“But waiting also means the risk of losing the element of surprise,” I say. “If the Kalovaxian patrol notices our fleet lingering not far from the coast, they’ll attack us.”
Søren nods before turning toward Heron. “You’ve been keeping in touch with Erik with that gold,” he says. “Has there been any more news from him?”
Heron shakes his head. “Not since the last update I gave. They’re on their way from Timmoree and they’ll hopefully be here tomorrow, but it could be another couple of days, depending on the weather.”
There are so many variables, so many choices with unforeseeable consequences, so many things that could go wrong. I stare at Søren’s map, as if there might be secrets there that I can somehow find, but it’s just a map, and one that doesn’t put things in our favor.
“What would be the best time to attack?” I ask Søren.
He frowns. “They’ll have a skeleton guard on the night shift,” he says. “So it would be fewer men awake and ready to fight, but the dark would affect our warriors more than it will affect theirs. The Kalovaxians have trained in the dark, they know how to use it against their enemies. Dawn is our best chance. It’ll be light enough to see, but the guards wouldn’t have changed shifts yet. They’ll be tired, not ready for a fight. Of course, it will only buy us a bit of time before their replacements join them, fully refreshed.”
“And the slaves?” I ask. “Where would they be?”
“Some would be in the mines,” Heron says. “The night shift is smaller, but still present. The rest would be in the slave quarters, here.” He points to a place on Søren’s map, just next to the mine.
I nod. “I trust your opinion on this,” I tell Søren. “We’ll attack at dawn.”
I look around at everyone. “It must be dinnertime, go eat,” I say. “There will be more time to plan when you’re done.”
Everyone stands up from the table, chairs scraping against the wooden floors, but I stay seated. I’m too stressed to be able to stomach food, and I don’t want the rest of the ship to see me like this, uncertain and afraid.
“Blaise,” I say when they begin to file out. “Stay a minute, will you?”
He freezes in the doorway, looking at me before stepping back inside. Artemisia pauses as well and nods, leaving the cabin and closing the door, though I’m sure she will be waiting right outside, just in case. The thought makes me sick and I feel sicker still when I realize I’m grateful for her presence.
Neither of us speaks at first and the air is heavy between us. We haven’t spoken much since we left Sta’Crivero, though I’m not sure who is avoiding whom or if it’s even been intentional. There has been so much to do to prepare for this battle. But even as I think that, I remember that there has been time for Søren to come into my room every night, time for me to fall asleep in his arms. I wonder if Blaise knows about that; I’m sure he must have his suspicions.
I clear my throat. “I don’t like this plan,” I say.
He’s quiet for a moment. “Do you think I do?” he asks finally. “Do you think I relish the idea of risking my life like this?”
“I think you relish the idea of being a hero.” The words force themselves out of me before I can stop them.
Blaise reels back like I slapped him. “It wasn’t my idea, Theo. You heard Artemisia and Heron and Søren—they all think it’s our best chance. You know it is, too.”
“That doesn’t mean I want you to do it,” I say quietly.
For a painful moment, he only stands there. “Do you believe that Glaidi gave me this gift?” he asks.
“Mina said—”
“I’m not asking what Mina said, or Sandrin, or Heron, or Art. I’m asking what you believe.”
I bite my lip. “Yes,” I say after a moment. “I believe Glaidi blessed you.”
“Then it would be an insult to her to not use her gift,” he says with a grim smile. “This is what I’m meant for. Let me do it.”
I shake my head. “You don’t need my permission, Blaise,” I tell him. “The others agreed with you. I was far outnumbered.”
“That doesn’t matter,” he says. He seems to be fighting himself for a moment before he takes my hands in his, squeezing them tightly. His skin is as feverish as ever, but I squeeze them back. “If you ask me not to do it, I won’t.”
It’s a cruel offer, and part of me hates him for voicing it, because there is no right answer for me to give. I can’t give him my blessing in this any more than I can stop him.
“You know yourself,” I say instead, forcing a smile. “If you believe that you can do this, I do, too.”
THE MOON PROVIDES ALL THE light we need as our ship pulls farther ahead of the fleet. They will wait for our signal that it’s safe. On the bow, Heron, Artemisia, and Blaise stand shoulder to shoulder, staring out at the horizon where three Kalovaxian ships patrol the coast. Søren and I hang back, watching and waiting for what can only be called a miracle.
Søren’s hand is on the hilt of his sword, his eyes on Blaise. I don’t have to ask him if he would actually follow Blaise’s direction to kill him if he loses control—I know he will without hesitation as surely as I know that if he does, I will stop him however I can.
Even if it puts everyone else in danger? a voice in my mind whispers, but I push it aside. It won’t come to that. It can’t come to that.
Everyone on the ship who isn’t on duty crowds behind Søren and me to watch the three of them, and it seems that we are holding one collective breath, waiting for the moment we can finally exhale.
Heron begins first, though the only sign of it is his shoulders tensing with effort. The effect, though, begins immediately, spreading through the ship and all of us. Like it does whenever he’s used his gift on me, my skin begins to tingle as if my whole body has fallen asleep. A quick glance behind me confirms that the others are feeling it, too—some look down at their bodies in surprise and bewilderment only to see them begin to fade before their eyes.
