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They had to stop eating dinner at the Swan.
"We have to start doing lunch. I'm not sure if the Cobbled Swan knows about breakfast, but lunch is safe," Neve offered as she and Rook picked their way through back alleys in a dying twilight. Either way, if the Swan was where they were always going to be when someone crashed in seeking help, they had to start being there during the daylight.
"We'd have to agree on when lunch is. You called a bread roll at mid-afternoon 'lunch' last week," Rook chirped, vaulting over a crate she could have easily walked around.
"After the sun leaves the high point," Neve replied testily. She flicked her eyes to the skyline for a moment, wondering what Minrathous had left to mark a high point, and this was the only reason she crashed into Rook's halted back with a wumph.
Rook hadn't stopped because they were at the harbor. They were still a block or so from the harbor. Rook had stopped because even from this distance the size of the trapped ship was staggering. No one had yet been able to explain to them where the thing had come from, only that it had come in at an inadvisable speed, with a chunk of its side missing that couldn't be explained by the couple of Dock Town piers it'd snapped before the tide had tugged it back out to the deeper bay.
(They'd just rebuilt those piers. Did they have enough lumber to re-rebuild those piers? Lumber wasn't their job, but they found themselves worrying about so many things that weren't their jobs, lately.)
Neve gave Rook's shoulder a soft shove and they were moving again toward the edge of the water, where a crowd had gathered to pull survivors off flotsam and generally point in the direction of the ship. It took an earsplitting "Oy, OY!" from Rook to get an intelligible report from someone: there was a survivor still onboard, somehow, a girl stuck in the far aft.
"Aft means back," Rook murmured out the side of her mouth as they followed a dockhand to the end of the least-destroyed pier. Neve hadn't needed the explanation. The only hole in the ship low enough for someone to feasibly enter from the water was at the very front, so of course whatever they needed was at the very back.
A sharp crack split the air, and the ship started shifting in a way that threatened to make the very back into the very top, and Neve didn't know what they called the very top of a ship but she did know they needed to move faster. Rook seemed to agree; she was already unstrapping weapons and shoving them at the dockhand, talking fast.
"Get to the part of the shore where you can see the full view of the ship. I'll try to keep to the open side so you can track me. I'll put up the wisp when I need an assist." Rook twisted her hip to make sure the reliquary was still at her waist. It was a solution they'd improvised for when torches were dangerous or impractical, and Neve reached forward to double-check the enchantments and make sure it still had a few notes to read.
"Remember not to shake it. It likes up and down," Neve said. Satisfied with the work, she stepped back and began moving toward the shore.
"This time last year you would've wanted to do worse than shake it. Don't hold up anything longer than a three-count, I'll get under it," Rook said as she tossed her outer leathers onto the wood. The dockhand watched as she prepared to dive.
"Is there anything I can do?" He sputtered.
Neve was already back to the shore as Rook barked her answer. "Just make sure she has room to move her arms!"
'Room to move her arms' was achieved by the dockhand awkwardly poking Rook's sheathed saber at the crowd. It wasn't what she would have suggested, but Neve left him to it as she scanned the front of the derelict for her first signal. It flashed after what could only have been a few paces in, a bright blue light illuminating Rook's bright red hair.
Neve moved instantly, circling both arms back, down, and up again in a scooping motion. The crowd gasped as a pillar of ice shot up out of the water and pried a beam out of Rook's way. The visible dimming of the blue light was the cue that Rook was scrambling under the wood, and Neve started her count.
One-Tevinter, two-Tevinter, three-Tevinter.
She a deep breath against her rising apprehension as she released the beam back down. They always did a three-count, and Rook was fast, and Neve had to focus. Their previous rescues had been collapses on land, and as three more signals went by, Neve realized that the speed of her movements was destablizing the vessel. She chewed her lip and tried to let one beam down just a big more slowly - four-Tevinter - but Rook got so many paces ahead of her eyesight in that short time that she was almost impossible to find again in the growing dark. A tug at Neve's sleeve made her jump, and she looked down to see a young boy pointing excitedly at the ship. He'd spotted a blue light in a lower place than she'd been looking.
The dockhand was becoming rather spirited with the sword. He leapt dramatically to poke the kid back and Neve hollered a thread she knew she'd have to apologize for later. She was in no position to actually act on a threat anyway, gritting teeth and dripping sweat as she worked to make up for her lapse in attention, but he stepped back all the same. Neve kept her arms at the ready and tried to ignore the swoop in her stomach as the front of the ship bobbed lower in the water. Rook had to be close to the girl now but they wouldn't be able to get out the way she'd come in. They'd need a way out, need a way down…
The blue light flashed again, but in a different motion. Instead of the previous punch-ups it had done to signal that debris needed to move, it was swooping top-down in a pattern that became more frantic as the weight of the sinking front-ship upended the back-ship (aft, aft, Maker's breath) and the murmur of the crowd shifted from awe to panicked confusion. Neve took a deep breath and steadied herself on her back foot before circling her arms around in a motion that was firmer, slower, as though they were working against some invisible resistance. The dark on the water was total now but an audible hissing and crackling hit the spectators in a wave, and then there was a collective silence, a mass bated breath.
The blue light appeared again and somehow moved smoothly down from the ship, in a controlled curve that sped up as it approached the water. Across the water, audible only because of the stunned silence of the crowd, came a faint "Whee!" It was followed by a splash and Neve dropped down to one knee in equal parts relief and exhaution. A second louder splash echoed as the ice hill she'd summoned collapsed back down with her.
The splash seemed to break some enchantment. The next sounds were of the ship breaking apart into the dark water and spectators at the bank erupting into a frenzy that Neve had to struggle through after she got back to her feet. For some reason, poking her staff into the crowd didn't have the same effect as the dockhand's clumsy handling of Rook's weapons. By the time she made it over toward the closest bit of shore to where the ship's aft had been, the transplanted crowd was staring into a stretch of water that stayed gutwrenchingly smooth. No air bubbles, no stroke ripples, and Neve began to panic that maybe the whee she'd thought she'd heard hadn't actually been a whee but instead had been the start of we need help this isn't working—
Neve wrenched her head up as voices sounded even further down the shore - all the way over there, how in the hell? - and she found herself wiggling through the crowd again until she came to the pair sputtering on the ground. Someone had already gotten linens around the girl, but Rook was splayed out on her back like a starfish and waving off someone's arm. Her head flooped toward Neve in exhaustion as the mage knealt on the ground beside her.
Rook grinned and stammered through chattering teeth. "That was a new trick. T-thanks for showing me an ice ti—"
Neve tweaked Rook's nose gently. "I told you to find a different ice joke next time."
"Okay, okay." Rook leaned on Neve's shoulder as they both clambered back up. The crowd was already dispersing, and for once, making their way out of a disaster was much easier than making their way into it.
"D'you think my food's gone cold? Leggo my nose! That isn't an ice joke—"