Islands in the Sky

4.15

Cassa watched, and thought, and learned a lot, and kept becoming aware of there being more to learn. About boats, for instance. She took a while to realize that she probably ought to know as much about boats as she did about birds, and that she had been concentrating on the harvest at the expense of the tools. She realized, and began to ask questions about boats, and quickly found out that to the fisherpeople, as to her, boats were just there, and not especially worth considering. Boats were provided when they were needed, but were not something particularly interesting in themselves, not the way winds or migrations or air-currents in the sky were interesting. Oddly, Cassa actually thought the same way. She was used to ships and boats, because the Middletowers were a trading family. Decorative ships were everywhere around the tower, in pictures and paintings, in ornaments and also in words. All Cassa’s life she had heard endless conversations about voyages and scavenging trips and trade, all things which depended on ships, but somehow, the ships were forgotten. As if ships were so common a thing that the actual skycraft themselves disappeared from the mid, forgotten, even thought they were what all the rest depended on.

It was a failing, Cassa thought, and decided that soon she would learn about boats, as well as birds and nets and merchants and all the rest she had to learn.

Cassa learned. She thought. Most of all, though, she tried to gain the trust of the fisherpeople. She tried to be fair to them, and generous when she could. She spoke out for them if it was needed, and tried to help them when she was able, with doctors and landlords and by making loans against their pay. She tried to reassure them that she was kinder and gentler than the rest of her family, as always, looking to the day when she might have to fight for her inheritance.

In time, Cassa came to understand the bird-fishing business well enough to manage it without trouble. In time, she began to find it interesting. It was a challenge, like any trading was, and it had its own quirks, but on some level was the same as all other trade. It was about bartering effectively, and making more from what you sold than what it had cost you, and scaring and wooing people into doing as you wished. It was that and little more, and Cassa did it well. In time, she expected she would actually do it very well, and turn a large profit. Enough of a profit to begin buying actual power of her own, in her own right, here in the docks.

She had expected to. She had expected that. She had thought her life had changed, but then had settled into a new routine, a new kind of calm quiet everyday.

She had thought that, but then, one day, quite suddenly, a fishing boat disappeared. And then, a few days later, another. And soon there were more, soon it was a blight, a plague, and no-one seemed to know why, or what to do.

Fishing boats went missing, and then the burned-out island was found by woodcutters, and things began to seem odd.

There was something wrong, out there in the sky, something badly wrong, and Cassa felt like she was the first of the tower-named families to actually notice, because she was down at the docks, speaking with the fisherfolk and woodcutters, hearing their worries, trading and talking and discussing in a way that few others with power in Anew-Hame ever did.

Cassa was the first to notice, and that in itself was worrisome.

Worse, was the worry of what it meant.

Something was terribly wrong, and Cassa was scared, and for the first time in her life she wasn’t sure what to do next.