by Rose Francis
Farid swooped the bike in front of Lucia, putting himself between her and the ratlings.
“Get on,” he said.
Lucia pulled herself to her feet but found herself unable to swing a leg over the bike. “I can’t, Farid. My hip is busted.”
The ratlings crept closer, their hands clutching their nets and clubs tightly.
The pirate hopped off the bike and scooped Lucia up in his arms as if she weighed nothing. He smelled sweet and comforting. His arms felt like home to her for the briefest of moments before he deposited her on top the bike. Farid whipped out his bolter and fired a shot at the mob of ratlings. One of them in the middle shrieked as the sliver-tipped arrow took him in the thigh.
Farid hopped onto the bike and gripped the controls. “Hold on,” he yelled. Lucia wrapped her arms about his muscular waist, clinging to him tightly as he spun the dive bike around and sent them flying over the sands. Every bump sent agony shooting through her hip, but she almost didn’t mind. Clinging to the naked body of the pirate was worth it.
“You came back for me,” she said as the Letherine appeared in the distance.
“Of course I did,” Farid said. “You’re my crew. I’d never leave you behind.”
Lucia smiled despite the pain and nuzzled her face against the man’s neck.
And so their days went. The ship sailed ever westward, nudging northerly to avoid obstacles and raider camps. Lucia spent her mornings and afternoons lashed to the deck, her eyes trained on the oiled back of the sand pirate, waiting for his command. He’d gone easier on her after that first day, once he was certain she knew what to do.
At midday and evening she trained with Conwynne, forsaking meals more often than not to practice with her mother’s glaive. She could feel the bonds of pack establishing themselves. She was the alpha, even over Conwynne. Only Farid remained outside of her gifts.
Foxtail and Quinn formed an unexpected friendship, with Trip serving as interpreter. They both had a great love of games of chance and struck up a running score between them. Every evening, when it was too dark to sail, they gathered in the mess with their dice and cards and bones.
Lucia was surprised to find Farid uninterested in the card games. “I don’t gamble,” he said. “My ex-wife cured me of that affliction.”
Lucia’s blood ran hot at the mention of an ex-wife. Jealousy? Envy? Or pack protectiveness? “Did she beat it out of you?” Lucia joked.
“Sort of. She won every hand. Cards aren’t any fun when you never win. I swear she taught Quinn her tricks just to keep me honest after we split.” The pirate sipped his wastelander whiskey and watched the game of chance with shadowed eyes.
“Why’d you split?” Lucia tried to keep her voice casual.
“We were smugglers together. The two of us, Quinn, a handful of others from Sala City. We built this ship together, actually.” He pounded the hull affectionately. “But she wanted more. Callie wanted a home. She wanted kids. And in the end, she wanted someone who didn’t have all my charming faults.” He smiled, but his eyes betrayed the pain he felt. More than ever, Lucia wished she could get into his head, see what he was really thinking. Was she just a passing interest to him? A piece of tail to try to lure into bed? Or was there more to it than that? His smirk gave nothing away.
Every day brought the mountains closer. They appeared like a smudge on the horizon after a week, then grew each day until they filled the skyline like a wall marking the end of the world.
Farid and Lucia sat together in the mess, both exhausted from the journey. Farid’s head rested against the hull, a mug of Conwynne’s whiskey before him on the table. The lights were low. The scent of vanilla crumble hung in the air—a special treat from Quinn to mark the end of their journey. Across the table, Quinn and Foxtail were deeply involved in some new game of chance Conwynne had taught them. It involved dice and lots of math and Lucia felt even more tired just looking at it. Triptongue was asleep on the floor next to his shifter mate, his head resting on her feet. Conwynne was in his berth, already asleep. Even without sinking into a trance, Lucia could sense them all.
“Tomorrow we should be in Sierren,” Farid offered. “This could be our last night together.” His heavy-lidded eyes made an offer and Lucia was tempted, sorely tempted.
“Why do you owe my uncle?” she was surprised to find herself asking. The question had been on the tip of her tongue for days, but the timing had never been right. She knew this was her last chance to ask.
