Iron Seas 03 - Riveted

form one of Ayres rhymes, I’m sorry to say.”
    “So he has reason to believe that women can’t.”
    Her withering stare was met with his deep laugh, attracting the notice of the navigator, the first mate, and Kentewess’s companions. Oh, she didn’t want to share him with the others yet. She leaned in closer, turning her body as far toward him as the chair would allow, and was pleased when he did the same. Only someone more socially inept than Annika would interrupt them now—and as no one in the room fit that description, they would be left alone.
    “Madame Collin’s voice is also more beautiful than any other I’ve ever heard. When we are all pushed into the chapel on Sunday morning, I only pretend to sing so that I can listen to her.” Also because she didn’t know any of the hymns, but that was beside the point. If she’d known them, she would have still listened to the woman. “She likes sunrises better than sunsets—she is always on deck shortly after dawn, even in the rain, but I’ve never seen her on deck to watch the sun go down. She likes to drop rosewater onto her hair. She always smells lovely, which is well appreciated on a ship.”
    “Is it? I should splash a bit over myself.”
    Annika drew a long breath. If he had an odor, she couldn’t detect it. With some of the crew, across the room wouldn’t be far enough. “You smell all right, at least from this distance.”
    He didn’t smile as she expected. His posture stiffened slightly,his gloved fingers curling against his palms. After an endless moment, he finally answered. “From this distance, you do, too.”
    She couldn’t smile, either. Her chest tightened, her breath feeling heavy and quick all at once. Suddenly aware of the inches separating them, she wanted to lean closer—close enough that she could scent his hair, his skin. Would he smell like soap, smoke, sweat? Something completely unexpected?
    Even she couldn’t breach propriety so blatantly, though. With effort, she forced herself to stop imagining her face against his bare skin.
    Perhaps it would be easier if he stopped looking at her mouth. Her heart pounded, and she waited, waited for him to look up. How could she move her lips when he watched her like that? Oh, but she had to try.
    “So that is Madame Collin,” she said in a rush. Annika hoped that she had given him enough; she could barely remember what she’d said about the woman. “And now your man. Dooley, I think your aunt called him? Have you known him for very long?”
    His gaze finally lifted to hers again, but she still felt a bit breathless, as if she were on the edge of a laugh. Nothing about this was funny, though—except her attraction to him. Why here, why now, and why a man who might expose her village? It was ridiculous.
    Perhaps it was the gods who were laughing at her instead.
    “I’ve known him for many years now,” he said. “Dooley is the digger in our group, which sounds exactly like what it is: he digs up bones, looks through rubbish piles, pieces the dead and the buried back together, and attempts to tell their story with them. We’ll try to locate some of the earliest settlements marked on the old maps, and visit the allied outposts as well.”
    They wouldn’t find much there. Once, an alliance between the French, Dutch, Irish, and Portuguese had established a naval stronghold in Iceland, guarded by enormous sentinels and icebreaking,engine-powered ironships. The alliance served as a first line of defense against any Horde attempts to cross the Atlantic. But that had been before the invention of airships, before the discovery that no Arctic sea passage connected the great oceans—and before the number of giant, armored sharks in the northern waters made traveling by ironship too dangerous. The alliance had already begun to disintegrate before the fissure eruptions; the outposts were completely abandoned not long after, and much of the machinery left behind.
    Until Hanna and the Englishwomen had discovered it. Each sheet of metal and bolt had been salvaged, each engine and boiler had been used to construct their village’s defenses—a village that they’d built as far from the outposts as possible.
    “Those outposts are all in the southeast,” Annika said. “Is that where you’ll start?”
    “At Vik, on the southern rim. Then north and east.”
    Taking them away from Hannasvik—giving her village more time to prepare. “You’ll travel along the coast?”
    “Across