Morning came flat and bright, the kind of light that made the sea look like hammered metal and everything human upon it a scratch and a scrawl. The armada moved by patience, not by haste—sails reefed to steadiness, oars only for trimming a drift, hulls groaning like old men who had slept on hard floors and would do it again if asked. The whale-bones prison was a bruise behind them now, a shape the tide would forget before anyone else did. They had emptied it of suffering. That was enough work for a night.
On every deck, reunion and routine braided together. Someone wept into the neck of the person they'd already embraced three times, then turned and scrubbed the deck where they had cried. Someone laughed too loud and then passed a coil of rope along without being asked. Someone counted children. Someone counted knives. Someone washed salt out of a wound and said "sorry" when the man yelled, as if the salt had been a choice.
Rowan stood at the cutter's rail with the wind biting the sweat at his temples and let his hands remember wood. Midg pulsed at his sternum in little, stubborn beats, a tired lamp insisting at a windowsill: still here, still lit. He'd slept for an hour between ropes and ribs and all of his dreams had been water. He didn't mind. The water was honest.
"Eat," Mira said, shoving a heel of bread into his palm. She had a smear of tar along one cheek and a look that said she'd put it there on purpose if anyone accused her of carelessness. Todd, a quicksilver flicker, circled her boots in bright rings like a coin spun on a table that refused to fall over.
"I did," Rowan lied through crumbs.
"You look taller," she said, deadpan.
"You look bossier."
"Good." She bumped her shoulder into his and stood with him while the fleet breathed around them. "The prince is awake."
Rowan followed her glance to the flagship. An awning made from patched sailcloth had been rigged at the stern. Beneath it, propped on rolled rope, the prince watched with the concentration of someone learning a new language: the language of air returned. Thalriss attendants hovered with a caution that wasn't fear so much as reverence edged with the memory of failure. When an Islander boat hailed, the prince lifted a hand. When a Thalriss diver rose to report, he touched brow to brow, then lay back to husband the kind of strength no meal could purchase.
Not far aft, someone had lashed Callen's axe to the inner mast. No cloth veiled it. The empty bracket where it had belonged on their boat had been cleaned, oiled as if the leather strap might fray if ignored. Men touched the haft when they passed—some with a knuckle, some with a whole palm. The sound of skin against wood was very small. It carried anyway.
Rowan swallowed bread that had turned to stone in his mouth. He reached for the water-skin. Before he could drink, a shadow fell across his hands. Luna set the skin higher, tilted it so it would not splash his shirt, and held it there like she refused to let gravity make a fool of him. Her forearms were bandaged; the white cloth was already salty pink.
"How many times have you told other people to drink?" she asked.
"Depends whether I liked them."
She arched a brow. "And me?"
"You're on a trial period."
"Ah." She tapped the water-skin with one finger in a rhythm he recognized from last night, the simple in-out that had steadied a dozen panicked lungs. "Drink, then argue."
He did. The water was warm and perfect. She watched until he took more than a polite sip, then eased the skin down and looped it back on the peg with a competence he admired too much to say aloud.
"You should sit," she said.
"I did."
"You napped on rope and called it an invention. Sit like a person."
"I don't like feeling the boat move under me."
"That's the boat's opinion," she said, and caught his hands before he could tuck them away. Her thumbs found the raw places along his knuckles where locks had fought back. She sighed, very quietly. "Do you know what I like about your hands?"
"They're attached?"
"They're honest." She turned one over, traced the line of a split that had scabbed without consent. "They never pretend you haven't done a thing."
He would have made a joke. She arranged his fingers gently, and the joke did not arrive. Her glow, which often lay like a soft shawl around anyone she went near, had drawn close to her skin today—tight, bright, husbanding itself. He saw where Lyra's fingernails had scored her forearms last night and wanted to punch the sea for being a place where that had been necessary; he wanted to kiss her wrists where the cloth wrapped them. He settled for stillness.
"You didn't sleep," he said.
"I slept between beats." She smiled wryly. "The fleet has a lot of hearts. They kept me company."
"You're not a bellows, Luna."
"I know." She looked up, and for a heartbeat he saw the weariness behind the calm and the stubbornness behind the weariness. "But no one drowns in air on my boat."
"On ours," he said, before he could measure whether the word would land wrong.
She blinked, and the tightness at the edge of her eyes softened. "On ours," she said, and let go of his hands only to step into the space they made. She put her head against his shoulder in a hug that felt less like comfort and more like a pact: you hold; I hold. He wrapped an arm around her, surprised at how little strength he had to spare and how gladly he offered all of it.
"Gulls are discussing your hair," Lyra announced, appearing with the gracelessness of the newly exhausted and leaning her spine against the mast as if the mast had agreed to hold her up for a while. "They think it looks like seaweed that filed a complaint."
Luna didn't lift her head. "Tell them my hair could outthink their grandchildren."
