As I begin to post more original fiction online, I thought I’d toss this link to my Ko-Fi up as well. I write for the joy of it and it’s been absolutely wonderful to hear the response from the lovely folks out there.
If ever you’ve read my works or clapped eyes on the once-in-a-blue-moon visual art I’ve sent out into the aether, consider flinging a few dollars my way (or doubloons, or drachma, or large discs of polished abalone shell, or lei, or whatever you have in your pockets). It would mean the world to me and would allow me to continue updating and writing!
https://ko-fi.com/lucytroutscout
Take a look at my original fiction, found here (finished series, in update progress):
https://books-of-the-great-leviathan.tumblr.com/
https://archiveofourown.org/series/2947155
Or if you’re a Resident Evil Village enjoyer, here’s some juicy fic (saints of warding series, Burial):
https://archiveofourown.org/users/toothybeastie
All for FREE...that’s right, get it while it’s hot.
Thanks again, and shares/reblogs warm my dead heart!
Alois picked himself up and dusted grime from the front of his shirt. He'd fallen, and stayed there for long minutes, after they'd at last stopped running. His legs hadn't wanted to keep holding the rest of him up, so he'd let them do as they pleased, and what pleased them to do was send him to the ground.
"Huh," he panted. "Guess you were right, Elias. Isabella- your Highness-"
He turned, and his words died. Isabella was on her knees, and she was weeping. Her hair was tangled with sweat, her skin weltered by red marks in the shape of handprints. Both her hands were over her eyes- the flesh one, and the one that had turned partially to black crystal. She wept not like Elias had wept, but inwardly, silent sobs wracking her body and filling the cavern with choked echoes. Elias hung back- at last he looked his age, an uncertain, nervous boy scrubbing at his curls with his fingers- but Alois knelt by her and touched her shoulder. A soldier would have snapped at her to get up. A king would have commanded her to straighten her spine, to not shame herself. But he wasn't a king.
"Isabella," he said.
"He had her," she said, her voice ground between clenched teeth. A fresh wave of sobs choked her, and she curled over, rocking back and forth. "He...he had my mother's ghost. He had so many of them. Trapped. My people, trapped."
"He's witchborn," Alois said. The word sent a shudder through him. He hadn't seen the assassin, Sirin, until Luca sprang her from her cell, and then she'd looked like a dirty young woman, nothing to mark her fell power. To command the dead, to use them against the living, tethered to a soul...he couldn't fathom. His mind reeled, failed, scrambled for scraps of sense. "What else did he say?"
"He intends Lapide's destruction," Isabella said. She lifted her head. Tears glittered on her cheeks. A purpling bruise spread across one cheekbone. "And Estara's. He's heir to both of them. He's your father's half-brother, Alois. And my aunt's son. Your grandfather...my aunt. Some mad affair. And now he wants his vengeance against us all."
Bellana save us. "He won't stay in Lapide," Alois murmured. "Not now you've found out the truth. He's hamstrung it already, killing your mother. Now..."
"Triune," Isabella whispered.
Alois understood, too. Enzo Acier had killed one country's regent. Estara's was next. Daval was next.
His father was next.
Cold plunged into his guts. Let him die, he wanted to spit. How many times had he wanted to see his father lain low, how many times had he dreamed of crushing him into the dirt? How many more had he groveled at his father's feet, begging him to love him, to forgive him for his host of disappointments? Let him be torn apart. Let the sea-orks devour him whole.
But there was another way. Peace, like an ember in these dark seas.
"If we can warn him," Alois said, "get to him before Acier does, then maybe..." Friendship, armistice. Not yet. But the beginnings of peace, of reparations between their two countries. Trust, at least. There would be nothing without trust.
"Would he listen?" Isabella asked.
"He might," Alois said, sounding more confident about the matter than he felt. He had to have faith in his father that he wasn't blood-mad, war-mad, not entirely. That there was still something in him that yearned for calm seas and clear skies.
That he could be saved, too.
Isabella gave a short nod. "Then we don't have much time."
She got to her feet. Her shadow rose with her, fluttering across the cavern walls in the fading light of the alchemic command. They'd run- through a tangled web of tunnels, leading down, down, closer to the roar of water, then away again. Some were man-made, walls whitebrick, arched doorways and carved steps. Most were natural, wending this way and that, deeper into the earth. Water wept through these walls, slicking them with prismatic sheen of phosphorescent fungus, turning the stalactite teeth of them into glowing pillars hanging far overhead. The caverns swelled like the diseased organs of some great pale beast, rivulets of water trickling through cracks in the stone, the occasional roar of a subterranean canal vibrating through a wall, inches away. One day, it might split, and fill these caverns with water; they'd belong to no one but the cave fish, then.
"Which way?" Alois asked. His voice whispered back to him- which way, which way. Several tunnels led off from their cavern, which they'd stopped in to catch their breath, for Alois to collapse in and gulp mouthfuls of cave water to wash the bitter taste of ghosts from his throat.
"There are ways out of these tunnels," Isabella said. She brushed past him, clutching her crystal arm. "Luca and I...we explored this place as children. I don't know the tunnels as well as he does, but I think I can get us out of here."
"Someone's coming," Elias said.
Alois held his breath. Isabella raised her head, her aquiline profile sharp as a hawk's against the pale cavern walls. Alois clapped his hand over the alchemic command, dousing its light. Voices echoed from the tunnels behind them.
"Falcii," Isabella whispered.
"This way." Alois nodded toward the nearest tunnel.
Voices came again, louder, closer. Isabella didn't argue. She plunged in, a step ahead of Alois, her hand clenched on her sword hilt. Alois glanced at Elias, and together they hurried after her, Elias hunched over and hugging his arms over his chest.
Tunnels, stone walls, weeping water. The sunlight ebbed moment by moment, each pulse weakening in Alois's hand. He cupped it to his chest. What would happen when the light gave out entirely, when the darkness crashed in? He couldn't imagine a worse place to be lost in- stumbling through the dark, feeling his way by touch, not knowing if the next step would be on solid ground or send him plunging into a sinkhole, to be picked apart by cave-dwelling horrors.
That will be you, he told himself, and shame gripped his heart. Some day your sight will die, like the light, and you'll be left to wander the dark forever.
Voices again.
"This way!"
"Sir, there are footprints..."
"They're not far."
Isabella twisted round, then motioned Alois toward a narrow gap in the cave wall. Through it, Alois heard the roar of water. Icy spray spackled his face as he turned sideways and squeezed through. Stone scraped his shoulderblades; his breathing caught. One shift in the cave system and the two walls would crush him between them. Trapped. He scrambled faster, and stumbled out the other side, slipping down an incline of loose stones. Sunlight skittered over water: a broad river, some twenty feet wide and white with rapids.
Spume rose from the black surface of the water like mist, feeding the pale, finger-like growths of glowing fungus clustering thickly over the rocks that broke the river's surface. Enormous ridged tubes grew at the water's edge. Great fans covered in fine cilia blossomed from their upper ends, waving gently in the breeze off the river.
"There they are!"
"After them!"
Isabella burst through the gap in the wall, then Elias. He barely had to turn sideways, he was so skinny. Lanternlight chased them, and the scrape of drawn swords. Isabella bolted toward the river, then skidded to a halt, her eyes wide.
"Go," Alois yelled.
"Is anyone bleeding?" Isabella demanded.
"You are," Elias pointed out.
She snarled, shook her head. "Stay close. Close, I said."
Alois plunged into the river. The cold sucked all feeling from his legs. The tube-things sucked in their feeding fans as he brushed past them, sloshing knee deep into the river. He heard the others follow.
"Stop!"
He looked back. Falcii spilled onto the riverbank, blue and flashing silver and drawn blades. "Stop! Now!" roared their leader, and motioned. A gunshot split the silence; the river burst at Alois's feet, and he jerked back. The opposite bank wavered, so close.
"Come back, Highness," the Falcii called. "Captain Acier is prepared to grant you mercy."
"Forgive me if I don't believe you," Alois yelled.
"Mercy?" Isabella called. She backed away, toward the center of the river. The water rose to her hips. She lowered her hand into the water; blood unspooled. "And you believe your captain, do you? You believe his every word?"
Falcii stepped into the river. Alois heard it: subsonic, a bass shudder like a tapped drumhead. The river vibrated. He cast a glance downstream, where the water widened into a still pool, stalagmites jutting from its surface like a mouthful of cuspid teeth. In its center: a ripple, no more than gust of wind over its surface.
"Isabella," he said.
"Captain Acier saw what you did," the Falcii called. One of his men, standing knee deep, narrowed his eyes, looking down at the water.
"Believe what you will. I can't stop you," Isabella called. "But I promise you I'm not to blame. And I promise you I'm coming back. Lapide will never be abandoned, not while I still breathe."
"Sir," the Falcii in the water cut in.
"What are you doing? Get after her."
"Sir! Something's in the water!"
A shadow hurtled underwater, toward Alois, toward Elias and Isabella. Water surged, a glassy swell. Alois caught a glimpse of a pale, spiked carapace before the swell broke and the monster exploded from the water. A hooked mass of chitinous forelimbs, hooked claws and gripping mandibles burst toward them, mouthparts glistening dark gray, splayed wide. Alois yelled and threw himself backward. He fell, hard, going under; the cold closed over his head. He thrashed, panicked, clawing to the surface, eyes wide, nerves shrieking with cold.
More of the things dragged themselves from the deeps, one after the next. A half-dozen, more- the water thrashed and boiled with jointed crustacean limbs, eyeless things with mouthparts wide and starving, rising from the river. Falcii twisted, slashing with blade and dagger, taking aim. Gunfire lit the cavern like day, blasting craters in the cave-beasts' carapaces, sending chunks spinning into the current. Thin bluish blood spattered; Alois jerked back from the spray.
One of the creatures broke off from the pack and surged toward Elias, swimming-paddles pushing it sleekly through the current; mouthparts slithered, claws snapping for the boy. He was stiff, rigid, unmoving.
"Elias!" Alois lunged for the boy. No time; the monster would reach him faster. Alois spun toward the creature and slammed his boot straight into its mass of mouthparts. They latched on, and the creature reared back, yanking Alois off his feet.
He went down; the river sucked him under, swallowing him whole. All sound cut to a muffled roar. He felt the pressure of the thing's mouthparts around his ankle, the current sweeping past him, flashes of blurred light and the report of gunshots from somewhere above. He brought back his free leg and kicked the thing, hard, where he thought its head might be. Its shriek stabbed through him, all the worse for its hold on him.
It didn't let go.
No-
He kicked again, panic surging. He twisted; his head broke surface, and he raked in a starving breath. He didn't want to die down here.
He wouldn't die down here.
Steel flashed down, impaling the beast through the joint between head and carapace. The monster let go. A hand seized Alois's collar and dragged him to the surface. The current was already carrying the dead cave-beast away, and Isabella had him. She flung him past her, toward the opposite bank. Her sword was slicked blue with monster blood.
"I told you to stay close," she said.
Behind them, the river thrashed with pale carapaces, with the cries and commands of Falcii, with the rattle of gunfire. It chased them from the water, deeper into the tunnels. Alois squeezed his eyes shut until the sounds faded, lost to the dark.
The last light of sunset filled the sky when they emerged from the tunnels. The rocks were blue with dusk, the tunnel exit a narrow cleft in the ridge, spitting them onto a cascade of loose stones and scrub that led down toward the thundering surface of one of Valeris's many canals. Trails switchbacked down to a border of cedars and wild growth in the ridge's lee face. Past the cedars, the great pale boulders rising like sea-beasts from the scrub, Valeris glittered, caught under the haze of summer heat that shimmered off its roofs.
Alois wanted to stop, to stare, to stand forever in this warm, clean wind and watch the city. Birds of prey circled lazily on the updrafts, graceful as dance. Somewhere down there he heard the slow ringing of a chapel bell, saw the thread-thin unspooling of smoke as people lit cooking fires. After the darkness of the tunnels, he wanted to drink in the sight, to seal it inside him. Maybe he could convince his father things like this were worth saving, were worth fighting for. Were worth giving up fighting for.
"Come on," Isabella said at last. She jerked her head downslope. "We can't stay in the open for long."
Alois and Elias and Isabella stumbled down the trails. Cedars enfolded them, trunks like pillars: the sweet-sap wood scent of them, and of loam, and clean water. A small rill burbled through the needle litter, and night birds had begun to sing, filling the air with the hish-hish of their calls. Isabella sank to the streambank to scrub water through her hair. Elias simply climbed a boulder, standing in a lingering shaft of sunlight to watch the birds flit and flicker through the cedars.
Alois leaned against a trunk, head tipped back, and closed his eyes. In his hand, still cupped to his heart, he felt the pulse of the command like a dying bird.
He thought again of Cereza, worlds from here. She'd showed him the birds in the Palace gardens, and had names for each of them- glimmits, and starmice, and ember thrushes with glowing orange throats. Little yellow veterai, whose feathers could be ground and eaten to make the voice of the eater sweet as birdsong for a time. The war had not taken her wonder from her, nor her mercy. He hoped it hadn't taken all of his, either.
"We need a ship," he said, at last, after minutes of water-rush, of wind and birds and gloaming sky. "Where can we get a ship?"
Silence. He opened his eyes as Isabella stood. Her gray gaze was steely, her hair hanging in wet ropes around her face. Welts dappled her throat, hand prints encircling it like a collar. "I know where we can get a ship. That's the least of our worries."
"And the worst of our worries?"
"Getting across Bellana's Arm, for one," she said. "Outstripping Enzo, for another. He'll have already left."
"Then what are we doing here? We're wasting time-"
"No," Isabella said. "We'll just rush straight into your father's naval blockade. We need to slip through. Like a dagger between ribs."
"Not literally, I hope."
She gave him a dry smile. "Triune willing, it won't come to that."
"You're a soldier, aren't you? You've been out on the bloodied waves."
"That doesn't mean I know how to get through Daval's blockade, Daval's bolt cannons. If I did, Pavaloir would be flying blue flags." She cut a look at him. "No offense."
