The engraving magic channels of the ship were located primarily along its hull and underside — which made structural sense, the moment you thought about it, since that was where the vessel met the water and where the magic that moved and sustained her needed to be closest to the element she worked against. It also meant that the repair work required going into the ocean.
This was not a hardship. I had been wanting a proper swim since morning.
We completed the interior work first — the control room housed its own array of channels, most of them in adequate condition but visibly depleted, the magic in them thinned by the weeks of sustained use since the last time anyone had attended to them. This part was straightforward: careful, precise, thread the magic into the channels without overwhelming the reservoirs. I had the technique now, if not yet the fluency, and working through the control room was good practice before the more complex work below.
Then Rei tied his silver hair back with a length of cord, removed his shirt, and went over the side in one clean, fluid motion.
I followed.
The underside of the ship was extraordinary to look at — I had not thought to wonder what it looked like from below, and the reality was something I was unprepared for. The engraving channels covered the entire hull in an interlocking network of lines and symbols, dense and intricate, the whole system clearly the work of someone who had thought deeply about how magical current should flow through a large moving structure. The scale of it was humbling. The elegance of the design, even before I understood what each element did, was immediately apparent.
It was also colonised, to a significant degree, by barnacles.
Clusters of them had embedded themselves directly into the channels with the cheerful indifference of organisms that do not have feelings about the inconvenience they cause. Rei had already produced a scraping tool from somewhere and was working on the nearest cluster before I reached him, and I found a second scraper in the kit he had brought down and joined him from the other side.
The barnacles were stubborn in the specific way of things that have made a permanent decision about their location. We worked through the afternoon, scraping and clearing methodically, the water around us occasionally filling with small clouds of displaced organism. It was not glamorous work. It was thorough, and when we were done with it, the channels were clean and ready.
The filling came next. At Rei's direction, I positioned myself along the larger channels and began moving magic into them with the careful concentration I had been developing. Under the water, the effect was visible in a way it wasn't in air — the magic moved through the channels as a luminescence, finding each line and filling it from the edges inward, the glow building steadily toward the reservoir points where it would be stored. The light it made in the dark water beneath the ship was something I had no word for except beautiful.
I understood, somewhere in the middle of this, that this had been part of why he asked for my help. Not only because he needed a reserve of magic he didn't currently have. But because he had wanted me to see this. The thought settled in me quietly and I let it stay.
---
We surfaced in the late afternoon.
The resupply of the ship had been completed while we were under — fresh water barrels stowed, the herb and tea parcels loaded and secured. The arrow holes were gone from the hull, cleanly repaired. The only person still working was Benedict, who was moving along the outer hull with a polishing cloth and the focused reverence of someone attending to something they love.
"Do you need a hand?" Rei asked, approaching him.
Benedict shook his head without looking up.
"I can manage," he said, in the short, certain tone of someone who means this and would prefer not to be asked again.
Rei didn't press. He had known Benedict long enough, evidently, to understand the difference between needing help and wanting company in the work, and to respect the distinction.
We changed our wet clothes and walked back to the village.
An evening spread had been arranged around the fire — the islanders and the crew having apparently decided, collectively, that the day's work warranted a proper meal and that the food would be considerably better for being shared. I found a smooth section of a fallen tree trunk near the edge of things, settled onto it with a cup of Heilan flower tea, and let the evening proceed around me without requiring anything from me specifically.
Foods were beside the point for me. The tea was not. I drank it slowly and watched the fire and felt the particular relaxation of a day spent doing something genuinely useful with my hands.
Sheriya appeared beside me.
She sat without ceremony, and when our eyes met she produced a small, shy smile that cost her something — the colour that rose in her cheeks immediately afterward confirmed this — before she looked away to a safer point in the middle distance. She was still working up to something; I could tell from the quality of the silence she brought with her.
A few paces away, Phoenix was deep into a conversation with one of the island elders, a pile of bones beside him that suggested the meal had been comprehensively addressed.
"We share a lineage, you know," Sheriya said finally, in the quiet, slightly determined voice of someone who has rehearsed an opening line.
I turned to look at her properly.
"In what sense?"
She gathered herself.
"Snakes and dragons — we are both scaled, both ancient. In the beginning, when the Creator first made us, there was not much to distinguish us from each other, except that dragons had legs." She spoke carefully, as though relaying something that had been given to her by someone she trusted. "But the Creator favoured dragons openly. He kept making them more powerful — wings, then magic without limit, then an intelligence that surpassed every other creature. And we were simply left as we were." A pause. "Most of our ancestors spent a very long time resenting that."
I considered this.
"I remember killing a leviathan," I said thoughtfully. The memory surfaced with the particular texture of something that was both mine and not mine — one of Aiona's actions that had become, through the completeness of our merger, indistinguishable from my own past. I had stopped trying to separate what she had done from what I had done. It no longer seemed like a meaningful distinction.
"I know," Sheriya said. She looked at me then, directly — the vertical slits of her pupils, so like my own in dragon form, meeting my eyes without the usual retreat. "That particular ancestor was a tyrant to his own kind long before any dragon ever crossed him. So you don't need to carry guilt about it." A small, unexpected smile. "But despite all of that history — all of the resentment and the rivalry and the leviathans — I would like to be your friend, if you would allow it."
The sincerity in it was complete and unaffected.
"I would like that very much," I said.
The colour that came into her face at this was immediate and deep, and she looked away again, but the smile that accompanied it was genuine rather than shy.
"Then you are the most extraordinary big sister I could have asked for," she said, quietly, to somewhere near her own feet.
---
The evening unfolded pleasantly from there. Once the initial barrier had been crossed, Sheriya proved to be remarkably talkative — not in the way of someone filling silence, but in the way of someone who has spent considerable time with thoughts they haven't had the right company to share, and who has now found an audience that will actually engage with them.
Her particular interest was the deep history of the world — folklore, myth, the stories that predated writing and had been carried forward only in the memory of people who told them to other people, who told them to others, the content shifting slightly with each telling until the original fact had been thoroughly dressed in elaboration. She found this not frustrating but fascinating: the idea that every myth, however strange, had some true thing at its core that had been slowly transformed by the very human tendency to make a single crow into seven.
"You just have to look for the shape under the decoration," she said. "The decoration is added by people. The shape is what actually happened."
We talked about this for some time, and I found, genuinely, that I enjoyed her company and her mind.
At some point her attention drifted, naturally and without apparent effort, toward Phoenix. He had finished eating and was helping Ivanna clear the remains of the meal — carrying things, stacking things, doing what needed doing with the easy willingness that was simply how he moved through the world. Sheriya's eyes followed him without her appearing to notice that they were doing so. A small, private smile settled on her lips.
I watched her watch him.
"Do you love him?" I asked.