The Mistsea has weather. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not crossed it.
It has seasons, too, though they answer only loosely to the calendar. The first month after the Reckoning brings what sailors call the High Quiet — long windless days in the Middle Reaches, when stones must work harder and tempers run shorter. By the third month the Brightcurrent rises, fast and warm, and crossings to the Copper Ring shorten by half. The Ash Months that follow are cold and grey; the Stormring of late autumn rolls vast slow gales through the Veiled Waters; and at the year’s deep end, the Stillness — when the mist goes dense as wool, sound dies in your ears, and even old captains keep to known harbors.
Wind on the Mistsea does not blow — it sings. Every channel between two isles has its own pitch, and a navigator who knows her cluster knows it by ear before her instruments confirm it. New sailors are told to listen for the low note between Pike’s Reach and Ember’s End. If you hear it rising, the crossing will be smooth. If you hear it bending — turn back.
There are omens. Most sailors will deny them in daylight and obey them in the dark. A few worth knowing:
- A green tinge in the morning mist. Verdant on the wind. Trim sails. Speak to no one but your own crew until midday.
- Stones humming when no one is touching them. The cargo is wrong, or the course is wrong. Recheck both.
- A bird landing on the rail that you do not know. Feed it once, name it once, and let it go. Whatever you would have said next, do not say.
- Three lamps that go out together in still air. End the conversation that was happening when they did.
These are not religion. The temples do not teach them. But every harbor has a woman or a man who will tell you the same list, and the lists, harbor to harbor, are not very different.
The Almanac proper — the printed kind, sold in any large port for three copper — covers tides of mist, festival dates, customs schedules, and the expected positions of the seven stars. The unprinted Almanac, the one each crew carries between their ears, is longer and stranger and is what keeps ships in the air.
“The first thing you learn is wind. The second is silence. The third you learn from someone who has crossed the Stormring twice and will not tell you why she does not cross it a third time.”
— attributed to Captain Vesh, of the Marrowkeel*, 412 AU*