Vincent

They sailed through darkness, in a storm birthed by a flash of light.

The world ended at the bow of a wooden ship, where a lantern was bolted. The lamplight danced as the wind —billowing and bellowing —tried to snatch at the flame in its glass cage. Just above, the white canvas of the ship's balloon rippled and churned like troubled waters. The rails were frost-kissed, and the deck was slick with ice.

Vincent Locklear's hands were only steady because they gripped the wheel. His breath left his lungs as tiny clouds of white mist, and frost clung to the fringes of his coat. By his feet, however, a small gout of warm steam puffed up, hot as a whistling kettle. The steam came from the boiler of the ship's engines below his feet, a trickle of what he had to use to keep the air in the ship's balloon warm.

His eyes did not look straight ahead. There was little to see besides which direction the sleet striking his head came from. Instead, he stared down at a compass set into a wooden panel. The needle pointed down at the middle of the deck and slightly to his left, as it had for the last four days since they entered the storm. At the end of the compass' arrow was a stylized 'S', and it worked even where he now sailed, well beyond the gravitational pull of the great isles.

Most people thought the 'S' referred to the Sun. Vincent knew better.

The wind surged, throwing Vincent's coat back and shoving him backwards. His feet pulled at his boots, straining against the magnets in the soles that clung to metal strips bolted on the deck. The safety wire still stretched from his harness to the nearby rails, but Vincent patted the clip to make sure it was secure.

They were a long way from the pull of an island. Untethered, someone could fall forever in the open sky.

His hand fell from the safety clip and slid into his coat pocket, reaching for his watch. It wasn't the first — or even the third — time he had checked it in the last hour. But there was very little to do as Vincent steered the ship through this storm. He opened the cover and watched the second hand creep towards the top, and the minute hand creep past the tenth marker.

Once the minute hand crossed the hour, it would mark the beginning of the fifth day since they entered this storm. A storm that didn't exist six days ago.

With his eyes on his watch, he nearly didn't see the hatch in the middle of the deck swing about like an unfolding book. A woman floated up from below the deck and caught the nearby rail with her hand. She clipped herself on, spun about, and planted her feet on a metal strip set into the wood. She fidgeted with her harness for a moment, turning away from the oncoming rain, and looked up at Vincent.

"Checking to see if I'm late, Captain?" Mercy Larkin asked. And to Vincent, seeing her on deck made the storm feel a little warmer. She tilted her hat to the side, partially covering the right side of her face. The brim covered her right eye, obscuring the ghost-white scar that ran in a straight line from her eyebrow to just above her chin.

Vincent was there the day she put that scar on her own face.

"Can't rightly recall you ever being late, Mercy," Vincent admitted, as he folded the watch and slid it into his coat pocket. "Not from the first day you enlisted, to the last day you were my lieutenant on the Hood. Seems being kicked out of the navy hasn't changed that."

Vincent found his hand fall to the sword at his belt, tracing a small medallion set into the scabbard. The emblem was a stylized thief's cowl, a memento of the ship he had captained until just three weeks ago.

"You were the one kicked out of the navy," Mercy replied. A hint of a grimace twisted her smile, and her eyes carried both worry and sorrow. "I only resigned in protest."

"You didn't have to," Vincent said softly. It wasn't what he wanted to say, but he had no experience expressing the gratitude he felt. Much of his life's course had been set by being cast away. It was the strangest thing to have anyone insist on standing by him.

"Yes, I did. You were thrown off the side to keep the Admiralty's reputation aloft. Keeping my mouth shut would have said they were right to do it." Mercy walked across the deck towards him as she spoke, careful to keep her steps on the metal plates. One hand hovered close to her clip, moving it from one rail to the next. "So why did you have that watch out?"

"Trying to work out how much more of this we have to sail through," Vincent replied. "Despite the weather's best efforts, we've managed to stay roughly on-course. But this storm, it's not natural, so I don't know what rules it plays by."

