Flotsam hadn’t realized what gloom really was until he stepped from the thin circle of light. He had yet to truly learn his way about the narrow corridors in the ship and with it lurching at turns he stumbled forwards blindly. The light of his horn was bright enough that he focused it ahead of him like a search-light. It dragged things from the dark without warning and jumbled them around before his eyes. He dismissed whatever wasn’t roughly filly-shaped.
“Patches!” he called out hoarsely. Here was hold, hold, more hold; now rows of swinging, musty blankets on hammocks. The ship tossed and the stallion caught himself on a corner. A tucked-away alcove here with a bench and table, playing cards scattered about and a candle knocked over and sealed in place with its own stiffened wax.
She wasn’t here. Turning back on his path Flotsam took the hold, tossed the hatch and dropped down the ladder to the lower levels. Down here was the bilge and, as he understood it, the things they stored that weren’t perishable or for trade. Rattling lengths of chain and such.
“Flotsam?” came a voice. It wasn’t the filly. He met two eyes in the darkness. “It’s me. It’s Sea Bed.”
When he turned his spotlight to her the mare winced away. He lowered his horn and the intensity, until the unicorn was like a patch of oil on midnight oceans. No wonder he couldn’t see her. The attacking griffons were a blue-black, tinted in various shades between crows and basalt rock, but Sea Bed was darker still.
Cold air pooled around Flotsam’s hooves. His ear started to itch more fiercely for attention. “I’m looking for Patches. There’s a battle going on!”
“I noticed. They’re getting daylight below deck,” she accused with quiet venom. “She hasn’t been here,” she added.
As Flotsam’s eyes adjusted more he noticed the mare’s corona of dark magic. Not dark magic as such, but simply natural magic expressed in a somewhat similar hue. Ropes and chains flitted dutifully in the air behind her like gorgon hairs.
Flotsam imagined for a wild instant that they were for binding him; Sea Bed was reclusive and weird after all, then as if reading his mind and snubbed by the paranoid thought she said, cold and curtly, “You should go back up.”
“Er, right.”
“I have cargo to secure. Everything is being tossed about.” Then she was two unblinking eyes in the blackness once more. “If she comes down here, I’ll keep her safe,” the mare stated. “Keep the rest up there,” she said, with the suggestion not gone amiss from his ears that if it – that being the anarchy above – intruded any more down here into the quiet, never silent, weird sounding dark place of the below-decks she would personally be mad with him.
Flotsam was halfway up the ladder when his memory flinched. “Oh, uh, I’ve got one of the griffons trapped...” he felt an odd embarrassment about this fact. “She’s locked up.”
“Where?”
“The um, over there...hold?” he asked, pointing in the general up-and-forwards direction that he hoped marked the direction he’d come from. “There’s a hole in the roof there now...”
He hung uncertainty in the chilly gloom for a moment.
“I’ll handle it.”
“Right!” said he, popping up a level and that much closer to light and air again. He was glad that Sea Bed was going to help him, though that was really his way of spinning the gladness that he felt about leaving her lair.
It wasn’t like she’d been anything but civil and reserved, after all. But still.
When Flotsam regained the deck he found it in disarray. Half a dozen craters gave it the face of some embattled albeit wooden moon. Not one griffon still stood on the deck, though a few still engaged in shouting matches with various mares as they carted away their stunned and concussed comrades.
Somepony had quickly thrown down a length of wood bridging the space back to the Captain’s Quarters. It wobbled and bounced under his hooves and Flotsam was very mindful not to fall through the pit twice in the same day. It was full of sullen faces inside, standing about in a rough gathering around Nauticaa.
He’d never seen the Captain angry. He’d never seen her joyous for that matter, but for the weeks he’d been aboard the earth pony captain had always been a reserved, stoic figure.
Now she paced and bristled like a wolf in confinement. She hadn’t uncoupled the swords from her sword-shoes so that half of the space very definitely belonged to her. It belonged to her anyway, this being her ship and all, but the pointy swords had a way of articulating the fact much more succinctly. Crew mares pressed against one another and the walls to stay clear of the twinkling steel.
“Nobody knows who these guys are?” Nauticaa asked in a tone that suggested that she’d asked this a few times already and was decidedly not liking the answer she was getting.
“Could they be Lord Fullmane’s?” the pony named Moon Tide hazarded cautiously. “He’s a griffon.”
“No.” The Captain said it in such a way that Moon Tide recoiled, making a fervent eyes-to-lips gesture he had since come to recognize as the prayer-sign of the Siren followers. Sirenada, they were called, Shanty had explained.
