The next dawn brought brighter light. Dorrin looked out the window—coated with what looked like frost-fur—and opened it a little and breathed in the fresh air. She put a hand through the opening and felt the outside of the window, then tasted her finger. Salt. She pushed the window wider. The ship moved up and down over deep green water with white at the top of every wave. She could not see ahead or behind, but in the direction she could see, no land showed, only a vast expanse of water, all of it shaped into the hills and hollows of waves.
“Past the worst of it,” the cook said when he appeared with a mug of sib and another piece of bread. “How sick?”
“No more in the jug,” Dorrin said.
“Good,” he said.
She drank the sib in small swallows and ate the bread in careful bites. The ship’s motion, as it slid down into the hollows between waves and tipped up to climb over the crests, no longer bothered her while she was sitting in her bunk, mug in hand. After one slop of sib over the top, she learned to let her hand stay in place while she and the ship moved. Much like drinking from a flask while riding, she realized.
By midday she was able to eat more than dry bread, and though they passed through another squall in the afternoon, she felt no sickness. The captain explained that they had turned south while the storm moved north.
“We go behind it,” he said. “Come on deck—you should see.”
She wasn’t at all sure she could walk, with the ship falling out from under her and then shoving upward, but the captain helped her down the passage. “Loosen your knees,” he said. “Go with the ship.” She tried and at once felt steadier. It was like riding a horse, where stiff joints made balance more difficult.
Once outside, on deck, she held on to the rail of the ladder to the upper deck and looked around. The wider view showed no land at all. Dorrin had no idea how far away land might be or in which direction. Clouds obscured the sky, but here and there a ray of sunlight stabbed through.
The next day they sailed under a blue sky spotted with puffy white clouds over smaller waves.
Chapter Thirty
“We’ve got to bear west again,” the captain said. “The way the wind is, we’ll miss the Immerhoft if we don’t.”
Dorrin listened without commenting. Her stomach had settled in the better weather, and she was able to exercise on the deck, not just in her cabin.
“Not all the way to the Eastbight—” the first mate said.
“Yes, unless the wind changes. We’ll need the backflow off the mountains there.”
“I’ll start drilling the men, then,” the mate said.
Dorrin looked up at that. “Drilling?”
“Come in too close and Slavers’ Bay pirates will come out and look us over. Best to be ready to fight. We may need you, too.” That last in a tone that was almost a question.
“Certainly,” Dorrin said. She watched as the mate used the captain’s keys to open a storage locker in the passage just outside his cabin—javelins, crossbows, heavy wide-bladed swords she remembered seeing in Aarenis. Every day the crew practiced maneuvers she had not imagined, running up the rigging with a quiver of javelins, tossing rings of rope two handspans across to land over a man’s head, grappling with one another on the deck … nothing like the drills her own troops had used, yet—on a ship moving in the water—it made sense. She herself practiced her footwork, her point control, all the movements that could be performed on the ship. The captain even supervised her first attempt to climb the rigging, and the next day she made it up to the basket lookout on the mainmast.
Two hands of days later, a smudge on the horizon caught the morning light.
“The Eastbight’s prow,” the captain said. “A little north of where I hoped we’d find it.
“How close do we come?” Dorrin asked.
“No closer than this, I hope,” he said, looking aloft to the streamer she now knew showed wind direction whichever way the ship turned. “And the wind’s fair for us.” He turned away from her and began giving orders she now half understood. Sailors hurried to obey, and the ship swung to heartward—port, as he called it.
By midday they were closer to the Eastbight but not much, and the peak she had first seen now lay off the sword—starboard—side, a little aft of the ship. She could not see where the mountains met the sea, only the loom of their tops.
To her surprise, the captain ordered some sails furled; the ship slowed. She looked; he looked off to the southwest, then ordered more sails brought in. “If we sail past the Elbow in the afternoon light, they’ll pick us up from the lookout they keep on the summer side of the Eastbight and maybe attack by night. Don’t want to clear the Elbow in afternoon light. We’ll bide here until sundown, then raise all sail and try to get past the worst of ‘em by night … They’ll spot us in the morning, but it’ll be a stern chase and they probably won’t bother.”