Harkan paused. He had found them a quiet corner of the hold—a ratty canvas hammock, a fairly clean patch of floor. He had covered her bandaged hands, her castings, with his own gloves.
“I didn’t want to leave him,” he replied at last, his voice as thick as her mind felt. “You know I didn’t. But if it was a choice between going to find him and losing our chance of escaping, or getting you out of there safely… El, I couldn’t miss the moment. I had to act.”
“You didn’t.” She tried to glare at him, livid that her eyes insisted on closing against her will. “You didn’t have to do any of this. It was my choice to stay or go. You took that from me.”
He shook his head, dragged a hand over his mouth. “Please, try to understand—”
“No. I hate you. Understand that. Do you hear me? You’ve lost me. You have me here now because you’re selfish, and a coward, but actually you’ve lost me forever. Know that. Live with it.”
Forcing out those words required all the voice she had left. Eyes burning from tears, from the drug, from the battle-ash peppering the skies, she sank onto the hammock upon which Harkan had situated her and fell into a throbbing black sleep.
• • •
The Sea of Bones was calm—so the captain insisted, anyway—but Eliana was unused to traveling on ships and spent their first two days aboard the Streganna curled up on her hammock, miserable and sick with anger. A pail, one of many, sat on the floor below her; she used it often.
Harkan was not much better, which was a small comfort.
Now that the effects of the black lily had worn off, Eliana was able to observe their surroundings. The hammocks in the ship’s hold were strung up close to one another, ropes bolted to the rafters. She had counted at least seventy hammocks throughout the main hold, and not everyone had managed to claim one. The damp air quickly grew unpleasantly musky. But though the ship was small, it seemed clean enough, and the hammocks were large and sturdy.
Large enough, in fact, for Harkan to climb inside and join her.
He had been pacing the hold, convinced that movement and talking to their fellow travelers would distract him from his nausea—and perhaps supposing that allowing Eliana space would diminish her anger.
But at last he gave up and climbed quietly into her hammock. They had nothing left in their bellies, and though she was so furious with him she couldn’t look him in the face, she was too sick to shun him altogether. He was a body, as clammy as her own but solid and familiar, so she clung to him reluctantly, the ship rocking them. Even familiar sounds seemed new and strange within the walls of the Streganna’s hull—babies crying, the low murmur of conversation, laughter and the slap of cards, a distant sizzle of cooking meat from the galley.
Eliana groaned into Harkan’s hair. “That anyone could think of eating.”
“Please don’t vomit on me,” he said.
“You’d deserve it.” She wanted to say so much more than that. She wanted to rise from the hammock and abandon him, stay as far away from him as possible until they made port in Meridian, and then leave him behind forever.
But that distance would have been a mercy, for both of them—and neither of them deserved respite. He had taken her from Remy, from Simon, from the people who needed their help.
And she was terrified by the idea of facing whatever lay ahead alone, even if she had only him for company. Once, after such an egregious betrayal, she would have walked away from him and never looked back.
Once, she had existed without an Empire breathing down her neck, and with her hands free of cages she did not understand.
She slipped her right hand into her coat pocket, touched the cold metal lines of the box that held Zahra. The reminder of the wraith’s absence sharpened her anger. Her eyes grew hot at the thought of Zahra floating nearby, cooling her cheeks with the supple dark current of her hand.
“I wonder if Remy died after we abandoned him,” she said. “I wonder if he tried to find us, got separated from the others, and died with an Empire arrow through his gut.”
Harkan blew out a trembling breath. “El, don’t.”
“I wonder if he died alone, terrified, wondering why we’d left him.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Fuck you, Harkan. I’ll do just as I please.” And then, as the boat pitched hard, her tears rose until she could hardly breathe. She swallowed against the sour tang of her upset stomach.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” she said, her face pressed against his neck. An animal rage thrumming under her breastbone longed to tear into his flesh with her teeth, rip his throat from his body, let him bleed out and suffer as she feared Remy might have suffered, alone, in the fallen castle, without his sister there to protect him.
Instead she wept quietly against Harkan’s shirt, shrugged away his arm when he tried to comfort her, cursed him viciously every time he said her name. Though his voice was familiar, his body a welcome anchor on this tossing sea, it felt foreign to be so near him. She would never have thought him capable of doing what he had done. She would never have imagined him to be the kind of man to take her will from her, to direct her life as he saw fit rather than allow her to lead it herself, as was her right.
A terrible thought occurred to her: Had the war changed him? Had those horrible long weeks after they’d been separated in Orline done something irreparable to his character?
Or had she never really known him at all?
The feeling sat in her chest like a meal she could not digest. She did not try to dislodge it; she let it molder, barbed, between her ribs.
Sleep did not come easily after that.
• • •
She startled awake to find Harkan gone.
But someone else was watching her.
A child, standing very near in the dim light, dark eyes wide. Dark-brown skin beneath tight black curls.
The boy stared at her castings.
For a moment, she lay there frozen. And then she remembered: she had taken off Harkan’s gloves earlier in the night to allow her bandaged hands a chance to breathe—and had forgotten to replace them.