It was the wrong question. The pirate stiffened, Quinn also sat straighter, watching the two of them closely.
“I dumped cargo that was meant for him. He thinks I owe him the lifetime value of what I cheated him out of. He thinks I sold it to another and pocketed the money.” He took a long drink of the whiskey, hissing at the burn.
For the briefest moment, Lucia saw something.
Avar Farid, professional smuggler and freighter, hears a noise at night coming from his cargo hold. He lights a candle and walks on bare feet across the cold deck. His crew is sprawled everywhere. They dislike the berths they’ve been provided and have taken to sleeping wherever they fall after they’ve drunk their fill of the cheap wine. He steps amongst the bodies like a dancer, weaving and jumping gracefully, working his way to the cargo hold. A moaning voice, calling out in some foreign tongue, pleads for water. Farid—once called Farid the Gray when he was a street thief in Sala City—grabs a pry bar and levers the top off of one of Baron Lawson’s boxes with a splintering thud. Inside are two women, bound hand and foot. One of them has chewed through her rope gag and is calling out for water. At their feet is an empty sack with two canteens in it.
“Slaves,” Lucia said. “Two to a box. With just enough water to make the journey. But there’d been a sandstorm. You lost three days’ travel time and they were dying.”
The pirate’s face was a mask of horror. “How do you know this? Did you pull the memories from my head?”
Still half in a trance, Lucia continued. It was like the man’s memories were a song and she couldn’t stop singing until it was done. “You changed course, dropped them off in Carsonville, the nearest city. You didn’t know they were slaves. Didn’t even check the cargo. He told you it was mining equipment, entertainment for his boys.”
“Stop it,” Farid begged.
“The baron didn’t lie, exactly. The women were meant to work the mine, as bed slaves for his men. He resents you for rubbing his nose in his actions more than he cares about the lost money. The baron is a proud man, wants you to suffer. You have to pay by the month’s end or he puts a deathmark on your name.”
“Stay out of my head, girl. I signed on for delivering you to this fancy prince, not for letting a wolf-witch dig her claws into my brain.” Farid pushed the table away, sending the towers of dice Quinn was constructing tumbling to the floor, where they rolled across the sleeping Triptongue, who once again missed everything.
Lucia couldn’t sleep after that. The man was infuriating. Why would he keep his actions a secret? What was the shame in showing he had some humanity underneath his swagger? She moved to the ship’s deck, under the burning stars, to practice her forms. The glaive work came easier to her every day. She hoped she’d never have to use it, but also secretly longed to.
Sleep took her, after hours of spinning and slicing upon the sands, half-imagining ghostly hands on top of hers, gripping the handle of the shattered glaive, she’d fallen unconscious on the desk of the Letherine. Conwynne had warned her, that as her alpha gifts developed there would be times when she couldn’t tell reality from vision, or dreaming from prophecy. This was one of those nights.
Lucia saw herself storming into her uncle’s compound—her body shifted into a sleek black dire wolf. She could smell blood on the air. She could hear the panicked heartbeats of the thugs her uncle employed. The guards rushed her, armed with stunners and silver-banded clubs, but her roar scared them away, sending them tripping over themselves into the open wastes, where they
’d probably be devoured by spiders. She’d have to disarm one of them, to show she meant business.
Lucia saw herself freeing her uncle’s slaves, charging through the mine with the glaive in hand, smashing chains, giving a rousing speech and leading them all like an army to her uncle’s door. In her dream or vision, he has armor made of bones and wields a glaive the twin of her own. Why would he have a glaive, she wondered? They fought, blades ringing out as the sun sets on his empire. Behind her the cacophony of battle roared, as her army of slaves bested his army of thugs. Her uncles swung his glaive, she parried it. They were evenly matched. They traded blows, Lucia pushing him into the house, her glaive was relentless, never giving him a second to breathe. As they fought, they hacked his home to pieces. Bannisters and framed photos and vases full of dead flowers were casualties in their final combat. Finally, Lucia maneuvered him right to where she wanted him—in the room where he murdered her aunt.
