“. . . I probably would have.”
Ariadne looked me square in the face. “But I should have taken you anyway. Shouldn’t I?”
“I . . . don’t know.” My tongue felt numb, and too big for my mouth. “This is a lot of new information. I’m going to need some time.”
“You don’t have time. This is our last night. If you need to slap me or yell at me or eat my spleen, this is the only chance you’re going to get.” She pulled back, her eyes searching my face frantically. “Say something.”
“I don’t know what to say. You can’t land something like this on me and expect a written analysis of my feelings all of thirty seconds later. If you wanted a quicker answer, then you could have told me literally any time before this moment . . . No. Ariadne, no. Stop that. Don’t you fucking cry!”
She was doing the stuttering-gulpy-breathing thing that meant a full breakdown was imminent. I had her by the shoulders, ready to shake her until she either pulled herself together or shattered into a million pieces, when a quiet cough interrupted us.
“That’s enough, I think,” Darren said. She’d propped herself up on one elbow, and was raking leaves from her hair. “Sorry to pull rank, but I ought to take point on this.”
“I can handle it.”
“I know you can,” she said, diplomatically ignoring both my maniacal tone, and my death grip on Ariadne’s shoulders. “But it’s not your responsibility, and you’re tired. Go to sleep, Lynn. That’s an order.”
If I thought about arguing with her, the impulse lasted all of an instant. Ariadne’s revelation had sent a sort of tidal wave of emotion crashing through me, and my mental landscape was the shore after the tide receded: a mass of debris, smashed planks and bits of rope and stoved-in casks and beached fish gasping for air. Too much mess for me to cope, especially when I was so exhausted that my thoughts were all dissolving into a sickly slime of yellow-green.
I wanted to sleep, not to try to wrestle Ariadne back to a state of sanity. And—you probably have figured this out about me by now, but just in case—I get a kick out of being ordered to do things that I desperately want to do anyway.
I switched places with Darren, letting her scoot closer to Ariadne while I moved away as far as the chain would allow. At Darren’s pointed look, I rolled over and wedged my fingers in my ears, but I unplugged my ears as soon as she wasn’t paying attention. If Darren didn’t want me eavesdropping on her, then she should have fallen in love with someone less nosy, so it was really her own fault.
For the first few minutes, Ariadne just snuffled, and Darren murmured soft, meaningless words.
At length, Ariadne sniffed thickly, and someone—Darren—ripped up a handful of dry grass. “Here. Blow your nose.”
There was scuffling and sniffling and blowing and more ripping, as Ariadne worked her way through half of the surrounding vegetation in her quest to clear her face of snot and tears.
“Gods, I’m disgusting,” Ariadne muttered at last. “If I ever get a chance to take a bath again, I’m going to boil myself raw. You don’t have to stay awake to babysit me, Darren. I’ll muddle my way through to the morning somehow.”
“Sure. Since you’re up, though, I do have a question I’d like to ask.”
A tense pause. “What?”
“The Beggar’s Flip. How the flippety fuck does that thing work?”
“That? Darren, that’s just a stupid party trick.”
“All right, it’s a stupid trick, but I still can’t figure it out and it’s driving me out of the soft spongy remnants of my mind. So—if you please?”
“Well—all right, I suppose. We don’t have any cups.”
“We have rocks.” Three pebbles clinked as Darren set them down in a row. “I’m marking the tops with mud. There we go. Yet another feat of pirate ingenuity. I deserve a raise. As soon as I figure out who’s paying me, I’m going to ask for one. Now school me, princess.”
“It really is stupid. Here. This is how you set up the cups at the beginning of the game . . .”
There was a soft scuffing noise. I pictured how Ariadne was positioning the pebbles: upside down, right side up, upside down.
“But then, when you reset it and invite someone else to try, you set them up this way.” A few clicks as Ariadne shifted rocks: right side up, upside down, right side up. “So when your mark tries the same moves . . .”
Darren let out a yelp of real indignation. “Oh, come on!”
“I told you it was stupid. It works best when you use it against people who are really pissed drunk, or—”
“Or people like me? Is this your polite way of calling me a raging thickhead?”
“Darren. No. I was going to say, it works on children. I was completely mystified when . . . when Elain first showed it to me.”
Darren pretended not to notice the hitch in Ariadne’s voice when she said my mother’s name. “Elain taught you the trick?”
“Eventually. She tortured me with it first. See, I’d upset Gwyneth—Lynn, I mean. We’d been running races up and down the buttery, the two of us, and I kept winning. Longer legs. I got cocky and bragged a bit and Lynn got sore and went off crying. Once she was gone, Elain said that she wanted to teach me a game. We played over and over—must have been twenty times or more—but I couldn’t figure out the trick. So I got sore and went off crying, and life was a misery until Elain finally explained it, a couple of weeks later. Afterwards, I cried some more, and said she’d cheated. And she shrugged, and said, ‘I started the right way, and you didn’t. Whether that’s cheating is something you have to decide.’”
