Jonsson clung grimly to the port gunwale as freezing saltwater sprayed his face. It was not like plying skyborne currents. His dusky beard stuck to his skin and to his light sky-captain’s leathers. He could taste the ocean on his breath. Holding fiercely to the slimy wood, he peered back into their star-speckled wake. The surface of the ocean bulged and receded, as though something vast and primordial breathed. Where waves crested, they caught starlight. Where waves sank, they folded under, taking that captive light back with them to the depths. The oceans were realms within the realms, forgotten by time, history and gods. Ancient magic dwelled there, unformed, untouched by hands mortal or divine since the formation of the aetheric cloud itself. With every precipitating crash against the hull, he was reminded of its elementalism. With every tug of current on the keel, Jonsson conceded a little more that he had placed his fate in the hands of a dark and unruly god.

‘They crave what’s within, ’neath flesh and ’neath bone,

Sparing only the young…’

Tharril was effectively enthroned in the wooden prow of the boat, an oar in each hand, controlling the boom of the lateen sail with a pedal-like noose of rope about his left foot. Beneath the bench there was a massive warhammer, and in his lap, a spear. Tharril and his folk were fishermen, but there were plenty of fish around Blackfire Bight that would consider a single-sail like this one small prey. Jonsson too was armed, a skyhook on a strap across his shoulder and a privateer pistol loaded in his holster.

Thalia, the girl (Jonsson had also heard her father call her ‘spratling’ or oft times just ‘sprat’), sat against the starboard gunwale, across the centreline from Jonsson. A plaid net lay in sodden folds over her knees as she sang her ballad, extricating wriggling fish as long as her arm or longer. Silver, nightshade-blue and bone-white shimmered under starlight as they flapped and squirmed, only to disappear into buckets of cold brine. Jonsson watched as she pulled another fighter from the net. Smaller, this one, its tail barely reaching her elbow with her hand clamped expertly about its gills. She tossed it over the side.

The ocean accepted its return with a faint splash.

‘And when they grow old and grandchildren forget,

That will be the day when the fishing folk come.’

Jonsson wondered if he was paying Tharril and his girl too much to sail him out there, if they were just going to pursue a normal day’s take along the way.

‘Why do you throw back the small ones?’

‘They are young,’ she replied.

‘But why?’

She shrugged. ‘You just do.’

With a grunt, as disturbed as much by the company of the odd girl as by her brute of a father, Jonsson pried his fingers from the gunwale and leant forwards. His chest of equipment had been stowed inboard.