"A little taken, but I'll forgive it. You saved me, down there. Not a bad trick, with those..." He raised his hands and mimed wriggling mouthparts.
"Just blood in the water. If it spares more, I'll gladly give it."
Alois nodded, then reached into his waistcoat and pulled forth a bundle, wrapped in a kerchief. Isabella narrowed her eyes.
"I don't know if this will help," Alois said. "But...I thought it might be better than leaving it behind."
"Is that..." Isabella started.
She didn't finish. Alois unwrapped the bundle. The fading light struck its hilt, jet and tarnished silver. It struck its blade. Whaleglass, prismatic, blue and flame and silver, translucent as crystal. Cereza's blood still lingered on its edge.
"I got it from your room," Alois said. "I hope you don't mind."
"That thing should be thrown in the ocean," Isabella said.
"Then do that, if you want."
She let out her breath, but didn't answer. After a pause, Alois wrapped the whaleglass knife again and stowed it inside his waistcoat.
"I'm...I'm sorry," he said.
"About what?"
"Your Falcii."
She shook her head, like she was flicking off a fly. "They can handle a few deepghasts. They'll be fine."
"Not just them."
Isabella let out her breath. She strode over the stream. "Elias," she barked. "You all in one piece?"
He nodded.
"Come on, then." She moved past him, deeper into the cedar grove. Alois followed, pausing to help Elias down from the boulder. The twilight faded from the woods, and stars began to spangle the sky. Alois took a last breath of the warm sap-sweet breeze.
"You never answered how we're going to get through the blockade," he called.
"I know a sparrow," Isabella called back.
***
Night in the Valeris docks districts was a dark and simmering thing, knifeglint and beggar's fingers, night fishermen pushing flopping loads of phosphorescent fishes to their stalls, smoke twining from long pipes and dark deals haggled in corners. Alois had seen it in daytime on his way from the docks, and had stared, fascinated, down crookback cobbled streets of smoke-stained buildings, at the Rashi salt grannies as they crouched in doorways smoking long pipes, at the merchants and tarnish and grime.
Then, Lapide had been on the brink of hope. Tonight was different. Tonight held an edge, tension in every gaze, in the way the salt grannies clutched their pistol hilts, the way city guard stared into the faces of passersby and gripped their rifle straps. Doors that had before been open were now shut and barred, low conversations swapped across fryhouse tables, fingertips never far from a stiletto hilt.
Isabella kept her head down and face hidden by her cloak hood. Alois had a scarf, and Elias went undisguised, just another rigging spider pushing through the crowd. With their clothes dirty and finery abandoned, they looked like nothing more than a trio of dock workers eager to get home.
The stream of people thinned, and Alois caught sight of a mural splayed across a wall. Daval Belmont, impaled through the heart; the same spear impaled Captain Azare, and their blood flowed thick as rivers, red paint daubed so thickly it formed smears and crusts across the warehouse bricks. With a pang Alois saw he lay there dead, too, and a caricature of a young blue-eyed woman and little boy that could only be Queen Adele and Marin.
Isabella glanced sidelong at him as he sucked in a gasp.
His little brother. Lapide was calling for his blood. For a moment the prospect of what he was setting out to do seemed overwhelming, the weight of the sea, and sky, and all things. Too heavy to bear.
No, he told himself. That's Father talking. But he couldn't look away from the face of his little brother, crudely rendered, spattered in red.
Someone touched his shoulder. Alois flinched. Isabella stood by his side, fingertips light on his arm. He could just make out her gray eyes under the cloak hood.
"We need to keep moving," she murmured. "Can you do that?"
Alois tore his gaze from the bloody mural and nodded. His little brother, dead. Cereza, dying, her long hair streaked with blood. His own face, again and again, far from Bellana's light. So many lost, so many dying. He remembered the three-faced woman in the shrine, the play of candlelight off quartz, the gods that never seemed to listen.
Please, he prayed. Please let this be right.
They wound down alleys coiled like a nest of snakes, under ceilings of carpets put out to air in the cool night breeze, past racks of drying fish and children prowling and beggars slumped in corners, some dressed in ragged remains of soldiers' uniforms. Isabella took them under a portico, aclatter with hanging sailor's charms made from crab claws and small bones. The portico shadowed the arched entryway into a small courtyard, a whitebrick building rising three or more stories to a sloped, tiled roof.
It looked to be one of Valeris's older buildings, its walls belled and sagged, roof much-mended and sunscoured, bleaching the color from the tiles- one of many fryhouses and wayside watering holes strung along this edge of Valeris's harbor. Music threaded from green shutters. A sign swung over the entryway: a pale gray bird with long, pointed wings, crimson blood weeping round the arrow that pierced its heart. Words below in coastal Lapidaean read The Mollymawk.
The door was open, an urchin girl perched on the steps, singing as she whittled at a lump of orkbone. She looked up as Alois, Elias, and Isabella approached.
"Anything to spare?" she asked.
"Only fish-scales," Isabella said, and pressed a mark into the girl's hand: a heavy brass coin stamped with the dead queen's face. The girl made it vanish, then scrambled away.
"What was that about?" Alois asked.
"I fancy a drink," Isabella said. "I'm buying."
Inside, the air was dense and humid with sweat, with the scent rising from the lush spill of veil orchids down one crumbling wall. In a corner, someone picked at an off-key balalaika, and the tables were filling fast with a crowd of dock workers, ork-butchers stripping gorestained gauntlets from hands, painted girls and boys knocking shoulders with hulking herring crews. A glimmit sang from its cage over the bar. Shadows lurked, untouched by the sputtering amber glow of low-grade ork-oil.
Isabella shouldered to a free corner table, by the veil orchids. She flashed three fingers to the approaching barmaid.
"This sparrow," Alois said once the girl was gone, tugging down his scarf. "Can you trust him?"
"He doesn't answer to Enzo. Barely to me."
"Then who's he answer to?"
"Lapide," Isabella said. "And yes. We can trust him."
She surveyed the room and drew a breath. "Luca loved places like this," she muttered. "He'd come down to these docks as much as he could to listen to salt grannies spin tales of the high seas, gawk at anything and everything. If it was strange, or monstrous, he loved it. Sometimes I think he'd have been happier as a fisherman."
Alois' heart twisted. "My little brother's just the same."
"Prince Marin?"
Thinking of him was difficult. Alois dug his thumbnail into the table. "And what about you?"
Her mouth thinned. "I always preferred order. Swords in racks, all things in their right place. My mother trained me well."
Their drinks arrived in handleless earthenware cups. Isabella didn't touch hers, but Alois sipped at the strong stuff; he needed all the courage he could get. He glanced up as a group entered the cantina, then froze, cup poised at his mouth.
"Isabella," he whispered.
She looked and tensed as the trio of city guards, laughing, joking, off-duty and uniforms unruly, settled at the table alongside theirs. Alois ducked his head; Isabella tugged her hood lower over her eyes, one hand slipping beneath the table. Alois didn't need to look to know she was reaching for her stiletto.
"Hey. You there."
Alois flinched as one of them tugged at his scarf. He half-turned. Elias watched him, eyes huge in his thin face.
"Gio here wagers he's the king of catsbones," the guard said, hooking a thumb at one of his comrades. "I say he's a gull-brained fool who any old ork-butcher can trounce. What do you say? Want to take me up on an honest bet?"
"He's no good at catsbones," Isabella said, her voice hard.
"Oh, come on, just one game. What's the matter? You scared?"
"We have to go." Isabella made as if to rise.
"Late for the...fish," Alois cut in, lamely.
"Wait." The guard straightened, his grin flickering. His comrades did, too. "There's something familiar about you. I seen you before?"
Isabella stood. "We're going. Now."
The guard caught her arm just below the elbow. "Not before you take off the hood-"
Isabella's stiletto gleamed as she flicked it from its sheath and pressed it to the guard's underarm. Her eyes burned. "You want it that badly, do you?"
The guard's breathing caught. "Triune," he said. "You're-"
Alois heard a hiss. The guard's eyes sprang wide, then slid out of focus. He slumped, all at once, over the table; his head struck wood with a smack, and he sprawled, out cold.
A man stood behind him, slight, shadowy, clad in scarf and tricorn and oilskin half-cape.
The guard's companions stumbled from their chairs. The stranger lifted his hand. A needle-thin knife glinted between his fingers.
"Looks like your friend's had too much to drink," he said. "Wouldn't want to cut your fine night short like he has, would you?"
He turned to Isabella and inclined his head. "Follow me."
The stranger led them from the cantina, down steps and under bridges, winding through narrow alleys and along canals until they reached the back stoop of a warehouse, stained whitebrick and rotting old barrels, the smell of fish strong enough to make Alois's eyes water. The stranger pulled off his mask and tricorn and shook out his rumpled black hair. His face beneath the mask was pointed, foxish, his olive skin latticed with healing cuts.
"Highness," he said.
"Ren," Isabella said, clasping his hands.
"Apologies for the scene back there. I figured a jab of adderhasp to the neck would expedite the situation faster than alternative solutions."
"And I'm grateful for it." She turned to Alois and Elias. "This is Renard Irio. The Sparrow."
Alois knew the title. This was the man who'd gathered Estara's secrets for so many years, had flown them across Bellana's Arm, had whispered intelligence in Sofia Valere's ear that had put countless Estaran soldiers in their graves. Alois's mouth was dry, but Ren simply gave him a polite nod, dark eyes lingering on his face.
"I'm sorry about your mother," he said after a pause. "I wasn't the only one to grieve at the news of her death."
"You weren't," Isabella agreed. "I assume, then, you don't share the common belief that I murdered her."
"Did you?" Ren asked. "Murder her?"
Isabella's hands tightened on his. "No."
"Then I don't believe you did."
"Thank you, Ren." She drew a slow breath. "I need your talents."
His eyes flicked to Alois again. "I should say so, if you have the heir to Estara with you."
"You slipped me the sunlight commands, I assume?"
"I'm sorry it couldn't have been a knife."
"There isn't much time, Ren, so let me be blunt," Isabella said. "We need to get across Bellana's Arm, through the Estaran naval blockade, and into Pavaloir. And fast."
Ren arched his eyebrows. "That's all? You wouldn't like a private audience with Queen Valeria along with that?"
"No," Isabella said crisply. "I don't know how much you've heard, and I don't have the time to explain. All I ask is for this, and for you to trust me."
"You intend to flee Lapide, on the heels of your accusations?"
"We intend to save Lapide," Alois said. Both Ren and Isabella turned to face him. "And Estara. I intend to warn my father of a threat the likes of which he will have little defense against. I intend to heal this break between your country and mine for good."
He set his jaw. "And that's all."
A smile ghosted over Ren's face. He sighed, stretching. "You ask for the luck of legends."
Alois swallowed past the knot in his throat. "Can you give me such luck?"
"Only the gods and the Great Leviathan can grant miracles, Highness," Ren said. "But it takes mortals like us to be bold enough to try. Follow me."
Azare watched their small schooner's sails fill with wind, watched their witch swoop low over the rigging, cut stark against the blue light.
The Great Leviathan.
It filled the sea and swelled it; waves crashed up the sand, drowning the reek of burning bodies and half-swamping his Witchhunters. They backed up the beach, collecting in close tight file like they'd been trained to do, rifles and blades lowered to fight. But none of them, not Ziva, not Azare himself, had been trained for this.
He looked out, into the incandescent heart of that blue light, and saw it.
A form. A creature. His mind tried to grasp it, fought to fathom its scale. It clawed and stuttered and failed. The Great Leviathan seemed to cruise beneath the surface of the water, but at the same time it was bigger than the sea, filling it entirely: not a whale, not exactly, but the current-carved ocean too, the shape of the sky and the stormclouds, the vast rushing spill of the sea climbing in stronger and higher waves up the beach.
"Sir," Ziva shouted.
The aurora brightened, distant and then not distant, following the Leviathan. Prism light flickered down the long, smooth arc of the beast's spine; its fin parted the waves, and it arched higher than the island, scar-hewn black hide, the glistening shadow of muscle moving the vast and terrible machine that was its body. The smell of salt and storms grew stronger, a pressure against Azare's senses, the approaching god a weight on the fragile surface of Azare's mind.
Oh, Margaux, he thought, amidst the rush of wind and water and the god's form parting the sea, if only you were here to see this.
"Sir!" Ziva cried again, and grabbed him, her fingers digging into his forearm. Azare tore his eyes from the Leviathan and toward her. Her lip bled from a gash, earned somewhere in the battle. Her hair was a wind-whipped fury around her face. Her eyes reflected the blue light in sparks and glints. She was beautiful, she was terrible. All things at once. All things in balance. "You're letting them go?"
"They're not our concern," Azare shouted back. "The whale is all that matters now. Get to the longboats. We can intercept it before they do."
The longboat reared and bucked on the waves, half-swamped. Oars juddered in the rowers' hands, nearly torn from their grip. The sky swirled like a hurricane overhead, luminescent blue, flashes of too-bright stars visible through the ragged clouds. The Mistfox reared too, swaying and groaning on the swells. Wind whipped through Azare's hair as he climbed aboard. Their witch stood on deck, swathed in chains, his arms thrust outward, his eyes closed and his body shaking from the strain of keeping the winds at heel.
His eyes sprang open as Azare closed in.
"Take us out to the whale," Azare ordered. "Now."
"You feel it," the witch said. "Don't you? You feel it coming. And you're wondering if you can do what you came here to do. Such bloody work."
The witch's gaze flicked to the bolt cannon on the bow. It stood, silhouetted black against the sky, jutting over the Mistfox's prow like some great predator lunging for its prey. The twin fellfoxes shone vivid blue. Witchhunters supported the javelin crate between them, two to each side, carrying the crate steady despite the pitch and roll of the Mistfox.
"Kill a god," the witch said. "Not an easy thing to do."
