After another week of bartering and long days fishing the reefs, the day eventually came to set sail for Saphir, and Grey felt bittersweet about the ordeal. Regardless of the outcome of the captain’s announcement to the crew, she was guaranteed to say goodbye to some of them. She had used the rest of her time on the island to ignore that fact.

  She pulled on her gear in her officer’s cabin, getting used to the sway of the ship again after spending a few weeks sleeping in her sunveil. It was mandatory for the lower enlisted to sleep in quarters on the Paso Fino the night before they disembarked, and Grey kept the habit even after her first promotion. She didn’t care to have her first night back on the ship choking down bile on the rougher waters of the open sea.

  Grey was fortunate to have a cabin to herself. There were plenty of rippers that stayed in the crew dorms, stuffed in with the cooks, grounders, and other sailors. They were some of the last senior-enlisted to be afforded a private cabin, captains generally prioritizing sages, navigators, pursers, and the like. Even as the division lead, it was not a guarantee she would be assigned one. The world seemed to think sailors in the combat ranks were fine wherever you stuffed them.

  Lucky for Grey, the Paso Fino was a massive ship. After Akula had acquired it, he had to bring on more crew just to sail the beast. As far as Grey could figure, they were still shorthanded. After a potential exodus in Saphir, the Captain would have a big task hiring on enough sailors for the long trip to Mayacar.

  After she had inspected and tightened the last buckle on her ripper leathers, Grey made her way down the hall connecting the officers’ cabins in the belly of the stern. The rear of the ship was the most stable part of the Paso Fino and the least dangerous in battle, so the senior-enlisted, especially the officers, were afforded cabins on its lower level.

  They shared the space with an impressive line of rear cannons and the rudder. In an ambush, they were the last line of defense to these essential rooms, both of them critical for fleeing a battle.

  The captain’s quarters, as well as his office, the armory, the great cabin, and the navigation chamber, were on the top level of the stern. They were a short climb up a ladder at the end of the hall, making them easy to reach and defend from the officer’s quarters as well.

  Sunlight from the stern galleries temporarily blinded Grey as she ascended the ladder into the great cabin. It was a massive room with maple walls, sturdy rails, and hammered iron fixtures. Akula was already standing at the sturdy command table, pouring over the three maps he had shown Grey.

  The sight reminded her of the biggest advantage of housing the officers in the stern for a captain: they were likely to pass through the great cabin at the start of their day. The other end of their hall dumped out into the cargo hold, which was inconvenient to navigate when trying to get to the mess hall in the midship. The exit was there to allow alternate routes if they were boarded, but the cargo hold was either stacked high with cargo or with supplies, depending on the leg of their journey they were on.

  Heading up and through the great cabin simplified things, in theory. On Akula’s ship, you often had an over-eager captain ready to jump you as soon as your eyes opened.

  Without looking up, Akula spoke. “I’m having the division leader’s meeting today, officers included. I want everyone to have as much time as possible to consider their options, and I polished the plan a few days ago. After we get through sailing out of port, I’ll call a meeting this afternoon.”

  “I wondered why you had those out where anyone could see.” Grey laughed, gesturing at the maps, trying to lighten the mood.

  Akula shrugged, barely registering Grey’s response. She hadn’t seen him this focused on something in a while, and it was making her weigh his drive to do it. She sat a few chairs from him, pulling the map of Eel Cay and the surrounding Myriad while he remained focused on the map of Mayacar.

  She had loosened up to the idea after her breakfast with Lotti. The whisper always had a way of making Grey rethink things. She would give this opportunity a chance.

  She believed in the Captain and in the rest of the officers. The leadership on the Paso Fino was second to none, and it set them apart from crews that had tried and failed to run the route. Or so she hoped, even if she chose not to stay.

  Grey examined his notes. Akula had changed pieces of their path after Saphir, but the general idea was the same: solve filling the crew in the port of Saphir, journey through the more populated islands of the Myriad, keeping well supplied, and then set out across the Mayacar border.

  “Are you seeing anything you would improve?” the captain asked, finally looking up.

  “No, you’ve clearly gone through it well enough. At this point, you’re on to the decisions that won’t matter in the long run, and, honestly, should be run past Gideon.” She broke eye contact to look down at the map. “Maybe you should let this go for a while and clear your mind before calling us in. The most important thing is that you sell this to the crew.”

  He looked like he wanted to ask Grey where she stood, but instead he stretched out his back. “You’re right. I should put this down.”

