Page 21 of The Cradle of Ice

RHAIF CLUNG TO the maesterwheel of the Sparrowhawk. He braced his legs to hold himself in place as the ship plummeted in a steep dive. He fought to haul back on the wheel, to draw the nose of the ship up. He had seen Darant do it before, but the wheel’s piston refused to budge. Ahead, through the curved windows, he watched the jagged teeth of the Dragoncryst rush toward him.

He came to a flurry of conclusions with each panicked beat of his heart.

First and foremost …

Someone should’ve taught me how to fly this sarding bird.

To either side of him, figures lay collapsed across the wheelhouse’s planks. Except for Darant, whose body snored between Rhaif’s legs, where the pirate had fallen after he dropped from the ship’s wheel.

Second thought …

Be careful what you wish for, you fool.

After being trapped aboard the Sparrowhawk for so long, with little else to do but win a few brass pinches from some of the crew, Rhaif had chafed at the confinement, the boredom, the blur of one day into the next under a sunless sky. He had prayed for something to break the monotony.

And look what that got me.

Sweat ran in cold rivulets down his face, stinging his eyes. His arms ached from his struggle with the wheel. He grimaced at the certain death rushing toward him. His bowels clenched in his belly, giving rise to a third conclusion.

I really should’ve used the privy before we hit these winds.

At the moment, he fought his bladder as much as the storm. And like with the battle in the air, he was certain to lose this fight. He searched for relief, for some help. Graylin had fallen to the planks steps away. Others of the crew slumped over the secondary controls, which consisted of screwlike wheels and levers of unknown function.

He cursed them all, reaching a fourth and final thought—and probably his last:

Why me?

He had no idea why he had been spared whatever witchery had befallen the crew. As everyone began staggering and dropping, Rhaif had felt the world lurch around him. His vision spun and blurred at the edges, as if he had swilled flagons of cheap ale. Then a melody had suddenly filled his head. It was not some bawdy ditty, though that would’ve matched the drunken spiral of his senses. Instead, it had been a lullaby, one his mother had sung to him many nights. She had been a member of the Kethra’kai tribe of Cloudreach, whose bloodlines were rich with bridle-song.

Unfortunately, while Rhaif carried the gift, it was a pale shadow, watered down by the Guld’guhlian blood of his father. Still, he caught inklings occasionally: spotting the wisps of golden strands wafting from a skilled singer or, even rarer, catching a sense of another’s inner world when he brushed past them. It was what probably made him such a skilled thief. Then moments ago, as his mother’s lullaby had risen in his head, it had cleared away the muddling miasma that threatened to drown his senses. The world had stopped its spinning.

Not so for the others.

When Darant had fallen, Rhaif had rushed for the maesterwheel—not that he knew what to do. As the squall of winds tore at the ship, all Rhaif could manage was to hold them steady, to fight the wheel with each gust and bluster of the storm. But he could not pull them out of the dive. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong. He feared his stabilizing efforts were only quickening their plunge.

Through the windows, he spotted his fate. The serrated tip of a peak filled the world and grew nearer with every breath. It looked like the Sparrowhawk would be impaled atop it, skewered straight through, from bow to stern.

To avoid such a fate, Rhaif yanked the wheel to the right. The Hawk rolled in that direction. Slowly, too slowly. The roar of the winds grew to a wail. Draft-iron cables shook under the strain, tremoring the entire ship.

C’mon, c’mon, c’mon …

He prayed to every god of the northern pantheon—and wished he knew all thirty-three of the Klashean gods, too. The only name he skipped was the dark god Ðreyk, whose sigil was a horn’d snaken.

Feck ’im. I’d rather die than owe that daemon a favor.

The view out the windows skewed ever so slightly. The mountaintop tilted away. Rhaif’s lips tightened to somewhere between a grimace and a smile. Thatta girl. By now, he practically hung off the maesterwheel, adding his weight, trying to force the ship into a harder turn. It seemed to be working. The peak slipped farther to the left. Still, it would be close.

The Sparrowhawk plummeted toward the rocky crag. It was all black and encrusted with ice. Savage gusts scoured crystals from the stone, creating a glinting haze that traced the winds. It would’ve been beautiful if it wasn’t so deadly.

The swyftship dove through the ice storm. It slipped past the jagged mountaintop, but its slope rose high to the left, like a dark wave frozen in place. The Sparrowhawk skidded sideways down its slope. A wide valley opened past the mountain, though more peaks rose beyond it.

Rhaif didn’t have time to worry about those.

His prayers turned to curses.

Maybe those’ll work better.

For a moment, it appeared so. The slope fell farther back. Rhaif huffed out his relief—until an outcropping appeared ahead, a dark shoulder of the mountain. Rhaif hauled on the wheel, bracing his legs for more leverage, using every muscle in his back.