He found the one he was looking for—the charcoal coat he’d come to favor in their years at sea—and he shrugged it on just as a voice rang out from the deck above.
Not Vasry or Tav calling down for wine, but Stross, his deep tones booming across the ship.
“Hals!”
Land.
III
THE SOUTHERN POINT
SEVEN YEARS AGO
“Hals!”
Stross’s voice rang through the ship a moment after something scraped against the hull. One second Lila was asleep beneath a mound of quilts, and the next she was lurching out of bed, balance thrown by the steadiness of the floor beneath her legs.
She swore, shoving her socked feet into the boots she kept beside the bed, and sliding into her coat as she flung open the cabin door. Kell was already there, his own coat in his hands, his face taut with alarm, and moments later Vasry and Tav spilled into the hall, the former disheveled but dressed, the latter wearing far less but clutching a sword.
Lila opened her mouth to speak, but she was cut off by the sound that a captain never, ever wanted to hear: the splintering of wood.
She surged up the steps onto the deck. A pale mist surrounded the ship, and the sun sat somewhere below the horizon, the sky promising a dawn that hadn’t yet arrived, but in the soft light, she saw Stross gripping the rail, and staring down over the side.
“You’re supposed to call land before we hit it!” she snarled, breath pluming in the frigid air.
“It’s not land,” said Kell, from the upper deck.
She stomped over to the nearest rail, looked down, and swore even louder when she saw that he was right. The ship hadn’t struck land.
It had struck ice.
Three weeks before, Lila had decided to point the ship south, and sail until something stopped them. And now, at last, something had.
She should have seen it coming, should have turned back days before, when she’d first woken to find frozen slivers floating on the surface of the water. When the cold turned sharp enough to drag its blade across her skin. When Kell’s coat started offering him warmer and warmer sides, cowls and hoods and collars lined with fleece, gloves already waiting in the pockets.
They should have turned back, but the world was vast, and she was hungry.
And now they were stuck.
This wasn’t an icy plinth they’d struck against, a cap floating in the sea. There was no sea anymore. It had frozen solid. Which meant she would have to unfreeze it. She sighed, and swung her leg over the side.
“Captain,” called Stross, but she waved him away.
“Lila,” warned Kell, but she ignored him.
She was an Antari, the strongest magician in the world. She could move a ship.
She jumped, held her breath on instinct, expecting the ice to shatter when she landed on it, expecting to feel the bone-jarring cold of the water closing over her head. But her boots hit the ice with a slap, and the world beneath didn’t so much as shiver.
Lila squinted into the distance, but it was like staring into an empty scrying glass. Her good eye played tricks, tried to conjure something in the absence—a port, a dock, another ship—but the images all dissolved back into the fog.
She circled the ship, hoping to find a path of water in its wake, but in the short time they’d been stuck, the ice had somehow already frozen around the hull. Lila rolled her neck and cracked her knuckles, the cold wind latching on to her bare hands. She rubbed them together.
“Put wind in the sails,” she called up, her voice echoing across the vast expanse of ice.
Moments later, Tav had the canvas drawn taut and Vasry conjured a gust of air. The whole ship groaned in protest, and Lila thrust both hands out in front of her, taking hold of the surrounding ice, wrapping her will over it like fingers as she ordered the mass to melt.
The scene before her shone, and shimmered. The ice seemed to thin in places, but beyond that, it did not heed. Annoyance bloomed into anger, and anger was powerful. She tightened her grip, forced her will into the surrounding ice, told it to be water.
The sound of it rushed in her ears, along with the crack of the topmost layers of ice.
The world tipped, but it wasn’t the frozen mass giving way. It was her sight. Lila’s good eye blurred, her head suddenly heavy, and Alucard’s voice echoed a warning in her ears, from those first days when he began to teach her magic. The larger the element, he’d said, the harder it was to wield. A magician could only manipulate what they could hold. A current from the air, a few inches from the soil, a wave from the sea.
No one can stretch their mind around an ocean.