Azare grabbed the witch's chains. He yanked tight, wrenching the iron collar round the witch's neck. Its edge cut into his pale skin. The witch's golden eyes sprang wide. Lightning arced and crackled between the Mistfox's masts, spirit-fire and feylight, casting an eerie glow over the rippling sails. Azare felt the thrum of power in the deck under his feet, the spatter of rain against his back as the storm strained at the witch's control.
"Take us to the whale," he snarled. "Or I pull this tighter and snap your neck."
"Ghost on your back," the witch whispered. "Claws in your heart."
"Remember your promises, witch."
A smile fluttered over the witch's face, showing the sharp points of his teeth. "And you should remember yours."
Azare's grip trembled. He shoved the witch away, and the boy stumbled, chain scraping chain, his skinny body bent nearly double under their weight.
For Estara.
Azare turned before the witch could rise and felt the pressure in the air shift. The sails lifted, swelling taut as the Mistfox met the wind. The blue light swept closer: nearly two miles out by his estimate, and nearing by the second. Valere's schooner was a black scrap on the surface of the sea, almost at the first tendrils of blue radiance.
"Ready the bolt cannon!" Azare roared. "All hands, prepare to sail, prepare for hard winds! We are all of us children of Estara, and tonight, here on the edge of the world, we honor her! There has never been greater glory. There has never been a brighter horizon than that which we fight for, you, and me, and all of us. For our king. For our empire. For Estara!"
Shouts echoed him, from the throats of his soldiers, from Ziva, her voice harsh as a bird of prey's hunting call. For Estara.
Blue light flooded the Mistfox as it plunged ahead, loosed by the witch's winds, waves turned to mist and salt spray hissing against the ship's hull. The waves were vicious; there came the crack of breaking ropes as one spilled over the Mistfox's deck, tearing free a longboat and swallowing it down, lost to the sea. Two men heaved a javelin into the bolt cannon's toothed gears, winding back the firing mechanism. It locked into place. Now the machine seemed complete, vast twin bow-arcs sweeping to a deadly, humming point.
Like Luca Valere's harpoon, Azare thought grimly, his head down against the spray as he walked the deck, calling orders.
"Sir," called one of the men at the bolt cannon, "it's ready to fire."
"Not yet." Azare narrowed his eyes. "The beast's not close enough."
"Soon," Ziva breathed at his side.
She burned with some strange fire, her body tense, her eyes wide, filled with that brilliant blue glow. Stars trembled in them- stars in the water, in the sky, Azare didn't know. The light filled the clouds, filled the sky, pulled the stars from their settings and cast them into the sea.
All things made one.
The Leviathan's back broke the surface again, an impossible expanse, scars like ravines, ancient wounds made by ancient horrors. Power pulsed in Azare's blood. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt so alive.
Do you remember what I told you about the Great Leviathan, Severin? The same thing I told you about the world.
The sea teemed with life: Azare looked down as a vast shape cruised by and saw the ocean filled with creatures, like the Leviathan's coming had shaken out the skirts of the world and gathered all its beasts in this singular span of sea. Sharks, and flat gliding rays, and monster fish he had no name for, entire shoals of herring winking like stars. Phosphorescent things half-flower and half-squid danced on the currents. Platefish with great crushing jaws swam inches below the surface, and even the armored gray flanks of sea-orks gleamed in the Leviathan's light. Their tusks jutted above water as they breached and snorted and shook their massive heads, venting their lungs into the air. Blow-spume spattered the decks, hot with breath and glimmering blue. The waves lifted like fortress walls, enormous breakers to shatter masts and men alike.
Gods are in balance.
Just as the world is in balance.
Flukes rose, sliding from beneath the ocean. Azare could not look away from the Leviathan. A wound gouged a half-moon from its right fluke, edges ragged and crusted with ancient scar. He smelled it, the weird animal reek of it, heady and salty and living musk. All too real. This beast was flesh as much as it was divine.
Balance.
He remembered Luca Valere clutching his dying sister, Sirin's eyes as she stared him down, prepared to kill him, to kill herself in the doing of it.
He remembered Cereza, the princess whose death he'd engineered. A child, clinging so ferociously to life despite the curse crushing it from her.
Emotion rose, tangled like it always was, a razor snarl inside him. He remembered Alois in the corridor of Pavaloir Tower, the last time he'd seen his son alive. Alois's eyes, so like his mother's, had shone with such hope. He remembered being young with Daval, laughing, sparring, the brilliance of his friend's smile, the surety they would fight together forever. He remembered the first time he'd seen Alois, a sleeping baby, fragile and defenseless.
How the world seemed to break, then: all hopes thrown aside for this child, his son sleeping in Margaux's arms. How he'd broken the world again, and again, for Daval, for Estara, for duty and honor and loyalty, for the love of a dead woman, for all he had thought was right.
For Estara.
For Estara.
He had thought his loyalty was just, pure as Bellana's light. But it was dead inside, a devouring rot at the heart of him.
All things in balance, Severin.
"Keep her steady," Ziva cried. She strode toward the bolt cannon, the sleet soaking her curls. "No faith lost now, Witchhunters. We're so close-"
Azare reached out and caught Ziva's wrist.
Ziva jerked back and spun, wrenching her arm from Azare's grip. Her eyes narrowed. "Captain, what by all Saints-"
"Not yet," Azare said.
"What do you mean not yet? We're in range." She swept a hand toward the Leviathan. "We can take the monster down now. We can end this now, sir, in one shot. One damned shot."
"No," Azare said.
She stepped toward him, her eyes still wide, still burning blue. He took her by the shoulders. Spray rained across them as the Mistfox cleaved closer. He felt Ziva's heartbeat under her skin, the shiver of her muscles. She wanted this. She wanted to see the ocean set on fire. This was her life coming to a point, all her fury and all her pain at last made worth it.
Azare's heart blazed with love, and fear, all the things he'd once kept locked so deep inside him. Ziva's eyes and her beautiful face were inches from his.
"I saw you," she shouted. "I saw you let them go-"
"None of that matters," Azare said. His hands found her face and held it, his fingers wound into the dense, wet tangle of her hair. Ziva's fingers braceleted his wrists. "Look at it, Ziva."
He turned her head so they both looked toward the coming Leviathan. Valere's ship was no longer visible amidst the waves.
"Look at it," Azare said again. "We can't destroy it. Not for Estara. Not for anything."
"Have you forgotten your vows? We both swore them. I swore them at the feet of Bellana herself. At any cost, sir, at any sacrifice-"
"I remember them. And I am defying them."
"Captain," Ziva said. Her chest rose and fell, her eyes shining. "We have a mission."
"Damn the mission," Azare said. He turned Ziva's face toward him again. "Do you understand? We kill it, we kill everything. All mercy. All hope. It made the world, Ziva."
Her nails dug into his wrists so hard they cut in. "How long, sir? How long have you doubted the mission?"
"I don't know. A long time, I think." Tears streaked her skin with silver. Azare stroked her face with his thumb, wiping them away. "Not long enough."
"The king-"
"Daval can have his empire," Azare said. "I'm done with it, done with his wars and his vengeance. We can leave. You, and me. We can be anything. We can be free."
Her mouth trembled. Her hands left his wrists, climbing to his chest, to his face, cupping one cheek. Her skin was so warm. A sob choked him. He needed her, needed to gather her to him, to hold her and be with her and rest, pure and sweet and unbearable. Twenty years he'd fought alongside her, watching her rise. All those years with her wasted, all of them dedicated to nothing. Soldier's oaths. War, and blood, and sand. Dead men, and fire, and children weeping in the dark. How much else had they lost, in this campaign of dust?
The blue light brightened. It cascaded. It illuminated her, glory, glory. He heard the Leviathan's song, then, shuddering from below, more feeling than sound.
Ziva heard it too. Her eyes creased, as if holding back some great strain. "You," she echoed. "And me."
"Yes. Yes."
"All this time."
"I know. I am so sorry-"
"Severin." She drew closer, her hand still cupping his face. She traced the line of his cheekbone, his lower lip. Her eyes still shone with tears, refracting the Leviathan's light.
"Severin," she said again, and he heard the rush of feeling in her voice as if for the first time. There was no more fear. All had turned to starlight inside him.
Azare pulled her face to his and kissed her. Her lips were chapped and warm against his; he tasted blood from her split lip, the rasp of scar, the softness of her skin under his fingertips. Ziva's lashes fluttered against his face, light as moth wings.
They half-parted, a bare thread of wind snaking between them. Not for long. With a soft oh she twined closer, lips parting, deeper, harder, brilliant, all of him alight.
His mouth left hers, and the wind returned, the light, the roar of the ocean. The Leviathan's song peaked, a wave of sound.
"Ziva," Azare murmured.
She smiled, and it transformed her: no hook of a grin, no reservation, just that smile like sunlight.
"Severin," she said. He felt her pulse quicken under his hands, felt another wave of whalesong, so close it shivered in her eyes. "I've loved you for so long."
Cold slid into his heart.
Azare stared down at Ziva's dark eyes, the shifting veils of blue in them, and at her fading smile. He couldn't breathe. Cold was inside him, and pain, a white spear of it straight through him. He tried to draw breath, and the pain sharpened. He looked down, between them, as heat spread under his uniform.
Her hand gripped the bone hilt of her plain knife.
Her knife.
In his heart.
He looked up at her again. Her smile was gone, her eyes wide. No tears anymore- just traces of salt lingering on her cheeks.
"But I've loved Estara longer," she said.
Whalesong rose. Azare heard it stronger than before. Dark pushed in at the edges of his vision. He staggered forward, closer to her; the knife slid deeper but he felt no pain, just pressure, just the cold of it in him. So much cold. Had it been cold before? He didn't remember. He held Ziva, her shoulders, her hands. They were slick with his blood, and red to the wrists. The world became narrow. All he saw now was her face.
She turned, knife still in him. Her hair lashed in the wind as she looked to the Witchhunters, ready at the bolt cannon.
"Fire!" she cried.
And she wrenched the knife from him, and shoved him, hard. Azare struck the gunwale and toppled over the side of the Mistfox, toward the heaving waves below.
He had no strength to resist. Ziva's face receded. He hit the water, hungry current pulling him down.
The next wave rolled over.
Azare sank, a plume of red trailing behind him. He closed his eyes. All became blue light and whalesong.
Holding Luca in a net of shadows, Sirin plunged into the water, twenty feet down in a cone of bubbles. He was dead weight in her arms. She kicked out, pulling her shadows tighter. Blood plumed from Luca's head as it lolled back, his eyes closed.
No, Sirin thought, panic beating in her chest. He'd drown in her arms if she didn't get him to the surface.
She kicked out again. The surface churned overhead. The currents drove her back down, spinning her in their merciless grip. Sirin let go of Luca, her shadows biting deep into his wrists like ropes, and clawed toward the light. She felt her power cringe inside her, shadows fraying in the light, but she raked out again, pulling herself from the choking embrace of the ocean and toward the surface, toward air.
A current swept past. Her shadows splintered. Luca slipped from their grasp, bubbles streaming from his mouth as he sank like a stone. Sirin grabbed his wrist; his weight pulled her down, down from the surface.
No-
Let him go and save herself. Hold fast, and drown with him at the bottom of the sea. The dead of Alkona weren't meant to meet water- ghosts of the drowned drifted forever in the deeps, grave-dolls uncarved, never to find peace.
Damn you, Valere. A scream built in her, worse than her burning lungs, her burning eyes. Not that.
Not Luca.
A hand gripped her wrist.
Sirin looked up as the hand tugged, heaving them from the sea and into air. Sirin erupted from the water, Luca clenched to her chest with her other arm, the both of them dragged over rough wood. Sirin heaved; water spilled from her mouth as she hacked her guts onto the deck, still clutching Luca with all her strength.
A hand touched her shoulder. "Sirin, it's all right. You're all right."
Sirin jerked her head up. For a moment her vision was a prism of tears and salt. It focused, and she blinked, and Cereza looked down at her.
Sirin hissed a breath, the cool air rough on her salt-abraded throat. Cereza knelt at her side, alive. The dark veins were gone, her pallor gone. Her hair was loose around her, a golden curtain limned in silver by the starlight. Overhead, the stormclouds had cleared. One of the triplet moons hung, a bright half-disc. Another was a ghost, a faint crescent, nearly invisible against the stars.
Sirin glanced around. They clung onboard the schooner's hull, broken and half-swamped and still afloat. A single spike of mast jutted into the sky, a ragged pennant of sailcloth fluttering as wind skimmed Sirin's cheeks. Niive crouched on the schooner's prow, wings half-furled. Her hands were raised, keeping the wind and the waves in balance, keeping the ship from capsizing. The sea was smooth to the horizon, swirling with the last remnants of the Leviathan's light. No sign of the Estaran ship. No sign of the whale.
Sirin knew, then, like a weight settling into her heart. They'd come too late. The Great Leviathan was gone.
"Are you all right?" Cereza asked.
Sirin shook her head. Her grief for the Leviathan could wait. Luca, she signed, and Cereza's eyes sprang wide with alarm.
"I..." she stuttered. She pressed her hands to his chest. "I don't know...is he drowning? What do I do?"
Sirin pushed her aside and shoved Luca onto his back. His lips were parted, water streaming off him and soaking the deck. His hands were folded over his stomach as if hugging something to himself. Sirin pressed her fingers to his throat and felt his heartbeat, faint but there. A gash on the side of his head matted his hair with blood; he'd hit it on the gunwale as they were thrown overboard. Sirin glanced over it. Shallow. Head wounds always bled. She'd inflicted enough, and had enough inflicted on her, to know.
He wasn't breathing. No surprise there- he must have swallowed half the sea. He'd drown on the water in his lungs if she didn't do something.
She tipped his head back, hands shaking. Gently, her grandmother had said. She'd been called down for a child on the beach, dragged from the rock pool where he'd fallen, sprawled on the wet sand. Sirin tried to recall what she'd done, tried to remember the careful movements of her hands, the assurance with which she'd given the boy breath.
She wasn't her grandmother- she never would be- but here, now, she had to be enough. She clamped Luca's nose shut and took a deep breath of the warm breeze, her own lungs aching, her eyes burning.
Gently.