“Fullmane lets you know when it’s him. He struts and announces himself and doesn’t shut up about his own greatness. He’s a prima-donna dandy. He’s annoying but he’s got style. Finessese. A sickening amount of preening wax. These griffons are trying to smash and grab.”
“Maybe it’s the Snake-Empress Jade-Fang...? But no, I they haven’t seen any snakes...”
“Snakes is kind of her thing,” somepony murmured quietly. “That one always does snakes. Even her ships slither.”
“Is she actually a Snake-Empress, or like, a Snake themed Empress? I never actually found out...”
More names were considered and dismissed, all for the roughly the same reason. Everyone the crew could name had a thing going for them, some kind of motif that was not only happenstance but actively cultivated. It almost made a bizarre sort of sense to Flotsam. When you traded in notoriety and banked on infamy, you needed a memorable and distinct image. These griffons had nothing of the sort. They were just thugs on a boat, albeit heavily armoured ones.
“Patches!” Flotsam found the filly in a small lump quietly soaking in the corner. Shanty grudgingly let him pass and go to her. Patches had lost a lot of her colour and bore the empty, rattled expression that he’d first seen after the storm and hated to see ever since.
Somepony had draped a tough blanket over her shoulders. Flotsam hesitated as the child stared blankly at him. That was the Captain’s own blanket. He knew he wasn’t mistaken. He’d seen it well enough the times he’d been at Nauticaa’s bedside, doing ridiculous push-ups and making...sounds... purely to convey to the rest of the crew the notion that he’d been claimed as the Captain’s own bedmate.
.
Big brother, best friend...something to one pony and happenstance nuisance, circumstantial sailor-servant, and intentionally implied something else to the other. Only two piebald ponies on the ship and Flotsam was tangled uniquely to both of them.
He couldn’t think of anything to say and, and since his ear was blooming with renewed, hot ache sensations, he put a hoof to it. He touched and it twinged painfully as he discovered a slit in it, not far from his skull, an inch or maybe less of separated skin.
He didn’t want anyone mooning over him with sympathy. Nobody did, and a little part of him secretly felt cheated.
“I’m fine,” he said on general principles.
“Flotsam. How big a shield can you do? Big enough for the ship?”
“I think so? Yes.” He gauged his sense of his abilities and reiterated it with confidence.
“Then do it now, quick as you please.”
The Captain’s voice was not loud, nor did it even target him with anger, but it had the weight of command to it and Flotsam moved to obey. He shot the filly in the corner a pleading look, hoping to convey his mix of emotions – happy that she was safe, unhappy that she was distressed, relieved to know whatever had happened, her crewmates had pulled her clear of it, remorseful that it hadn’t been him, that he’d failed to rescue her.
Flotsam lightly focused on the task before him. He didn’t remember the use of magic, could quote not a whit of arcane teachings or recall if he’d even ever had such things to forget in the first place. Maybe for other unicorns that would have been crippling, but Flotsam prodded at his own gaping, dusky ignorance and realized that his abilities were somewhere else entirely. They’d never been exclusive to whatever life he’d lost.
Flotsam had caught the weight and deflected the ship’s mast during the storm to save Patches out of pure, necessity induced reflex. He’d caught himself and turned aside a blazing bonfire from pure unthinking instinct to save himself. That little incident from one point of view made him look like quite the idiot for having fallen in the first place, but from the kinder view it also meant he’d been able to do protect himself on a whim when his brain had already been down for the count.
The first point of view (had this been a debate between the two) could have snidely suggested that taking Flotsam’s brain down had not been all that difficult, nor had it very far down to go for that matter. The second point of view (continuing the hypothetically personified argument) could then have told the first to shut up and be nicer to the poor stallion; he had a good heart, that’s what mattered, and so what if he was a lightweight, that was the liver’s responsibility anyway.
To return to the important point and say it clearly: Flotsam’s magic worked out of an office in his head (which had since had the windows left open and the filing scattered about), but it had never actually lived there.
Silly as it sounded, Flotsam’s magic came from the heart.
It was like breathing, or having a heartbeat. It did what he needed it to do all by itself. It needed only the direction of his general input every once in awhile.
And it needed conviction. That both surprised and didn’t surprise Flotsam to discover as he rooted about in his own thoughts like a pony exploring their teeth with their tongue. The spell began to take shape in his ideas. It wasn’t hard to be convicted...or convinced, or whatever the relevant word was. The deck had been pulverized – it was a miracle of fortune or griffon aiming that nobody had been struck directly and squished – and these ponies needed him to hold back whatever next attack would come.