“Please,” he said, dropping to his knees. “I’ll do anything. Don’t kill me.”
“Did she beg?” Lucia asked. In the vision, a cool looking scar marked her face. She had an amazing haircut.
“Did who beg?” the Baron Lawson said, but he wasn’t playing dumb, he really didn’t know what she was talking about.
With a roar that shook the foundations, Lucia chopped off the baron’s head. It sailed through the air, but wait. No.
Could she really do that? Could she kill her uncle?
The glaive in her hands was light and cold. The blade seemed to drink in the moonlight.
She wanted to help people. To end suffering. Was killing really necessary?
Chapter 7
Captured
The sand ship sailed at first light. The sun at their back cast deep shadows in their path. Lucia snapped herself into the safety harness like an old pro, but Farid’s jokes and innuendos were missing. He wouldn’t even look at her. He steered the ship as straight as possible, Lucia thought, just to avoid talking to her.
Stupid, proud man. Everyone has pain. Everyone has regrets. What makes his so special that he can’t bear sharing them?
The mountains rose before them. They were unbearably tall. Just looking at them made Lucia want to turn and run. How could anything possibly be so big? She’d heard stories, of course, from her uncle’s men, but had taken them for the exaggerations and lies they seemed to be.
Ancient cracked trails opened up under the ship. The roads of old, when the ancient builders laid stone on the desert floor to make passage easier. The roads crept up the mountain in a zigzagging line.
Lucia couldn’t believe they were going up there. What if they fell? What kinds of weird shifters lived in the stoney crags? Clouds obscured the peaks, giving the range the impression of infinity.
Lucia felt very small indeed.
Farid halted the ship miles from the base of the range.
“What’s wrong?” Lucia asked. But the man just glared at her.
“You can’t sail a sand ship where’s there’s no sand.” Conwynne’s voice preceded him up the ladder onto the deck. “From here we walk.”
“We could take the dive bike,” Lucia offered.
“This terrain is unfamiliar to us. Better to go slowly,” the old man cautioned.
Conwynne was already packed. And, with a shock, Lucia saw he’d packed her things as well. Not that she had much. But still, it felt like an insult. Like she was a child being hurried along.
“We will leave the foxes here, for the time being. The trip shouldn’t be hard, but if we run into trouble I’d like to move quickly.”
As Conwynne turned to leave, Farid seized his arm. “And when do I get paid?” he snarled.
Lucia was disgusted. Was money all he cared about?
“The prince has your money. Or his people do. We shall return as soon as we can with your payment,” Conwynne soothed. He looked at the pirate with a half-smile on his lips, like he was daring Farid to make a move.
“Then I’m coming with you. Give me five minutes to get my things.” The pirate unbuckled himself from the safety rig and slid down the ladder into the hold. Lucia could faintly hear him barking orders to Quinn.
“We’re leaving Foxtail and Trip here with Quinn. Is that a good idea?”
“The mutt will protect them. I have no concerns about that.” Conwynne scanned the wasteland behind them, squinting into the rising sun.
“What’s going to happen when we get to Sierren?”
“We find the prince’s people. We give them the amulet. We assist them however we can.” The trip had driven a wedge between them, Lucia knew. Or rather, Conwynne was her teacher now, her guardian. Not her friend. He spoke to her like she was a child and looked at her constantly with an air of superiority.
“Well,” Farid yelled from the sands, at the edge of the Letherine’s shadow, “are you coming?” He’d exchanged his shirtless look for a set of heavier clothes, better suited to mountain weather. A sword hung on one hip, and a bolter on the other.
Conwynne and Lucia clambered down the side of the ship, using a thin rope ladder.
“Do you know where you’re going?” Conwynne asked the pirate.
“Not a clue, grandpa. Sierren doesn’t trade much with people like me.”
“Pirates?” Lucia asked.
“Purebloods,” Conwynne said.
“They think we’re bad luck, that we bring disease and ill fortune.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lucia said.
“That’s Sierren,” Conwynne replied. And everyone was silent for a while after that.
