Aralia sprawled across the new couch in her office, sipping smoky liquor from a chipped cy mug and trying to concentrate on the pad full of scribbled notes on her p. Admittedly, the work was a pretense, a ritual of compartmentalization that she needed far more than the alcohol. At least, when it even worked. Lately even her most steadfast bulwarks were starting to disintegrate, her mind wandering back to ruts and grooves that promised, in the end, nothing but pain.

  She cast a skeptical gnce at her desk, where she knew there was a drawer full of alchemical nootropics, but she had already started drinking, and she wasn’t desperate enough to py with those contraindications.

  Instead she tried to focus on the full-bellied orange moon, rising across the ste rooftops, trying to think of anything, anything at all, to fend off the inevitable cascade of the past into the present, the yank and pull and seeping lull of loss.

  ~ ~ ~

  In their shared cabin, under warm and bright alchemical light, Aralia is packing. She has full kits and provisions id out next to her on a brown wool bnket, and she is smoothly fitting them into all three of their rucksacks.

  Every so often she gnces up at Kalista, and lets her attention wander along the high shadow of her cheekbone, her flexed calf, the smooth motions her hand makes as it draws a yellow cake of beeswax along the taut line of her bowstring. Kalista has one end of the bowstring looped around her big toe, and is holding the other end between her teeth. Back and forth, up and down, goes her slender, sinewy arm, sure and liquid in its movement.

  Aralia isn’t sure why she finds the sight so…interesting. She can’t even muster any annoyance that her normally impeccable concentration keeps getting thrown off.

  Pasha is the only one sitting in a chair. His gaze is intent on a tacked-up signal chart, his hands practicing the code intervals under the table, flipping and closing and flipping again the lens of a palm-sized signal mirror.

  Seeing the furrowed lines of his brow, Aralia’s heart twinges. The pace of his education has sped up considerably. There is so much to learn, and not enough time.

  A tension and a fearful urgency had been seeping into the whole crew for moons now. There is an edge to their interactions, a telltale hunted look in everyone’s eyes, too many nervous gnces astern.

  Aralia reads the code that Pasha’s deft fingers are repeating, over and over. Three sails, north, approaching. Three sails, east. South by southeast. North by northwest. Three sails. Three sails. Three sails. East. South. North. West.

  Impulsively, just to interrupt the stream of nervous, repetitive motion, Aralia clears her throat. It works. Her two friends both pause what they are doing and look at her, expectantly. She picks up the nearest item—her tinderbox—from the bnket and slots it neatly into one of the packs, buying herself some time. What can she say? Think. Kalista is looking at her with dark, serious eyes.

  “Jacynth thinks the ship is becoming a liability,” she blurts, and then mentally kicks herself.

  Kalista frowns at her, and Aralia winces at her own tactlessness.

  The conversation has been building aboard the Damselfly, among the kin networks that crew the ship, shading and darkening all other conversations. It has been taking pce in shared gnces and grimaces, low voices and raised ones. It has been hovering, unbroached, between the three of them for a while. Partly because Aralia knows how Kalista will react.

  “Existing is a liability. Say what you mean.”

  Aralia sighs. She knows how persuasive she can be. She can salvage this. She can make her friend see what is pin to see. “This isn’t the same Imperiat Navy we’ve been duping for years,” she says, perhaps a little officiously for a thirteen year old. “They’re doing something new, something different. Look.”

  She rises and goes to the wall, where a navigational chart of the Whistling Sea hangs that she drafted st spring under the tutege of an auntie named Benso. A loose spatter of pins tipped with red ink has been growing denser, more numerous with every passing moon.

  Aralia has been tracking the coordinates of their every tip into the Tides. Each pin represents a sighting of three sails, or six, or nine, followed by a sea chase and a narrow escape.

  “Look at their movements, where we keep running into them. They’re not just patrolling—these are systematic sweeps. They’re quartering the entire sea for us, and then quartering again, and again, and again, narrowing down our whereabouts every time.”

  Aralia stared at the wall. Her voice dropped a little, became smaller. “Every ship they have is hunting for us.” She turns back around.

