Page 110 of The Crown of Moonlight
‘ve heard of the canvas bags of projectiles the queen’s ships fire from their cannons to shred everyone aboard an open vessel like our birlinn or a Highland galley.Still, weapons like those are so far removed from the way our warriors fight that it takes me too long to process what’s hurtling towards us.
I shove harder at the wall of wind and water I’ve been driving towards the cutter.It’s too broad to be of any use against what looks and sounds like a swarm of iron bees.The swarm pierces through it, and the force I’ve used pushes back against our ship
The deck bucks beneath my feet, and Sean slams back into the mast.And the swarm is still coming.
Breathing deep to calm myself, arms shaking with effort, I try to think.Then grapeshot hits a wall of air and falls into the sea in front of us.A ball of fear in my throat leaves a bitter rasp behind as it fades into relief.
Glancing beside me, I find Niall with his hands up, as though he has commanded the shot to stop.He has three power runes along the back of each wrist, and one on each arm is glowing.As soon as things stop flying at us, he catches my eye, grins, and steps closer.
“Can you push against her hull to turn her to starboard?”he asks.“If we can fill her sails, we can use them to force her onto the rocks.”His eyes flick from the sail to the skerries and back, measuring the distance.
I can’t speak for fear of losing control, so I nod instead and concentrate on narrowing the wide thrust of water and wind into a narrower fist directed against the cutter’s left.
“Good,” Niall calls.“Keep going.”
It’s an odd sensation when his magic brushes against mine—similar to Chyr pushing the water back for me this morning, but different in the way that one batch of ale can vary from another.My ears fill, and the hairs on my arms lift as his power presses in.
He pushes air into the cutter’s sail.I shift my focus to aiming the ship at a row of rocks that bare their teeth near the point of the island on our right.She starts to turn.
Chyr comes up on my other side and braces against the rail, his right thumb rubbing the pommel of his sword.“Are you two all right?”
“She’s doing well,” Niall answers as the cutter—the one we’re driving towards the rocks—moves beyond the lee into the churn, where the tide turns on itself and enters the churning white water.“A little farther now.”
I can’t let up, but the magic is too eager.It’s a fight to keep the sea from bucking under my push.The birlinn slews and oars bang the gunwales.A horse screams on the cattleboat behind us.Finally, I adjust the force I need.Unlike Siorai magic that risks running dry, the magic that comes from my Crown of Vines feels like more than I can harness.
The cutter’s crew swarms the deck, desperate to pull down the sails that Niall’s magic has filled with air.Sheets of canvas plummet from the mast.Then Niall’s magic has little to manipulate.But Daire moves behind me and places his hands on my shoulders to help me guide the water along the cutter’s beam.
Inch by hard inch, we force the ship to the jagged rocks.Spray stings my cheeks as our birlinn finally slips out from the cover of Loch Moadar into the open sea.Wind whips against us.Daire and I crowd the cutter until she hits with a thunderous bang and the screech of splintering wood.
The cutter shudders, then the whole hull tilts sideways.Men spill from the deck, and the mast snaps with a gunshot crack.The next wave lifts the carcass and drops her again.She grinds harder against the rocks.Bits of railing and jagged sections of beam break off her hull, and she’s finished.
I feel it as each life dies, like threads snapping from my heart.How many men are on the cutter?Part of me doesn’t want to know, but I can’t shed the responsibility.They’re dying by my hand.They have families—someone who loves them regardless of the orders they follow.
A few men crawl up the shore and fall, heaving against the sand.
“Boat!”someone cries.
I whip around, tasting blood from where I’ve bitten into my lip.
All ideas of stealth have vanished now.The crew of our birlinn hoists the sails.Chyr shouts orders to make a run at a sloop-of-war approaching port side.The sloop is larger than the cutter we broke on the rocks, but the birlinn heaves around to pursue.Then someone mutters a curse, and a Cymbeul longboat noses out from a pocket bay on the island.Men in the queen’s crimson coats mix among the blue and green Cymbeul plaids, rowing on the open seats.
“I’ll take the longboat,” Daire says as the sloop fires a broadside at us.
I shake my head.“Let me.You and Niall are more used to working together.You’ll defend against the cannons better.”
The thirty-foot longboat is low and wide, built for twelve.No sail billows from the narrow mast, nothing to catch any wind that I could send.But here I don’t need precision.
I raise a swell of water, pulling it higher and higher.It towers above the longboat, kelp fronds streaming from it like grasping fingers.
A handful of the rowers scream and dive out of the boat, swimming back towards the island even before I let the wave break down onto the longboat’s spine.
The longboat is done.It plunges underwater, then shoots back to the surface in three separate pieces.Water plumes back into the air around it, and the churn tumbles men and wood.An oar pops up as if the sea has spit it out.
The sloop-of-war hammers a second round of cannons at us.Chyr and Niall stop the swarm of iron before it hits us, but a few stray bits of grapeshot pierce through.An oarsman grunts as he’s hit, and splinters fly from the mast as iron embeds in wood.The rest of the stilled balls hail harmlessly into the froth around us.
I step onto the gunwale between Niall and Daire and wait until the sails of our birlinn carry us past.Then we work together to turn the sloop broadside.We’re farther out from shore, but rocky skerries at the mouth of a sea loch crush the sloop as we push her against them until she sinks.
We can’t make a run for Muilean; we need to defend the cattleboats.But the cannon fire has alerted Vheara’s fleet, and I have only a short breathing space in which to draw the grapeshot from the injured oarsman and heal the wound.As we clear a point of land that juts out into the sea, a second sloop-of-war bears down on us with little warning.