She pressed her mouth to his. Luca's lips were cold. All his skin was so cold. Two breaths, hissing through her and into him. She parted the kiss and searched his face again, shaking him a little. He didn't respond.
Breathe, Valere, she willed him. Your life still belongs to me. No ocean can kill you, not before I have my chance.
It was useless; he'd never breathe with the sea in his lungs. She had to force the water out of him. She seized his shirt and tore it open, pressing her palms to his bare chest. His pulse fluttered like a bird under her hands. Her shadows webbed through his skin, winding deep into his flesh.
Breathe, Luca.
The shadows tightened around him, inside him, and through them she felt his heartbeat, his struggle to breathe, the water in his lungs, his terror of dying. Sirin's resolve was stronger. She'd ended so many lives. This one she could save.
Breathe, damn you.
She needed him to open his eyes. She needed to tell him he wasn't alone. She needed to tell him he'd held onto her at the end, through fire and falling stars. She needed to tell him how much she hated his stupid broken nose.
She clenched her hands, and the shadows clenched too, driving the water from his lungs, up his throat and out of him.
Breathe-
He pitched upward, spine arching. An awful wet racking burst from him, and water spattered the deck. He keeled to the side, on his hands and knees, spewing seawater. Sirin knelt by him, holding him until he looked up. He blinked, recognizing her. He reached out for her, fingers brushing her cheek, her lips.
"Sirin," he whispered.
Sirin caught him before he fell. He slumped against her, all at once. Cereza scrambled to help her, and together she and Sirin dragged him up the deck, toward Niive crouched on the prow.
"Are you all right?" Cereza panted. Her skirts were sodden and ragged, but her hair, her skin, was radiant. Their weeks of travel had been erased: cuts, bruises, gauntness, gone.
Luca's voice was rough from saltwater. "Cee? You're...you're alive?"
"It's you we need to worry about-"
He reached for her. "You're alive," he said, his voice thick with wonder. His hand found her shoulders, her face, and then he was gathering her to him as she flung herself into his arms. Cereza was weeping, her brother's fingers tangling in her hair as he clung to her, his face buried in her shoulder, her cheek pressed to his, like she might never let him go again.
At last she did, though Luca's hand never left her arm, as if by holding onto her he could convince himself she was real.
"What in all Hells happened to you?" he managed. "You were dead, Cee."
Cereza glanced up at Niive, then twisted open the buttons at her collar. The wound was gone, the curse with it. Faint silvery scars remained, twisting like spellburn across her skin.
"I don't know," she murmured. "I was, yes. Quite dead. But I think the Leviathan saved me. Before it died, it spared me. It brought me back. And now..."
She pressed her hands to her head. "I feel...strange. I think it changed me, too."
"Changed," Luca echoed.
He still clenched his arm to his stomach, hand clasped over something. Now, Sirin could see it: a fluttering, a glow. Blue light, illuminating Luca's hand and arm from beneath, astral blue, witchlight blue, blue as the Leviathan's blood.
Luca, Sirin signed. What is that?
He lifted his hand. The creature clasped to him blinked up at her with round blue and gold eyes. The glow faded into glittering motes on its dense black fur, now sleek with damp. An infant thing no bigger than a fox kit, all webbed paws and flat tail, tiny cuspid teeth displayed as it opened its mouth and yawned.
Luca gently ran his hand down its back. It snuffled, nosing upward to lick his chin, his cheek, the gash in his forehead.
The wound glistened. No- it shimmered. It glowed. The edges of the wound drew together, skin reforming.
Healing.
The light faded, and so did the wound. Only traces of blood remained. Luca touched the faint scar, and the creature snuffled again, chirruping in delight. Sirin glimpsed the many-colored glimmer of the aurora in its wet fur, and all at once she knew.
She pressed her hands to her mouth.
"The Leviathan..." Cereza began. "The Leviathan was dead."
"No." Niive knelt at Luca's head, smoothing aside his hair with clawed fingers. "The Great Leviathan is not dead."
She looked up, and Sirin saw the hope in her golden eyes. But it was Luca who spoke, who drew the little creature closer, who lifted his face to the stars and smiled.
"It's not dead," he echoed. "This is the Great Leviathan."
"Are you insane?" Isabella said. "You're telling me you believe him?"
She faced her brother down the length of their mother's office, her voice ringing off the white-stone walls. Luca stared back, resolute and rumpled. His hair was plastered to his cheeks. The smell of seawater hung about him. He'd made his own small lagoon on the antique Ishvoli carpet under his boots.
Behind him, the queen and Cereza stood alongside Prince Alois and a pair of his guards. Their ceremonial helmets were off, and they looked scarcely older than their charge, with the same dark skin and darker curls. Alois had insisted on his presence when he learned Cereza was involved.
Involved. A diplomatic word for Luca dragging her onto his deathtrap of a ship and catapulting them both out into the bay.
"Of course I believe him," Luca said.
Fire boiled in Isabella's guts. "How could you be so stupid," she snarled between her teeth.
"I know," Luca said. "And I'm sorry. But I heard what the boy said."
"You could have gotten Cereza killed. Yourself, too. You put our nation's peace in jeopardy. And for what, Luca? For some mad stab at rebellion?"
"That doesn't matter anymore," Luca insisted. "The Great-"
Isabella whirled, slamming her palms hard into the gleaming surface of the queen's desk, a slab of ironwood and brass flanked by a pair of carved lynxes. The impact rattled the set of gilt pens on the desk, shook the arc of tall windows: the office's prow, outthrust from the face of the Palace like a hawk's keelbone. From here the entire city was visible, whitebrick and shadow and streetlight, a web of moonslit canals down the sheer fall of the ridge.
Isabella made herself stare at it, made herself breathe. She couldn't look at Luca without wanting to put her hands around his bloody neck.
"Isabella," her mother said. "Enough."
"How can you defend him?" She turned back. Her mother's gaze was level and cool. Isabella fought to control her voice. "He risked-"
"I am aware," her mother said, "of what Luca has risked. I have no doubt this night could have ended far less favorably."
"What does the boy have to say?"
Isabella and the queen turned as Prince Alois stepped forward. His guards moved with him like a pair of shadows. Isabella brushed her fingertips against the hilt of her sword. It was a gift from her father, given to her when at fifteen she'd completed with honors the Royal Soldiers' Academy, finishing top in her class. She'd never felt such pride- silver hawk pinned to her bandoleer, uniform pressed knife-sharp, her father proffering the sleek enameled sheath. This was a weapon she'd earned. If there was to be a fight, she was ready for it.
She lifted her chin as Alois stopped before them.
"I want to hear his account," Alois went on. "Maybe then we can..." He glanced at the queen, at Isabella, at Luca, who'd slung a towel around his neck and begun to scrub dry his hair. "Come to an understanding," he finished, diplomatically.
"I agree," Luca said.
"Thank you," Alois said, almost smiling.
Isabella looked to the boy. He sat by the hearth, firelight gilding his sharp-boned face. He was huddled in a blanket as a maid fed him spoonfuls of hot broth. He ate obediently, like some silversmith's automaton, staring into the flames, fingers clutching at the blanket. He'd said nothing since Luca and Cereza had brought him to the Palace.
"Very well," Isabella said.
"It's at my word, Isabella," the queen said. She nodded to Alois and Luca. "Go on."
Alois hung back, but Luca went to the boy- Elias- and knelt, taking both of his hands. "Tell them," he said. His voice was gentle. "Tell them what you told me."
"Why were you marooned?" Isabella asked. "A storm?"
Elias blinked. His lips fluttered.
"It's all right," Luca urged. "Go on."
"Not a storm," Elias whispered. The fire popped, illuminating the boy's face with orange and gold. He shuddered and looked away. "They had cannons. So much smoke. They came out of nowhere, out of the Great Blue. We were ranging the edge, and I didn't see...they were on us before I knew what was happening. I fell...I saw the Tern on its side in the water. Smoke from the holes in its hull. I dunno if everyone's dead. I think they are."
"Pirates," the queen murmured.
"That was all you saw," Isabella said. "You mistook them for a whale, didn't you?"
Elias turned his head. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, dark as deepwater. A chill traced Isabella's spine despite the warmth of the fire, despite the staunch, rational voice inside her head telling her the boy was mad, he'd been addled by fear and dehydration, that he hadn't known what he'd seen, not really.
"No," he said. "It was there. It was real. There was a wind, and a light. An aurora on the horizon. It swept across the sea. More than the sea. It was in the ship, it was in the air. It was in me. I felt its song like it had always been a part of me. That's the reason I survived. The Great Leviathan kept me alive. I should have died out there but I didn't because I knew I had to come back. I knew I had to tell you."
"A god needs a prophet," Luca murmured.
Enough of gods and prophets and pagan mutterings. "The Leviathan hasn't been seen for two centuries. It has no reason to return now."
"You don't know that," Alois said.
Isabella rounded on him. He stiffened.
"Not a word of this leaves the room," she said, to him, to his guards, to Luca and Cereza, to the maids in the corners, hands folded down their aprons. "Do you understand?"
"Cereza," her mother said at once. "Go back to your chambers. You've had enough for tonight, and you need your rest."
"Mother," Cereza started, but fell silent at the look the queen gave her. She cast a glance toward Luca, then turned and hurried from the room, Falcii on her heels.
The door boomed shut. Silence flooded in.
"If the Leviathan is back-" Alois began.
"The war is what is important," Isabella said. "The peace negotiations. We cannot let other matters cloud what must be done. Talk of the Leviathan or the suggestion it's returned will do nothing but sow confusion across the isles."
"But it's good," Luca insisted. "Can't you see that?"
"All I see is a boy addled by sun and fear, stranded for days without company or provisions," Isabella said. "His hallucinations are hardly reason to go sounding off about...about witches and whales and gods returning-"
"King Lorenzo Valere claimed multiple visions of the Leviathan," Luca said. "He wrote about them in his Tomes, and he describes it exactly as the boy does. I can fetch them for you from the Library if you've forgotten-"
"King Lorenzo Valere burned himself alive because he thought his enemies were trying to murder him with ghost soldiers and only open flames would ward them off," Isabella said. "Really, Luca, it's like you want to sound like a madman."
"Maybe I do," Luca said. "If that's what it takes."
"Any judgment made by you is suspect after tonight," Isabella shot back. She shook her head. "Every time you have a chance for the contrary, you insist upon failure."
Luca narrowed his eyes and half-rose from his chair. "Say that again, Bell, while I'm on my feet."
Isabella moved closer, facing him down. "Foolish," she said. Her hands curled into fists; she ached to throw one square into his face, skew that straight nose sideways. "Naive. Useless. You could never be a king. Never. Not if Lapide sank to the bottom of the sea and all you had to rule were the bones of your own bloody beast-gnawed corpse-"
"Oh, do your worst, Isabella."
"Go on," Isabella spat. "Push me. I dare you."
"I don't think you could survive a push from me. I can be extraordinarily exasperating."
Heat pulsed around Isabella's eyes. "Survive," she said. "Don't make me laugh. You were given command of one ship, Luca. One damned ship. And you failed that, too, and everyone on it burned because of you-"
"Yes." Luca's eyes were bright, his voice soft, and all the worse for it. "Just like father."
Her composure shattered. Isabella gathered herself to lunge.
"Enough!"
Queen Sofia's voice sliced between them, ringing off the vaulted heights of the grand room, off the watching heads of elk and saber-fanged Buyani leopards mounted high on the walls, glass eyes glimmering like they were listening in. Isabella stepped back. Her mother's eyes were wide; spots of color burned on her cheeks. One fist was pressed to the hollow of her throat, clutching something on a long chain. She knew that look in the queen's eyes. She knew fear all too well.
Her mother, afraid? She'd seen the queen's grief. She'd seen her elegant, deadly rage. She'd seen her send men to their deaths, and seen her pride, full and glowing like the sun. She'd never seen her afraid.
And of what? Not of her, surely, but that was what it looked like as she stared at Isabella from across the room.
"Mother?" Isabella said. She stepped closer. "Are you..."
Her mother lowered her hand from her throat. Her composure returned, like a veil dropped over her features.
"I am fine, Isabella," she said. She addressed the maids and guards next. "You will take this boy to the infirmary. You will ensure he is well-fed and his injuries treated. You will send a letter to Pavaloir inquiring as to his identity, and informing Estara of the loss of their vessel. We will not speak of this again."
"Thank you," Isabella said.
"No," Luca said. He brushed past Isabella, tossing his towel to the floor. "No, don't you see we could have a chance, for learning, for discovery-"
"Your sister is right," the queen said. "Now is a time for balance, not uncertainty."
Isabella heard Luca's harsh inhale, but he said nothing. He stood, damp strands of his hair hanging over his forehead, hands in fists at his sides. He released them with an exhale and turned, bracing one palm against the carved lintel of the fireplace.
"Does that bring the matter to an end?" the queen asked.
But as Isabella drew breath to agree, a different sound filled the air: the clamor of bells, an unmistakable four-count syncopation, echoes pealing across the Palace battlements. Alois's guards hefted rifles, flanking their prince as he looked around, eyes wide. Isabella whirled, her hand slipping around the grip of her sword as she stepped reflexively in front of her mother.
Isabella's step echoed off the high ceiling as she slipped through the doors. She let them close behind her, trapping her in the dark.
Her mother's offices had stood untouched since her death, doors sealed, dust undisturbed. It had begun to rime her desk, the carved mantel above the fireplace, the twin lynx statues standing guard, as ever. The drapes were drawn across the windows, obscuring Isabella's view of Valeris below. Low lamplight cast a fey glimmer over paneled walls and the eyes of the mounted animal heads, the saber teeth of Buyani leopards, the scrimshawed ooshka tusks and elk heads.
Her exhale stirred the dust. Fear breached the dread simmering inside her, a burst of it strong and bitter. It shook her, held her rigid. Turn back, she urged. She'd armed herself; she had a head start on the Falcii; she could escape. Run and save yourself. This isn't the Lapide you want to know. This isn't the country you believe in. This isn't your nation.
