The Captain of the vessel – Volin was his name, I remembered – waited for me by the giant ship’s wheel. He was a tall, barrel-chested man with ruddy, freckled skin and the most peculiar beard: wildly curly, and a sort of pale orange-ish colour, even though the hair that could be seen under his black peaked cap was the characteristic Silingan brown-gold.
I had met him three times. The first, when I was carefully and officiously handed onto the ship by the entourage who had escorted me to the coast, I had barely begun my study of Silingan and understood only one in three of his words. The last two, I had been too sick to do more than brusquely refuse his offers to dine in the Captain’s cabin, and close the door in his face. This time, after nearly eight weeks of study and with the sea calm, I would do better.
“Good afternoon, Captain.” I acknowledged his deep bow with a polite nod, concentrating on the unfamiliar rounded vowels and flat, sharp consonants. The uneven stresses were giving me some trouble too, but I went on, reasoning that it was better to practise on him than on anyone more important. “My ladies tell me that land has been sighted. How long do you estimate it will be before the ship reaches the shore?”
The Captain stared at me wordlessly for a moment in apparent surprise.
“Your Royal Highness? You – speak Silingan?”
I didn’t allow my expression to change. “I have studied it as best as I could in my cabin, Sir. I hope you find me understandable.”
He blinked. “More than understandable. Do you speak many languages?”
“Six with what I would dare call fluency – but that includes Yamarri, of course. A handful more, enough to speak and understand, but not write. My Mother – ” I broke off, feigning a cough to conceal the lurch of remembered shame and grief. “The Queen thought it important that I have the facility to learn.”
She had thought it important for the future head of state. Had she known my eventual fate, she would most likely not have bothered to encourage my interest in linguistics. What did a minor foreign princess need so many languages for? It was likely that the only tongues I would speak for the rest of my life were Yamarri and Silingan. Yamarri, probably, with decreasing frequency...
Aramin only spoke Yamarri and Ulmenni, the mountain dialect. And that last not very well. When she was little, she had wanted to learn, but my Mother had always shooed her away, telling her that my tutors must focus on me. When she grew older she had been too busy with friends and music and parties and riding to attend even to the lessons she was offered. But she had always been so charming and loveable that no one really minded. I wondered if Mother minded now. If it irked her that her new heir was so unprepared for the role in almost every way. That Aramin lacked every skill I had worked so hard to perfect.
But I knew the answer, of course.
If it were otherwise, Aramin would be here. And I would be there. Where I belonged.
Seeking to distract myself, I repeated my question, “Are we within sight of land at last?”
Still looking a little dazed for some reason – perhaps my accent was difficult to understand – the Captain bowed to me again and cleared his throat, gesturing to my left with one gloved hand. “Not land as such, no. Well, look for yourself, Princess.”
I turned reluctantly into the harsh wind, grasping at my hood to hold it in place. And then stared, letting the hood fall, heedless of the freezing onslaught on my newly exposed skin.
“Are those – they are – ?” My new Silingan vocabulary failed me and I was grateful when Volin jumped in.
“Icebergs, Princess. That is the Numinast, in our old tongue. The ice fields of Silinga.”
2
A field of icebergs? More like a – a forest, or a labyrinth. The milky grey sea proliferated with great floating chunks of ice: blue, white, blue-white, jade green. Some were striped. Some as large as the very ship that carried us. They were jagged, ragged, swirling and cracked, twisted as if the sea and the wind had sculpted them from blasts of flying foam, and the cold had frozen them in place while they were still in motion. They extended as far as my admittedly nearsighted gaze could follow them, seemingly anchored somehow deep beneath the lapping waves. Though the sun was well hidden in the clouds and the light was dim, still each iceberg had a strange inner glow – a sort of blue-ish or green light that emanated from deep within. It was eerie.
“They mark the beginning of the Inland Sea that separates our largest island from the three smaller ones,” the Captain explained. “In the summer they shrink, but each winter they return, as great as ever – one of the symbols of the indomitable will of our nation. No enemy ship has ever navigated the Numinast without sinking. They are either crushed between the shifting walls of ice or run aground on the spikes that lurk beneath the waves."
“And we are to navigate it?” I asked faintly.
The Captain smiled, moving as if to pat my arm, and only drawing back when Ane gracefully blocked him with a minute shift in her stance. Good girl.
“Never fear. We’ve dropped anchor here and signalled to the mainland with magnesium flares – you will have heard them, I think?”
The lightning and thunder in my dream. I kept my expression immobile and simply nodded.
He went on, “One of our iron-hulls, with a Royal Ice Breaker aboard, will come to meet us. The Ice Breaker will use his magic to clear a path through the field, and lead us safely back through it.”
Sereh made a small noise of shock. She was the only one of the ladies who spoke passable Silingan herself. It was the reason she had been selected to come. Without looking, I reached out to grasp her hand: reassurance and warning for both of us. My own lip wanted to curl and I bit the lower one again to stop it.
‘Magic’. I had read about it in my books and tried to prepare myself, but now I was forced to confront it. They truly believed in such heretical things here.
In Yamarr it had long been understood that all the extraordinary Blessings possessed by certain humans were a product of our sacred connection with the Triple Gods. There was no such thing as ‘magic’, no trickery or supernatural forces. It was a natural ability, born to some just as a beautiful singing voice or strength or intelligence were given to others. Children with such a divine ability were taken by the Whisperers – our religious order – and educated and trained to dedicate their abilities to the service of the Gods and the realm. They healed, researched, advised. They used their talents to make discoveries in medicine, agriculture, and science that glorified the Triple Gods, and passed their skills onto the next generation. My own chief tutors had been from the order of Whisperers, and it was on the advice of one of the order that my Father, a promising young scholar, had been chosen to pair with my Mother and create the next generation of the Royal family. Whisperers were humanity’s only real link to the Gods.
The Silingans, I reminded myself, did not worship the Triple Gods. They had only one deity. Morogana, they called him – for they had even given him a gender. The Warrior Sun. A god of war.
Too late to go back now.
The Captain was regarding us with a crinkled brow, perhaps sensing something of our shock but not understanding it. Seeking to distract him and Sereh, I let my gaze wander back to the water. Before I could make some remark about the icebergs or the weather I saw something that truly did distract me. Letting go of Sereh’s hand I stepped closer to the rail, pointing down.