It took effort to convince the spell to present itself. It needed to be long enough for the ship, wide enough for the ship, high enough for it. For a split-second he was convinced for no traceable reason that it was obviously beyond his ability, beyond anypony’s. But the anxiety popped in an instant as if it had never been his at all.
Flotsam was aware of in-drawn breaths, light-catching eyes and the closed in quarters glowing with the reflected shine of his magic, but just now his awareness of self wasn’t rooted in his senses. He took information from them and kept them fondly, but he wasn’t restrained to them either. He could not have given a name or number to it, but in that moment he was aware of the ship. Above and below, end to end.
The spell grew and reached critical mass, Flotsam took one sidelong glance to the expressions of the ponies around him and cast his spell. It felt like ears pop, from swimming or climbing high, but across his entire being.
It was a moment of blinding brightness.
Shining Armour saw a piece a paper. It was on a table so low to the ground that it could only have been meant for a small child. A foal’s play-set, meant to mimic the grown-up world, recreate it with softer edges, rounded corners and a well-thought out sippy-cup holder built in.
It was like that because it was exactly that. He was too big for it, even then; when adults were tall enough that their heads reached halfway to the clouds and were full of abstract, half-alien concepts and patterns. It hadn’t been meant for him though, this tiny student’s table. He wriggled uncomfortably on the too-small stool and Twilight Sparkle exhorted her student to pay attention in class. The other seats were occupied by Smarty Pants the ragdoll (such a teacher’s pet) and a deflated, long-since grass stained and worn-smooth hoofball Twilight had rescued from the back yard (transfer student).
“What’s this?” Twilight asked him rhetorically, smacking the drawing she’d left in front of him with her ruler.
“It’s a circle. There’s a dot at the centre.”
“Is it big?”
“The dot?”
“The whole thing.”
This was a strange line of questioning, but with Twilight Sparkle, what kind of baseline was there that determined a normal question? She would read a book, find an interesting term or name, drag in a book to follow that lead, find another lead therein, and in a matter of hours it was time to raid a book-fort when Mom called them for dinner.
And this was Twilight’s game, on Twilight’s time, so Shining did his best to play along. He considered the circle and dot. It filled the page, mostly. As big as it could without running right off the edges, leaving a neat margin for comfort. It clearly hadn’t been meant to share the space with anything else. Even though almost the whole page was still blank, that space was inside the circle now.
He chose his answer. “Yes,” Shining Armour, aged seven, answered. And because Twilight Sparkle liked concise answers, he added, “the circle is big.”
Twilight glowered with the glee of a teacher building up to a reveal. “And now?”
She had added dots to the circle, put them right onto the line as it ran around the page. But that hadn’t changed the size of the original circle. How could it?
He didn’t understand. That didn’t bother him as much as it might’ve done some other seven years old. He was a big brother at heart even then, and caring, and understood that between them there were things the other couldn’t do. Twilight could cite complicated words and famous names. Shining Armour could talk to other ponies and make friends.
He felt she sensed his confusion and ducked in under his chin for a second. “Okay, what about now?”
She’d added a word.
MOLECULE.
“It says molecule,” she’d added helpfully. The little dots were each named electron in neat little writing and the middle dot had been called nucleus.
She muttered in the voice he recognized she used when she was talking to herself, “It’s really more of an atom there, but...”
Shining knew when Twilight’s voice went that way to gently redirect her focus to the moment. He couldn’t ask who cared if the drawing was one or the other, because he knew she did. But he knew it wasn’t important (but that it was, to her) and gently lead her thoughts away from fixating on it, for her own good. “So it’s not big: it’s small,” he said with some confidence.
“But is it?” she asked with overblown drama as she came back into the moment, as if she meant to be the curly, black and white italics at the end of the corny monster movies that Dad liked to see played at the cinema. Her mane blocked his view again and Shining Armour heard the quill scratch the page again. She came away, beaming.
He considered her work. She’d scratched out the word molecule (and added an asterisk to the word, then added atom in brackets, then scratched them both out again) and the new word was something else.
It was two words.
They were: SOLAR SYSTEM.
Similarly, electron and nucleus had been scribbled over and replaced with planets and sun respectively. “What about now, Shiny?”
Shining Armour knew about the solar system. Canterlot had a planetarium, and an observatory. It was his sister’s favourite place, next to the library. “I guess that means it’s big?”
