Hagel

• Build & height: two bodies and one soul.
  • The storm: a storm the size of an island, bigger than all the Fleet's squalls together, black as tar, with grey-white lightning in its belly and hail falling from it in a white curtain. Over it, tier on tier of thunderhead sails, rigged like a ship of the line, and at its heart a wheel (ch. 277–278).
• Face:
  • The storm-face (ch. 278): the front of the storm folds into a colossal face of black thunderhead leaning down over the water. It wears a tricorn of cloud and a beard of hail that drags on the lake.
  • The man's face (ch. 284): an old captain, gaunt, with grey stubble and water running endlessly off his chin into the still lake.
• Hair: the storm has a tricorn and nothing under it. The man's hair is grey, plastered flat and always dripping (ch. 284).
• Eyes: grey-white lightning in the storm-face (ch. 278). In the man the lightning is inside the eyes (ch. 284). When he answers Njord about the boys, "the lightning gone quiet in his eyes" (ch. 286). Never green: green is Vigolas's.
• Clothing, layer by layer:
  • The storm: a storm-coat of cloud, the tricorn, the hail-beard, and a lantern, dead, on a chain of rain at its throat (ch. 278).
  • The man: an admiral's coat, soaked through and black with water that never dries · epaulettes green with three hundred years of sea · the same dead lantern at his throat (ch. 284–285).
• Signature item: the dead lantern on its chain of rain. The second is the wheel of cloud, which is never still.
• Movement:
  • The storm moves slowly, enormous and unhurried, until it wheels in a single heartbeat (the feint, ch. 278).
  • The man's hands never stop on the wheel: "a quarter, back, a quarter, back, never still" (ch. 284).
  • 285), he starts to rain away.
• Voice:
  • As the storm: "a voice like hail on a roof", in jagged, rattling balloons (ch. 278). He laughs a rattling hail-laugh, and his roars are drawn as hail.
  • In the eye: "a man's voice, quiet, very tired" (ch. 284).
• Variant looks:
  • The watermark (ch. 276: a flagship storm faint over the night sky, three days off)
  • The flagship (ch. 277: alone in front of the wall, hail curtain, a figure at the wheel)
  • The storm-face (ch. 278)
  • The reach (ch. 278 splash: the captains in his rigging leaning down to watch a new one join)
  • Enraged (ch. 281: "THEN I'LL BRING IT MYSELF!")
  • Quiet (ch. 282, over the empty lake: "Three hundred years I gave them wheels.")
  • The man at the wheel (ch. 284)
  • Raining away (ch. 285–286: on his knees on still water, a puddle widening round him, still hooked)
  • Weather again (ch. 286: rising, the rain gathering into a coat of cloud and a beard of hail, smaller than before)

He is his storm, and he is the captain at its eye.

• The storm is hail, black cloud, grey-white lightning and thunderhead sails, with a wheel of cloud at its heart. Hit the storm and you hit weather. Hit the eye and you hit him (ch. 284). The eye is still: a well of quiet air with a disc of sky at the top and walls of storm turning round it, and the captain inside it is a man (ch. 283–284).
• The Fleet: "Every captain who drowns hating the sea is mine. His hate stays in the weather and I give it a wheel." (ch. 278).
  • Ranks: each is STORM CAPTAIN · THE DEAD · drowned.
  • The ships: squalls each the size of a house, black-bellied, with thunderhead sails and a dim drowned captain at a wheel of cloud (ch. 277). Forty storms came at Tidekant (ch. 282), and a dozen more were still in the wall afterwards (ch. 286).
  • The thread: every storm has a thread running from its swirl to its captain (Kompis, ch. 277).
• Captains feint: a captain can change his mind, and the weather can't. That is "the one thing a forecast can't promise" (ch. 277).
  • He raided a day early (ch. 277).
  • He promised "three days" and sent his dawn storm one night later (ch. 278, 280).
  • He swung north and back in the same heartbeat.
• Lightning feeds a storm: an Emerald Knuckle thrown into a squall is swallowed and turns grey-white, and the squall doubles (ch. 277, 280).
• He knows his own lightning: Vigolas's green lightning came in with Hagel's sea (ch. 279). Kompis sees a grey-white thread from Vigolas's heart to him: "It's not a bond. It's like it's… part of you." (ch. 278). He can pull at it: "Then give it back." (ch. 284).
• What it can't do:
  • Be still.
  • Take a man who didn't drown hating. Njord's sons were never in his fleet (ch. 286). Vigolas drowned, doesn't hate the sea, got up, and stayed out of it (ch. 278).
  • Take what Levla has priced. Six price tags read PRICE: THREE DAYS: "You can have their boats. The men cost three days." The storm smashed the boats and couldn't touch the men (ch. 278).
  • Live in still water (ch. 285).
  • Keep his storm's schedule against a FLEX, or reclaim a storm Njord has knotted before it formed (ch. 281). It was given back to him the hard way (ch. 282).
  • Stop lightning that is answered. Released along the path the sky already wants, green and grey braid together, land twice as hard, and burst storms from the inside (ch. 282, 284).

