Sleep was hard to find.

The girl pretended to be asleep anyway, hoping that would trick her body into obedience. But when she heard a low grunt and the crunch of pebbles her pretense was blown. She creeped open her eye to the size of a slit, to find under the dim light of a dying flame that Lalmeja and his acquired cudgel were absent from where they had lay.

She shut the slit, trying to sleep. She would have succeeded too, had not a swishing sound sliced at her dreams.

Sighing quietly, the girl got to her feet. Taking care not to step on pebbles she hunkered down to a heap of orange rocks. She peeked over their top.

The Ardaunt was making use of a tree trunk as a practice sword. A thin bole, thin as the girl but twice as long. He was lunging at invisible enemies, thrusting, jabbing, swinging up, swinging low, swinging hard enough to behead.

Fascination gripped the girl. She knew swordplay, of course. Or rather, she knew of it. But she had not known one man could cut down two dozen if he knew how to swing well enough, like Lalmeja had cut down those bandits.

Then again, he was no man. He held the trunk in his hand like it were a pick.

The girl found her head inclined, her body pressed tight against the rock. Eyes captured by the suave motions the trunk-sword made, hewing at air.

They covered by-and-large fifteen miles the following day. She could tell since she had become used to keeping track of her heartbeats, and her steps, and a lot of things she would have paid no mind to till a month ago.

Lalmeja caught a rabbit for dinner. She cooked it over a spit. She ate all of it, him none. His ways were still a mystery to her; he seemed to eat less than a toddler, then lift grown men with three fingers like they were toys.

The girl was tired by the time Belraed sank in the sky and Cupar rose, but she made herself stay awake. This time she had to pretend to not be sleepy to keep herself from dozing off.

When she felt the Ardaunt’s weight shift behind her, she counted to fifty beats then stalked away searching for where he was. She scowled at the night when she could not find him, and squealed like the rabbit in her stomach might have done before it died when his huge hand descended on her shoulder.

“Why you not sleep?” he asked her, not ungently.

She had been caught off balance, in the kind of frame where one cannot help but be honest. “I . . . wanted to learn,” she blurted out. “Learn fighting. From you. Sorry.”

Lalmeja frowned the way only Ardaunts can, in the low purple moonlight that gentle edge to his vast forehead become a pit to fall in. “You are small,” he croaked, turning away. “Sleep.”

The girl felt anger stewing in her bosoms. She hardly realized her Wolf was snarling until the knife had jumped into her hands. His special knife.

Lalmeja stared down at her. She fully expected to feel his powerful fist on her silly mouth, but he only shrugged. “I do not know how to teach. I try. Okay?”

Her eyes swelled. “Okay,” she said.

A week later the girl was covered in bruises from head to foot, stiff in areas she was sure were supposed to be flexible. She was learning, slowly despite being a fast learner, that fighting was just another form of pretense. You pretend to be in control and charge of your muscles for long enough, and gradually they obey you to do fearsome things.

The mermaiden had a name for itself — herself — which was little more than a hooting sound.

She used to have a name, or so she said. Well, nay-eem is what she really said. She used to be a normal human girl once. She didn’t have memories of then, she said, only the knowledge that they were true.

The naiad’s earliest memories were that of her Sea Mother — whose name was a sound like the cry of a walrus — holding her hand, leading her through the anemones and spatterdocks and lilies under the sea, singing songs of worship to Aevan, whoever and whatever Aevan was.

“Aevaaaaaahn!” the mermaid screamed when the surface-dwelling sea-riders wouldn’t understand her. “Roolah! One trooh roolaaaah!”

At this Gryphik’s lanterns lit. “Rakhian fishermen circulate stories,” the minstrel spoke knowledgeably, “of a ‘One True Ruler’ under the sea. A God equal to Nherse the Creator and the Holder his Holy Son. Maybe that’s who mermaids pray to.”

The mermaid nodded vigorously at this, her blood-red hair bobbing like the ship they were on.

She spoke their tongue as well as understood it but her memory of it was hazy as her memory of anything. The One True Ruler was furious for some reason, or at least all riled up, and he had killed the maiden’s kin. All of her kin. She might be the only living naiad left on Heim.

And the storm that had took her kind could soon take them.

“Not a false alarm this time around, you can be sure of that,” Joost told the mages. He had on accounts of Addie being an “Aaserrdae” had become unbelievably reverential. He was a smart man, the Cargochief — Addie would forgive him for his nighttime activities if not for the fact that him and Break-Bone Henry were worse than Disha and Doin at being discreet.

