If you love sea stories but have grown tired of cannon fire and shouted orders, this voyage is for you. In the age of myth, an exploration ship carries home the only chart of a safe passage through the northern fog and ice, and four black-sailed ships hunt it across a stormy sea. When the wind dies away, the escape rests on an old, half-blind navigator who teaches by asking questions and letting the sea answer.
When the wind falls asleep and the hunters lie on the same glassy sea, the only way home is to listen.
You are the youngest person aboard the Heron, an exploration ship that has just charted a safe passage through the fog and ice of the far north. On the night it returns, word comes that the lord of the Iron Shore has sent four black-sailed ships to take the chart, and the old navigator Ingrith leads the crew out into the dark without a single light.
The voyage is told to you as sixteen lessons, framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Each one begins with something that everyone believes, that you need light to see at sea, that the faster ship wins a chase, that the wind never sleeps in the north, and lets the sea show what is really true.
Then the wind dies away. Hunters and hunted lie becalmed on the same water, and the escape turns into a long, quiet contest of oars, currents, stars, fog, ice and patience, with a small crew learning whom to trust when there is nothing to fight.
Aboard the Heron, you will learn to
- Read the long swell of a storm far away and keep a course under a closed grey sky
- Find the slow river that runs inside a flat calm sea
- Tell how far north you are from the height of the one star that does not move
- Hold a frightened crew together with a steady voice rather than a loud one