CHAPTER 32: FROZEN PRACTICE

  Their northward journey was even colder than Elias had imagined. They flew low to avoid the added bite of higher altitudes, but the whipping winter wind was an endurance test for anyone above deck. And yet somehow, gradually and grudgingly, they got used to it.

  The body could adapt in ways you would not believe until you experienced the transformation yourself, Jalander opined as they stood out on the bow, Elias bundled in the clay-colored jacket he’d acquired the previous winter, his scarf flapping. Their suspicious passenger had mostly kept to himself for the first leg of their voyage to Saint Albus, speaking candidly to Elias only when they could be certain no one might overhear them, often outside under the howl of the wind.

  “Why are you here?” It was not the first time Elias had asked his occasional mentor this burning question.

  “I told you,” Jalander replied. “I’m here to acquire an artifact of considerable value.”

  “That’s what you told them,” Elias said.

  “It is the truth.”

  “It is a vague truth.”

  Flying through an endless quilt of low-lying clouds, their meeting on the bow felt even more hidden than usual. If ever a secret might be spilled, this seemed the time and place for it. Jalander peered through the fog for onlookers, but Bertrand and Briley were playing Sirens in the great cabin.

  “As you know, I work for the Valshynar,” he eventually said, his voice dropping an octave. “Not by choice, really, but that’s life as a collector for you. For me, at least. Something was discovered recently that my employer would like to… collect. Something even more ancient than relics.”

  “What’s more ancient than relics?” Elias asked, genuinely unsure.

  “You tell me. You dreamed the dream, did you not?”

  It took Elias a few seconds as the biting wind tousled his chestnut hair, looking like the curiosity-filled, messy-haired boy who had flown across Sapphire’s Reach on The Sleeping Sparrow a year and a season ago. “The civilization that existed before the Cataclysm?” He had learned from subsequent reading that this was the official name for the world-changing event of five-thousand years ago (like the details, the dates were contested), an event in which a once great mountain collapsed catastrophically into a great continent.

  “I knew you would get there,” Jalander said. “We call them the Ancients. Not a particularly clever name for a civilization, I’ll grant you, but as with collectors, subtlety is precisely the point. Relics are the crystalized power they once contained within them, but other artifacts also survived the Cataclysm and the torrents of time. One of those artifacts was recently discovered in the United North, or so we suspect. I’ve been tasked with acquiring it.”

  “Why don’t the Valshynar just fetch it themselves?” Elias wondered aloud. “Couldn’t they fly there through a sky rift in no time?”

  “Subtlety doesn’t come naturally to you, does it?” Jalander crossed his arms before continuing. “If a Valshynarian vessel descended upon the humble city of Saint Albus seeking a recently found artifact, well, that would certainly get the locals talking—and probably drive up the price of buying it too.”

  “That does make sense,” Elias admitted. “Can I see it when we arrive?”

  “That wasn’t part of our deal,” Jalander said. “Maybe. If you keep your mouth shut. We didn’t have this conversation.”

  “Just like all our conversations, then.” Elias looked back toward the great cabin and the amber glow emanating through its windowed door. Despite the cooler climate, it was warmer inside The Sapphire Spirit now than when they had it parked in Lowtown. A running engine meant a running heating system. No one savored the hot air sent through the ship’s network of pipes more than Islet, who was never far from a vent, sprawled out like a discarded scarf. “I have another question.” Elias turned from the door to Jalander. “I noticed you carry a rapier. Are you any good with it?”

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  Jalander wrapped his hand around its protruding pommel. “I might use words such as adequate and capable, but we Valshynar set a rather high bar when it comes to swordsmanship.”

  Elias had already seen evidence of that firsthand. Indeed, it was why he was asking this question now, because of Lucas Dawnlight and his cavalier words of wisdom: a gun is only as good as the bullet packed inside it. “We found a couple of dull rapiers below deck,” he went on. “I was wondering if you could teach me a few moves. It’s still another three days to Saint Albus.”

  Jalander sighed, but the answer was already written on his face.

