Daughter of Wine

Jason

I'm not sure what to hope for: storm or fire. 

As I wait for my daily audience with the lord of the South Wind, I try try to decide which of the god's personalities, Roman or Greek, is worse. But after five days in the palace, I'm only certain about one thing: me and the crew are unlikely to get out of here alive. 

I lean against the balcony rail. The air is so hot and dry, it sucks the moisture right out of my lungs. over the last week, my skin has gotten darker. My hair has turned as white as corn silk. Whenever I glance in the mirror, I'm startled by the wild, empty look in my eyes, as if I've gone blind wandering in the desert. 

A hundred feet below, the bay glitters against a crescent of red sand beach. We're somewhere on the northern coast of Africa. That's as much as the wind spirits will tell me. 

The palace itself stretches out on either side of me-a honeycomb of halls and tunnels, balconies, colonnades, and cavernous rooms carved into the sandstone cliffs, all designed for the wind to blow through and make as much noise as possible. The constant pipe-organ sounds remind me of the floatiing lair of Aeolus, back in Colorado, except here the winds seem in no hurry. 

Which is part of the problem. 

On their best days, the southern venti are slow and lazy. On their worst days, they're gusty and angry. They'd initially welcomed the Argo II, since any enemy of Boreas is a friend of the South Wind, but they seem to have forgotten that we're their guests. The venti quickly lost interest in helping repair the ship. Their king's mood gets worse every day. 

Down at the dock, my friends are working on the Argo II. The main sail has been repaired, the rigging replaced. Now they're mending the oars. Without Leo, Calli is doing the best she can, and I'm impressed she's done as much as she has. But she's struggling to repair the more complicated parts of the ship, even with the help of Buford the table and Festus, who is now permanently activated thanks to Piper's charmspeak. But she keeps trying. 

She's standing at the helm, tinkering with the controls. Piper relays her commands to Coach Hedge, Frank, and Hazel, who are hanging over the side of the ship, banging out dents in the oars. 

They don't seem to be making much progress, but considering what we've been through, it's a miracle the ship is in one piece. 

I made Piper explain what Calli did multiple times. She explained it in great detail, but I simply can't imagine it in my mind. Of course, before, I couldn't imagine Calli as anything but bright. Now, she seems to be a husk of what she once was. I know she hasn't slept in days, and I haven't seen her eat, either. These days, she reminds me of Nico di Angelo: quiet, sulking, and not friendly. She sits quietly in the mess hall while we eat, pushing food around her plate. She spends every night in the engine room, trying to fix the engine. She explained to me what was wrong. She said: The syncopator is misaligned. The superdeadly fluids aren't being released because the rotor is out of alignment, and because of that, the ship's main power source is out of commission. I need to realign the syncopator and reset the gauges on the fluids in order to reset the engine and get the engine core pumping agan. 

That's the longest sentence that has left her mouth in a week, and I barely understand less than half of it. But she's in that engine room every night, trying to fix the problem. At least she knows what the issue is, but I don't think she knows exactly how to fix it. 

During the day, she's working on the rest of the ship. She's gotten darker too, her olive skin tanned and warm-looking, despite her sudden personality change. She's done most of the repairs herself. Our friends try to help, but since she isn't speaking very much, it's hard for anyone to understand what she wants them to do. I don't think she completely understands what she needs them to do herself. Her hands seem to just work without direction from her mind. That, coupled with the bubble of heavy depression that surrounds her constantly, makes it very hard for anyone besides her to get anything done.