Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 82: Little Town’s First Voyage

Lightning was the only one aboard who had ever sailed anything, so she became the navigator by default.

She had spent most of her father’s voyages watching. He had refused, consistently and with the patience of someone who had made his decision long before she asked, to let her take the helm. She had been allowed to manage small lines, to read the charts, to identify current patterns by the color of the water. The helm itself had always been someone else’s responsibility. So Little Town’s first voyage would, in a sense, be her first time as well — which she did not mention to anyone.

By tradition, she broke a bottle of wheat wine against the bow. Carter, who was the captain and therefore the actual command authority on the ship, had decided to accommodate the navigator’s traditional role without entirely yielding his own, which meant that whenever Lightning gave an order he would repeat it in a slightly louder voice as though confirming it. Lightning did not argue with this arrangement. She was twelve, and he was considerably larger, and she got what she wanted either way.

Little Town’s sails were animal skin — cowhide and sheepskin for the majority, wolf and bear for the rest, stitched together in whatever configuration had been available, so the result was patchwork: brown, grey, white, ragged-edged, magnificent in its ugliness. They were trapezoidal and divided by four horizontal beams, raised by a cable running through iron rings at the top. Pull the cable and the sail went up. Lower it and the sail came down. Roland had designed everything for the smallest possible crew learning the fastest possible sequence.

“Release the dock lines,” Lightning told the workers on shore, and Little Town moved into the current.

“Right full rudder!” she called down to Brian.

Brian scratched his head. “How many circles right?”

Lightning turned to look at him. He doesn’t know what right rudder means. She had not accounted for that. “Turn the wheel to the left,” she said, already moving toward him.

She took the handle herself — a transverse steering wheel that came up to her shoulder — and lifted off the deck slightly to bring her weight to bear, rotating it left around. A strip of iron at the rudder base stopped the over-rotation she would have otherwise applied; she noted it and filed away the detail, because the detail mattered and it was clearly someone’s deliberate choice, which meant someone understood the problem of rudder overrun on a wide-hulled vessel.

How does he know these things? The question about Roland arrived in her mind, not for the first time, and departed without resolution.

“Sister Wendy,” she called upward. “You can start the wind.”

From the top of the cabin shed, Wendy looked down at the river and thought about what she had agreed to. This is why he asked if I was afraid of heights. The contrast was not lost on her — all the things she had used her power for before, the one-time gales and the small camp chores, and now this: a sustained, even flow in both sails simultaneously, balanced so the helmsman could steer. It was not a question of power. It was a question of control she had never developed because she had never needed to.

She opened her hands and began.

The sails bellowed out unevenly. She corrected. They came closer to even. The masts creaked. The bow swung right, slowly, gaining steadiness as the wind found its shape.

“It’s moving!” Carter said, with the surprised conviction of someone who had intellectually accepted this possibility but had not quite believed it until this moment.

Sir Pine, watching from the correspondent’s position, laughed. “Is there anything he can’t do?”

Little Town moved toward the river’s center, wide and unhurried, the patchwork sails full. Brian learned the wheel through repetition — Lightning giving him direction changes specifically to teach him the relationship between rotation and response, the lag of a wide hull, the way the bow lagged behind the rudder angle by several seconds. He was a quick student when the learning was physical rather than verbal.

An hour into the voyage, Wendy began to sway.

It was not her power running out. It was the cold. She was wrapped in every layer she owned and still the wind cut through at altitude; the cabin roof was exposed and she had been standing in moving air for an hour with her hands out. Snow had accumulated on her cap. Her fingers and feet had gone past ache into absence.

Lightning saw her sway from the deck below and flew up immediately, seizing her under the arms.

“Brian — turn for home!”

Brian turned the wheel, corrected, turned again. The bow came around. Wendy, on the deck now, was shivering through every layer. The deck was sheltered from the worst of the wind and she began, incrementally, to return from wherever she had gone.

Lightning brought Little Town in herself — she would not give the landing to a first-timer, and did not waste time with explanation. The hull met the bank with a sound that made everyone’s heart stutter, a collision that was louder than it was damaging. The sailors scrambled to fold sails and extend the gangplank.

Carter stood on the deck afterward and looked at Little Town riding the current. Without Wendy, he thought, it was simply not practical to move her at all.

He kept this thought to himself.

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