(title hidden — not yet read)

(summary hidden — not yet read)

Weeks at sea bring the Wandersail only slowly toward Aimia — even good winds make the run from Thaylenah a long one — but Rysn has enough trade correspondence and letters from other paralyzed people around the world to keep her station busy. The ship shelters in coves for highstorms and Everstorms; she goes ashore briefly to send letters by spanreed. Her crew remains difficult to draw out: she now reads their reserve toward her as loyalty to the captain and not personal dislike, but the rebsk is in any case a station above the easy banter of the deck.

The Lopen has no such problem. He prances around her quarterdeck chair on hands and knees demonstrating the proper form of crawling — a skill he sincerely missed while down to one arm — and Rysn finds herself, against her training and against her expectations, simply enjoying his company. He has the trick of making people laugh at what he does rather than at what he cannot help, and quietly invites her into the same kind of permission. They trade no-legged Thaylen jokes; she ventures one of her own (a Thaylen who cannot walk would be called *names, from afar*; she would never *stand* for it) and he nearly falls off the deck laughing. The ardent Rushu disapproves, on principle, of any joke a brightness has to crack at her own expense to keep the room comfortable; Lopen agrees in the abstract and continues cracking them, because life is unfair and the chair is still there. Huio, meanwhile, quietly works the rigging and untangles rope — duty a Knight Radiant has no business doing and is doing anyway.

Rushu finally produces the demonstration she has been promising. She hands Rysn a silvery hoop with half a ruby socketed at the top and keeps a matching hoop for herself; once Rysn twists the housing to conjoin them, Rushu's hoop hangs in the air and Rysn's feels slightly heavier. Moved together they would track each other — the principle behind every spanreed. Moved in opposition, as this pairing is configured, they move as mirror images: hers down, the floating one up; hers left, the floating one right. This is the principle Navani's scholars have been latticing into the new flying platforms — drop one lattice on a cliffside, lift the matched lattice up over a battlefield to give scouts or archers a perch.

Rysn asks the obvious shipboard question: why do spanreeds break down on a moving deck and these hoops do not? Rushu explains that the wobble of the ship overwhelms a spanreed's two halves, which are in different frames of reference; here both hoops travel with the ship and so share its frame, and only Rysn's own deliberate motions register. The Lopen, sitting up, proposes attaching the hoops to Rysn's legs and having someone walk around for her so she will *look* as if she is walking. Rushu corrects him: they had rather meant to make the chair itself hover. Lopen accepts this as the better idea, and seems disappointed.

Rysn sees, with a cold practicality, why Navani would not promise anything firm. A chair simply made to hover would still have to be hauled by someone holding the matched lattice — porters under a different name. She has been letting herself dream of moving under her own power; for a moment she has to choke that dream down. The world fills with marvels — men flying, ships with masts as lightning rods — but none of the marvels quite reach her. Rushu, gentle, lists the smaller experiments she has been told to try: maybe a sunshade view as high as the masthead, maybe a small fabrial-counterweight lift between the quarterdeck and the main deck wound by a crewman. Rysn agrees to be available for all of it, and forces a smile.

Packing her kit away, Rushu lays out something else: silvery aluminum sheets of varying thickness, and a roll of foil. Navani has only recently confirmed that aluminum blocks spanreed communication; Rushu's brief on this voyage is to map the threshold and to test whether thicker, thinner, or foil-thin sheets interfere with the conjoined hoops or, perhaps, with how those hoops respond to the natural motion of a hull. She catches herself getting technical, apologises, looks up — and finds the Lopen absolutely serious. *Wait. Back up.* He needs an explanation. Rysn smiles as he begins to genuinely pester Rushu about how fish breathe.

Then movement breaks the moment. Kstled storms up to the quarterdeck and whispers urgently into the captain's ear. Drlwan frowns at once, gives an order, and starts down the steps — only to pause halfway, see Rysn watching directly back at her, and reluctantly turn back to report. *Dark Soulcasting,* she says. *And bad omens. You should probably see it in person, Rebsk.*