Darren laughed quietly. “Cheeky.”
“Elain had a talent for putting me in my place, which few people are able to do.” A sniff, and then, “That’s not true anymore, I guess. Almost everyone on this island has seen me cringing and cowering all over hell’s half acre. So if anyone ever wants to put me in my place in the future, they can just copy Jada’s techniques.”
It was a cold night, but even so, the mention of Jada’s name seemed to chill the air. Ariadne sniffed hard, and Darren sighed into the silence. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but—”
“Don’t say something kind and banal and meaningless. I can’t bear it.”
“I have to say it, because it’s true. It’s not your fault that Jada tortured you, and it’s not your fault that you were human enough to break.”
“Shut up. I mean it. Do you not understand how it burns when you say things like that?” She wasn’t crying yet, but her voice was half-choked. She’d start again any second.
“You know what the worst thing is?” she asked. “Jada broke me, but that just exposed all the rot and the weakness that was already there, beneath the gilt. I already knew it was there; I’ve known it forever. I can’t even remember the last time I liked myself, or felt proud of anything I’ve done. And now Latoya’s sold out you and Lynn for me, and Darren, I know she loves you both. How long is it going to take her to figure out that saving me wasn’t worth the price she paid? How am I ever going to look her in the face?”
“Stand on a box? On your tip-toes, if necessary.”
After a frozen second, there was the sound of a well-deserved slap.
“Ow,” Darren said. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m not laughing at you, I swear. But, see, I’ve been where you are now. I know how it works. You sit alone in the dark and take out your soul and look it over. You see a rotten patch, and you try to cut it out, and then you see another one, and you go after that too. And you cut and you cut and you cut, and by the time you’re done, you can’t remember what you were trying to save, or whether there was even a ‘you’ to begin with.”
Ariadne sniffed thickly. Cloth rustled—she was wiping her nose on her sleeve. “Maybe we’re not worth saving. Look where we come from, both of us, the way we were raised. You think we weren’t warped and twisted by that?”
“Maybe.” Another pause. “You know, ships are built of warped wood. You have to bend the planks
to make them fit the frame.”
“ . . . Are we seriously going to talk about shipbuilding right now?”
“We could. Why not? It’s interesting. I cut my teeth in the timber trade—used to work the wagon routes up and down the Screaming Peaks. You learn things. Say you need a mast for your ship. Then it’s a pine tree you want, as tall as possible, without a speck of decay. But let’s say you’re making a longbow. The best longbows come from yew trees that are rotten on one side. The other side, the good one, has to hold the tree’s full weight, so the wood there gets denser and stronger. Of course, for a longbow, the wood needs to be dead straight. But say you’re making a wheel hub. Then you want elm, with a twisted grain, all knotted and burled, so the hub won’t split in half when you drill holes for the spokes.”
“Darren.”
“Yes?”
“Is there a reason for you to tell me all this that makes even a tiny little bit of sense?”
“Oh, hell. I don’t even know.” Darren rolled over on her back. “I’m probably just rambling. I’m sleepy, is the thing, and my blasted ankle itches and I’m not allowed to scratch it and I haven’t had nearly enough dinner. Maybe I’m talking total rubbish. But do you want to know something funny? My old girlfriend, Jess, she’s a better human being than I am, in almost all the ways that matter. But she’d be a lousy pirate.”
Ariadne shivered, making the leaves around her rustle. With a grunt, Darren sat up.
“Come over here,” she said. “We should at least try to sleep. You and I can share our blankets—it’ll be a few hours before Lynn’s ready to be touched. And . . . Ariadne? You and Latoya are going to have to hash things out between you, but can I give you one piece of advice? Don’t push her away because you’ve decided, all on your own, that she’s too good for you. I have both been there and done that, and it’s never a good idea.”
I DOZED FOR a while, but when I woke to the sound of my own chattering teeth, I rolled over to join the others. Darren and Ariadne were sleeping back to back. I burrowed in beside Darren, and pulled her arm around me.
She woke about halfway, enough to let out a soft questioning snuffle. I patted her hand. “Just me. Go back to sleep.”
She nuzzled into the nape of my neck, and there it was, her warm breath against my skin. I’d kept her breathing. Whatever else I’d done or failed to do, I’d kept her breathing, for one more day.
“Here’s the thing, O my mistress,” I said, and I didn’t really care whether she heard me; it just needed to be said. “I could say ‘You’re my world,’ and I’d mean it, but that doesn’t go far enough. There wasn’t a world in existence that I wanted to be a part of until we built one together. And I can’t lose that. So, you know. How far would I go to protect you? Pretty damn far. I hate that I took your power away, but I’m not sorry I did it.”
Darren kissed the back of my neck, then reached up to stroke my hair. It was the kind of leisurely, possessive touch that always left me hungry and aching—at least, when I wasn’t lying on stony, freezing ground with my sister a few inches away.