“What are those?” The child looked up, a sharpness overtaking his expression. “I’ve never seen those before.”
“No, I don’t suppose you have.” Eliana swung her legs out of the hammock, ready to grab Arabeth. “They belonged to my mother. What do you want?”
The child considered her hands once more. “If I touch them, will they hurt me?”
“If you touch them, I’ll hurt you.”
The child’s gaze lifted, appraising her. “My name is Gerren. You snore in your sleep. If you don’t stop that, someone will pound your face in, probably.”
Then, quick as a kitten, he dropped a folded piece of paper into her palm, ducked under the hammock beside hers, and was gone.
The hold was dim—a few stubby candles throughout and a pale wash of light from the nearest hatch. Eliana opened the paper and squinted to read it.
Slop room. One hour.
We know who you are.
• • •
She found Harkan swabbing the portside deck, ignored the irritated bark of the boatswain, and held up the paper for Harkan to read.
He wiped his brow. The rising dawn illuminated the sheen of sweat on his skin.
“What did you tell him?” she said softly. “This man you found who secured us passage. Is this his doing?”
“I told him nothing of significance.” Harken frowned at the paper, then marched to the railing and tossed it overboard. “Who brought that to you?”
“A child. Gerren was his name. He saw my castings.”
Harkan was aghast. “How? My gloves—”
“I took them off to let my hands breathe, forgot to put them back on, and fell asleep.”
“El, you can’t be careless like that.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way,” she said, though she had been careless and was furious to realize it. “I was tired, all right? I’m so tired I can hardly think.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t driven yourself to the edge of death back in Astavar,” Harkan said, “you wouldn’t be in such a state now.”
She fixed him with a hard glare. “It’s astonishing to me that you feel you have any ground to stand on here. I did what I had to do to save Navi.”
Harkan rounded on her, his eyes glinting with tears. “And I did what I had to do to save you.”
Silence fell between them. Harkan turned away to watch the brightening sea. The sun fattened on the horizon; there was no land in sight.
When he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I suppose we’ll have to go meet them, whoever they are. Otherwise this could escalate.”
“I have to meet them, anyway.”
“You can’t possibly expect me to let you go alone.”
Eliana stilled, the lines of her body drawing tight with the urge to strike. “Let me? You’ll want to think very carefully about what you say next, Harkan.”
He was quiet for a long time, and when he finally looked back at her, there was a weariness to his expression, a sag of regret.
“I know. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to apologize enough. And I accept that. But I also don’t think you should do anything alone—not here, not when we disembark. You have a target on your back, now more than ever, and we have no friends here, or anywhere. We have only each other.”
The terrible truth of that settled, spinning, into her gut.
She had only Harkan.
And she realized, watching him, that despite everything, she still loved him and always would. He had done something unforgivable, and she would see the memory of that act for the rest of her life, every time she set eyes on him.
But there had been a lifetime of friendship and devotion before that, and though she longed to discard those memories, wipe clean the slate of their history, she couldn’t. He was too much a part of her, and she of him. They were braided together, and if she untwined those threads, she would have nothing left to hold on to.
Wordlessly, she helped him finish his chores, and then, together, they climbed belowdecks.
• • •
The slop room was down the hall from the galley. Multiple times a day, the cook’s assistants dumped rotten food, refuse, and waste through a locked hatch in the slop room floor.
The narrow corridor outside the room was empty. All was silent, save for a raucous shout of laughter from the galley.
Eliana knocked on the door. It opened at once, admitting a foul odor that smelled exactly as she had expected the slop room to smell.
“You’re late,” said the woman inside—one Eliana had seen in passing aboard the ship. She was young, perhaps two or three years older than Eliana, lithe and reedy in a way that suggested she hardly ever stopped moving. Her eyes were quick and sharp, a honeyed brown to match her skin, which was dusted with freckles. Her long, braided brown hair had been dyed a rich scarlet—though that must have been some time ago, for much of the color had faded.
The woman’s gaze fell at once to Eliana’s hands. “So what are they?”
Eliana did not blink. “They were my mother’s.”
“Yes, so Gerren said. But what are they?”
“Odd, that you would care so much about jewelry,” said Harkan, at Eliana’s elbow.
The woman raised an eyebrow. “They’re rather ugly, for jewelry.”
“What do you want?” Eliana snapped.
The woman considered Eliana for a moment longer. “Your help,” she said and then stepped aside to reveal a man sitting behind her on an overturned pail. He was pale-skinned, with wild copper hair and a fresh red scar across his face, part of it obscured by a black eye patch.
Eliana stepped back, unbalanced. She felt as though she were lifting away from herself.
“Arris?” said Harkan, sounding surprised. “What is all this?”
“Harkan.” The man inclined his head, his voice slow and smooth, deeply amused. “When we met in Vintervok, you didn’t tell me what sort of company you keep.” He glanced at Eliana, his mouth twitching.
