"Clarissa, would you tell me about the Monastery?" Yannick asked. He wore his now familiar earnestness, and even though one eye was still an inch behind his telescope, his smile was wonderfully genuine.

It made Clarissa wonder if she had ever seen anyone else smile before.

Clarissa considered the request, weighing it against the various imperatives of secrecy set upon her by both the Monastery and by Captain Locklear. "I can't talk about everything. There's a lot I'm not supposed to say."

"Oh," Yannick nodded, and that earnest smile vanished. "I'm sorry."

As reflexively as if trying to catch something falling from a shelf, Clarissa opened her mouth to soothe the hurt on the young navigator's face. "No no, that's my fault. I can tell you some things. I just might pause before I answer, and I might tell you I can't talk about certain parts. But I'd love to tell you what I can."

Clarissa found a silly bit of happiness washed through her — like drinking tea on a cold day — when Yannick smiled again. He turned to face her and pushed the messy curls out of his eyes. "That would be nice. The Captain doesn't talk about his time there."

Clarissa beamed, and asked, "what did you want to know?"

"What did you learn? What were your classes like?" Yannick asked.

"Letters and numbers, first," Clarissa admitted. She thought back to the earliest lessons she could remember, being read simple stories and shown simple arithmetic involving candies. "The Abbess always said it was best to learn indisputable things first, so we were better prepared. So we learned sums and stories, working our way up to algebra and calculus, as well as the Olencian philosophists and the Volentian playwrights. Once in a while, we would get a guest lecturer from one of the academies of the Great Isles."

"What were you learning before you were sent with us?" Yannick asked.

"We had just started classes on metallurgy. The additions to iron that make different kinds of steel. Start with adding carbon, but how much and under what heats will give you different tempers, that sort of thing," Clarissa explained. The classes at the time had been rather dry, and she struggled to remember what she had been taught. But as Yannick hung on her words, she regretted her lacklustre interest in the subject.

"Really? Wow," Yannick said, and he pointed with his thumb to the now covered up Banshee. "Because the steel in that gun doesn't exist anywhere else under the sky. I don't even know what they used to make it, and the Captain is really keen to keep naval officers from knowing it exists."

"Really? It all seemed so..." Clarissa frowned and looked back at the cannon. It bothered her now, when she thought of herself leaning on her hand, twirling her hair, and wondering if she could watch the boys swim between classes. What she had glossed over was the science behind a gun the Monastery had made for the Ravens' Child, and both the science and the political implications were profound.

Her gaze fell to the deck, and she had a hard time raising it again to look Yannick in the eyes. It was humbling, to find that a life she had partially resented, would have been a precious gift to the earnest boy standing beside her.

And he would have shone in the Monastery.

"I didn't realize the skies were so cruel," Clarissa mused.

"Children of unkindness," Yannick replied, nodding as if he understood where Clarissa's thoughts were sailing to.

The wind swept Yannick's curls back, and Clarissa could see his eyes were wet.

"Yannick," Clarissa said. "Did the Captain ever ask the Monastery to take you in?"

Yannick's smile faded again, his bottom lip quivered, and his hands were clenched. "He, he did. I was turned away, they said I was too old, and I didn't have the right head for their schooling."

A single glance at Yannick's notes, half of which Clarissa didn't understand, suggested that refusal was absurd. It didn't surprise her as much as it should have, when Yannick added, "Captain said my rejection was less about me, and more about him."

"It had nothing to do with you," Clarissa insisted. "You're amazing."

Yannick bowed his head again, but the pink Clarissa could see in his cheeks was new, and the Child's navigator was smiling. "T-thanks," he said eventually.

Clarissa smiled in return and resolved to find something happier to pull Yannick's attention to. She pointed back at the island Yannick had identified as Olencia earlier, and asked, "the city built around the big lake. The one showered by that endless rainfall you mentioned. What's it called?"

"Duolun," Yannick answered. As he spoke, he pulled a small notebook out of his bag, and set it down on the table. He scanned the pages for a few seconds until he found what he was looking for. "I'm not sure, but I think it's the largest city in the world. It's bigger than Vol Ayre, the Calmoori don't have the irrigation infrastructure to build cities quite as dense, and the Aventillians don't have the materials to build vertically. Not to the same degree. Duolun and Vol Ayre seem keen to prove they can each build taller towers."

Clarissa studied the open book, finding the page packed with tiny notes, and several sketches that looked remarkably similar to the city in the telescope. She quickly flipped to another page, finding similar drawings and notes about cities she had never seen. "This is beautiful. The books about the Isles in the Monastery are all rather dry. There's no sense that the authors appreciate what they see. Not like this."

"You like it?" Yannick asked. Hearing him ask again, despite how earnestly she had tried to express her appreciation, reminded Clarissa that the young man's life before the Ravens' Child was needlessly cruel.

Lost in thought, she was taken by surprise when Yannick asked, "would you like to keep it?"

Her answer welled up in her stomach and nearly sprung out of her lips unbidden, but her own eagerness to keep Yannick's work kept her from accepting. She didn't trust her own covetousness. "I couldn't. You must have spent so long working on these pages."

"I can. I can make another. I can even add to it, if I see you again. After you go to the Shield," Yannick said. Clarissa saw his head turn out of the corner of her eye, his curls covering half of his face.

Clarissa looked his way for a moment, and a thought came to her unbidden. A surprising thought, one she wouldn't have expected to have. A thought that — were this moment any different — she might never have had. She turned the notebook to an empty page, spun it so it faced him, and held her hands over the corners to pin it down. "I'll fill in this page for you," she said. "I just need you to write the title."

Yannick looked her in the eyes, took a slow breath, and squeezed his hand into fists. He breathed out slowly and relaxed his hands. Only after that, he let himself look down at the page, and pick up a stick of charcoal. "What should I write?" he asked.

"The Shield," Clarissa said.

Yannick's mouth opened, ever so slightly, and the small stick slid out of his hand. He tried to speak, but managed little more than sounds.

"It's okay," Clarissa reassured him as she picked the stick up. She put it in his hand and squeezed it until he gripped the charcoal again. "You know it exists. And you can't come with me to draw it yourself, can you?"

"No," Yannick admitted.

"Then I'll have to do that part," Clarissa said as she let go of his hand.

Yannick smiled and wrote at the top of the blank page. His script was impeccably neat, something her teachers would have been proud to see at the Monastery. Even his writing suggested a dedication, an earnestness to learn that Clarissa had never been able to muster.

She found herself admiring, and even envying the Child's astonishing navigator.

"Let me tell you about my home," Clarissa said, as she turned the page in the notebook and held out her hand for the charcoal stick. Yannick handed it to her wordlessly, and she began to sketch what she could. "This is the Arboretum. It's always been the main hall, but I liked to do my homework there because most of the other halls were too crowded."

And so she drew and talked, trying to describe a part of the world her audience might never get to see, to give him a glimpse of a world he had never been allowed. She talked about how tall the glass ceiling was, how when the storms were thick it was almost as dark as a lightless room. She talked about the trees, the birds, the flowers and the smells that changed with the seasons. She spoke of her home with a sense of wonder she had never felt for it when she was there.

After a while, when she ran out of pages to draw or take notes on, before she could use another, Yannick took over and flipped to an earlier part of the notebook. And then would point the telescope to a new part of the sky to show her. They took turns, for hours, until Mercy eventually came and told them it was long past time they tried to get some sleep.

Telling those stories came almost effortlessly for Clarissa, since she no longer pitied the Child's navigator. After all, between the two of them, he was the one who could fly.