“But it was small?” she prompted.
“You changed it though...”
Twilight Sparkle was very happy. Sometimes she bounced for joy, like she’d been meant to have wings all along. He was glad of this turn to joy, but glad like a dog is glad, not sure what it had done to win affection just now. He had no idea what he’d done.
“But I didn’t change the size at all,” she announced in her most revealing voice. “I only changed how you looked at it!”
“Ooooh,” Shining pondered loudly, and continued to ponder over dinner, not really getting it and then forgetting their play-lesson of Twily-time entirely when one of his friends came around to go to the park with him, he didn’t remember who it had been though...
Flotsam slammed into the wall, his horn sizzling hotly with angry feedback. His back trailed sticky tar down the wall and left marks on the floor.
“Woah!” shouted ponies as they leapt out of the way.
“Something went wrong!”
Charming Booty had her head out the door. “Wait, the shield is up. It’s pink. Is Sammy ok?”
“Looks like that hurt.”
“Some kind of feedback from the spell it looks like. Hit him pretty hard.”
“Pink? I would not have guessed pink. I mean, he doesn’t look like a pink.”
“The whole ship? He did the whole ship? Who is this?”
“How long can he keep that up, do you think?”
“Wouldn’t have expected that. Now a shade of blue, maybe, like his hair, that I would have expected.”
“He’s already unconscious though...”
“Did he make it pink for our sakes, do you think? All mares like pink, is that what he’s doing?”
“What kind of unicorn are we dealing with here?”
“I like pink...are you saying I can’t be a strong, independent mare and like pink?”
“Good posture... good teeth...good manners... cute. Not very smart but you just know he’s going to have a great big-”
“-ship? Really, the whole ship? Oh wow, he really did the whole ship. Goes right over our crappy mast and everything.”
“No, but, well, that’s the cliché, isn’t it? Filly likes pink, panders to socio-political norms.”
“I’ll turn you into paper cliché!”
“Now you’re thinking maché.”
“Stop” This was the Captain’s voice. Again it was low, and direct, and not in any way overtly angry. A half-dozen tangent-meandering conversations dropped off instantly all the same. “Right now there are only two questions I want answered. Did it work and what happened to him?”
Charming Booty cleared her throat as attention was conceded to her. “It is up, Captain. I can’t tell for certain just how strong is or how long it’ll last. I’ve seen ponies put bubbles around chests and block doors and windows before, but I never did see anything like this. It feels like it’s strong, and that it’ll hold up.” The eyes of mares were on her as if she told the best of intriguing tales. “I can’t explain it, but any pony with a horn will know what I mean.” The unicorn turned her eyes to Flotsam, slumped in place against the wall where weather and work roughened hooves worked to pick him up. Patches had lunged from her stupor to assist him. Though she could do nothing against his weight, she shadowed around them, looking for something to do.
“We did not pull your average Pony Joe out of the ocean, that’s for certain.”
Charming privately wondered how many others watched the little drama play out: Patches seeing Flotsam’s sliced ear, Patches looking for something to fix it with, Patches tugging at her own, still-sopping bandana...
Harpoon’s low, gruff voice reached them from the wheel. “Cannon ball just hit the shield, Captain. Bounced right off. But it’s not blocking the air at all. We’ve still got the wind with us. Looks like the water flows right through it, too.”
Nauticaa considered. She knew the frigate had given up half its height, the better to hound Harpoon’s jarring evasive maneuvers. “They might go higher up again. Or they might not.” These griffons had not displayed intelligence thus far. She imagined what it must be like to be the griffon’s commander, to stand up there and look down on an already half-hobbled, seabound ship. The kind of ego that perspective would stroke to over-stuffed engorgement in such a figure.
Even so, she disliked the idea of relying on anything so uncertain as Flotsam: the pony with secrets he himself did not know. Nauticaa had seen the wayward stallion turn aside the falling timber in the storm. That had been impressive, she knew most unicorns wouldn’t be able to match a feat like that. But she’d never seen nor heard of this. If this shield was everything Charming suggested it might be...a pirate captain could aspire to greater ambitions. The kind of ambitions with a crown on its head.
Captain Nauticaa decided then and there that the best course of action was to assume that a thing that seemed too good to be true simply was. She took the notion that the only reasonable belief to hold right now was that the shield would break – or fail of its own accord – at any instant.
That left one course of action. She gave her orders.