  Kalista is nodding. “What we do—who we are—is a real threat to their regime,” she says proudly. “This confirms it.” She snorts. “Clearly we’re doing something right.” Her voice softens a little. “It makes sense to feel fear, in the face of death, but—”

  Aralia’s insides twist in sudden shame. “I’m not afraid of them!” she blurts. Please let her not think me a coward. “I just think Jacynth is right! We need to adapt in response, change tactics, go to ground. The ship makes us simpler to track, easier to eradicate.”

  Kalista’s look darkens. She and Pasha grew up on the Damselfly, whereas Aralia only joined the crew a few years ago—the ship is her home. In Jyll, children who show signs of being haliati are quietly sent to live aboard the sea traders, rather than raised in an Imperiat-occupied port. It’s safer for them.

  Pasha looks back and forth between them, biting his lip uneasily. He is unused to seeing his closest friends fight.

  “How will we make all our ports of call without a ship?” Kalista says sharply. “There are whole generations of haliati across the Whistling Sea that depend on us—on us alone, since Turtle’s Back was sunk st year! You’d have us abandon them?”

  Aralia swallows her reflexive protest, tries to pause, tries to think.

  Kalista is shaking her head. “The Imperiat is afraid of us for a reason! That’s the most important thing, to continue threatening their power and their grasping control over all bodies—everywhere we make port, we offer antidotes to their world, we add tension to the stewing, seething pot of revolt, and we leave behind seeds that will grow into lives we cannot even imagine!”

  There is a sick feeling flooding Aralia’s stomach. This is going all wrong, fast. “There are other ways,” she says desperately, trying to salvage what can be salvaged. “I heard Jacynth and Benso and Merma talking about it—”

  “None of whom are haliati,” Kalista interjects, her voice tight with betrayal, and the look on her face is breaking Aralia’s heart.

  There is a bleak and empty silence.

  Aralia takes a painful breath, throat aching. What can she say? What can possibly help?

  “Your pratha is my pratha, mia canat,” she whispers hoarsely.

  For thousands of years, the steep river gorges of the Jyllish isthmus were forded only by countless bridges of rope woven from long bluestem and bearflower meadow grasses. Traditionally, on a single festive day, up and down both coasts, everyone in the vilge came together to weave the year’s bridges, known as pratha. The keepers of this knowledge have always been haliati.

  Since the Imperiat’s coming, the pratha festivals and the haliati both have been suppressed and the gorges are now forded by hard stone bridges and hard cobbled roads built by hard engineer minds. Jyllish bureaucrats trained in Imperiat schools oversee a Jyllish client state that collects taxes, runs ports and shipyards and maintains a careful amnesia. All that is left of the vast and vivid cultural geography of pre-colonial Jyll survives underground and at sea.

  Aralia grew up comfortable in her girlhood on the mainnd, knowing vaguely that she was something that was once called lemiati—meaning non-haliati—but not what that meant, or why, until she was chosen from among many candidates, by secret council, to apprentice to the traditional navigators and alchemists of her people, and came to live aboard the Damselfly.

  Still, the invocation of pratha means something for all of them, in this cabin. It warms slightly the grimness and the chill that has crept into and between the three friends.

  The ship’s bell peals out, signaling dinner, and Aralia and Pasha and Kalista slowly collect themselves, in silence, and pad heavily down narrow, cramped ways to the ship’s galley, at the stern.

  There is a bustling common space here, in pce of a captain’s quarters, where several long tables jostle with each other for breathing room. The room is packed with a dull roar made of familiar, friendly faces, which cuts Aralia’s residual gloom a little.

  A cheery Esca dles them each a bowl of peanut stew over fragrant rice, and then Moa is calling Pasha over to sit with her and Jacynth. He goes, smiling, and Jacynth tousles his golden halo of hair affectionately.

  Kalista nudges Aralia’s side with her elbow and nods at a table where Hallel and Venti are just now parting ways, the tter rising on her way to take the helm for the star watch. They approach Hallel, sitting rexed and erect, and nod respectful greetings.