But the sensation is not as strong as it was when Heron made only me invisible. He isn’t strong enough alone to make the entire ship disappear. However, between his gift and the natural cover night provides, we should be impossible to see.
Artemisia is next, and she has a flair for drama that Heron lacks. The crowd gathered behind me gasps as she lifts her arms and the tides pick up straight away. The fine mist of magic flies from her fingers as she directs our ship toward the Kalovaxian ships on the horizon, faster than I would have thought possible. In the moonlight, her every movement seems liquid, every jerk of her arms and flick of her wrist executed like the ocean itself gave birth to her.
It’s a bit like watching her sword fight.
The crowd gathered behind her gives whispers of awe—our ship flies across the sea, propelled by a perfect tide. The plan is working—as long as Artemisia can get us close enough before Heron becomes too weak to hold our invisibility. That is the question, the theory we couldn’t test out before putting it into action. That is what this all comes down to. We need to get close enough that Blaise can deploy his own gift.
Some small, stupid part of me hopes that we fail on that account—that Heron will fail to hold our invisibility and the Kalovaxians will see us and that we will fall into a less magical sort of battle, but at least Blaise wouldn’t use his gift. He wouldn’t risk his life like that.
The prayer goes unanswered. Artemisia’s tides propel us toward the Kalovaxian ships swiftly, Heron’s gift holding until the moment Blaise steps forward, his body shaking. He takes the gem-studded bracelet from his pocket and clutches it tightly in his fist.
For all his bravado earlier, he is actually afraid, I realize. Without meaning to, I take a step toward him, but Søren grabs hold of my arm with his free hand.
“It’s a brave thing he’s doing,” Søren says to me, his voice low and his eyes still
locked on Blaise. “Don’t rob him of that now.”
A protest lodges in my throat. Søren is right—even though I would rather have Blaise cowardly and alive instead of brave and dead, that is not my choice to make. And so I do the only thing I can do: I watch.
Heron stumbles backward, drained of energy, and Artemisia drops her arms to catch him, keeping him upright. Both of their magic fades, but it isn’t needed anymore. The Kalovaxian ships are close enough now that I can make out the shapes of the sailors running across the decks of their ships, close enough that I can hear their panicked shouts. It’s too late, though they don’t realize that. They will soon enough.
Blaise braces himself against the ship’s railing, his body straining like he’s being torn apart. Our ship is so quiet I can hear each breath from the crowd behind me, each wave crashing against our hull, each Kalovaxian curse and order being shouted in the distance.
He lifts one hand, extending it forward toward the center ship, directly ahead of us. Beneath the thin material of his shirt, the muscles of his back strain like something is trying to force its way out of his skin. A crack splits the air like thunder, followed by another and another, each one louder than the last. Seconds later, I see it—the Kalovaxian ship’s hull splintering apart, planks of wood breaking off and splashing into the water. The crew begins to call out as the fragmented ship sinks, and a bell rings out. An alarm, I realize, to alert the other ships of trouble.
The ship on the left hears it first and they try to come to the first ship’s rescue, but Blaise is ready for that. He lifts his other hand toward them. The power that racks its way through him is so strong that he has to lean the full weight of his body forward against the bow’s railing to stay standing. Even above the chorus of destruction, I can hear him gasping and grunting with pain.
“It’s too much,” I tell Søren. “He can’t do any more.”
But even as I say it, the second ship begins to break apart, just like the first, plunging wreckage into the ink-black sea.
Two ships wrecked without a single life lost on our side—that’s enough. But it won’t be for Blaise. I know this even before he turns his attention to the third ship. Unlike their nobler brothers, the third ship isn’t making an attempt to rescue the other two. Instead, they are fleeing.
“We can let them go,” I say to Søren, but he shakes his head, keeping his eyes on Blaise.
“They may get help and come back,” he says. “We can’t afford to take that risk.”
Blaise must know this, too. He turns away from the wrecked ships and focuses the brunt of his attention on the one fleeing. His shoulders shake as he takes a deep, trembling breath and lifts up his hands once more. He lets out an animalistic cry so loud it could break open the sky itself. The power that floods from his hands is not a beam of light shooting from us to them. Instead, it is a tornado, whipping through the air without a target—as aimless as it is brutal.
The fleeing Kalovaxian ship takes the worst of it, dissolving to nothing but splinters as quickly as I can blink, but our own ship is not spared. The crowd behind me screams and drops to the ground, covering their heads as pieces of the ship begin to break.
“Blaise!” I scream, but my voice is lost in the madness. A piece of the mast above my head snaps off and plummets toward me. I am frozen in place, unable to move until an arm snakes around my waist and yanks me out of the way.
“Get everyone to the aft of the ship, to the rowboats,” Søren tells me, drawing his sword from its sheath.
I grab his sword arm. “No,” I say, the word wrenching itself from my gut. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, you can’t—”
“Theo, look around. He’s going to kill us all,” Søren says, gesturing around the ship with his free hand. “He asked this of me and I’m going to honor that.”