“Keep us steady on to Rivaplút, but give it enough wiggle to keep their wheelman busy if they still want to shade us like this. Try to make them think we’re struggling to keep it straight. Tell me of any change in their altitude or course. Don’t let them climb up again.”
Nauticaa could see the aching stiffness in her first mate. Harpoon wouldn’t fail.
“Aye, Captain.”
“Moon Tide. Hard Tack. Scuttle. You three gather up the cannon balls they dropped on us. Have them ready. I don’t intend to keep anything aboard that was used to attack the Mother.”
“You want us to toss them overboard?”
“No. Bring them to the centre of the deck.”
“Right!”
“You Windlass. Hop Scotch. Start on repairing those pits in my ship. Get them covered good enough to walk over first, we’ll worry about the real thing after we deal with the griffons. Start there and work up the deck.”
“Yes, ma’am!” said the mare, stooping and shimmying to fit through the door.
Flotsam was an unconscious, unhappy-looking mess. “Shanty. In the first hold there’s at least one barrel of proofing-tar broken open. Bring as much of that up here as you can. Get Sea Bed to assist you.”
The youngster's face contorted with obvious questions, Nauticaa offered no answers and Shanty refrained from wasting time with asking. “Tar. Sea Bed. Right.”
“Parrot.”
“Er, yes?” The brightly-green pegasus chirped.
“Help me get Flotsam onto the bed.”
Nauticaa said nothing when Patches wordlessly inserted herself into the effort. The bedclothes would take some vigorous washing to get the sticky tar out, but that was why Nauticaa had ponies like Flotsam to do that sort of work. Later. For the moment he was breathing and wasn’t convulsing, and Nauticaa had to trust that this meant he was not in immediate danger – at least, nothing separate from the immediate danger they were all in.
The Captain allowed herself a wolfish grin “Now. Get the colours out. Put ‘em up high. They’re going to see what’s coming.”
Charming Booty had not been given specific instructions. She didn’t need them. She knew that, given this situation, and with Harpoon holding the wheel, until her Captain specified otherwise her task was to oversee all the other tasks that had been issued; to crack a few verbal whips as well as throwing herself into tasks that needed some speeding up.
She still didn’t know what the actual plan was. The Captain had laid out the pieces, but just how they fit together hadn’t revealed itself yet to her. As Charming Booty tugged ropes and directed the ponies around her, she worked on what she knew.
Flotsam had conjured up a spell of absurd proportions. Everything about it was untested, even the stallion himself. Charming stepped clear of work and turned her eye skywards. Three griffons had gathered overhead, hovering in place with powerful, broad wing strokes. Charming Booty saw the pantomime of an argument break out then. Eventually one came nearer. With one talon’d foot covering her eyes, a griffon reached out.
“You see this?” Harpoon asked her from her place at the wheel. More than a few mares were making cursory glances upwards.
“Mhmm.”
The griffon reached out one quivering talon-tip and touched the pink barrier.
It didn’t pop at any rate, like some world-sized party balloon. The talon’s tip became a flat palm, then the light blow of an experimental punch. Soon the others were running their claws over it and more were coming, winging their way down from the sky-frigate. The shield gave absolutely no sign of change, like it could withstand everything forever. That was what worried the Quartermaster. Hadn’t Neighpolean the Taller-Than-You-Realize-Thank-You-Very-Much warned about overconfidence in one’s own defences? Maybe if she’d read whatever book that was instead of bluffing her way through that conversation with the boring young fop (but wealthy and easily hoodwinked; oh, he’d been smitten, positively smitten with the mysterious, flame-haired stranger) she’d be certain on the point. It didn’t matter.
She raised her voice enough to clear the urgent work around her. “Is it two-way, do you think?”
Harpoon had a fixed grimace. The wheel spun and the ship swerved decidedly once more towards sunlight. After a long moment the frigate corrected to match them. It lowered another tiny measure towards them. There was a thin sheen of sweat over her eyes as the pegasus gave her a look.
Charming Booty nodded, putting it to words. “Maybe it is. Or maybe we can go through it just fine. Or maybe we could go out through it fine and then be stuck outside with those louts. We have to have covered at least a mile by now. Is the field following the ship, or Flotsam specifically?”
This whole engagement had started bizarre and only gotten weirder since. It had gone so far off book that this situation, whatever it was, wasn’t even in the library anymore.
Harpoon just shrugged. It is what it is. The ship wandered off in the other direction and again the griffons matched it.
“Cannon balls are ready, sir.”