“You hear that sound?” Joost cupped his ears. “That’s the sound you hear right before the crash of thunder. Come with me, me’lady.”

He stamped over to the prow, gesturing for Burn-Face Addie to follow, pointing at the foaming dark water they were sailing through.

“That right there, those bubbles, they mean the water’s angry.” He said it so fast Addie wondered if his tongue moved at all.

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” she told him, having no idea if anything would be.

The mermaid seemed to agree with Joost Aklump’s assertion: the water was angry, she said (only she said hingree), because Aevan was, because the surface-dwellers were too . . . she stopped there, and sat bare-bodied sad-faced staring at the rivulets agitating around the ship with her stunning green eyes. Since every crewmember was bent on penetrating her with eyes (and more) and offering her warmth in their respective cabins — or collective ones — Addie decided to wrap the creature in a blanket despite her dissent. Being scantily clad was not a wise move when surrounded by sailors who had been at sea with no friendly company for over a month. (She would not jump back into the water; the water was angry, Aevan was angry; He had wiped out her kin, and if she stepped into his territory He would erase her from the realm of the living.)

In addition to that cold winds from the north were starting to extend their tendrils towards them.

The mermaid hadn’t been able to tell them much during their inquiry. Most things she simply didn’t remember, like how her feet became webbed or how old she was or how undersea life was. “A fly has better memory,” Balwen grunted.

Since they couldn’t keep calling her ‘it’, decided they to come up with a name for the water nymph. It became a noisy conference of sailors and smugglers and mages, each craving another look of the maiden’s face. Addie, for one, kept hers concealed under a makeshift cowl.

“Call her Spiritous!” Mhaku recommended, his bird screaming agreement.

“In me mind she’s like’s to a Seohrah,” Wykson the Tehzvan put in. Even he had taken his affections to the mermaiden from Addie — burnt face versus beauty, the choice was obvious, and at least for this Addie was grateful. Wykson, who had scarcely a month ago told Addie that Captain Ainar Mhaku was the best and most well-meaning of men, was now Joost Aklump’s dog through and through. The boy was not as plain as he seemed — perhaps one day he would climb the ladder to captaincy and not have to clean latrines any more. “Ohra seems a good name, if you’s asks me thoughts.”

Murmurs and protests.

Ridiculous, how beauty affects men. But it was not just that; they also wanted to forget whatever they had seen in the mists earlier.

“Wat do you theenk?” The maiden’s voice sheared through the others. She was looking at Maihui, who had been standing tight-lipped towards the back of the deck conference.

“Me?” the almost-alchemist stammered out.

“You saved her, diving into the sea like that,” said Addie, noticing he was wearing clean clothes, the kind he had worn when they had set out to ride to Chisteen. “You should get to have a say.”

Maihui thought on it. “My grandmother’s name was Glohra,” he said at last. “I loved her endlessly.”

It had ‘Ohra’ in it, and it sounded good. The mermaiden’s name was finalized.

The conference had to be dispersed when clouds exploded overhead and sleet gusted down in thick, leathery sheets. Crystalline white this rain of sleet was, and it seemed to be falling from a bone-pale ceiling atop them like a curse of the gods.

“Steady, north and west!” shouted Joost Aklump.

“Yer hard him, yer fat cows!” Break-Bone Henry yelled in support.

Ichika flapped her wings, hurling herself into the air. Sailors set to ropes. Most of them, anyway.

Addie stayed on the quarterdeck, letting Joe Esper wash her cowl. She couldn’t physically get herself to her cabin. She felt that if she did the ship would snap, like a twig stepped on. She had never seen a rain with ice in it. She wouldn’t like to see it again, taking into effect the way the cold pricked at the burns on her face. She would never like to hear it again, shrieking and beating at the hull and decks and ocean. But that was life in the north. Just a taste of it the sort of life she’d have at the Pheeliax alongside her would-be Jen brothers and sisters.

Maihui seemed to have the same idea of it. He let nature’s spindrift cleanse him, while rotten-toothed Gass and tongueless Koshal snaked towards him.

Addie kept her ears open for subtext under the hard pitter-patter, pitter-patter. Keeping your ears open always counts for something.

“Keep it in your pants for the fucking seagirl,” Gass was directing farts with his mouth towards the alchemist-smuggler, “or I’ll open you up balls to brains.”

“What do you know, you’ll always smell like shit and salt,” Maihui shot back.

“Isn’t it weird naming someone you want to hit after your mother’s mother?”

“At least it’s better than seagirl!”

