythm, one calling color, the other cutting the wheel. The Seraphine slid past the last islands into open west. Ajax stood at the bow with Elara's token in his fist and his father's blade at his hip. The idle season was behind them. Ahead lay the reef, the smoke, and a door older than his father's line. He meant to reach it first.