Lucia had never walked on proper roads before. She knew they’d seen better days—the concrete was cracked and uneven. But still, there was a comfort in having an actual path to follow. The desert devoured everything in time. No roads survived there as more than shattered islands, hiding rat creatures or scorpions if you were lucky. In the desert, one avoided the remains of the old roads. It was different here, at the edge of the mountains. The land had different rules to learn, different paths to survival.
Scrubby grass grew in clumps at the edge of their path. The mountains reached skywards in front of them. They weren’t going to climb all the way up, Lucia knew. Sierren lay half-hidden in a valley or gorge between two of the massive peaks. Still, she shivered whenever she looked up. She had the oddest feeling that if she saw the peak of the mountains she’d fall off the earth into the sky.
It was half a day’s walk to Sierren from where they anchored the Letherine. Conwynne was the only one who spoke on the journey. He pointed out plants, the signs of animal life. He spoke of the area’s history. Lucia heard little of it. Farid walked just in front of her the whole time, like he couldn’t bear to lay eyes on her. But that meant she was forced to watch him walk, the swing of his hips and the strong lines of his shoulders was all she could see. She tried to keep her eyes from straying to his firm ass, but it was impossible. It was right there in front of her. What could she do? She tried not to look, but it was like trying to not think of a pink bear. Once you think about not thinking about something, you can’t help but think about it. Her second plan was to take one long good look, just let her eyes feast on the man’s body, get it over with. But that just made things worse.
Conwynne led them off the road onto a narrow path that wound its way up across the face of the mountain. Thin trees poked out from cracks in the stone like the last tufts of hair on a bald man’s head.
“The prince of Sierren is a kind man by all accounts. I knew his father quite well.” Lucia focused on Conwynne’s voice and tried not to look down at the valley floor, which was terrifyingly far away. She also didn’t want to watch Farid’s ass anymore. It was making her regret everything that had happened the night before. Why didn’t she take him up on his offer for some under-the-covers fun? What could it hurt?
Conwynne had the glaive strapped to his back in the open now, looking less like an odd old hermit and more like an aging warrior in search of one last dragon to fight. “
When the Suzerain came down from the north, leading his army of savage shifters, Sierren took all the refugees that fled before him. They had massive stores of food and water and empty halls to fill. And fill them they did. Thousands of scared families found a home here. Without the Suzerain’s attack, Sierren would have remained a mountain fastness slowly dying with the wasteland on one side and the brutal forests of Yosemite on the other. They didn’t have the population to keep going. Not until the fleeing families made a stand here. Ironic, I suppose, that the very attack that should have killed Sierren strengthened it.”
“So what happened?” Lucia asked. “I’ve never heard that part. All the stories just go, and the Suzerain won and now we have peace.”
Farid laughed and for a second his eyes met hers and there was warmth in them again. But then something slammed shut inside him and he shouldered his pack and moved away from her.
“It’s true, Sierren bended the knee to their new high king, the Suzerain. As did everyone else. His power was too great, too terrible. Every freehold, enclave, town or community swore allegiance to the man. To resist was to be slaughtered.” Conwynne picked up a long branch that had fallen from one of the scrubby pines, tested it as a walking stick.
“But how?” Farid asked, standing as far from Lucia on the narrow path as he could, without plummeting into the valley or climbing the mountain to get away from her. “From the old stories, Sierren had nearly as many men and superior terrain. Why did they give in?”
Conwynne sighed as he picked his way up the path. “There were rituals in the old days, known to the council of alphas. Rituals to strengthen a pack’s bonds. A bond forms naturally, over time. The process is slow. A bond has begun between us all on the Letherine, but to fully form it would takes months, perhaps years. But a bond can be forged as well. It wasn’t uncommon, before a battle or a matter of import, for a pack to be formed through ritual and pledge.” Birds exploded from a gnarled bush as Conwynne tapped it with his walking stick, shrieking and cawing they flew out over the edge of the path. “In times of great need an alpha could pull on those bonds of pack, draw energy from them. If an alpha had a large enough pack, or a strong enough pack, their strength could shatter steel. They could run faster than the wind. Their gifts were endless.”