She paced into the office. It smelled of her mother's perfume. The scent lingered strongest around the desk, papers still spread over its surface. Her pen set in its enameled case, the quartz figurine of a mistfox carved by Isabella's father, the teacup of Buyani porcelain. Isabella trailed her fingers over her mother's things, as if something more than a scent might linger. As if answers might come through these precious, useless things, charms against fading memory.
Isabella plucked up papers, scanned them, set them down. She stood at the desk, the palm of her good arm braced on its edge. Whatever secrets her mother held weren't here. This was the sanctuary of a queen, not of Sofia Valere.
She reached in her pocket.
Smooth orktooth brushed her fingers.
Where had they played? Two little girls in sapsilk shifts, one taller, the other never fast enough to keep up. Where had they ranged, like she and Luca, finding all the secret corners of the Palace they would never be allowed in, had their parents known? High on the roof, a garden of wind and spires spattered with salt, hunting for birds' eggs and feathers caught between statues' fingers. The gardens, or the library. The muggy sprawl of Valeris itself, carnival masks pulled low over faces to hide the identity of two princesses, hand in hand so they wouldn't lose one another in the market crowds. Or had they gone down, not up, looking like Luca had once become obsessed with looking, plunging deep into the network of tunnels beneath the Palace?
Isabella lifted her head. A breeze tickled the back of her neck. A pulse traveled down her numb arm, and she clenched its hand.
She turned as she felt another lick of wind. She approached and touched the wall, the seam between two panels, the smooth, cold wood.
Too cold. It was icier than its neighbor, and the seam wasn't a seam, but a gap, no wider than a hair.
Isabella drew her stiletto and fit it into the gap, then slid down. The blade met a resistance. With a click, the panel swung outward on hidden brass wheels. Frigid air washed over Isabella, drowning the summer heat of the office, pricking gooseflesh down her good arm. She stepped back, spine straight, stiletto clenched in her off hand.
A passageway beyond led into shadow. Eider moth nests danced in the draught, and dust lay thickly across the floor, the stones of the walls, the rusted sconces where orklight must have once burned. Now, their glass globes were discolored and spotted with age.
Isabella fished an alchemic command from her pocket and crushed the seal. It was one of Luca's, grayamber trapping sunlight in the small pebble, another like the one she'd found slipped into her pocket. Who had given them to her?
Secrets, schemes, enough to drive her mad.
The symbol of an eye flashed between her palms. Sunlight poured from her hand, illuminating the coil of steps leading down into the dark. The air breathed across her. Nothing else had breathed here for a long time.
She stepped through, wedging the door open on a table behind her. She didn't want to be trapped in this place. The passageway was narrow, brushing her shoulders on either side; dust showered from the walls, the ceiling, and soon she was powdered gray. The steps corkscrewed down and down; sunlight crept before her, her shadow keeping pace at her side. The light cut the steps into shards of darkness and white stone, eider moths fluttering through the beams.
In her hand the command felt warm, pulsing, like a small heart. Her own thudded in her throat.
Down. Further. Minutes slipped by; Isabella didn't know how many. Sound fell away, nothing left but her own breathing, her own footsteps, like descending into the darkness of some deep sea trench. She was underground now, the walls no longer stone blocks like the rest of the Palace but natural cavern rock, the passageway carved straight down into the ridge. The silence pulled at her, leading her on.
She became aware of shapes on the walls. Primitive things, these: paintings in relief, winged women- witches? The Triune?- and whales. She touched them, felt the cold, powdery pigment against her fingertips. The whales seemed to dive, crest, dive again, cycling through some endless movement. Or perhaps they were dying, not diving: sinking to the bottom of the ocean, far from the light of the surface.
The glowlands beneath the sea, she thought. Where all lost children go. A bitter taste crept into her throat. She heard echoes reflected to her from ahead.
A door.
It swam from the darkness: rusty steel studded with bolts. There was a lock, much corroded, but when Isabella touched it, it fell open.
The door swung wide at a push.
Beyond, Isabella smelled incense- death-incense, funerary incense. Dust too, and water weeping over stone. Echoes fanned away. She stepped through and sunlight spilled with her, illuminating the cavern ceiling arcing down to pillars in bas-relief, shaped like winged lynxes with hawks' feet, or foxes with too many eyes and bared teeth, ears and fangs and talons worn down by years.
A grave-vault. One of countless subterranean chambers built into the ridge by the original peoples of Valeris, who had lived on this land centuries before Valeria had come. They had buried their dead in stone and salt, shrouded in darkness, in water that never saw the sun.
Isabella passed slowly through the vault. Eider moths burst in flutters of silk-soft wings to vanish through hidden gaps in the walls. The vault was full of curiosities- glass cases filled with strange forest birds and insects the size of her head, glimmering beetle carapaces and preserved fishes and fossils of ancient flowers blossoming across slabs of red sandstone. Hunting-rifles chased in silver and pearl leaned in racks, and books were stacked in piles higher than Isabella was tall. There were gowns, too, the styles of decades before, sapsilk ballgowns with elaborate fan ruffs, court dresses stitched with feathers and gems and embroidery thick as armor, riding habits still hemmed in mud. Furs, and collars, and slips fluttering in the draught like ghosts.
Empty, hanging. Waiting.
Dust fell, thick as ash.
Through the dust, she met eyes.
Isabella jolted. She reached for her sword, but the shock faded as she realized the eyes were only paint: a portrait in a tarnished gilt frame, rendered in the lush oils of a master, fully life-size and hanging between two beast pillars on the far end of the vault.
It showed a young gray-eyed woman dressed in the ornate blue sapsilk of a princess of Lapide, waves of golden hair falling down her back.
Eider moths fluttered, fleeing beneath the frame. The young woman smiled, a sharp, clever grin. She was haloed by cedar boughs, a silver hawk perched on one gauntleted hand. Her face was a ghost, an echo, a mirror. Isabella recognized her, of course, recognized her as well as she recognized her own face. The woman in the painting held uncanny resemblance to her, such that they might have been sisters themselves.
The only difference was stark, and damning, and made sorrow twist deep inside her. Princess Alezia Valere, born to be queen, who had died before she could become what she'd been meant to be, had at her throat a sailor's charm. Half a circle of scrimshaw, carved from orktooth.
Footsteps stirred the dust behind her.
"Strange thing about statues," someone said. "They never get the details right."
Isabella pressed her eyes shut, let out her breath, then turned.
Enzo stood in the vault, his head lowered. He wore shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, so in the glow of her sunstone Isabella saw the veins of glimmering silver twining up his arms, shifting and writhing like eels. Isabella saw, too, the pistol leveled cleanly at her heart.
"Enzo," she whispered.
"I thought you'd left already."
"More fool I. Foolish enough to trust you."
"I'm sorry, Bell," he said. "Sorry about your mother. Sorry about what I did to you, too. But you deserve to know what she was. You deserve to know what gnaws Lapide from beneath."
"Alezia Valere," Isabella said. "She was-"
"She was my mother," Enzo said. He hadn't moved. The silver light pulsed up his arms, unfurling like smoke from his shoulders. Isabella heard whispers in the air, too faint to decipher. "And Sofia Valere killed her."
Isabella's mouth tasted of ashes. "Why?"
Enzo's mouth trembled. His face was set, but his eyes were bright.
"She was witchborn," he said. "A thread of ancient power bright inside her, true power. She could speak to the dead, could summon them to her sides like birds and listen to their whispers. Ghosts flocked to her and she gained the sympathy of the dead. Sympathy for all things. Sympathy for the king of Estara, Etain Belmont, whose dead were so many and had suffered through such terrible plagues. I think he loved her, too, in his way. As best as a man like that can love."
His voice was bitter as a snarl, and Isabella understood in a single sick lurch. Enzo Acier was son of Alezia Valere and Etain Belmont, King Daval's father. He not only had claim to Lapide's throne, but to Estara's.
He was the Sundered Empire made whole.
"Your mother had her talents, too," Enzo said. "She saw her sister's secret, listened outside the door as Alezia Valere bled on the birthing bed, hid in the shadows as her nurses hurried the child away. She knew her sister would always have a soft place inside her for Estara, was linked to it now, like a fish hooked on a long line. She knew her sister had been weak. And weakness always gives, before the end."
"She killed her for Lapide," Isabella said. Her body was numb. Forgive me, her mother begged. Forgive me. "She killed her for the crown."
"Poison, made to look like sickness. Easy enough," Enzo said. Isabella heard the tension in his voice, the quaver he couldn't hide. "I suppose she didn't have the heart to poison me, too. Maybe she lost me in the crowd of babies in the Palace nursery. Maybe Alezia's loyal nurse stole me from her too quickly. But she knew who I was, before the end. I made sure she did."
"She made her choice for all of Lapide," Isabella snarled. She straightened her spine, lowering her hands from her weapons. "She did what she had to do."
Rage, and hate- true hate, black and boiling- flashed through his eyes. He lunged toward her, closing the distance between them. "We all do, Bell-"
Isabella drew her stiletto. Steel flashed in sunlight; it was in her off hand and the grip felt awkward. She leveled the dagger at Enzo, stopping him short.
"What about your gifts, Enzo?" she said. "What inheritance did your mother leave you?"
"Power," Enzo said.
Silver light brightened, smoke thickening, spinning, interweaving, becoming a coiling mass of- faces, Isabella realized, and limbs, clutching fingers hooked like claws, long whipping hair moving as if underwater.
The mass churned around Enzo's shoulders like a shroud. The whispers sharpened: screams, ululating shrieks and cries and howls like wind through statues. Eyes glowed like stars.
Witchborn.
"The dead don't find me," Enzo called, through the howls. His hair danced around his face, his eyes alight with that fell silver glow. "I find them. I pull them to me. I command them, like I commanded my mother's ghost to tell me her truth."
"The dead man in the garden-"
"Ghosts occupy their old skins easily," Enzo said.
"Let them go," Isabella cried. The screams tore at her. "You're hurting them."
"The dead are past pain," Enzo said. "But they go on hurting the living. They can't forget. We can't forget. I don't want to hurt you, Isabella-"
"You've already hurt me," Isabella said. "You killed my mother. You betrayed Lapide. You cursed Cereza."
"I didn't curse her," Enzo snapped. "Daval-"
"You're his hound, on Estara's leash. Did Belmont promise you asylum? Gold? Some holding tucked away for you to rule, his bastard brother kept quiet? And all you had to pay was Lapide."
"I don't want Daval's asylum," Enzo said. "I want Daval dead."
"What?" Realization came, all at once, like a lightning strike. "No. Enzo. No." She stepped toward him. Ghosts churned past; a strand of trailing hair lashed across her cheek, leaving a slice of cold deeper than a winter sea. "Stop this. We can make this better. We can end the war. You can help me end it. Together, I know we can do that much. Before worse happens. Before our chance for peace is gone." She thought of Cereza, of spellfire. Of light, and the nothingness left behind. "Please."
"Estara and Lapide are two fighting animals tearing at each other. Ravenous. Rabid." He lifted a hand. "You don't soothe a rabid animal, coax it back to health. You kill it."
The howls strengthened, hands becoming claws, fusing together into a mass of silver and screams. Enzo sliced his arm down, and they lunged. Bitter wind blasted Isabella's hair back from her forehead. She threw herself aside, down, palms slapping the floor. Ghosts tore past her, ripping all the heat from her skin. She tasted blood, felt the spreading heat of it over her shoulder. Her bad shoulder. The pain was dull, throbbing.
She scrambled to her feet, the ghost mass spilling after her. Isabella sprang for the space between two pillars, twisting sideways to force her way through. The ghost mass broke into two behind her, clawing through, shrieks and pleas and reaching hands. Isabella spun, drawing her sword. In her maimed arm the weight seemed twice what it had before, her bicep already trembling. Black blood wicked down from the cut on its shoulder, slicking the sword's handle. Ghosts coalesced in a circle around her, barely humanoid now: silhouettes in smoke, crouching, snarling, hair whipping in phantom currents. Eyes winked, bright staring points. She smelled bitterness and storm winds, the bright sear of lightning.
Witchborn, she thought again.
"It's useless, Bell," Enzo called. A ghost reached out. Isabella slashed its hand away; it vanished in a curl of silvery smoke. "They'll never tire. They won't stop. You can't kill what's already dead."
"No," Isabella said. "But I can kill you."
The ghosts parted, and Enzo stepped through their mass. Hands clutched at him, pulling at his arms, his hair; he didn't seem to notice. He drew his sword slowly, steel hissing against steel. Isabella's eyes flicked to it, to him, to the sword again. Her pulse hammered inside her. Her crystal arm trembled. It would give out three strikes in. She knew it. So did he.
Isabella lifted her sword and angled it toward him. "For Lapide."
"Really, Bell?" Enzo murmured.
She struck. Enzo's sword pealed off hers; the blow drove her spinning, crouching. Her arm shook badly now, blade a silver blur. She spat away a strand of hair and threw herself toward Enzo again. One strike, two- the third cracked across her face, his pommel snapping her head to the side. Just like the dead Falcii in the garden. He'd used his corpse like a puppet, had the ghost stab him in the neck to avert suspicion. He'd never stop. Like his ghosts, he'd never tire. He'd flay himself to the bone to see Lapide and Estara punished.
He'd see them all drowned before he'd finally let himself go.
Isabella whirled with a scream. Her elbow smashed into his neck, over his wound. Enzo's face blanched white; his eyes sprang wide as he staggered, Isabella panting and sweat-bathed. The anger flashed back, and then gave way. Respect. Love, even. All she'd seen for so many years. A friend, a confidante, a brother in arms. A queen and her soldier. Now he was a cousin, tied to her by blood as well as by duty.
"Not bad, Bell," he said. "But not enough."
A specter blossomed before her.
Its matter spun from mist, from silver light, like moonslight on rare nights when all three rose full at once. She looked like she had the night she'd died, the gown, the sorrowful eyes. Her face, folded in quiet mourning.
Queen Sofia Valere looked up at Isabella, and reached out her hand.