Charming Booty spared the deck a glance. Hard Tack and Scuttle were busy bear-hugging the half dozen or so balls into place. “Don’t let them roll,” she said. “Have them ready.” As she said it Shanty struggled to the deck, the guttered remains of the tar barrel in a similar wide-legged grip. A dark glow over the deep-running fissure in the wood prevented what was left of the viscous tar – about a quarter, maybe a third of the whole – from spilling out. Charming Booty spared both Shanty and Sea Bed a quick acknowledgement. “Put it there, like the Captain said.”
Another cannonball bounced harmlessly from the dome and raised a substantial plume of spray as it disappeared into the ocean.
Plans were coming together. She wondered just what those plans were.
The Captain, the ship’s filly and the castaway were the only ponies in the cabin. Patches had tied off her bandana around Flotsam’s sliced ear. Maybe she’d put stitches through it later. Right now, it didn’t matter one whit.
Nauticaa looked to all purposes calm and collected as she unclasped her swords. They would require proper maintenance to remain pristine and retain their razor edge, but they would have to go on the rack simply as they were. For now. Her sword shoes clinked as she drew open one of the lower drawers of her immense desk. Clever little hinges and springs unfolded so that several tiers of little trays lifted out, each full of the things that prudent captains kept personal stocks of.
The particular glass vial she sought now was stubby and tiny, about the same proportions as a glass eye, give or take.
“You alright?” she asked her filly, not lifting her eyes from the search. Nauticaa scanned the tidy levels quickly, taking the measure of each and moving on. Quills, stubs of coloured wax, ink. Not what she needed. “Speak up.”
“Yeth...I’m okay.”
“You don’t sound okay. You sound like a reckless little pony that went looking for trouble and didn’t know what to do when she found it.”
“Are you going to punithh me?”
Nauticaa couldn’t decide if Patches was sulking or simply resigned to it. For a captain dealing with an infraction, it couldn’t be a matter that affected her decision-making. “Yes. You’re old enough to know better.”
“Okay.”
Ah, here it was. It’d been awhile since she’d needed this for anything. Nauticaa tossed the tiny stoppered vial to her wayward filly. “You know how to use salts? Pull the cork. Don’t touch it with your tongue and don’t breathe it. Hold it under Flotsam’s nose. Be ready to put the stopper in again.”
She watched the filly struggle to get a grip on the tiny, tightly inserted cork. She knew a hasty accounting of the filly’s antics with griffons, but not enough. Like the swords, that accounting would have to come later. With a soft grunt, the cork came free. The filly hadn’t used smelling salts before, at least to Nauticaa’s knowledge, but she seemed to grasp the concept readily enough.
“That’s right. Like that.”
Flotsam exploded into consciousness, choking and retching on the overpowering smell that pervaded his senses.
“Stopper it again, quick. Good.”
The instant he gained some air, the unicorn spent it on some hearty screaming. He was here, one pony aching, worryingly sticky, nasally invaded by a cloying burst of ammonia, but also he was someone else, somewhere else. Two conflicting images fought for the space behind his eyes.
Before, he had clutched at the fleeting memories and they had drained away like water or sand.
Now they burned in his proverbial hoof, like mementos that had fallen into a fire – burning and burning his fervent effort to fish them out.
His dual awareness, his doubled-up perception was splintering down the middle. On the one side, darkening, falling away was a pony. One with a life, with... A name, there has to be a name! Let me keep a name! Something! Anything! There was something there, something shining and dear and precious – something he loved, something bright and beautiful and slipping away.
In the other awareness there was thrashing, shouting, and hooves pinning his chest. The one subsumed the other and Flotsam was himself again, chest heaving, eyes watering and wildly flitting between the two faces perched attentively over him. Whatever had distressed him so drained from his mind. It left him strangely empty and receptive.
Nauticaa whirled away, did something at her desk and came back to him again. She’d put away her swords. “Get up,” she ordered stiffly. It was a simple task to focus his scattered thoughts on and Flotsam was pitifully grateful for it.
Patches hugged his leg as if she meant to support him, regardless of the tar that was still smattered all over him. It was a silly notion, but one he was thankful for. In an instant, tar was all down the filly’s side as well. Whatever sea-legs he’d earned over the last few weeks, for the moment they had fled from him and every swaying motion of the deck left him noodle-legged and uncertain.
“Can you control the shield?”
The shield? There’d been... right. He nodded before the words found him, taking a moment to cautiously navigate the bouncing bit of wood bridging the Captain’s Quarters to the rest of the ship. “I can, a bit. I think. Yes.”