“Jus’ ‘cause you got her up, you think she belongs to you, neh? Think you got some kinda rights, neh? Don’t get that idea, boy, we was jus’ as hard when we saw her tits as you —”

“Have you no respect?”

“No. Jus’ lust.” Addie could almost hear Gass’s rotten grin. “You’ll have a better chance at sticking your cock in that burnt faced cunt Joost keeps worshipping. She’s all kinds of wrongs, you ask me. Demoness straight from Inira. Notice how bad the weather is? See things in the mist, neh? Never been this way before, in all times that I’ve set to sail, and I’ve set to sail a hundred times and then some. All sorts of wrong, that cunt, thinks herself a goddess. But maybe you don’t have a chance with her either, maybe Y’tra should be your pick. Burn Face likes herself some big Tehzvan cocks, I heard. Wykson says she blew him before, when her face was right and not so ugly. That Skiller pal she has, she rides him every night, I heapurgh wrrgh . . .”

Gass scratched at his neck, swooning down to one knee. Only when his face was purple as the Smoke around his throat did Addie release him.

She allowed herself the smallest of smiles when blood started dripping from her cowl, watery with rain, thick with ice. 

Addie looked up, as did many others, to find one of those gigantic birds that had assaulted them near Baendol hanging stationary in the sky like a flake of snow in the sleet. It cast no shadow. It cut an impressive image notwithstanding, rust-colored and fearsome. Wings laden with hoarfrost covering the span of a wagon.

Suddenly lightning streaked the sky in multiple fiery bolts, and Addie saw in its beak between teeth like icicle-spears was a limp sea sparrow with patterned grey plumage.

“ICHIKA!” The cry that tore out of Captain Mhaku was felt by Addie and others. She employed her Tester mageic to bring the larger bird down and drown it in the Shadneer. As the giant bird fell Mhaku’s cutlass met it in its cold, icy heart.

For days to follow the Captain had blood in his eyes and wine in his hands. His sea sparrow the crested auklet had meant the world to him. First his ship was taken over, leaving him captain only in name. Now his one loyal companion.

“She wanted to visit Trunazia,” the Captain moaned loudly, poring over vast multi-colored maps. “May the Holder grant ‘er soul a pilgrimage across the Heim, to the Beyond.”

This particular remark stuck with Addie. She started having visions — “Let’s call them what they are,” Disha said when she was told — of the place she believed to be the Beyond. A swampy land with trees as tall as hills with dead, twisted limbs. Estella Longbrow’s We will find her echoed between their trunks while the sky fell above them.

One morn when Addie awoke she was told they were in north, far as the sailors were concerned. Another two days sailing and they’d be docking at Nerba. Even if she hadn’t been told the cold and the fog would have been a strong enough hint.

Addie had boarded Sink at Port Konta, in Gorpal near Fehnia, a magus girl with a dream in her eyes and the loss of a mentor wrapped heavy around her heart. That she would soon be in a northern kingdom, an Untethered Kingdom where the infrastructure of royalty stood on ice-spears, as a Tri-Wielder . . . it seemed almost a dream. She only wished Master Harl were still alive. In fact she wished for far more but for Master Harl to be there she wished the most.

Another morn after a vision/dream she awoke to find a blue streak staining the pale sky, like a day-star made of broken glass. Sadh called it a comet, Gryphik an ill omen.

The morn after that fog had smothered the ship, sailors high-strung, afraid of what they’d see in the sea of white this time. Nothing demonic showed. Nothing showed at all, except a shivering red sun and the comet far above.

Glohra approached Addie in private later that very morn, taking the latter by surprise. “You are . . .” The mermaid furrowed her brows, delicate red lines above her green eyes. “You are . . .”

“I am,” Addie said simply. She somehow knew Glohra somehow knew she was a Tri-Wielder.

The mermaid bowed to her and went back to sit at the prow while sailors stared at her like she were a mantelpiece to distract themselves from the frigid cold and the frightening fog. Well, all of them except Joost and Henry, who were lost in each others’ anxious faces. 

The morn after that when Addie awoke she felt it approaching in the marrow of her bone.

The Disaster. The Quenching.

Her Wolf whimpered. The Smoke inside her dimmed.

Addie hadn’t even gotten off her berth yet, when the ship have a horrible jolt and she knew they were all dead.

The next chapter is my favorite thing that I've written yet in this book. It relies heavily on whether you've read the past chapters or not, and exploits that knowledge to thrall you.

Be prepared.

I hope to hear your thoughts on it.