Lyra grinned, then winced and pressed the heels of her hands to the hollows before her ears. The dolphin surfaced just then beside the hull, a silver back drawing a clean line through the sun. The bond still shocked Rowan's bones each time he saw it—the way a sliver of that light lived now beneath Lyra's skin, the way she tilted her head as if listening to rain that had yet to fall.
"Too loud?" Luna asked gently.
"Yes, but also…good." Lyra's eyes were bright and unfocussed and then suddenly sharp, as if she'd found a single face in a shouting crowd. "The manta is humming again. She hums when she counts. She counts the breaths of everyone she loves. She says the prince's breaths keep trying to be ragged and then remember they ought to behave." She giggled, then clapped a hand over her mouth, startled by her own laughter. "The gulls are also discussing whether that boy's fish is theirs."
"Which boy?" Rowan asked.
Lyra pointed with unerring accuracy, then flinched, pressing her palms harder. "I can hear under the hulls too. The remora say our boats taste like fear and old rope." Her mouth pulled sideways. "The orca is far out. Angry. Not at us. At…something I don't have a word for yet. He says the water is bruised."
"Then we are in the right place to leave it better," Luna murmured.
Darin thunked an elbow against Rowan's shoulder as he came by, Tharos's shimmer hugging his shape in soft jade. "Shield's holding across two beams now," he reported, as utterly matter-of-fact as if he'd learned to tie a new knot. "Tharos doesn't like when fish bump. I think that's professional courtesy."
"Try three beams after we feed you," Luna said.
"Feed me and I'll hold the whole damned fleet," Darin grunted, but his grin took the sting. He tilted his head, caught sight of Lyra's knuckles grinding at her temples, and sobered. "You good?"
"I'm…" Lyra considered. "I am not drowning."
"Good enough," Darin said, and touched two fingers absently to the bandage at Luna's wrist in acknowledgement before he moved on.
Mira hung off the rail near Todd and watched Darin's back disappear. "He thinks he can be a wall to the horizon," she said, admiration grudged only in tone, not in truth. "We'll let him try."
Rowan turned back toward Luna. She had not stepped away. The deck trimmed under them, the fleet's slow breath. He realized his heart had taken to beating when hers did, as if her in-out cadence had loaned his chest a metronome. "You never told me about your teacher," he said quietly. "The one who cuffed you and blessed you in the same breath."
"She has an opinion about everything and cuts rope like it called her a name," Luna said, eyes going sideways to find the older woman on a nearby deck. "She taught me there's no such thing as a small job when water's around. You pull the little thing that's wrong out of a net and the whole net remembers how to be right."
"You do that with people."
She made a face. "People are harder. They keep putting the wrong things back in."
"Then pull again."
"Stubborn," she accused.
"Says the lantern," he said, and she huffed a laugh that turned fast to a soft sigh.
It shouldn't have been a surprise when she kissed him. It still was. She tipped her face up and he met her halfway and the world narrowed to the warm edge of her mouth and the salt on her lip and the way her breath caught just once before she steadied it like a hand on a nervous horse. It was not a hungry kiss. It was patient and certain and clean, a promise you can repeat without it wearing out. He put his palm to her cheek and felt—under the skin, under the scar of salt and the long night—the steadiness that made her the kind of person boats would obey even while pretending not to.
When they broke, Mira pretended not to look. Lyra didn't bother. "At last," she said, deadpan, then brightened. "The gulls give it a six."
"Out of?" Rowan asked.
"They didn't say." Lyra squinted toward the flagship and shivered as another current of voices crowded her attention. "The dolphin says you two smell like bread. He's curious."
"Tell him I'm taken," Luna said primly, then glanced back at Rowan, humor cutting clean through the heaviness and leaving something lighter behind. "No arguments, harpooner."
"None," Rowan said, and meant it as a vow.
They walked the length of the deck together, Luna's fingers lingering on his wrist as if to learn the language of his pulse. The fleet around them was learning, too: Islanders and Thalriss swapping tasks without digging up old grievances to salt them; a coral-headed spear passed to a sailor who had never liked the taste of kelp and now took it with a nod because today wasn't about preferences. Thalriss medics slid through the water on either side with green poultices tucked against ribs; Islander cooks sent hard bread and fish stew down lines and across gaps and didn't admonish anyone for slurping. A mother taught a boy to sit in the shadow of a mast, hands under thighs so he would not fidget them into trouble. A Thalriss child with wet hair like a crown watched, eyes wide, before vanishing under the rail with a flick of her tail to remind the sea she had not forgotten.
Now and again, the chest-beat began—two thuds and silence, two thuds and silence—and boats answered with palms. Not mourning. Not triumph. Only the language of respect when words would have been cheap. The fleet was remembering something older than suspicion: how to move as one without agreeing on every reason why.
A shout rose from the second line of cutters. Rowan and Luna both turned, ready for the kind of shout that meant attack. This one meant the opposite: a child had found his father's footprint in dried tar on a plank and traced it with a finger and argued mightily that his own foot would fit when he grew, and men had made a noise with their mouths because the noise wanted out.
Luna smiled until the corner of her mouth quivered. "If this day were kinder," she murmured, "we'd float like this to dusk."