Isabella froze. "You trapped her." Her whisper sounded strangled. "Let her go. Enzo, let her go-"
Cold seized her arms. She looked down as silver twined round her wrists, her bicep, even her throat; it burned, bringing new tears to her eyes. The specter of her mother shattered. Without warning, the ghosts yanked her back, lifting her off her feet. She twisted, teeth clenched, but the cold was in her, now, winching her jaw tight and her muscles inert. All she could do was stare as Enzo straightened. Blood pulsed from beneath his bandages.
He didn't seem to feel the pain as he pressed the point of his sword in the triangle of soft flesh just under Isabella's sternum.
"Not enough," he said again. Isabella tensed. "Never enough."
"Stop!"
A shot rang through the vault. Ghosts howled, shattering apart like a flock of startled birds. Enzo stumbled back; the blade scraped off Isabella. The cold grip of the ghosts released, and she fell hard to her hands and knees. She tumbled away, behind a pillar. Her whole body shook now, adrenaline and terror brewing a heady mixture inside her. She hazarded a look through the swirling mass of ghosts, but didn't see Enzo.
"Princess-"
She whirled, lifting her dagger. Alois jerked back, hands raised. Behind him crouched Elias, the mad Estaran boy. He held a Falcii pistol, its muzzle still hot.
"Triune," she gasped. "You shot him."
"Sorry, no time," Alois said. "Come on." He seized her arm and yanked her to her feet. "What is this mess?"
"Enzo...Captain Acier...he's the traitor." Her vision swam. She thought she might fall again. The places on her skin where the ghosts had gripped her burned like she was on fire.
"We have to get to the door." Alois pulled her along.
"Stop them!"
Enzo's voice rang through the vault. The mass of ghosts re-formed, blocking their way to the door. Chained to their master, no escape, like them. Isabella saw the fear in Alois's eyes, felt his fast pulse through his grip on her arm. He'd followed her here and damned himself in the doing.
They'd be lost down here, turned to husks dry and papery as eider moth nests.
Moths.
She remembered. A flash like lightning, and she snapped straight. "Alois," she rasped. "There's another way."
"What?" The ghosts advanced, crawling, dragging, drifting. Silver light spread like tide toward them.
"Now!" She pulled him, and they spun, the three of them together. Books cascaded, gowns and dead birds shoved aside as they went for the back wall of the vault, where Isabella's dropped sunstone still spat sunlight. It glowed through the ghost haze like a beacon. Moths rushed with them, fleeing the dead, and she glimpsed them again wriggling under the edges of the painting's gilt frame. She felt it, now: cold air brushing her cheeks.
A breeze.
A draught.
She slammed the tip of her stiletto under the frame and wrenched, hard, using the dagger as a lever. Wood and paint cracked. Isabella wrenched again, and the painting listed, swinging away from the wall, trailing dust and ancient plaster. Behind it was another door, a match to the iron-studded one leading into the vault. This one was clean, free of rust, and free of locks, too. Alois pulled it open and darkness spilled forth, a gloom filled with the rush and thunder of water.
Elias snatched up the sunstone as they stumbled through, and Alois slammed the door shut behind them, trapping them again in the dark.
"Do you think," Luca panted, staring down at the ruptured blisters pocking his hands, "you'd rather see him strangled, disemboweled, or eaten alive by a pod of starving sea-orks?"
He looked up at Cereza. She leaned on the mop, her eyes narrow. Tangled strands of hair straggled down her cheeks. She watched Matteo as he strode back and forth along the deck, leaving bare wet footprints where they'd just swabbed.
"Don't think the sea-orks could choke him down," she muttered.
Luca managed a grin. His face ached, bruised and burnt by days of working under a searing sun. His hands were worse: blisters on top of blisters, his shipwright's calluses insufficient for this kind of labor. Maybe if he survived much longer he'd have calluses even Isabella might not sniff at. "Strangling or disemboweling, then. Take your pick."
"Why not both?"
"Savage," Luca said. He scrubbed his hands down his shirt, which was more sweat by now than fabric, the fine linen rotted and tattered. "I like it."
"Quiet," Matteo drawled. He whirled his sword from hand to hand, its blade flashing silver-blue in the evening sun.
"Or what, pretty Matteo?" Luca called, straightening. Around him, above him, strung across the rigging or at work at the gunwales, the crew whistled and jeered. He didn't see Sirin amongst their ranks; little wonder. She didn't seem to favor this beating sun. "You'll whip me? I think you enjoy that a little too much."
His grin widened. "I'm starting to not mind it so much, myself-"
"Would you rather see her whipped?" Matteo pointed his sword at Cereza.
"Mm, no, I don't think so. I don't have much of a taste for other people's pain." Luca strolled forward, dragging his chain behind him. He and Cereza were both manacled to one of the cannons, although he wasn't sure how much of a threat the crew of the good ship Fishcutter thought they'd be. He supposed they didn't want him to take a dive off the side of the ship, drown himself or let the sharks eat him. That would mean a loss of potential profit, after all. "You, on the other hand-"
Shadow fell over him. Pain cracked across his back. Luca cried out, stumbling. He twisted as he fell, catching himself by a knee on the slick deck. Nadya stood over him, tattoos rippling as she smacked the shaft of her fish-killing stick into her palm.
"Another?" she said, Buyani accent thick as porridge.
"I think our prince is feeling feisty," Matteo said as he strolled toward them. Cereza stood rigid, her fists clenched around the mop handle, her gray eyes pale in her sunburnt face. Matteo crouched and took a hank of Luca's hair in his hand, wrenching his face upward. "I think he needs a bit of honest exercise to tire him out. What do you say to that, Nadya?"
Her blue-toothed grin widened. "Would like."
"Our lady has spoken," Matteo said. He shoved Luca away. "Someone toss me a sword!"
"Bastard," Luca snarled.
"Probably," Matteo said. Steel flashed. A sword slapped into his off hand. "We didn't know dear dad long enough to say for certain. On your feet!"
"Luca," Cereza hissed.
He ignored her and climbed to his feet. The world swooped around him as his head spun. He staggered, but managed to stay upright.
"I'll warn you," he called. "I'm no good at dueling."
Matteo's teeth were very white. "Oh, I know."
He flung the borrowed sword. Luca barely caught it. He stumbled as the crew's laughter and taunts filled the air. His mouth tasted raw and bloody. He'd kill for a drink of water. Why was the sun so damn hot?
Luca kept his feet. He tossed the sword from hand to hand, like Matteo had done, getting a feel for it. Hardly a Lapidaean soldier's sword, like those he'd ineffectually trained with- this specimen had been broken before, a line of lighter metal soldering the two rusty halves of the blade together. The grip was rotting sarkyvor hide, so worn it slipped and slid under Luca's sweaty palm.
"It's to be a fair fight, I see," Luca said.
"Not at all," Matteo said. He dropped his weight, arching his off arm over his head like a scorpion's tail. Luca tensed. "I just want to watch you dance."
He sprang. Luca twisted aside as Matteo's blade spitted the air. Chain scraped the deck, dragged behind Luca's ankle. Matteo whirled, sword already arcing its descent toward the chain to snag Luca off-balance.
Luca yanked the chain from Matteo's reach. It skittered over the planks.
"Aha," Matteo sang. He swiped his blade left and right, carving a silver X in midair. Luca jerked away from each strike, but he still felt the air part over his face. "Clever little prince."
"I've been known," Luca managed.
"Clever as a rat," Matteo said. "Who knows he's in a trap."
He moved, faster than Luca could react. With a lunge, Matteo whirled behind him. He snatched Luca's chain from the ground and yanked hard. Luca hit the deck. Fireworks burst behind his eyes as his sword spun from his hand. Luca dragged himself toward it, but Matteo was quicker. His foot came down on Luca's wrist as his swordpoint dug into the back of his neck.
"Looks like this rat's run long enough," Matteo said. He pushed the point in harder. Luca grit his teeth as he felt it bite flesh.
"Matteo!"
Luca twisted his head toward the source of the voice. Captain Irene stood atop the upper deck, silhouetted by the sun and wheeling cloud gulls. Sirin stood at her side, watching Luca's humiliation with dark, impassive eyes.
"Stop playing with the merchandise," Irene ordered.
"Come now, Captain-"
"I said stop," Irene said. She tapped the pistol thrust through her belt. "Unless you want to fight me next?"
Matteo made a scathing sound, but lifted his blade. "Looking forward to round two," he tossed down to Luca, then strode away, whistling. Nadya slapped her fish-killing stick once more into her palm and followed.
Luca let his head drop. The cool, damp wood of the deck was almost as good as a drink of water. Not as good as a swig of whiskey, though, nor the prospect of sticking Matteo's pretty sword in him as far as it would go.
He heard someone approach. A cool hand touched the back of his neck, where the sword had left its mark.
"Luca," Cereza muttered. "Why?"
He drove his heel into the deck and, with effort, flopped onto his side. "Go away."
"There's nowhere to go."
"Then..." He couldn't think of anything to say. His thoughts seemed chopped up, like chum before it's thrown to the sharks. He tried to drag one hand under him and lever himself to his knees, but it didn't want to obey. "Leave me to my shame, or...or something..."
"You're going to pass out," Cereza said. She raised her head. "He needs water!"
"Cee, don't..."
"You'd rather die?" she said. "Someone, please, give him water!"
A shadow blotted out the sunlight. Luca looked up. Captain Irene stood over them, one hand on her hip, the other dangling a canteen. Sirin had accompanied her, standing a few paces back. She'd cleaned up and gotten new clothes, Luca saw, ones that didn't have holes and blood all over them.
"Water, was it?" Irene said.
"Whatever you have lying around," Luca rasped. "An Ishvoli vintage would suffice."
Irene flicked the cap off the canteen and took a long, slow drink, watching him all the while. "We'll be making land by nightfall," she said when she was done. "You'd best keep a civil tongue if you want the next days to go well for you and your lovely sister."
"And which verdant shore, might I ask, will we be landing upon?"
Irene's smile was a pretty thing, as pretty as Matteo's. Her whaleglass eye glittered. "Have you ever heard of the String of Pearls?"
Luca struggled to his knees, head swimming. "You're mad-"
"We're pirates," she said. She sloshed the canteen at him. "You'll get your share later, when you're fed. Now finish the decks."
She moved on, the tails of her long leather coat flapping behind her in the salt wind. Luca's heart pounded. The String of Pearls. A broken archipelago, shattered off from the flank of some long-erupted volcano, surrounded by deadly currents, vast monsters, and worse. He'd read about the String, seen them on the vast maps of the Inner Sea: to the south and west, on the corner of the Sea, before borders shifted to the wild nothingness of the Great Blue.
It was an area of the map inhabited only by the monstrous, or the mad. None sane would dare live in such a place, pounded by the Great Blue's endless storms, subject to no protection, within the boundary waters of no greater isle. A frontier land, wretched and lawless. He'd always wanted to mount an expedition forth, but on the Wasp and his own terms, not chained to a cannon and daydreaming about water.
He only noticed Sirin when her shadow slid over him, her bare feet stopping inches from his hands. He stared at her feet for several seconds, then tipped his head back with an easy smile. He hoped it was easy, anyway. He hadn't been near a mirror in weeks. He was sure he looked like a wreck, all his Palace veneer scraped away. His jaw bristled with several days' worth of stubble, his arms dappled in striped bruises from Nadya's fish-killing stick.
Sirin, on the other hand, had never looked better. Aside from the new clothes, her cuts had begun to fade, her skin losing its grayish tinge. Her hair had begun to grow in, a dark fuzz along her scalp, hiding the scars.
"Dearest Sirin," Luca said. "Come to spare me from my misery? Surely you have some water hidden away in that charming waistcoat of yours."
She didn't give him water, but gestured at the mop. You'd best learn to follow orders, Luca, she signed. And learn fast.
He lowered his head once more as she moved on. Sweat prickled the back of his neck. The sea was a blue so vivid it hurt to look at, the sky nearly as rich a color. He'd known they were headed south- the stars had betrayed that much- but he'd never expected a place like this, where the sun seemed the cruel burning eye of some fell god bent on torturing them, where the moons were so massive they seemed fully twice the size of those he was used to in Lapide.
The pirates hauled fish after fish from the waves- seven-foot rojak with magnificent scarlet fins jutting like sails from their backs, armored platefish with jaws strong enough to break a man's arm, squid and cuttlefish and whip eels, nuremi round as dinner plates and transparent, so their phosphorescent bones and organs were visible through their flesh. Now, some two hundred yards out, the ridged spine of something massive arched above the waves, then sank down into shadowy depths once more.
He didn't even know what to call that.
This was the wilderness of his books. A country of all his childhood dreamings, a land where the Leviathan might breach from the next swell. So why could he think of nothing but the spark of desperation he'd seen in Sirin's eyes, weeks ago, through the bars of his cell?
Had he imagined it? Was he banking all his hopes on nothing?
No. He had to have his hope. That, and belief, the belief that they would get out of this, the belief that the Leviathan was out there, was all he had left.
It had to be enough.
It is enough.
By his side, Cereza began to sing.
He turned on her. "Cee?" he began, but her eyes were closed, her bruised eyelids iridescent in the sunlight. The words slipped from her mouth, barbed and trilling, full of rough fricatives spat up from the depths of her throat. She rocked back and forth slightly on her knees, hands open at her sides as if in the attitude of prayer, but this was no hymn Luca had heard before.
A chill arced through him, wild and strange. Around him he sensed the crew's work stilling, all eyes on Cereza. They sang too, but it was all sea shanties or Nadya's endless Buyani dirges. Not this, in a language alien even to Luca.
Not just the crew.
On the bridge, the witch turned her head.
She stood there as days dawned and died, moving only to pace back and forth, her black hair streaming behind her in the wind. Luca always watched her as, each morning, she stilled at the foremost point of the Fishcutter's bow and raised her arms. The wind rose, too, a swelling gush of it so cold and clean it brought tears to Luca's eyes. The sails billowed, straining at their lines, the ship groaning around them as the wind took hold. Now, she lowered her arms, and with the movement the winds fell, sails collapsing, the Fishcutter slowing its gait over the ocean.