“His name isn’t Arris,” Eliana managed at last, forcing her shock to release its hold. “It’s Patrik. He’s Red Crown.”
23
Rielle
“Stories from the early days of the Second Age tell us that Saint Marzana, understanding how exhausted and heartsick the scattered people of her homeland were after so many years of war, decided to craft her throne from flames that would never die. Even on the darkest night, the throne would burn brighter than the sun and warm the coldest reaches of even the most desolate heart.”
—The Fire That Lit the World: A History of the Formation of the Kirvayan Realm by Blazh Tarasov and Lyudmilla Zakhovna
Rielle awoke in the early hours of the morning from a strangely dreamless sleep to hear Ludivine’s urgent voice.
Rielle, wake up. There’s someone here to see you. The speaker of the Kirvayan Obex. We’re right outside. I barely managed to stop her from barging in. Wake Audric.
Rielle’s exhaustion vanished. She gently shook Audric until he stirred, rubbing his eyes.
“What is it?” he murmured.
“The speaker of the Obex is here.” She climbed out of bed, the cool air prickling her skin, and retrieved her dressing gown from the floor. “Lu’s outside with her.”
Rielle waited until Audric had pulled on his tunic and trousers and then told Ludivine, All right. We’re decent.
Ludivine entered at once, her brow knotted with worry. Behind her followed a pale woman with close-cropped gray hair, her skin lined and weathered but her gait strong. She wore layers of snow-dusted furs, carried a walking stick, and brought with her the crisp bite of winter.
The bronze clasp of her cloak bore the sigil of the Obex—a single eye, resting atop the Gate.
“Prince Audric. Lady Rielle.” The woman bowed. “My name is Vaska. I speak for the Obex.”
“It’s quite late, Vaska,” said Audric, “and we’ve been traveling for days. Can this wait until morning?”
Vaska blinked. “No, my lord prince. It cannot wait until morning.” She looked at Rielle. “You are here for the casting of Saint Marzana, are you not?”
“Yes, we are,” Rielle replied. “Has something happened?”
The woman shook her head. “I cannot speak of it here, my lady. As you know, the Obex is loyal to no one but our sacred task. We are not loyal to the Blazing Throne, nor to the Magisterial Council. And, as I’m sure you also know, this city is one of unrest. You have heard, perhaps, of the elemental children who have gone missing?”
Rielle raised her eyebrows. She felt Ludivine’s shock like a tiny shove against her spine. I didn’t know of this.
“No,” Rielle said. “We hadn’t heard of missing children.”
Audric stepped forward. “How many children? Are there efforts underway to recover them?”
“Yes, but that is not your concern,” Vaska replied. “I mention it only to further illustrate the precarious state of this city, which I’m certain our queen and her advisers are taking great pains to disguise from you during your visit. Now, please, come with me. I do not trust the walls of Zheminask.”
Vaska walked toward the doors. When they did not follow, she turned back and stared. “Why do you hesitate?”
“This is all rather untoward,” Audric replied. “A single Obex representative, coming for us in the middle of the night, urging us to leave with her and go to an undisclosed location.”
Vaska nodded once. “I understand. Unfortunately, I cannot disclose our destination.” She paused, her mouth thinning. “Jodoc told us of your angel. Surely she can sense my honesty.
”
Ludivine glanced at Rielle. Her presence was an uncertain tangle, clinging to Rielle’s mind like a burr.
“I sense that you are telling the truth, Vaska,” Ludivine said slowly.
But beyond that, her thoughts are clouded to me in a way I dislike.
Rielle lost what remained of her patience. “She says your thoughts are clouded to her, which she doesn’t very much like.”
Vaska’s smile was thin. “We Obex have learned much over the years about how to shelter our thoughts from angelic intruders.” Her eyes passed over Ludivine as they might have over a discolored spot on the floor. “Now, please come. Every moment delayed is another moment closer to the Gate’s destruction. And dress warmly. It has begun to snow.”
• • •
Evyline insisted upon joining them, along with three other members of Rielle’s Sun Guard—Jeannette, Ivaine, and Riva. Rielle did not protest. She did not trust Vaska, who led them out of Zheminask through dim passages far below the palace’s ground floor.
Ludivine’s thoughts felt like those of a confused but determined child, fumbling in the dark.
There is something amiss here, she told Rielle.
Here, in our midst?
Here, in this city. And I cannot determine what it is. Something is obstructing me.
Rielle had an idea of what that might be. She wrestled her thoughts clear and calm. Perhaps you are merely tired.
Ludivine fell stubbornly silent. At last, they passed through a narrow door and emerged onto a rough flat of land dusted with snow. They were behind the palace now, and approaching a series of cliffs.
Five elegant stone bridges connected the land on which Zheminask stood to the mountains beyond. Vaska led them across the leftmost one, then up a craggy path that quickly grew steep, scattered with patches of black ice. The higher they climbed, the harder the snow fell, until Rielle could hardly see her own feet. Soon they were trudging through powdery drifts, Rielle’s breath coming high and sharp in her chest, her skin slick with sweat beneath her woolen layers.
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