A storm can never be still.

• In the eye (ch. 284): "Because if I stop… I stop." · "Still air rains out. Three hundred years I've kept this wheel turning." · "If you hold the wheel you don't have to feel the water."
• On the page: his hands never leave the wheel. When the answered bolt slows it for the first time in three hundred years, he panics: "don't let it STOP—" (ch. 284).
• Dragged off the wheel onto Still Water (ch. 285), the moment there is nothing turning under his hands, he begins to rain: water pours off him "as if he were made of it, and he is". Ch. 286: "I'm running out, old man. Another hour on still water and there'll be nothing to talk to."
• The price was also the mercy. "It's still. I'd forgotten what still felt like." (ch. 285). His freed captains were glad to go (ch. 282).

• Hit the captain, not the storm. Kompis: "Every storm's got a thread! Follow it in, and there's a captain! Hit the CAPTAIN!" (ch. 277).
  • Subtick Shots down the thread (ch. 277).
  • Kompis's Five-Gun Volley: five captains (ch. 282).
  • Perne's Long Look (ch. 282).
  • Smurjan's shadow drags a captain out by the throat (ch. 277, 282).
  • Svala flies a line at a captain, not his storm (ch. 277), and through a squall's mast of cloud (ch. 282).
• Vigolas's STORM-ANSWER:
  • one bolt the length of the Fleet's line bursts half the Fleet (ch. 282);
  • lightning answered straight down into still water in the eye stops his wheel (ch. 284: "It doesn't want you. It doesn't want me. It wants to stop.").
• Njord:
  • Still Water laid a glass road through his wall (ch. 276) and the patch he rained away on (ch. 285).
  • Wind-Knot caught his unformed dawn storm (ch. 281).
  • The Long Cast hooked him in his own eye (ch. 283).
• Flexsnus:
  • FLEX: a storm's forming is a rule ("Storms keep a calendar"), bent one notch (ch. 281).
  • THE PINCH: one more word, "…forever" (ch. 286).
• Levla's PRICE TAGS (ch. 278).
• Somebody pulling. Two ships and two crews on a hawser dragged him out of his own eye (ch. 283–285). The one thing he never had: "Nobody pulled me." (ch. 284).
• What protects him:
  • Thrown lightning feeds him (ch. 277, 280).
  • Fists go straight through rain ("You can't hit it!", Krydog, ch. 277).
  • A forecast can't follow a feint.
  • Nobody comes in ("You came in. Nobody comes in.", ch. 284).

• The dead lantern on a chain of rain.
• The wheel of cloud, standing on the water at the heart of the eye, always turning (ch. 283–284). Left alone with no hands on it, it slows, stops, and the whole storm loses its shape round it (ch. 285).
• The flagship storm: tier on tier of thunderhead sails, a hail curtain, grey-white lightning in its belly.
• The Storm Fleet (STORM CAPTAIN · THE DEAD · drowned):
  • The captains: drowned men in sodden coats with empty eyes and beards of rain, at cloud-wheels. One laughs as a shed's roof peels away (ch. 277). One sniffs at Vigolas: "Green. That's our lightning, boy. Where'd you get it?" (ch. 277).
  • The freed: when a captain is struck down his storm rains away, and he is freed, looking up once, almost relieved (ch. 277). In ch. 282 one takes off his hat, one laughs, one reaches up as if to touch the light, and one, dragged out onto the beach, says "…Oh. It's warm." Kompis: "They were tired of holding the wheel."
  • The remnant: a dozen storms fall in behind him and sail out into the Deep (ch. 286).
• The storm-wall: black cloud from the water to the top of the sky with sails in it, standing across the lake's horizon. Sill has never seen the horizon without it (ch. 286). It dissolved behind the departing Fleet (ch. 286).

He sends weather before he comes himself.

• Squalls raid the village a day early (ch. 277).
• He comes as a face to name what he wants (Vigolas), and feints across the fishing grounds (ch. 278).
• He sends a dawn storm to drown the village while he waits behind the wall (ch. 280).
• He sends the whole Fleet (ch. 281–282).
• Only when the Fleet is broken does he turn the flagship himself, on the smallest target on the lake: "I'll start with the old man who knotted my storm." (ch. 282).