"If this day were kinder," Rowan said, "we would have slept last night."
She made a noise that might have been agreement and might have been a prayer. "You will sleep tonight. I will make it so."
"Bossy," he said. He didn't quite make it a tease.
"Necessary," she said, matching his not-tease with her own. She squeezed his fingers and let her hand fall away because work tugged at her sleeve like a child with a question. "I have to check the bandages by the mast. Don't pick a fight with a wave."
"No promises." He watched her cross the deck and felt his chest expand and settle in a way that had nothing to do with Midg and everything to do with the idea that his life, full of salt and knives as it had been, might hold a gentle thing without breaking it.
"Rowan," Mira said, sidling up with the air of a sister about to rib and a soldier about to brief. "The prince asked after you."
"I freed his locks, Mira, I did not father him."
"You're very defensive for someone who hates ceremonies," she said sweetly. "He likes that you don't bow. It makes the men around him unclench." Her gaze softened. "He keeps asking about Callen."
Rowan's throat tightened. "We all do."
She knocked her shoulder to his again, less an assault than a leaning—tired bodies making a bridge. "When we tell the stories later," she said quietly, "we don't leave him out because he left the boat. We put him where he belongs—in the part where the line held."
"He'd hate that," Rowan said, and felt the laugh break against the back of his teeth like a wave against a rock. "He'd say we make him sound noble."
"He can complain when he gets back," Mira said fiercely, and that was that.
They were still standing together when Lyra's breath hitched like a fish caught in a child's two hands—gentle and too tight. She straightened so abruptly she knocked her head against the mast, swore, and then forgot the pain as both palms flew to the deck as if the wood itself had spoken.
"Lyra?" Rowan asked, already moving.
"Shh," she said, and it was not a command to him or anyone, it was a pleading to the riot in her skull. Her eyes went far and then focused like a spear tip. She swayed. The dolphin surfaced on the starboard side, turned, and pressed its brow to the hull twice, impatient. Lyra pointed down and a little off the bow, finger shaking with the certainty of it. "There."
"What?" Mira asked, all taut rope now.
Lyra's voice went quiet and huge at once. "Not words. Not like us. Young." She swallowed hard, as if the salt had risen to her tongue through no fault of her breath. Tears stood in her eyes and did not fall. "It hurts. It's alone. It's calling and it doesn't know who to call for so it calls to everyone."
Rowan did not realize his hand had found the rail until the grain bit his palm. Midg trembled so fiercely it tickled. "How far?"
Lyra turned her head and her listening with it, the dolphin mirroring the angle like a needle on a compass. "Two points starboard," she said with sudden confidence. "Under the swell. Deep. Nets above. Lines." Her lips pulled down at the corners. "Wrong singing."
"Wrong singing?" Mira demanded.
"Men," Lyra said, eyes narrowing, "and something that learned the shape of men but not why." She squeezed her eyes shut for a beat, then opened them, and the bright wildness there steadied. "It's calling us. Or it will take anyone who will listen." She looked at Rowan. "I think… I think it can hear you even when you're not listening back."
A ribbon of cold braided itself down Rowan's spine and warmed at the same time, an absurd sensation he would not know how to explain if anyone asked. He glanced toward Luna, who had felt the shift before he said a word. Their eyes met. She gave him the smallest nod; the kind you would miss if you didn't know what it cost to give. Go, and come back.
Rowan's mouth was already forming the order before his head caught up. "Darin," he called, and the man was there as if the name had pulled him by the collar. "Small cutters. Quiet. No horns. Thalriss in the water. Mira—fast line, short crew. Lyra—stay with me."
"Bossy," Mira muttered, and grinned despite herself. Todd sparked at her ankles like punctuation.
Rowan turned back to Luna and leaned into one more beat of her steadiness, the press of his forehead to hers an abbreviated prayer. "Tie me to the world," he said low, so only she would hear.
"I already did," she murmured, and kissed him once—quick and sure, a knot pulled tight. "And I'll yank if you drift."
He smiled because the alternative was to break. "Then we find it," he said aloud, and the words ran the length of the deck like a cord touching off fuse after fuse, sending men to places they already knew their boots would fit.
The armada did not turn like a single beast. It didn't have to. A handful of cutters peeled off, oars slipping into water without a splash. Thalriss slid over rails like knives being returned to their sheaths after an argument. The dolphin arrowed ahead, a bright seam pointing the way. Somewhere on the flagship, the prince raised his head and fixed his eyes to the place Lyra had pointed, as if he might will the distance to shorten by stubbornness alone.
Rowan braced his hands on the gunwale as the cutter leaned into the first pull and felt the fleet's breath shift to make room for what came next. Midg steadied in his chest. The minnow had nothing left to prove and would prove it anyway.
"Two points starboard," Lyra repeated, voice gone simple now that the choosing was done. "There."
Rowan nodded once. "There," he agreed, and the cutter's prow cut a clean V into the morning, toward a cry that had not learned its name yet and had called theirs instead.