tell where the rain ended and the sea spray started. It was hard to remember that only a few minutes ago the waters had seemed relatively calm and he could see all the way to the horizon.
The ship’s timbers creaked and groaned now and he realised that something, somewhere was putting the hull under enormous stress. The wind and the waves roared like angry daemons.
The worst of it was that he had no idea of how likely things were to go wrong. It seemed entirely possible to him that the whole ship could break in two at any instant, or that the power of the waves could swamp the vessel, filling the hold with water and sending them to the bottom like a stone.
He glanced at the captain and at Lady Malene and then at the rest of the officers. They looked tense but not worried and he decided that it would be best to take his cue from them.
Part of him realised that they were in the same position as him. Even if they knew the vessel was about to break up, it would do them no good to panic. It helped that they remained calm. The sense of authority radiating from them affected the crew, who went about their duties with a will. If the officers had seemed frightened, the crew might panic as well, and in that panic the whole ship could be lost.
There was a lesson in the duties of command here that was not lost on Tyrion. He filed it away in his memory for future reference, swearing that he would remember the demeanour of the captain and the mage if and when he was ever in a similar situation.
Lightning erupted in the sea in front of them, so brilliant that it was blinding. Someone, somewhere, screamed and Tyrion wondered whether the bolt had hit the ship. An instant later thunder bellowed like an angry god overhead. A huge gust of wind and a giant wave hit the ship simultaneously. Water crashed over the deck and surged towards Tyrion like a moving wall.
Despite the raging seas, despite the swaying deck, despite the lightning flare and the thunder roar, only one thing held Teclis’s attention – Lady Malene. She had begun working magic almost as soon as the storm started, a slow, subtle weaving that most elves would never have spotted but which was obvious to Teclis with his peculiar sensitivity to the flows of power.
He watched, fascinated. He had never seen anyone work magic like this before. His father was a wizard, for sure, but his craft was the slow, subtle assembly of runes and flows of power that went into making and moulding things. It was rare he had ever seen his father do anything that was not directly connected with the armour of Aenarion, and even that was usually small, trivial stuff like the making of light or fire.
This was something of an entirely different order. He was not sure what Lady Malene was going to do but he was sure it was going to be something much greater than anything he had ever seen Prince Arathion cast.
Malene summoned more and more of the winds of magic to her. She pulled power from the very air surrounding her and moulded it with gentle, small motions of her hands and body.
Teclis watched, understanding instinctively what was happening. He was tempted to copy it the way a child copies the action of a parent but he was sufficiently conscious of what was happening to know that any interference on his part might prove disastrous. Instead he made himself watch and memorise, hoping that at some point in the future he might be able to recreate what she was doing.
As the storm intensified, Lady Malene wove her spells. Teclis moved as close as the ropes binding him to the ship’s railings would allow so he could hear what she was saying over the howling of the wind. There was magic in the words and in her voice. They were laced with power and his magic-attuned senses caught what she was saying in a way his hearing alone never could have if she was merely speaking words.
He saw the relation between her words, her gestures and the flow of the winds of magic. She was the still centre and she was doing something that manipulated the forces around her. Something about her mind and her spirit anchored the whole structure of spellwork she was creating.