  * * *

  “The rapier is an ideal weapon for collectors with the gift of sight,” Jalander explained during their first lesson the day after Elias had broached the subject. “We may not possess the speed of those once associated with the Silver Sanctum School, but the rapier shares certain qualities with your preferred weapon, the pistol. For one, its reach is longer than you think.” Jalander lunged forward to embody the point, his forward knee bent into a perfect angle, his back leg as straight as a ruler, his weapon arm extended further, indeed, than one would assume. “And secondly, it is primarily a piercing weapon. Sort of like a bullet, only you are guiding its trajectory until the moment of impact. Unlike with a gun, however, you will not have time to think and aim against a formidable opponent. Use your sight to augment your strikes and parries, but never rely on it.”

  “Got it,” Elias said, his breath coming out in clouds, his body trying but failing to stand still as he shivered uncontrollably, gripping his dull weapon in a single gloved hand. He was still waiting to actually swing the thing. After some debate on the matter, the two collectors were practicing outside, Jalander having determined that the lower deck was too cramped for practicing the proper techniques of swordsmanship. Elias had wrongly assumed that his trainer was a man of comforts at his core, but he clearly did not know Jalander as well as he once believed. The sarcastic Southlander still contained a treasure of tightly locked secrets deep within him—and, it turned out, just as many lessons to impart.

  Lessons such as how to parry and strike back before your opponent could return to his guard position. “Parry with the base of your blade,” Jalander reminded him, knocking aside Elias’s failed counter. “Use leverage, not muscle. Again.”

  Lessons to be heeded at a later date. “In a real fight to the death, your opponent may not duel you like a gentleman. If he comes in close,”—Jalander came in close—“your rapier will be at a disadvantage. You’ll want a parrying dagger like this one.” He unsheathed his own from within the tent of trinkets that was his cape. “It can stop a blade or even stop your enemy.”

  Lessons, too, that Elias would forget until he was forced to remember them. On that inspiring note, Jalander insisted that while he shared with his young apprentice the wisdom of a thousand Southland pearls, practice would nonetheless prove to be the best teacher. A simple mistake could grant a man the gift of eternal knowledge or death itself, and that often depended on whom he was sparring with.

  One candidate revealed herself on their last day of practice, as The Sapphire Spirit crossed its final border over island-sized snow patches and crisp copper tundra, destined for the United North’s singular sanctuary of civilization: the remote city of Saint Albus. Briley stepped down from the ship’s wheel and watched them quietly, analytically, watched them as Briley watched everything, collecting intel before making her move.

  “May I?” She extended a hand toward Jalander.

  Unsurprisingly, Jalander welcomed this request with casual curiosity and subdued amusement. He handed her his silver rapier and retreated to the bulwark, observing them distractedly as he fiddled with his pipe (a steady gale made lighting it nigh impossible).

  Briley got herself into position and put up her guard. Nothing about the way she stood betrayed her as a novice, if a novice she truly was. Elias had seen her handiwork with a dagger, but a rapier? Clearly, she was showing him something now, revealing yet another chapter in the Book of Briley Soren left unprinted—one she evidently preferred communicating with fewer words.

  Elias took the first swing. Briley parried it and almost got him. He parried her attack in turn, and so it went—their movements accelerating into a fluid dance—until, at last, she struck him in the shoulder through the fabric of his coat.

  “Sorry,” she said, not sounding it.

  He inspected the damage. “Where did you learn how to fight with a rapier?”

  “Same place you learned how to shoot,” Briley replied. “Where I grew up. Fencing is a popular pastime in the Broken Isles. Ever since we were attacked by pirates, I’ve been thinking about dusting off those old blades in the lower deck. Never imagined you’d beat me to it.”

  “Pirates?” Jalander inquired.

  “It was nothing.” Elias waved it off.

  “We almost died,” Briley clarified.

  Jalander shook his head and said nothing else, as if every detail unspoken revealed more to him than explanations ever could. The weather was turning on them now, but Elias had found his sparring partner, and Briley hers. Jalander would leave these fledglings to fly on their own, though there would have to be other days for that.

  Snow had started falling minutes earlier, and already it was painting their deck a clean, reflective white. The dry flakes of the arctic stuck more immediately than the wet slush of Sailor’s Rise. In the United North, snow was not an uninvited guest. Snow was the clay of the land, the sand of the shore. Snow was this place, and on the eve of another encroaching winter, four unlikely travelers and a cow-print cat silently slipped into its majestic, far-reaching domain. Elias had not seen another ship in days.