Each breath of vital sea-air left Flotsam feeling more himself. Crew mares regarded him with mixtures of concern and critique. He felt sure-hooved enough to not be at risk of stumbling or falling now. “What do you need?”
“When I give the word, open a hole. Directly between ships. I want a straight line of fire.”
Parrot was a voice on high. “Captain! The flag’s up!”
“About time.” All heads turned. It was the classic pony skull and crossbones, ripped at by the wind and wearing its tattered damage like badges of honour. Nauticaa’s expression was a strange grimace. If he let his imagination run with it, Flotsam could almost see it as the face of one who concedes a grudging defeat to a long-standing opponent. Except a flag wasn’t an opponent, and it was her flag. Even so, that was the look she bore as she stared at it.
“Have to do it the right way,” the Captain muttered. Flotsam wondered if she’d meant to say that, or if anypony else had been near enough to hear it. It was baffling and Flotsam was confused enough already.
Then she was shouting orders.
Shanty, Hard Tack and Scuttle were to take each cannon ball and drop it on the tar, then to dollop on as much of the stuff as they could convince to stay on the rough, irregular metal.
Parrot and Harpoon were to get a wind-spout going. Narrow, as perfectly vertical as they could manage, as tight as they could manage. The First Mate grit her teeth, but if it hurt her to make the effort she displayed nothing but total commitment to the order. The two pegasi spun and spun in a widening gyre. Blue, green, blue-green bluegreebluegreen blur. The wind rose to become a pony-wide, hair-tugging, eye-watering constant spilling up from the deck.
“Sea Bed. Put as much buoyancy as you can into our cannonballs. Make them float.” The unicorn nodded, focused her whorled, onyx coloured horn and one by one the smeared cannonballs that were offered up came unsettled and lifted into the air.
“Windlass. Grab the first cannonball and stand in our little tornado.”
The giantess of a pony nodded shyly and wrapped one leg around the tar-smeared sphere. She stepped into the tiny, gusting funnel. The big pony’s soft voice was tattered in the wind. “I can’t see, Captain.”
“You don’t need to see. Just throw it straight up when I say, hard as you can.”
“Aye, sir.”
Charming Booty gave a little knicker of sound. She understood the plan now. “And I’ll add a certain little flare to it, will I? she asked, raising her voice a little more than was necessary to overcome the tugging wind.
The Captain might have grinned, ever so slightly. “When it’s clear from my mares, yes.”
Then Nauticaa turned to Flotsam. “You understand your part in this.” It wasn’t a question, more like an order. “Don’t screw it up,” she suggested, not unkindly.
Flotsam was rattled. Casting the shield had done...had done something to him. Jogged something loose in his head, and not necessarily in a good way. He still felt confident about a smaller manipulation of the shield though, and found both his conviction and his understanding.
“Everyone else – if any griffons come through, you keep them off us. We don’t stop throwing until we’ve sent back every last cannonball. Everyone understand?”
“AYE, CAPTAIN!” Chorused the voices of all. Flotsam felt himself swell with pride and exhilaration. He added his voice to theirs “Aye, Captain!”
“Nobody comes after my ship. Now fire!”
Windlass heaved. The cannonball sped upwards, straightened on its course and accelerated by the wind-tunnel. Halfway to the sky it burst into fire with flames whipped to frenzied madness by the whirling winds. Tar spat and hissed and it trailed streaking fire behind it like a meteorite hellbent on returning to space. The tail was stretched out long, caught and twisted into a spiral of smoke and fire.
The shield slid open, griffons flung themselves clear in desperation and the fireball slammed explosively into the sky-frigate’s exposed underbelly.
“Get it while it’s hot!”
The next shot ripped through one of the sideways sails, tearing through cloth and strut, spreading oily fire to both. Burning cloth billowed and dropped upon the ocean.
The third shot struck true again, this time further aft. Splinters and timbers fell in a scatter down upon the shield. As Flotsam watched he could see first the black plume of impact, then the tumultuous grey of storm cloud spilling out, mixing with oil-smoke black as both bled out from the frigate.
The fourth flaming cannonball was a glancing hit, it punched a gash along the ship’s side and split the gunwale. By the fifth and penultimate shot the sky-frigate was listing so extensively as to careen clear of the Mothers attack. That cannonball whistled away into a bright speck, then vanished into a sizzle of nothingness on hitting the water.
The final attack curved – the pegasi’s work – found its apex and slammed down onto the the enemy’s forward deck from above.