  Grey smiled, trying to reassure her old friend. “Well, what about attending muster? Maybe a word or two to the grounders will get you in the right mindset. They all made it on the ship last night for check-ins, so there shouldn’t be any dramatics.”

  The captain considered and then acquiesced. He stood, folded his maps, and backed away from the table. After stashing them in his office and locking the door, he continued with Grey out of the double oak doors that led to the deck.

  The main deck was massive on the Paso Fino. Even after you worked past the ratlines and dark oak main mast, there was a sizeable open area before reaching the stairs to the foredeck. The sailors called this open stretch of planking the stomp deck, crudely referring to both a common Nochebraga dance and the fact that their quarters were directly below. It was hard to sleep with the main thoroughfare of the Paso Fino overhead.

  The saltwood boards of the stomp deck were a light shade of smoke grey that the sailors, often the grounders, polished to a dim shine. The saltwood planking and rails complemented the warm honey tone of the teak foredeck and quarterdeck and the dark oak of the mast timbers and doors.

  Had the Paso Fino been truly expensive, the entire ship would have been constructed of saltwood, save the masts. The material was extremely resistant to ocean water, mold, and wood bugs. Its downside was that it had to be pulled out of the bogs of central Etos, Swanrot Fen, usually by prisoners. Between the bug-sickness and drowning, the work was dangerous, which made saltwood a rare and expensive timber. The fact that the Paso Fino had any at all spoke to its quality.

  The grounders were already in formation when Akula and Grey stepped out onto the stomp deck. They looked excited to see the captain, which pleased Grey.

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  Grey started with a roll call. She had ensured all of the grounders were aboard last night before curfew, but it was tradition to run the list at muster. It was habit for them and took hardly a few moments.

  Everyone was here, looking better than they had in weeks. This was likely because the quartermaster limited rum rations while actively outfitting the cargo hold. They were more sober than they had been in weeks.

  Grey nodded that everyone was accounted for, and Akula took over after. After a short greeting, he moved on to morale building and a few bawdy jokes. He wasn’t an overly harsh captain, and though there were exceptions, Grey had noticed that most of his crew responded well to his firm kindness. If she ever had her own ship, it would be a lesson she took with her.

  He did not mention their next venture. He would save that for after his meeting with the officers. While he would eventually gather the sailors, grounders, and the rest of the lower enlisted to talk about their plans, he would want their division leaders to hear the information first. As the lead riptide, it would fall to Grey to break the news to the grounders.

  After a few minutes, the Captain started to wind down. He winked at Grey. “Remember, a good grounder finds their own way out of trouble; a great one finds a way to blame the riptide.” This got a big cheer from the formation and a grunt from Grey. She dismissed them with instructions to start helping the sailors make ready to weigh anchor.

  The captain busied himself with clearing for sail, checking individual operations, equipment, and plans. Grey left him on the quarterdeck talking with their navigator, Gideon, who looked annoyed that he was being checked up on.

  He was a short, wiry man who looked like he’d been on the sea as long as Grey had been alive. He was never pushy, but when he had advice, everyone listened. She thought this was the best place for Akula to work out some of his energy, and she headed across the ship to the foredeck to check on her own items.

  It wasn’t long until Lotti climbed the stairs to the raised portion of the bow in her sage raiments. While she was on the ship, long lavender stormsilks waved from where they were tied into her powder blue raiment and maple blonde hair. While she wore the silk ribbons on shore, they were fewer and of a more convenient length. On the ship, they trailed behind her like the tail end of a gale.

  Grey nodded as she approached, but was busy checking the anchor rigging. A lot of stress was put on its components while docked, and losing it when the crew was weighing anchor for departure would be a disaster. She moved ropes and crates around the foredeck as they barred her from her work. She only paused to help the sailors where she could.

  Lotti spent a reasonable amount of time making fun of Grey for doing manual labor before she started warming up for her departure responsibilities. She read the air currents, letting the Myriad breeze whip her stormsilks into a dance around her.

  Wind sages were the only ones who wore the silks, but other sages used their own tools to read the world around them. People often attributed a sage’s power to these items, but as with most things about the Order-chosen, the general populace was in the dark.

  Grey knew the stormsilks assisted Lotti in her work, as a compass assisted a navigator, but that she didn’t need them to influence the wind. In fact, when she was in a mood, she liked to threaten to throw them overboard. Grey knew she was being dramatic. Her ship-set alone could buy a tavern, and though she feigned it often, Lotti was not an inherently wealthy woman.