“Will you promise me something?” she asked.
“Probably. I should ask for more details before I commit myself, but let’s face it—yeah, probably. Considering what parts of you I’ve licked, it’s a bit too late for me to start setting boundaries.”
“No. It’s never too late.”
Serious voice. Crap. I squirmed around to bring us face to face. “You know that was a joke, right?”
“I know. But maybe don’t joke about that part of us. That’s what I want you to promise.” She ran her hand along my jaw, traced my ear. “No matter what happens tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that, no matter how far away they keep us from each other, no matter what they force us to do or say—we decide, the two of us, what we are to each other and what happens between us. Our world is the one we make together. They can control everything else, but this—”
I caught her hand, kissed it, and pressed it to my chest so she could feel the beat.
“I promise,” I said. “No matter what happens. I swear it, Darren. But since we are together tonight . . .”
“Yes?”
“Stop thinking, for once in your life. Just shut up, and come over here, and kiss me properly.”
“The things I do for my marriage,” she muttered, and leaned forward.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Darren of the House of Torasan (Prisoner)
DAWN IN THE hill-country.
It was raining again. Not a downpour, but a drizzle hard enough to keep the blankets damp and chilly. Lynn started shivering, and couldn’t stop.
“I don’t know why the damp is bothering me so much,” she said through chattering teeth. “When we’re at sea, I spend half my time soaking wet.”
“Wet with salt water, though. Fresh water always feels colder than salt.”
“You just let that innuendo sail right over your head, didn’t you?”
“I know. Sorry. I guess I’m a little off my game this morning.”
“Yeah.” She huddled into my side and tugged one of my arms around her. “I can’t think why.”
There was very little movement in the soldiers’ camp. Maybe, with the cold and the wet, the men were reluctant to leave their bedrolls, or maybe, with the sky so dark, they didn’t even know it was morning. At the bottom of the ridge, the Freemen’s tents stood as if deserted, grey canvas flapping in the wind.
For a brief, shining moment, I allowed myself to fantasize that Milo’s entire army was gone—that Latoya had invaded the camp during the night, and smashed all the Freemen’s heads into mushy pancakes, and kicked Milo into the mouth of a giant shark on the way out.
Then a soldier stumbled blearily from a tent, tired and squinty-eyed, but definitely with a head of non-pancake shape. He scratched himself, then lowered his trousers to squat.
Yet another fantasy destroyed by a pile of crap.
In all the chilly camp, there was only one fire alight. Of fucking course, it was in front of Milo’s tent, and Milo sat by it, sipping from a cup that steamed. A silent woman in servant’s garb toiled to and fro, stoking the fire with handfuls of twigs and leaves.
Was this how revolution worked? One fiery burst of desperate hope and violence before everyone fell back into the same old shitty routine? Man on a big chair, ruling. Women at his feet, serving. Maybe Milo wouldn’t force Lynn to empty his chamber pots, but her degradation and humiliation in his service would be as bad as anything she’d suffered under Melitta. Maybe worse, because he would force her to hurt me. That was one thing she’d been spared as a kid.
As for what would happen to me, in Milo’s service . . . I wasn’t quite ready to think about that, I decided.
Jada sloshed towards us through the mud puddles. “All right, princess, on your feet. We have to gift wrap you for delivery.”
I’ve never been the parenting type, but I felt a flutter of almost maternal anxiety as I waited to see how Ariadne would cope. Not that badly, as it turned out. She stood up without comment and matter-of-factly presented her hands, wrists together.
“There’s something you should both know,” she said to me and Lynn while Jada bound her hands, pulling the knots tight with savage little jerks. “I’m going to come back here for you. I don’t know how I’ll do it and I don’t know how long it’ll take, but I won’t leave you here.”
Jada seized Ariadne’s face and twisted it towards her. “Found your voice again, did you, chicken?”
“Yes.” For the first time in days, Ariadne managed to meet Jada’s eyes without flinching. “I have.”
“Feeling brave again, now that you’re on your way home? I guess it’s only natural. But just so you know . . .” Jada leaned in, and scratched lightly at Ariadne’s throat with one pointed nail. “If you ever come back here, your voice is the first thing that I’m going to take away from you.”
“I know you’re scared,” Ariadne said, with barely a pause. “You
’re in over your head and the water keeps on rising. So stop posturing already, and ask Darren to save your ignorant, vindictive, petty, selfish ass. She’s such a bleeding heart that she just might do it.”
“I won’t,” Lynn put in helpfully. “I hate you.”
Jada’s eyes narrowed, but she had no time to respond before Milo joined us, still nursing his steaming drink.
“The men are late getting up,” he said. “Go give them a good kick, Jada.”
“Why not make one of them do it?” She nudged Lynn with the toe of her muddy boot. “Aren’t they supposed to be working for their keep?”
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