Page 226 of The Cradle of Ice

“I’ll come with. Fenn was working on some intriguing calculations. On projected paths back to the Crown.”

She nodded, hoping they’d be able to use them.

They headed out of the cabin and into the tight passageway that ran from bow to stern. She led the way forward. The winds passing through the damaged ship howled and chilled the air. To escape their icy grip, she hurried quicker and pushed through the door at the end.

The wheelhouse was warmer but nearly deserted. Darant still stood before the maesterwheel. She doubted he’d slept at all since his daughter’s death. Another crewman had replaced Glace and Vikas, manning both secondary control benches by himself. The only others awake were Fenn, who still looked hard at work, and Shiya, who never slept.

As Nyx headed toward Darant, she spotted Graylin hidden to the side, seated on the floor in a back corner, his chin to his chest. Kalder lay curled at his feet, one hindlimb thrumming in some dream, maybe chasing a Liar’s Lure, too.

She also noted Krysh snoring in the small map room off the navigation station.

She joined Darant and stared out the window in front of her. When she had retired to her cabin, they had just reached the mountains, a forbidding, lifeless scarp of frost-scarred black rock. She had been happy to turn her back on it.

The view now was even more desolate, beaten flat and cracked. The plains stretched in all directions. The nearly featureless landscape looked like a pan of black mud that had been left too long in the sun, drying cracked and brittle. Only it wasn’t mud, but the outer crust of this terrain.

“The Brackenlands,” Nyx muttered.

Darant grunted his assent.

“How long have we been crossing it?”

“Near on three bells.”

The barren, eerie landscape cast a melancholy pall, as if they were the only ones alive in all the world. But she knew that they were likely not alone out here.

“Any sign of another ship behind us?” she asked.

Darant shook his head. “Fenn’s been checking with the ship’s farscope, scanning all the way back to the mountains. But the moon has set, and it’s gone dead dark. Even the stars are hazed over by some dust blowing off those dry mountains, dimming the view. If someone is riding the wind’s current without burning forges, they’d be hard to spot.”

“I can take Metyl up and do a quick pass around.”

“No, lass. Not by yourself. And Daal is bedded down somewhere and needs to rest. If there’s anyone out there, there’s naught we can do about it now.”

Fenn called over from his station, “We can’t be far off from Shiya’s marker.”

As if stirred by her name, Shiya spoke up, lifting an arm and pointing to the south of their path. “Something shines there.”

Darant left his post and followed with Nyx to join the woman.

“I don’t see anything but the same sodding hardpan,” Darant said.

Still, Shiya’s glassy blue eyes were sharper than any of theirs. Knowing that, Nyx kept staring until she saw the shine, too. As she did, past and present momentarily overlapped. The memory from the Oshkapeers returned again.

—as she turns away, far in the distance, something glitters under the icy shine of a full moon.

“It’s there,” Nyx confirmed. “Just at the horizon. Darant, can you angle us slightly to the south?”

“Aye.” He headed back to the wheel, calling orders to the crewman posted at the secondary controls. By the time the brigand got his hands back on the wheel, he spotted it, too. “You two were right.”

Their commotion drew a growl from Kalder, and a moment later, a matching one from Graylin. They both climbed to their legs and came over.

“What is it?” Graylin asked, rubbing an eye.

Nyx and Shiya both pointed.

At the swift speed of the Sparrowhawk, the shine had grown quickly, reflecting ever brighter, even more than could be attributed to starlight alone.

Strange …