  With a loose wave, Hallel gestures for them to take seats on the bench across from them. Their face is as lined and weathered and squinty as a sandstone pilr, looming out of the mist on some lonely beach. When they speak, their voice is the sussurus scrape of a foaming wave in retreat, pulling sand back down the tideline.

  “Kalista. Aralia. My friends, you both have looks fit for a hurricane.”

  Kalista and Aralia gnce at each other, somewhat ruefully.

  “And towards each other, unless I’ve misjudged my footing entirely.” Hallel looks patiently between them.

  “Perhaps I can even guess why. Would you like to hear what I was just telling Venti?”

  “Yes, mia fera,” says Kalista quickly, and Aralia nods, leaning forward to hear better. Perhaps this is what they both need right now.

  “Remember that I am an alchemist, and not so much a navigator, hm? I spoke to Venti, as I will speak to you, only of what I know. If I seem to ramble, if I seem to wander, or speak no sense, well, remember that you came over to me, just now.” Hallel pauses, and their eyes glitter lively in their deep-seamed face. “Here is what I’ve been thinking tely. We seem to survive on the edge of a razor, with each passing moment bringing more and more narrowness pressing in from all sides, and this is a brutal pce to choose to act from.”

  “In such a situation, we need to remind ourselves of the ancient wisdom of our people. Perhaps we have been so harried that we have been letting our opponents force us into making choices on their terms, from inside their own narrowness.”

  Hallel clears their throat enthusiastically, warming to their subject. “The heart of alchemy is nothing like the war chemistry of our enemies, and they will never understand it, even if all is lost and they come to possess our most coveted and powerful secrets. Alchemy, as an art of transformation, is always a journey from an unchosen starting pce, and that is why it lends itself so well to us haliati and our purposes.” They nod proudly at Kalista.

  “The truest, oldest alchemy can be distilled to this—wheedling the spaces of infinite possibility between the very smallest units of things into new shapes.”

  They rap the wooden table, then pinch the loose skin on the back of their hand.

  “For things aren’t things, when you really get down to it. This table and my flesh both can be described chemically, can be reduced to categories and heaps of tiny clusters of matter, but in truth matter is nothing more than space in the form of choice. What this table and I are actually made of, for the most part, is space. And so what we are isn’t truly bound or fixed—there’s really nothing essential about us. When you consist mostly of space, there ends up being plenty of room.” Hallel winks at their own joke.

  “That halo of potential that lives in the spaces between—we call it the quicksilver, when we distill it in our alembics—can be coaxed to believe it was never truly supposed to be the way that we see it or once saw it—can be unbound from any predetermined form and convinced that it was always meant to follow the shape of our desires, our choices. We are what we do, and that is a good thing.”

  Hallel shrugs. “As for the rest, you both know it well. One must only know how to find their way safely through the unseen yers of the world, flowing cold and dark between the stars. The spirit waters that undergird all possible dimensions, and the guardians that keep the gates between them. Always, the way is treacherous. Always, there is risk, walking hand in hand with any choice we truly give our hearts to.” They grunt decisively. “So. What are we to do?”

  Hallel gestures down the table at where Jacynth and Moa have each thrown an arm around Pasha and he is giggling helplessly as they all sway side to side, riffing silly sing-song rhymes about the whale queen’s drama with the mermaids.

  “Both of you, Aralia and Kalista, lemiati and haliati, are shaping yourselves according to your desires, as Pasha now is, too. It is a beautiful time, a sacred thing, not fit for narrowness, nor pressure, nor fault, nor fixing.”

  Pasha sees them all looking and blushes and smiles and waves shyly, Jacynth still singing gruffly next to his head.

  Kalista slips her hand into Aralia’s, smiles at her like a flower opening. Aralia squeezes her hand and takes a soft tumble into her friend’s eyes.

  Hallel snorts and clinks their gss against a pitcher. “Listen to me, I’ve begun rambling at the foals and fawns gamboling in the meadow, like an old coot hitting too much Pramnian wine.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Aralia closed her eyes against the slow leak of tears, her heart aching sharp as cut gss, and rubbed her face roughly. When she did remember home, all she wanted to dwell on was this moment. All her kin together, all of them full of life, full of joy.

  ChaoticArmcandy