I swallow, tears biting at my eyes. “Let me do it, then,” I say, my voice shaking. “I owe it to him, Søren.”
Søren’s eyes flicker to Blaise and back to me. After a second, he nods and passes the sword into my hands. “Remember—strike hard and true, end it fast.”
I nod. It’s only when he turns away from me and begins escorting the frightened passengers to the aft of the ship that I realize it’s the same thing, more or less, that he said to me when I held a dagger to his back.
Steeling myself, I step toward Blaise’s figure, still leaning against the ship’s railing as tremors rack through his body, making his muscles spasm and twitch. Heron and Artemisia stand on either side of him, too exhausted from their own efforts to do much more than stare and call out his name, though their voices are lost in the overwhelming din of ruin.
The sword is longer than the ones I’ve practiced wielding with Artemisia, and the tip of it drags along the deck beside me. The ship careens one way and I stumble, leaning on the sword like a cane to stay upright, only to have the ship rock the other way. Each step I take toward Blaise feels like my body is moving through quicksand, but I keep my eyes on him and put one foot in front of the other.
Distantly, I hear Artemisia scream my name, but she feels a thousand miles away. Everything does. It is as if the world consists only of Blaise and me and the sword in my hand.
The air between us crackles with lightning. I reach out and touch his shoulder, hoping against hope that it will be like the last time and my touch will be enough to pull him free from the magic or Glaidi or whatever it is that has a hold on him. But when his head turns toward me and his eyes find mine, there is nothing of Blaise left behind them. They remind me more of Hoa’s, staring glassy and lifeless after the soul left her body. He looks at me, but he does not see me.
“Blaise,” I say, his name a whisper.
The deck begins to crack beneath my feet, shards of wood peeling up like fruit skin.
This is not like what happened in Sta’Crivero. Then, there was enough of him left that I could pull him out again, but now he is more magic than man, unreachable, unsalvageable. I swallow down the tears threatening to spill and lift the sword with shaking hands.
It feels like I am standing over Ampelio all over again, with the tip of a sword pressed against his back. I killed him then to save him from more pain, to save myself, to keep the rebellion alive. How is this so different from that?
My eyes clench closed tightly so that no tears escape. I know what I have to do—drive the blade through his chest, hard and true, just as Søren said.
I take a steadying breath.
I grip the hilt of the sword harder.
I lunge toward him.
The sword twists out of my grasp, the force knocking me to the ground. It takes me a moment to process what is happening, but when I do it’s like time itself slows down.
Artemisia with Søren’s sword, gripping the blade instead of the hilt. Her fingers digging into the sharp edge, streaking the wrought iron with rivulets of red. She charges Blaise with a guttural yell that I barely hear and my heart tightens in my chest, but instead of stabbing him, she brings the heavy hilt of the sword overhead in an arc, hitting him over the head with every last ounce of her power.
They both fall to the ground and the ship goes still.
* * *
—
With Blaise unconscious and the threat contained, we assess the damage done to the ship. Luckily, it was largely limited to the areas nearest Blaise—the upper deck, the masts, the railings. There are holes belowdecks spouting water, but they are easy to patch up.
“We can’t go far without sails,” Artemisia tells me when she reports the progress made. I haven’t been to see it myself. When Heron and Søren brought Blaise’s unconscious body back to his cabin, I came with them and I haven’t left in the three hours since.
“We don’t need to go far,” I remind her without looking away from Blaise’s still face. “We’re only a mile from the shore. We could coast there. And we have
the rowboats.”
Artemisia nods, her eyes drifting to Blaise and then back to me. “We’ve sent word to the other ships and they’ll meet us there. We should make landfall in an hour.”
When I don’t reply, she continues.
“You should try to get some rest, Theo. It’s going to be a long day,” she says, her voice surprisingly gentle. Still, the words rankle me.
“You think I could sleep while Blaise is like this?” I snap. “He might never wake up, Art, and—” My voice breaks and I take a deep breath before forcing myself to continue. “And if it weren’t for you, there wouldn’t even be that possibility.”
The confession comes out in a whisper, but it hangs heavily in the air between us. The mattress gives as she sits down beside me.
“I think you’re greatly overestimating your aim,” she says.
I know that she’s trying to lighten the moment, but I barely register the joke.
“How did you know that knocking him unconscious would stop him?” I ask her.
Artemisia sighs. “I didn’t,” she says. “It was a guess—a random, dangerous guess. If it didn’t work, I would have done what he’d asked and killed him. It just…it was worth trying. I didn’t want…” She trails off, pausing for a moment. “I didn’t want to lose another person.”
“Neither did I,” I say, shaking my head. “That didn’t stop me from trying to kill him when it came down to it.”
Artemisia surprises me by touching my shoulder.
“There were lives at risk, Theo,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “You put your country over your heart and that is not something to be ashamed of. Blaise would have understood.”
I nod, even though her words lodge under my skin like a splinter.
Because yes, Blaise would have understood. But he never would have made the same choice if our positions were reversed.
* * *
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