  Lotti had tried her best, over the years, to explain how whispering worked to Grey. Though she would never fully understand it, Grey knew quite a bit more than any other nullborn on the Paso Fino.

  Grey was proud that she knew what she did. The practice was so much a part of Lotti, and in order to understand her friend, she had to understand how the world worked for the sage.

  Of course, there was also certainly an advantage to knowing more about sages than the average riptide, even outside of knowing her friend. Knowing the basics had certainly helped her at the wrong end of a fight against one.

  As she understood it, there was a force, or Velor, in all things. Either by natural ability or practice, Sages learned to manipulate Velor in their favor, influencing the physical world around them. The more religious of Etos called this Faith and proof of Order; others believed Velor was of the natural world and not related to temples and prayer stones.

  According to Lotti, Velor was the same whether influencing a gale, a tidal wave, or a sailor’s wooden leg, but the Sages learned the discipline they excelled at when they came of age. For Lotti, this was obviously wind. She could take their sails from luffing and slack to bellied and straining with a few moments of concentration and a wave of her arm.

  After so many years, Grey was not sure she even needed to wave her arm. Same as Grey added to her reputation on the Myriad, Lotti added to her own. Even with her abilities, it was important to have every advantage while sailing with Akula.

  Lotti had been born, as all Sages were, with the ability to influence Velor in every capacity, though with relatively little effect. These children, the Order-chosen, were carefully watched until they came of age and their influence specialized. Then they’d be carted off to the appropriate sage court to hone their craft, a great honor for their families and a world of opportunity open to them.

  As the years passed, Grey came to learn that everything was not so black and white with the Order-chosen and the sages they became. It wasn’t often, but Grey would catch Lotti influencing outside of her discipline. Sometimes, when they played a game of stones for gold, Lotti could aid the pebble into the cup by moving the pebble, but not the air. When she had blown the sign from the tavern in the Dusk Isles, Grey was almost positive she had sucked the Velor out of the torches as her gale became its full force.

  Lotti had no formal training outside of the whisper court, Mistvale, which meant that she would not have been introduced to influencing anything other than the wind. An Archsage would claim it wasn’t possible for her to achieve the feat on her own. A Noble would insist she must be high-born to have a shot at that kind of miracle, and, of course, a Priest of Order would have you believe that it wouldn’t be possible for her to manipulate Velor outside of her discipline at all.

  Everyone insisted, but Lotti just did.

  Despite what the Faithful would have you believe, there were Sages who had spent a lifetime mastering other disciplines, but Grey had never met one, and she likely never would. The vast mental capacity required to understand how Velor influenced dissimilar objects and elements was only born into a few people a generation, and they remained in Mistvale, the Grove, or one of the other Sage Courts as Lorekeepers, Archsages, and Elders.

  In Lotti’s own discipline, there were stories of legendary wind sages who were able to slice a slip of parchment without moving it a hair or send an arrow through a sheet of iron without using a bow. Lotti had insisted the kind of precision and control this would require was impossible, and that these stories were for the uneducated (no offense, Grey). Funneling the wind-down without losing its Velor, to even the diameter Lotti had used to launch the sign on the Dusk Isles, could only be achieved by extremely skilled whispers.

  Even without knowing the extent of it, the sailors knew to walk quietly around the sage while she prepared to push and pull the currents. Grey was greasing the anchor port when the wind started to whip in unnatural ways, and she knew Lotti had started influencing. She liked watching her friend work and paused to look up.

  Something about the stormsilks whipping in erratic waves around the whisper was calming, and when the sun was out like it was today, the iridescent white of her raiments’ pearl trappings shimmered and matched their movement. The display reminded her of how vast the world was, and how fortunate she was to see so much of it as a ripper.

  After a few soft moments, Grey went back to her work. She laid the rag she had been using onto the teak of the foredeck and focused on some bolts mounting handles to the windlass. They appeared tight, but she could borrow a wrench from a passing sailor to check.

  As she considered, movement fluttered at her feet. It had not been a minute since the rag left her hand, and it was whipped off the foredeck and flapping across the saltwood planking of the main deck. She liked the rag and didn’t want it overboard.

  “Chaosdamnit, Lotti.” Grey stumbled down the stairs and lurched across the stomp deck after the stretch of fabric. After reaching and missing it three times over, she decided she was done with the anchor for the day.

  If you're enjoying Osprey, don't forget to check out my sapphic sci fi, Hopper: