The skyfarer’s trade is the work of moving people, cargo, and word across the air-currents of the Mistsea. It is older than any temple-record will admit and younger than the Reckoning by some uncertain margin. Most inhabited isles in the Reaches depend on it for everything they cannot grow, mine, or carve themselves; most adult skyfarers will tell you, when asked, that they would not do anything else, and most of them will say this even after they have stopped being able to do it.
A working ship of the Reaches carries, at minimum, eight hands and three officers. The officers are these:
- The Captain, who holds the right to the ship’s name and answers for everything the ship does. The captain is not always the owner; on most reach-vessels, the owner is a brasswright consortium of the Copper Ring or a family-line on the home-isle, and the captain serves on contract. A captain who is the owner is called an owner-captain, and is not necessarily admired for it
- The First Hand — sometimes First Mate in the older trade-tongue — who runs the deck. The first hand is the captain’s voice when the captain is below, the captain’s challenger when the captain is wrong, and the captain’s friend when nothing else holds. Most captains will tell you privately that the right first hand is the difference between a working ship and a ship that simply has not foundered yet
- The Stoneward, who answers for the aetherstones. The stoneward’s work is more felt than seen; a good stoneward keeps the ship aloft and the crew calm, a poor stoneward does neither. Stonewards are paid more than first hands and treated with particular care. They are also, by reputation, the strangest officers on most ships, because the work is strange. The crew will leave a stoneward to their own counsel and not press for explanations. Stone-talker is the affectionate folk-form; stoneward is the formal one. Both are in regular use
Below the officers, the hands do the work. A standard reach-vessel carries eight: bosun (deck-discipline), navigator (charts and currents), and six general hands who rotate among rigging, galley, watch, and cargo duties. Larger vessels carry more — the great Brassmarket cargo-haulers sail with twenty or more — and small reach-runners sometimes work with only six total bodies, officer and hand combined. The eight-and-three shape is what reach-folk think of when they think crew.
The share-system is how skyfarers are paid. The trade-rule, in its plainest form, is this: every crossing carries a settled cargo, every cargo has a value, and the value is divided into shares. The standard division on a reach-vessel is:
- Owner-share: 40% (the ship itself, its upkeep, the next stone)
- Captain’s hand: 15% (the captain’s pay)
- Officer-share: 5% each (first hand, stoneward — 10% total)
- Crew-share: the remainder, divided equally among the hands
A vessel with eight hands at standard division gives each hand roughly 4.4% of the cargo’s value. A successful long-crossing pays a hand more than a season of land-work; a poor season pays nothing at all. There is no salary in the trade. There is only the share, and the share is what came home.
This is not a stable way to live. Skyfarers are paid in windfalls and droughts, and the droughts kill some of them — not from starvation, exactly, but from the long slow grinding of a debt that will not close. Most reach-folk who do not skyfare consider the trade romantic. Most skyfarers consider it a job that occasionally produces romance as a byproduct, the way a forge produces sparks.
A skyfarer’s first crossing is called the first-crossing, and it is a rite of passage no formal institution administers. The rite is this: the greenhand stands at the bow as the ship takes air, watches the home-isle fall away below, and kisses the mist — touches the lips, briefly, to the back of one hand, to greet the air. The gesture is older than any record; the temple does not require it; no skyfarer will tell you they were taught it. They simply do it, and they do it on every crossing afterward, the small gesture diminishing to a habit and then to nothing, until they only notice they did it on the crossings that nearly killed them.
A crew that has crossed together becomes, in the trade-tongue, first- named to one another. The phrase has a precise meaning. To be first-named to someone is to know the name they were given as a child — before any travel-name, before any title — and to have permission to use it. Skyfarers exchange first names slowly. A captain may go three seasons before being first-named to her own first hand. A crew with twenty crossings between them may still hold one or two members at travel-name. There is no shame in this, and no formula. The first name is given when it is given. Crewmate is the standard word for someone you have crossed with; first-named is what you are when you have crossed with someone enough.
The trade has its private dignities and its public ones. The private dignity is the share-board: every reach-port keeps a record of the crews and the captains who paid out a full crew-share for the season, and the captains whose names appear on the share-board year after year have, in the trade’s own estimation, kept faith. The public dignity is the three-stone: a captain who has commanded three different ships across her career, and survived them all, is called a three-stone. There are not many three-stones at any time. They are treated, in port towns, with a courtesy that does not extend to nobility. Most three-stones tire of it within a year and ask, where they can, to be addressed by their first name.
The trade also has its constants of grief. A working captain in the Reaches loses, on average, one crewmate per six crossings, by reach-statistics from the Copper Ring’s harbour-rolls. Most are not deaths in any vivid sense; most are slow attrition — sickness, debt, retirement, drift to other ships, the quiet decision to take land and not return. A captain who has lost a crewmate to a fall, the trade’s word for the worst death, will mark the loss in private ways most landfolk would not recognize: a small notch cut into the ship’s bell-rim; a candle lit at the home-port on the same date each year; a particular brand of small unspoken caution about who is allowed to take certain stations. The notches accumulate. Most working captains’ bells, by the end of a long career, have many notches. The bells are kept when the ships are sold, and given to the next captain of the line, who will add their own.
The trade is, finally, a faith — though no priest of the Seven would say so aloud. It is a faith in the lift, in the stones, in the captain, in the deep currents that carry every ship of the people. It is a faith that has buried many of its faithful. It is, by every measure the trade applies to itself, worth it. Most skyfarers cannot explain why. The phrase that comes closest, in the old trade-tongue, is we cross because we cross; the phrase has no theology, no logic, and no defence, and is the only thing that has held the trade together in four hundred years of crossings.
“My grandfather was a three-stone. My father was lost on his second command. I am twenty-six crossings into my own first ship and I will not be a three-stone, by my own count. We cross because we cross. The bell on the Marrowkeel has eleven notches. I cut three of them myself. I would not give the ship up for any landed work I have ever been offered. I do not know how to explain this in a way that would satisfy a landsman. I have stopped trying.”
— Captain Vesh of the Marrowkeel, in conversation with a Wren Academy delegate, 412 AU