"You were pretty eager to steer us into it," Mercy remarked. The comment might have sounded glib and uninterested, but Vincent didn't need to be looking at her, to know she was studying him intently under the shadow of her hat.

Vincent felt his stomach clench and forced himself to breathe slowly. There were things he knew that he couldn't tell, and everything about this storm cut perilously close to those secrets. "The Monastery ship we rescued almost a month ago, the reason I lost the Hood. It only left four days before we did. Their course should have taken them through these skies exactly when we saw that explosion."

Mercy nodded, the shadowy inquisition gone as she tilted her hat up again. "You're worried about them."

"The skies aren't safe for the Monastery anymore. Our current lot in life is proof of that," Vincent said. He regretted his words almost as soon as they took to the air. It was the wrong response, didn't speak of being bewildered by either the explosion or the storm that followed.

It was an answer someone who knew the cause of this storm would give. Which was something Mercy couldn't have helped but notice. "I suppose you still won't tell me what you think caused that explosion," she said. Her voice was tight, her tone measured, and her expression was as dark as the shadows under her hat.

"No," Vincent said, and he could feel himself slipping into the familiar cold steel of giving orders as the captain of a ship. He cringed at the realization and found himself unable to meet Mercy's eyes. Mollified, he added, "it's not my secret to tell."

Mercy nodded and looked away, which was an immediate relief. It was hard enough for Vincent to keep the truth from her. He wasn't sure he could manage a lie.

He leaned down and pulled on a small lever near his feet, and the wheel locked into place. He then moved his clip to a rail just outside of arms reach, stepped back, and gave Mercy room to take over at the controls. "Wind's been shifting over the last hour. Storm seems to be churning in on itself. No sense in chasing after a favourable wind just to put out the sails, though. Keep our heading true; we'll pass through this storm eventually. I'll be back up in six hours."

"Sounds good, captain," Mercy said, and she graced him with a smile. Vincent hoped it meant she'd accept his lack of answers, at least for the moment. He breathed a quiet sigh of relief and set his gaze back on the bow of the ship.

Which was a stroke of extraordinary luck. Just as he looked, a wall of grey rock burst through the clouds. The jagged, cracked cliff-face was a blur as it grew with hypnotizing speed, and in the blink of an eye became everything Vincent could see between the balloon and the deck.

Vincent leapt back to the controls and spun the wheel to his right. He flung the levers on his right side about, throwing every bit of power the ship had into the port side propeller. He hung on as the ship twisted about. "Mercy!" he called out, without looking back. "Check your clip!"

The first lesson for any sailor to learn was the need to clip-in when your ship sailed beyond the pull of the large isles. In the weak pull of the far skies, not being tethered to your ship risked being tossed out into the open sky to fall forever. Deep in the endless blue, the only time a sailor shouldn't be clipped-in was when she was moving her clip from one rail to another.

Just as Mercy was doing. Her clip was in her hand, moving it to the rail beside the wheel. Her back faced to the oncoming horizon of stone. The ship was turning, but not quickly enough to avoid the rocks. Vincent lunged away from the wheel, and leapt towards her.

Wood cracked and split with a roar more ferocious than a cannon shot, and the ship was shoved off the rocks like a ball bouncing off a brick wall. Vincent and Mercy were both thrown into the air towards the cliff face the deck had just splintered against. Expecting this, Vincent kept his eyes open and grasped Mercy's hand as the crash pulled them off their feet. He snatched the clip from her hand just as his harness ran out of line, and the ship pulled him back towards it.

A heartbeat after his trip into the open sky was interrupted, Vincent snapped Mercy's clip onto one of the metal loops in his harness. He only just got his hand clear as Mercy's harness reached the end of its rope. The ship threw her forward, pulling her free of her drift into the open sky.

Somehow, Mercy went through all of this without losing either her smile or her hat. "Much obliged, Captain!" she called out, and tilted the brim of her hat in a short salute. She grabbed the rope with both of her hands, and pulled hard, launching herself back to the ship.

