The sea-bronze cable hummed against the flagship’s iron hull like a tuning fork.
Kaelen leaned over the bulwark, watching the thumb-thick bronze line plunge downward into the dark, swirling current.
Instead of hauling the buoy onto the deck, he tied a loose loop of hemp around the main capstan to keep the cable running smoothly alongside the ship.
“Steer northwest,” Kaelen called over his shoulder toward the helm. “Follow the wire.”
Following a piece of submerged wire is much better than reading nautical charts.
A wire doesn’t have thirty different tide charts to calculate, and it leads straight to the person responsible for my bedtime stories.
Behind the flagship, five more Star-Iron warships adjusted their rudders, following in a silent, single-file column.
Night fell across the northern reaches of the Star-Fall Archipelago.