"What are you doing?" Irene demanded. "Bring the winds back. Now."
"That song."
Luca hadn't heard the witch speak since Irene had tried to feed them to her. Cereza's song faded, and her eyes fluttered open.
"How do you know that song?" the witch asked.
She paced toward them, her feet silent on the deck, chain grating behind her. Cold breezes skated past Luca, swirling around the witch along with her scent of rain. She stopped a few feet from where Cereza knelt.
"How," she said again, "do you know that song?"
Cereza looked coolly up at her. The witch stared back, golden eyes narrowed. She stood taller than Luca, which meant she stood head and shoulders over Cereza.
"I dream it," Cereza said. "Along with the Leviathan. I dream it dying, bleeding out rivers of blue into the sea. I dream it singing its own songs of ending. Do you understand that, too?"
"That song is a prayer. A holy thing. You desecrate it by singing it here."
"That was witch-tongue?" Luca said. The witch didn't spare him a look. "How would Cee know witch-tongue?"
"Are you witchborn, too?" the witch asked Cereza.
"I don't know."
"How can you not know yourself? Are your people so foolish as to be afraid of a little girl's dreams?"
"A lot of people have called me that. Little girl." Her eyes flicked up and down the witch's body, then came to rest again on her face. "You're just as much one as me."
The witch gave her a thin smile. Her face, her eyes, her lean body- it all seemed a mask barely hiding the creature inside. Or was this her true form, and the bird was the mask? A question asked by countless philosophers, and none Luca had read of could come to any satisfying conclusion.
"I am three hundred and fifty-three years old," the witch said. "I was riding storms when your ancestors were burgeoning in their mothers' wombs."
"Then you were there. You were alive before the Leviathan disappeared," Cereza pressed. "You've seen it-"
"Disappeared," the witch scoffed. "The Great Leviathan did not disappear because you don't see it, any more than the moons disappear at daybreak. The Leviathan is everything. The Leviathan is the sky, and the stars, and the islands in the sea. The Leviathan is the sea, little girl, and it made you, and it made me, and it made everything you or I or anyone will ever know. The Great Leviathan was never gone. It was away. And now, now it has returned."
She closed her eyes and breathed. The winds rose, and so did the witch's hair, lifting around her shoulders in long blue-black strands. "I heard its call. I heard it and I answered. I was flying to meet it when-"
"When the pirates shot you down."
The witch opened her eyes again. A muscle twitched in her cheek. "Yes. They shot me down. And now I serve them."
"Can't you break your chains and go free?"
"No. You don't understand. I swore an oath to the one-eyed woman- to fill her sails with wind in exchange for my life. I cannot break that oath."
"Why not?"
"I-" Her brows drew together, as if she was holding something back. "It is our way. It seems it is not yours."
"What if someone made you a new oath?" Cereza said.
Luca glanced at her with a smile. His sister's eyes glinted, her face set with determination. "If you help us find the Leviathan," she continued, "if you help me break this curse before it kills me-" She pressed her hand to her heart. "-I will set you free. I promise you."
"A fascinating proposition. And how do you intend to set yourself free?"
Cereza's face fell. "Well, I..."
"Seems that should come before you start making promises, shouldn't it?" the witch said. "Little girl."
"So you'd rather follow Irene's command," Luca said. The witch's eyes cut to him. "Do her bidding. Lick her boots. You're a disappointing excuse for a witch, I'll tell you that. Maybe you should scrub the decks like us, if you love being on your knees so-"
Talons pressed into his throat. Luca's words died with a gasp. The witch had knelt, so fast Luca hadn't registered her movement. Her arm was still a girl's arm to the elbow. Her forearm had shifted, becoming hard ridges of black scale and down. Her fingers were scaled, elongated, curving into razor-sharp talons. One slash, and Luca's throat would spill onto the freshly-cleaned deck.
"How's this for being on your knees?" the witch snarled.
She straightened again, removing her talons from Luca's neck. With a ripple of muscle and feather they receded, dissolving until her hand was pale and human once more. She whirled on her heel and returned to the bow, lifting her arms to fill the sails with a billow of icy wind. Luca touched his neck and winced at the blood on his fingers.
"I will make her listen," Cereza said. Her voice was hard. "I will."
"It's not me you have to convince, Cee."
She shook her head, still staring after the witch. "I know."
Then, softer, with a note to her voice Luca had never heard before, "She's beautiful, don't you think?"
Something spun across the deck and nudged at Luca's knee. A canteen. A full canteen, judging by its weight. He looked up to where Sirin stood at the base of the steps to the Fishcutter's upper deck. She'd been looking out to sea, but as Luca watched her, her eyes flicked to him.
She lowered her head:
A single nod.
'Thank you," Luca whispered, but he didn't know if she heard him. He hoped she did.
***
"Landfall!" shouted the night watchman, high overhead in the crow's nest.
Night had long since come, sweeping from horizon to horizon, shoals of stars lighting the sky as the sea darkened to the color of squid ink. Ahead Luca made out a glitter of lights on the far edge of the sea. He glanced at Cereza, and she stared back, silent, her eyes wide and pale in the moonslight.
The witch's winds died down as the Fishcutter drew closer. Around them the sea was full of light, and of destruction: shipwrecks, great decaying hulls jutting from the ocean like some enormous, rusting reef. Armored things, waves booming through jagged holes in their hulls, bristling with broken rigging and weaponry long-since defunct. Wood ships, too, fat-bellied galleons and sleek schooners and strange crafts with unfamiliar back-slung sails ridged like a bat's wing, all of them so far consumed by the sea they seemed more barnacle than vessel, all of them smashed up against sea stacks, masts broken and clustered with seabirds.
Around them, inside them, vast phosphorescent shapes swelled and pulsated, filling the water with eerie, blue-green radiance. Jellyfish, gigantic jellyfish, slowly furling and unfurling with the movement of the currents. Mantles undulated, pale blue and rose, countless tentacles rippling in its wake.
Luca watched, entranced, as a jellyfish the length of the Fishcutter cruised silently beneath the ship, bioluminescence curling off it to swirl through the water like drowned stars.
"Don't fall in," Matteo said, picking his nails with an oyster-shucking knife. "It's spawning season, you see. They're drawn here by the warmth of the water to break off their little polyps. Means they're extra-shiny, and extra-deadly, too."
He gestured overboard with the knife. "One touch from those tentacles and your body turns stiff as wood. If you're lucky, you drown. If you're unlucky, they'll stick to you, reel you in. Let you rot in the mantle-part and suck up your juices when you're good and putrefied."
"Sounds interesting," Luca said. "Love to see you demonstrate."
"Careful, little prince." Matteo tossed his knife, catching it by the tip of its blade. "Your face'll snag my sister a pretty stack of coin, but no one would object too much if I carved a bit of it off before she puts you on the auction block."
Captain Irene stood atop the upper deck, her eyes narrowed. "Watchtower?"
"In sight, Captain!"
Irene nodded and drew a small pistol from her belt, aiming it forward, toward the nearest sea stack. She fired. Red light burst from the pistol and arced across the sky, leaving a scarlet trail over the stars. It lingered, like a comet, throwing a river of bloody light across the surface of the waves.
Seconds later an answering burst of light trailed its way toward the Fishcutter, winking out meters above the taller mast. Luca caught a glimpse of what looked like a crumbling watchtower clinging to the side of the sea stack before the Fishcutter sailed past, and it was gone once more.
"Good news, crew," Irene called, to cheers and applause. "Seems we're still in our lord's good graces."
"What would have happened had you not been?" Luca asked.
Matteo's grin was sharp. "Remember what I said about the jellyfish? They must be fed somehow, mustn't they?"
"Who's this lord she mentioned?"
Matteo's smile widened. "The kind of fellow who feeds men to jellyfish."
"Triune," muttered Cereza.
"Well," Luca said, after a pause, "I, for one, can't wait to meet him."
The lights of civilization grew brighter, consolidating into a town. Not a town- a city. Luca straightened to get a better look. Crags of dark rock cupped the city, forming a broad bay clustered with countless masts. In the distance Luca caught a glimpse of a broken conical mountain, smoke rising from its smashed-in peak and trailing across the face of the full greater moon. The wind off the island smelled of sun-seared earth and volcanic ash, of dead fish and ork-oil, perfume and rotting fruit.
And blood. Luca thought he would never forget that smell, not if he lived a hundred years: blood on the wind, coating the inside of his mouth and clinging to the seams of his teeth.
"Welcome to An Gholam, your Hignesses," Irene called down. She laughed, the sound wild on the wind. "City of monsters and madmen."
Smoke hazed the moonslight red as the Fishcutter sailed into the thick of the harbor. The city spread beyond: endless battlements and broken towers, seething dark and flags fluttering ragged from spires, ancient statues, headless, armless, all with too many eyes or too many wings and rearing against the star-spattered sky. An Gholam looked less like a city and more like the island had spat it up, some tumorous upheaval of ancient architecture and more recent structures built in and around each other until Luca couldn't tell where the old stopped and the new began.
The harbor teemed with activity: workers slinging cargo, great hauls of fish swinging from nets. A sea-ork corpse splayed across the deck of a trawler, half-stripped of its blubber, besuited butchers with buzzsaws carving away valuable grayamber from its flesh. The water was streaked with blood and iridescent oil, the reek of decay rising from it thick enough to chew. Carnivore night-birds clamored by the hundreds, wheeling in great piebald flocks to snatch scraps of blubber or flung fish heads midair. The ships docked at long floating quays were mongrel things, bristling with weaponry and painted with arcane symbols.
Luca recognized one symbol, reoccurring: a whale daubed in blue, a hundred different permutations across a hundred different hulls.
"Does everyone here worship the Leviathan?" he murmured.
"We all believe one way or another, no matter what gods we grew up with," Matteo said, and for the first time, he didn't sound like he was mocking him.
The smoke thickened, swirling in low-hanging clouds around the Fishcutter as the witch drew them in. The sails swelled with a final gust, whipping Luca's hair around his head and stirring Irene's mane of locks. It fell, and the ship came to berth, crew vaulting onto the docks, Nadya shouting orders in Buyani.
Cereza's hand crept into Luca's, and he held it tight.
Bound together, crewmen holding their chains, they were shoved off deck and into the sprawl of the docks. Luca's head pitched and swam, his legs shaky as he acclimated to solid land again after so long at sea; the ground seemed too stable, the horizon too level.
"Nadya," Irene ordered. "Stay with the ship."
"Yes, Captain."
"You lot, come with me." She hooked her finger at crewmen, picking swiftly. Sirin was the last she picked. She hefted the harpoon, giving Luca a quick, desultory look as she slipped by to stand at Matteo's side.
She didn't look again.
This plan of yours had better be good, witchborn.
They headed into the crowds. Streets tangled and weaved, knotted as a basket of live eels. Brazen music burst from a crooked doorway flanked by statues of monsters, and everywhere voices sang, or squabbled. Fish flashed as they were tossed through the crowd. Smoke billowed, the scent of grilling squid rich in the air. A whole platefish hung by the tail from a butcher's hook, slabs of meat carved off to the haggled bargains of customers. Lean women dressed all in black gathered under archways, smoke twining from their lips as they watched passersby from under their tricorns. Children darted; painted girls called down from balconies. In corners and down steps, wheeled carts rattled with glowing spirit bottles, tattooed hands flicking aside curtains to usher in customers- for a sweet night or sinister, Luca couldn't tell.
In a square, hemmed in by market stalls, a child conjured schools of fish spun from glimmering light. They bloomed and swirled in midair, as if the illusions swam through invisible water. Old men grinned up at Luca as he was pushed past. One held up a cap, not full of coins, but of human teeth.
"Give one?" he croaked as Luca flinched back. "You have so many-"
"Don't answer him," Matteo said curtly. "Bloody nuisance." He stepped in to aim a kick at the old man, who skittered back on hands and knees, hissing and cursing. He was swallowed by the crowd before Luca could get another look.
The architecture was a mad boil of crumbling buildings, volcanic stone lashed by storms and stained by smoke and centuries of graffiti, but Luca could still make out the temple forms lingering in peaks and pillars and carved reliefs.
"This was no city," he muttered. "Not originally...this looks like some kind of religious complex, pre-Sundered Empire, definitely...possibly from even before Rashavir sank-"
Matteo yanked his wrist chains, and he stumbled forward a few paces.
"Must you?" Luca muttered up at him.
He shrugged with a smirk. "I must."
"This isn't no temple," Irene called back. "Not for a long damn time. Don't be thinking your Lapidaean gods'll be hanging about here."
They wended deeper, crowd parted by Irene's elbows. Luca saw what they approached as they broke onto a thoroughfare, a broad, straight avenue slicing An Gholam in two. Its paving stones were buckled and warped by centuries of foot traffic. Blots of color and light amidst the sea of people marked street performers, gutter alchemists, more market stalls.
Ahead, up the gradual slope of the avenue, a building reared against the full bellies of the three moons. This had retained its temple glory, a vast twin-horned structure of volcanic rock. Reddish vines, thick and prickly as ropes, slithered across the structure's walls, wending deep between blocks of stone and holding on with strangling strength. Flags flew from its spires, dozens upon dozens, each displaying a different sigil or crest.
The temple jutted from the complex of smaller, similar structures around it like a mountain amidst hills, built up on its crag of rock and covered in countless overlapping relief sculptures, blade-wielding figures of heroes and many-eyed, many-limbed beasts, gods grappling monsters with mouths spilling hundreds of tiny humanoid shapes, writhing in ecstasy or pain. Luca could not tell which; both seemed applicable, in these, the realms of the gods.
In the mass of carvings, one beast claimed centerpiece. By now, Luca could have traced out its lines in his sleep, but still his heart gave a single thud of awe, of fear- again, both seemed to have a home here, a home in him. The Leviathan reared over the crowd and the city in turn, its fins and flukes spread, its jaws wide. Its back bristled with harpoons, like the one Sirin spun so casually, as if it belonged to her. The monsters, the gods, the heroes and the devoured of the carvings seemed to spill from the Leviathan's mouth, from the gash slit in its belly, its blood flowing forth like rivers to form the world. Life, and death, hand in hand; all things, Luca thought, had their turn.