Vincent spun around and did the same, landing on the deck a moment later. He grabbed the rail, set his feet on the metal, and then moved Mercy's clip off his belt and to the railing beside his. He reached the controls just as the ship passed the tiny island it had struck, and the rock face disappeared back into the storm.

"There shouldn't be any tiny isles in these skies," Mercy said, after she moved her clip to a nearby rail and looked out at the storm.

"Tell that to the hole in my boat," Vincent replied.

He felt a hand clap him on the shoulder and turned to find Mercy's face less than a foot away from his. She was frowning, chewing on her lower lip, and her eyes were as wide as he had ever seen them. "Vincent, I know the isle we're heading to, the one we saw the explosion happen near. My people call it Grainglove. It has this bowl-shaped scar that takes up one face of the island, that always faces the rains. It grew enough buckwheat and barely to feed all of Volante. I also remember Grainglove was too big to have any little islands in its skies."

Mercy pointed to the compass near Vincent's left knee, and then tapped him on the side of the head. "And I know you navigate as well as any Windwalker among my people. So where did that rock come from?"

It wasn't a question Vincent was prepared for. As his mind chewed through the possibilities, he had no chance of keeping his fear and confusion from Mercy, who had learned over the years to read him with unnerving accuracy. So when he whittled away the impossible and unlikely reasons, cutting his way to a single answer, he had to share at least some of it.

"This rock is a piece of Grainglove," Vincent admitted, as much to himself as to Mercy. The flash of light that birthed this storm also breaking pieces off an island was, terrifyingly enough, the most rational explanation he could think of. It brought him no comfort.

"Impossible," Mercy whispered a quick denial, and shook her head to articulate it.

"So is this storm, and so was that flash of light we saw six days ago," Vincent said, and he gestured out at the inky darkness that surrounded them. "Now, if I'm right, what do you think the odds are there are more rocks in these skies?"

"Almost certain," Mercy replied immediately.

"And trying to make our way blind, through skies full of small isles, would be suicidal," Vincent said. He pushed one of the levers to his right, to ease the speed of the propellers and slow down the ship. "We're going to have to anchor ourselves to the next rock we see and wait out the storm."

"Guess that means I'm the one setting up the anchor," Mercy said. "I'll go get the ropes ready."

"You want me to do it?" Vincent asked, and he didn't bother to suppress the grin that began to creep across his face.

"Ha! No one alive has ever made an offer less sincere! Do you remember the last time I took the controls, back on the Hood?" Mercy asked as she sauntered away, down the steps to the lower deck.

"Nothing's ever frightened me more," Vincent said, and he was only half-kidding. The last time Vincent had tried to get her experience at the helm of a ship, she had begun their return descent to Volante lift-balloon first.

As Mercy began to pull the anchor ropes out of the storage trunks, Vincent spun the wheel and turned the ship starboard. He kept his head turned to the port side as they flew, and held that position as the minutes wore on. The only things marking the passing minutes were the whistling of the wind, and Mercy tying the ropes to the large metal hoops set into the ship's frame.

Mercy had just finished tying the other end of the rope around her waist, when another wall of stone shoved the storm aside and drifted into the lantern light. In just a few heartbeats the jagged cliff-face became everything Vincent could see to his left, and even straight ahead.

Vincent pulled the levers hard and steered to the right, and bow turned away from the island. He shoved all four levers as far down as they could go, and the ship's propellers surged to new life. The ship pulled the tether chains hard, and the deck swung as it yanked the balloon after them.

Vincent watched intently, tracking the island's spin and trying to match it. The rocks passed his sight in a blur, rushing ahead and disappearing around the tiny isle's horizon.

At the edge of his sight, Vincent could see Mercy toss herself over and in front of the ship's outer rails. She spun in the air, twisted, and planted her feet on the side of the ship's hull, her body now pointing to the island. She kept one hand on the ship's rail, the other extended out to the rock, and stood ready to spring into the open sky.