A hundred small fires gorged on the damage from above and below. Lightning crackled and flashed inside the dark plumes that spilled out from the holds of the ship. Already its keel rose, pointed towards the horizon and tilted higher still. She was tipping. A smattering of griffons flew about madly, pushing and pulling in a mad bid to steady her. None of those that had been hammering at the shield came forward to press an attack. How could they? They swarmed up to throw themselves into the efforts.
“There’s a storm cloud inside it. That’s how it flies!”
The attack tornado dissolved as Harpoon came stumbling to a rest. The deck of the Mother of Mercy rejoined the rest of the world in daylight, unhindered by pesky cat-birds of prey. “Not any longer.”
Flotsam didn’t need to be a sailor to know the frigate was going down. A thing could not take impacts like that, could not have holes in it like that, could not be spilling out its insides like that – all whilst on fire – and not fall.
The frigate had careened well away from its original course, and fell further away and behind the Mother by the second. The fall looked slow, almost ponderous, but for the griffons it surely must have been all too much a screaming, flaming, plank-splitting plummet.
The ship hit water, sank half the hungry fires in the hungrier-still ocean and bobbed up again. An immense gout of stormy-grey cloud billowed up over the griffons, crackling as it dispersed thinner and thinner into the fair weather.
“What are they doing?”
The crew raced as one excited pony to the ship’s edge. The griffons were tearing at their own ship; shearing off whole rows of planks from the embattled sides; collapsing in their sails and rending them clear from the collapsed and drooping masts.
Charming Booty’s voice was calm and clear. “Of course. It’s double-hulled.”
“What?”
“The outer hull looks like it was little more than an airtight shell. See how it just comes away like that? Probably it’s only meant to keep their storm-cloud penned in. The inner hull was inside that, I’d assume it’s where they actually kept their supplies, their bunks and things like that.”
Flotsam saw griffons diving below the surface, no doubt making desperate bids to clear their inner hull of whatever dead-weight now held it so low in the water. Other’s pulled struggling swimmers onto sloshed-over decking. The distant air was noisy with breaking wood, quenched fires and griffon shouts. “We should go over to them. They need help.”
The Captain’s eye was judicious and bereft of kindness as she took in the struggling griffons. She turned and the mares moved quickly from her way. Nauticaa took the wheel of her ship and stared forwards. Behind them the griffons shrank smaller and smaller. “They’ll float.”
By ones and twos the crew of the Mother took up their stations. Harpoon had to be assisted below decks. Whatever she’d had left after the battle, she’d given to the tornado. A few others were limping. Flotsam wanted to go with the First Mate. In a minute, he decided.
“Best possible speed to port,” Nauticaa ordered. “We will be seeing these griffons again. There’s no other port either of our ships can reach. The only thing we can do is make sure we get there first. We don’t stop and we don’t slow down until we’re tied into dock.”
“But-”
“They’ll. Float.” Flotsam shrank back from the harshness. When next she spoke, the severity was gone from her tone. “They’ll live, Flotsam.”
“There’s-”
She cut him off with a glare, chastising him like he were a sulking child. Maybe he was. But he had something to say.
He started more slowly, hoping to show the Captain his calm, considered words. They need our help! he shouted internally, but didn’t let it show. Nauticaa was the Captain, not him. He disagreed with her decision on this but trusted her word when she judged the second hull of the griffon frigate still seaworthy. The griffons would limp into Rivaplút days from now. Hopefully days later than themselves. He spoke.
“There’s a griffon still on this ship. Below decks. I captured her. The one I tackled.”
Nauticaa’s face was considered and impassive. “Very well. Good work, Mr. Flotsam.” He felt her scrutiny take his measure and wondered privately just what measure that was. “Go see to your needs. Mind the ship’s filly. See she’s alright.”
Did her voice hitch just a little on those last words? But Nauticaa was once more staring forward to the horizon and her poise allowed no question on the subject.
“Yes, Captain,” said Flotsam. He went, aching, to a quieter corner of the deck. After a battle in the shade, he found himself craving a simple rest in the sun.
He found Patches already there, with much the same plan.
He put a sore, tar-smeared hoof over the filly. She cradled herself against him. Afternoon was hanging lower into evening now, but the day was still very warm. If they were wise, they’d set about scrubbing the gunk away before they lost the heat. In a bit.
“You okay?”
“...yeah.”
“Me too.”
They watched the frigate become tinier and tinier in the ship’s glittering wake, until with a single swishing wave it vanished, too small to see.
And that was that.
For now.