He fights from inside weather, where fists go through and thrown lightning feeds him. He finishes by giving the drowned a wheel. Fleet combo, Admiral + captains: squadrons feint together, and lightning thrown into any one storm feeds it.

• Wants: never to stop. "I gave them wheels so they wouldn't have to stop." Under that: never to feel the water.
• Fears: stillness. The wheel stopping.
• Contradictions:
  • A drowned man who hates the sea, and rules it.
  • Merciless to the living, and in his own way kind to the drowned: he gave them wheels so they wouldn't have to feel it.
  • Proud to the last ("lifting his chin with the last of an admiral's pride": "…Terms."), and still the one honest voice on the flat water about Njord's boys.
  • He sneers at "Up" ("What a stupid word."), and nobody ever pulled him up.
• Humour: a dark, rattling fondness. "You should have a storm of your own by now, boy. Green, I think." · "Three days it is, little lake."
• Habits: turns the wheel a quarter and back; calls Tidekant "little lake" and Vigolas "boy"; remembers every wave he ever raised and everyone who saw it.
• Alone: at the wheel in the still eye, looking up the turning walls of his own storm.

• Vigolas: the captain who turned in.
  • "I know you. You steered into me." / "So why aren't you in my fleet?" / "I don't hate the sea." / "Then why does my lightning live in you?" (ch. 278)
  • "Bring your green, boy. I'll keep you a wheel." (ch. 278)
  • At the battle: "You answered it." / "It wanted to go home. I just went with it." (ch. 282)
  • Two drowned captains (ch. 284): "I wouldn't strike my colours. You wouldn't drop your gold. We both went down holding something." / "Somebody pulled." / "Nobody pulled me." / "I know. I'm sorry."
  • It was Vigolas who named his destination: "The Deep's got no weather… It could use some weather." (ch. 286)
  • Vigolas keeps his own steering: "The storm was his. The steering was mine." (ch. 279)
• Njord:
  • The man whose sons he drowned. Hooked by the Long Cast (ch. 283: "Hooked you, Admiral.").
  • "You knew I was coming and you did nothing." / "Aye. I'm doing something now."
  • Dragged off his wheel (ch. 285), held to terms, and then unhooked "the way you'd free a fish you meant to let go": "Go on, then. Forever." (ch. 286)
  • His last words were to Njord.
• Flexsnus:
  • "You're the one who made my storm late." / "One notch. I'm still paying for it."
  • The Pinch: "That's cheating." / "That's paperwork."
  • "Three hundred years I kept a wheel turning so I'd never have to stop. And a man with a tin of snus just told me where I'm going for good." (ch. 286)
• Krydog: "He drowned, yeah! Then he got UP! That makes him OURS!" / "Up. What a stupid word." (ch. 278)
• Levla: "What is that?" / "A price." · "Then three days it is, little lake. I'll come back and pay." (ch. 278). He came back sooner, and the price held.
• Kompis: found the thread in every storm, and the grey-white one from Vigolas's heart to him (ch. 277–278). He pulled that thread so Vigolas could feel where the storm wanted to go (ch. 280).
• Drekk: grew up on his legend (ch. 278).
• Sill: signed [Come home.] at his storm while it had her grandfather (ch. 283). She had never seen the horizon without his wall (ch. 286).
• The Up-Again and the Marka's crews: the hawser. "Nobody lets go! NOBODY!" (ch. 283)
• His captains: "Three hundred years I gave them wheels." Freed, they were glad.
• Hallbard: the keeper who hasn't sat in four hundred years and the admiral who hasn't been still in three hundred. One can't choose his ships. The other couldn't stop his.

• "…You. I know you. You steered into me." (ch. 278)
• "Every captain who drowns hating the sea is mine. His hate stays in the weather and I give it a wheel." (ch. 278)
• "COME AND TAKE YOUR WHEEL!" (ch. 278)
• "Up. What a stupid word." (ch. 278)
• "Three hundred years. Three hundred years I gave them wheels." (ch. 282)
• "If you hold the wheel you don't have to feel the water." / "I gave them wheels so they wouldn't have to stop." (ch. 284)
• "…It's still. I'd forgotten what still felt like." (ch. 285)
• "Your boys aren't in my fleet, old man. They never were. Only the ones who drown hating come to me. They didn't hate the sea." (ch. 286, his last words to Njord)