The deck of the Wave-Cleaver groaned with each swell. Salt had dried white in the grain of the cedar and flaked under the sailors’ bare feet.
Pei Jing stood by the foremast with a hand on the tarred rigging. The wind was warm and smelled of kelp and sulfur. To the south, steep limestone spires stood above rings of breaking foam. The South Sea Archipelagos.
Thousand-Star City lay more than four hundred leagues behind. His notebook had reached his sixty-third practice year. Almost sixty years had passed since he’d sailed from Pier Eighteen, and about sixty-two since he’d hunted with Cheng Shan at Mist Peak. The winter campaign and the road from Thunder Cliff lay between those two journeys.
Twenty years after the Iron-Fin took him south, Xiao Ling brought him a cracked cauldron at one of the shore shops. She set it on the repair bench between an anchor bolt and a cook’s skillet.
“Can you put a foot on that?”
“What are you making?”
“Nothing that goes in your order book.”
There was a boy in the doorway with a diver’s rope burn around his chest. Xiao Ling had been treating him in the room where the apprentices ate. She wanted a bench, a little fire, and a door that could close. Pei Jing drew up a plan for a larger room with the shop’s good brazier in it. She crossed out the brazier. If she took it, the apprentices couldn’t temper a full order before the next…