Its entryway was a massive arch, vines linking to form an organic mass glimmering with lanterns and hung with yet more banners, flags, and tatters of bloodied cloth. Iron-studded doors barred the way, each twice Luca's height. Despite the crowd's density the area before the doors was clear, occupied only by a pair of sentinel statues, guardian beasts: winged and lynx-like, canine teeth asnarl, tufted ears and clawed forepaws raised, hindquarters transitioning to the great gripping talons of some enormous bird.
A guard stood beneath each statue. Luca straightened, eyes wide. Both were women, both over six feet tall and built to crush bones. They had similar broad-planed faces, and their skin- all of their skin, and in their plain leather armor Luca could see a lot of it- was a deep indigo blue. Their eyes were blue, too, their braided hair salt-white. They advanced as Irene approached, crossing their stave weapons- not staffs, Luca saw, but long muskets enameled in red and gold.
"Evening, ladies," Irene said, hooking her thumb in her belt. "I'm Captain Irene of the loyal ship Fishcutter, and I've come to see Bateleur."
"Everyone comes to see Bateleur," one of the women said.
"Don't I bloody know it." Irene gestured at Luca and Cereza. "I just might happen to have something a little more interesting for our good lord than the rest of the rabble."
"Do you now?"
"I sent a hawk ahead. I'm expected."
The women's gazes skimmed over Luca and Cereza. Luca couldn't help but stare back. No common fighters, these- he'd read about them, and once, when Lapide's markets were open and brimming with denizens of the thousand different islands of the Inner Sea, he'd seen one, striding silent behind the palanquin of her master-for-hire. Isozi, blue-skinned mercenaries of the highest skill. They did not speak of their island of origin, of their training, of the beliefs that gave them such a ferocious hunger to fight- just of that hunger, and of their utmost ability to win. Whoever Bateleur was, he had to be bloody important, or bloody rich, to afford more than one.
He glanced sideways and saw Sirin, too, staring at the Isozi. Had she heard the same stories, read the same accounts, reveled in the same mysteries?
"I see," said one of the Isozi.
"I promise you," Irene said. "He won't be disappointed." She grinned and tapped her nail against her whaleglass eye. "And when have I ever seen myself be wrong?"
A glance passed between the Isozi. They stepped aside. One thrust her musket toward the doors. "Follow me."
Inside, the muggy air seemed twice as thick. There were few carvings in here, just vaulted rock walls and corridors thick with gloom. A sound washed over Luca as the great studded doors boomed shut behind them: a whispering, like the rush of the Vie back in Valeris. It grew louder, and he realized it was the muffled cheers of a crowd echoing from somewhere ahead.
Another cheer crested, and Cereza glanced up at him, her eyes gleaming in the glow of lanterns along the walls.
More Isozi waited- at doorways, at the base of a broad staircase that put Luca in mind of ancient sacrifice, children stumbling between priests to be taken to godly heights before their throats were slit. He snuck a look at Sirin's back as she climbed ahead of him, the harpoon slung easily over one shoulder. Matteo whispered something to her, and she smirked. Luca's wrists were slick inside his manacles.
Come on, witchborn.
They crested the stairs, the Isozi guards pulling open another set of studded doors at their escort's nod. The crowd's roar was a wave, a wall of sound and heat and the reek of sweat. Dust, too, hanging columns of it in the air, illuminated by the powerful beams of spotlamps arcing down from somewhere above.
The rooms beyond had once been some magnificent cathedral hall, its distant ceiling shadowed, cascades of mezzanines surrounding a broad central rectangle. Once, worshipers had gathered at those mezzanines to observe rituals. Now, the crowds were not worshipers, and the air was raw with shouts and jeers and shrieks. The central rectangle was a pit some hundred feet long and seventy wide, its floor covered with sand. Crumbling statues lined its sides, and the sand was blackened in wet patches.
Blood, Luca saw. His hands felt weak, his pulse a throb behind his eyes. They'd emerged along the lowest mezzanine, giving him a close view of the carnage. A man crouched in the pit, twin curved swords in his hands. The blades were slick and red, and opposite him prowled a pair of enormous, sinuous beasts. Their spotted pelts gleamed under the spotlamps, muscles moving slickly beneath. Panther-like, their long tails twitched behind them, tufted ears flattened along their skulls. Their heads were bare of fur and fleshed in tough black scale, eyes gold as coins.
Jakkar, scavenger-hunters from the night jungles of Noga. Their bite could crush skulls. And this fool was fighting them.
As Luca watched, tugged along through the teeming crowd, the man with the swords clanged his blades together. The jakkar snarled, showing huge cuspid fangs. One of the jakkar already bore a cut along its flank- not enough of a wound to account for that much blood on the sand. How long had these fights been going on?
"Fight, you coward!" bellowed a voice from an upper mezzanine, and the crowd roared its agreement. Sweat glimmered on the pit fighter's bare arms. He clanged the blades again and stepped into a lunge. The jakkar crouched, then sprang: twin missiles of muscle and bared teeth. The pit fighter slashed for the first jakkar's belly, nicking flesh, but the second was cleverer; it went not for the front, but for his back. Claws raked into his shoulders; he barely had time to scream before the jakkar took him face-down into the sand. Blades flashed, flailed, fell as the beast went for the back of the neck.
Bone crunched, wet and sickening.
"Get him off the sand." The voice boomed above the cheers, tinny and amplified. The jakkar ripped at the corpse; an arm came away in the wounded beast's teeth, hand still clutching a curved sword. "And pay up. I'll find out if anyone tries to scarper without settling their debts."
"Triune," Luca managed.
"Can't stand the sight of blood?" Irene called back.
"I'm not overly fond of watching men being mauled, no." He made himself breathe despite the tang of fresh blood in the air. "You people bet on lives?"
Irene gave him short, dry laugh. "You people," she echoed. "Like Lapide's not rotten to the marrow, too. Only difference is what we'd call bloodsport, your lot call tradition."
Luca lowered his eyes.
"Cheer up," Cereza muttered. "At least she didn't have someone hit you again."
They pushed through the crowds to a narrow set of stone steps. Their Isozi escort hurried up, and up, winding her way to the highest level of the pit and emerging at last onto a broad viewing platform. This must have long ago been the altar site, the sacrificial grounds: a dais still remained, a block of dark stone carved with grappling monsters, the ceiling open to the night sky.
Now, four Isozi guarded the corners of the dais, and on it, amidst an opulent pile of brocade cushions and furs, hammered tin-and-glass lanterns and low-slung benches, sat a man and a girl.
"My lord." Irene swept to one knee, Matteo and the rest of their party following suit. Matteo jerked Luca and Cereza down.
"Lord Bateleur," their Isozi escort said, and bowed. "Captain Irene of the Fishcutter."
"Irene!"
His voice was rich, edged in an Estaran accent almost faded. Luca raised his head as Bateleur stood from the dais. His first impression was mass- all broad shoulders with hard-won muscle underneath, his height well over six feet. His skin was bronzed, his dark hair touched with silver. He wore shirtsleeves amidst the pagan splendor of his surroundings: no aristocrat's flash for him, nothing save for a twist of white hair bound in silver round his neck and a hunting knife through the red sash at his waist.
Bateleur clasped Irene's hand, pulling her upright: a gesture of fealty. The rest of the crew stood, echoing their captain. "Fair winds?"
"The fairest."
"I got your message."
"Then you know what I've brought you."
Bateleur nodded at one of his Isozi, who took the chains from Matteo and yanked Luca and Cereza to their feet. The fetters grated at Luca's wrists. He forced his chin high. He had to look up to look Bateleur in the face. Scars etched the pirate lord's skin, nearly taking out one blue eye. Bateleur surveyed him, then moved on to Cereza.
"Royal children of Lapide, fresh meat to dance in your beast pit," Irene announced. "Just as I promised."
Without taking his eyes off Cereza, Bateleur nodded.
"Atana," he said. "What do you see?"
All eyes turned to the little girl still sitting on the dais, her hands folded in her lap. She wore a simple dark red shift, her hair the color of cinnamon and tightly curled, springing out in a halo around her face. Luca frowned. Her dark skin was tinged with gray, the lines of her face drawn. Some undefinable fragility hung over her like a veil. He noted how close the Isozi stood to her, how firmly they gripped their weapons.
"Spreading," the girl- Atana- said. "Like a cold current through warm seas. Life, giving way. Curses."
Her eyes slid sideways- to Sirin, who stood, watching. "Lies."
Bateleur grinned. It was the same sort of grin an eagle might give a small and cowering rodent. "A pretty present, Irene. My daughter likes these two well enough, and so will my pit beasts. But what about the real gift?"
"Matteo," Irene said. "Give him his present."
He moved, and before Luca could shout a warning, fetters clicked shut around Sirin's wrists. She jerked away with a silent shout, but Matteo had surprise on his side. With a kick the harpoon slapped into his palm, disarming her even as she twisted round to bring it down on him.
Matteo pulled the chain tight, and Sirin stumbled in front of Bateleur. He caught her chin in one massive hand. "This is the witchborn you spoke of?"
Opening his hand, Bateleur let her stumble backward, chains squealing across the ornate tiles of the floor.
Luca's heart pounded. "You never wanted her for your crew. You brought us all here to give like...like bloody boxes of chocolate-"
"Sorry, Highness," Irene said. "Leverage."
Fast, so fast she blurred, Sirin surged from the ground. Her chain snapped from Matteo's hand; her fingers closed around Bateleur's hunting knife. A flash of steel, and it was free, free and poised just beneath the jut of Bateleur's ribcage.
Just as fast, the Isozi leveled their musket-spears at Sirin. She stood rigid, muscles trembling in her arms, her teeth bared, her eyes locked on Bateleur's.
"Stop!"
Luca's voice burst from him. He could see where this would end: blood slicking the stones. Massacre, and the crowd howling as his guts were thrown to the jakkar. Sirin dead. Cereza, dead. "Stop," he said again. "This doesn't have to...I...I want to make a bargain-"
"You're in no position to bargain," Bateleur said evenly, not taking his eyes off Sirin's.
"Then I want to make a wager," Luca said.
Bateleur's eyes flicked to him, and Luca saw the spark in them, undeniable despite the pirate lord's composure. His heart still hammered, but it seemed distant. inside him welled a strange hot sense of calm. He grasped it and let it wash through him, straightening his spine, leveling his gaze. This was a story, like any other. He could tell stories. He might be a spare, a coward, a failure and a traitor, but this he could do.
"That is what you do here, isn't it?" Luca said. "Take wagers and hope they pay off? Well. I have one for you. You ever hear of a win-win situation?"
"The concept is familiar to me."
"Then listen."
"Have her lower the knife," Bateleur said, "and I'll listen."
"Sirin," Luca said. "Do as he says."
She didn't move. He could imagine her rage, her response- I would rather die than bow, Valere. She'd let them kill her if she could carve her pound of flesh on the way out.
"Trust me," Luca urged.
A beat, and she did. She let the knife drop. It clattered to the ground with a bright bell peal of metal on stone. The Isozi rushed in; one of them pressed a musket barrel to Sirin's chest. She stood, shoulders back, hands raised, face hard.
Bateleur faced Luca. "Let's hear this wager."
"Sir," Irene said, but Bateleur raised his hand, silencing her.
Luca took a breath.
"I am," he said, "very rich."
He glanced around the room, meeting everyone's eyes in turn. "Very, very rich," he went on. "The house of Valere is built on the wealth of Lapide. Forests, and grayamber. Silver mines that never seem to dry. And gold. Vault after vault of gold beneath Valeris, such that could buy all the salt of the Inner Sea and Outer. And I am prepared to offer you a portion of that gold-"
"You want to buy your way out?" Matteo smirked.
"I'm not done," Luca said. He spread his hands with a smile. "I am prepared to offer you a portion of that gold if I stand alive at the end of this. To that end, I want Sirin to fight for you in your pit."
She cut him a black glare. Luca ignored it. "If she loses," he said, "you can have me. Take me, take her, take Cereza along with the gold. It's all yours. I'll deliver it from my mother the queen herself if that's what it takes. But if she wins..."
His smile widened. "I get her. I get Cereza. I get myself. And a few other small bits and pieces, as reparation for our days of unkind treatment. A ship, to take our leave from your lovely city. The whaleglass cup," he said, directing this at Irene, "and the old harpoon. It's sentimental, see. Oh, and the witch."
The words- the witch- seemed to fill the room. Bateleur's eyes sparked as he fastened his gaze on Irene. "You have a witch?"
"I-"
"Is he lying?"
"No," Irene said, stiff. "My lord-"
"And you did not tell me this?"
"She was fairly caught. She belongs to the Fishcutter-"
"Did you forget your vows, Captain?" Bateleur said. "Or did they become inconvenient?" He turned back to Luca. "Your wager is a lofty one indeed."
"You'll still get your gold, if Sirin wins," Luca said. "When Sirin wins. Let it not be said I'm a dishonest man."
Bateleur's stare drilled into him, cold as the waters of the Ork Roads. Luca stared back. He felt his pulse inside him: not that of a trapped animal, but of a soaring thing, Nagi skimming over the waves. This, he knew. This he could not fail at. Because if he did, if he spoke or smiled or simpered wrong, he was dead.
"What do you see, Atana?" Bateleur said suddenly.
The little girl raised her chin. "He's not lying, Pa. Even though he has a lying face." She narrowed her eyes. "And a lying nose."
Bateleur smiled.
"I like your nerve," he said. "I'll take your wager, and your gold. Was a time I sailed Bellana's Arm, saw Lapide's shores for myself, and I'm looking forward to squandering its wealth. I have one mere addendum, if I may."
"Of course."
The pirate lord's eyes were ice, his grin wide and white. "The witchborn won't be fighting in my pit," he said. "You will."
