The Justice in Revenge

by Ryan Van Loan

  “It was there when you needed it,” I told him. Eld clapped the older man’s thin shoulder and whispered something in his ear that made Joffers’s face break for a moment before he regained his composure. “I’ll get this canopy righted while you get us back into the center of the channel. I think you’ll want to use that pole,” I added, pointing at the one I’d dropped. “Yours has seen its final fare.”

  The two men stared at me as if I were some strange lights the Northfolk claimed to see dancing in the night’s skies. Show me a job to be done and I’ll show you men waiting for a woman to do it, so Sin and I got to work. My limbs were trembling by the time I got the poles back in their sockets and the canvas halfway straightened out—probably as much as it could be righted, given the rents Eld and I had carved in it. By the time I slipped back inside, my hands were pruny.

  “W-what was that?” Eld asked, teeth chattering, when he came in—I had heard him and Joffers drop the remaining body over the side. I offered him one of the blankets that was only half-damp and he took it, shrugging it around his shoulders as he dropped into his seat.

  “I’d say someone wanted us dead.”

  Eld rolled his eyes.

  “It could have to do with us keeping the Doga alive this morning,” I said after a moment. He nodded, wiping back a sodden, blond lock of hair. “Or—”

  “Aye?”

  I shook my head slowly, sloughing water from my braids across my chest. Or, I didn’t know. A few months back I’d found myself in an alleyway with no memory of how I’d gotten there. Strange, but I’d managed to nearly convince myself it was just my imagination when it happened again. Off and on, since, but it was long enough since my last lapse that it seemed possible it was well and truly past. Sin swore it wasn’t anything to do with him, but I knew how far I could trust him—still, I couldn’t think of a reason he’d lie about this. Which meant I’d no idea what was wrong with me, just that every few weeks I suddenly had amnesia and not even the useful kind that made me forget bad shit. Could the assassins be connected to that, somehow?

  “How bad a knock did I take when the sugar factory went up in flames?” I asked. That wasn’t when my memory issues started, but it was the only injury I’d taken since we returned to Servenza. “I still don’t know how the thing managed to catch fire.”

  “I don’t think anyone plans for fires,” Eld said, his eyes fixed on a point over my shoulder.

  “Tell that to the insurance adjustor.”

  His lips twitched and he returned his gaze to mine. “What’s that have to do with who tried to kill us today? The bank already paid out.”

  “It’s just that…” I hadn’t told Eld about Sin or about the issues with my memory. Without knowing what was wrong with me, and more importantly, what I wasn’t remembering, there was no way to know if the suppositions I was making were accurate. Gooseflesh ran down the back of my neck. If I couldn’t trust my own mind, what could I trust? My mind was the whole reason I’d gotten to where I was.

  “You can trust me,” Sin whispered.

  “Sure, I can trust you,” I told him. “Just as soon as I let your bloody Goddess inside my mind.”

  “And I’d like to think I played a role on the sands against the Ghost Captain,” he continued.

  “A supporting role,” I assured him.

  “Does your head still hurt?” Eld’s question brought me back to reality and him leaning toward me, worry bright in his blue eyes. “Or is it something else?”

  “It’s nothing,” I lied. “I just thought that—” I faked a grin. “I’m just trying to figure out who wants us dead badly enough to send a dozen toughs after us in the middle of a wintry Servenzan canal.”

  “Long list?”

  “Pages,” I said, and he laughed.

  “Where were we going now?” Eld asked, shrugging off the blanket.

  “Back to the palazzo,” I replied. The rain pounded on the canopy like a thousand nails dropped by a God. Is that you, Ciris? “Before anything else happens today,” I added.

  “Wise, that.” He nodded over his shoulders. “You scared Joffers, just now.”

  “Why?” I frowned, looking across at him. “He was buried under the canvas with the first that jumped him the whole time. He didn’t see—” Didn’t see me put down half a dozen without half a thought. Didn’t see a little woman heft a pole it takes two men to get into the oar socket. Didn’t see my magic. But you did, didn’t you?

  “I saw you,” he whispered as if hearing me.

  “Do I scare you, Eld?” I asked him.

  “I think it was your nonchalance more than the killing that unnerved him,” Eld said, ignoring the question.

  “We faced a horde of undead this summer, Eld. What’s a few fools draped in seal fur compared to that?”

  “Aye, I understand, but Joffers wasn’t there and doesn’t.”

  “So long as he understands the coin we pay him, I care not,” I muttered. I ran a hand over my damp braid and squeezed a few drips of water out of my hair. “I don’t know if this”—I gestured at the gaping hole in the canvas—“was due to the past summer, us saving the Doga this morning, or something else entirely.”

  Eld’s lips moved but he didn’t say anything. His brow furrowed as if a thought had just struck him, but he was a bad poker player at the best of times and I could tell he’d been sitting on something. “If we are being followed, it wouldn’t hurt to make their jobs harder for them, would it?”

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t,” I said, staring at the scrap of daylight just barely visible through the torn canvas.

  “And it’d be even better if we were able to identify who is shadowing us, perhaps even have a discreet word with them?”

  “You mean like just now?” I chuckled and punched him gently in the shoulder.

  “Ow!” Eld rubbed his shoulder, glaring at me.

  “I barely hit you,” I chided him. “Growing soft.”

  “Why I said ‘discreet,’” he laughed.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What I’m saying, Buc,” Eld said after a moment, shifting from rubbing his shoulder to fingering the tear in his jacket that could have been a blade through the ribs if it’d been just a little more to the right, “is that it might make sense for you to slip out of the gondola at the next intersection and catch a hansom cab while I take this around a few of the Quartos … you know, in case we’re still being followed?”

  “Finding out who is keeping tabs on us at the street level isn’t a bad idea,” I admitted. “But I don’t know if you’ve heard”—I pointed at the sagging, soaked canvas—“it’s pouring like a motherfucking monsoon out there. I’m already wet, so I don’t really fancy climbing out at the moment.” I palmed a knife. “Besides, if you want to have a word with these folks, discreet or not, you’re going to want me there.”

  “I can better defend myself than you, if it comes to an out-and-out fight,” Eld said.

  “Did you see me with the oar? With Si—” I wanted the words back as soon as I said them, the image of me whipping a hunk of oak the length of a gondola around like it were a barrel stave—something even Eld would be hard-pressed to do and not something a thin woman who barely came to his chest should be capable of—bright in my mind.

  “With me in you, we’re the most dangerous being in this city,” Sin said. He didn’t boast, merely stated fact.

  Aye, but Eld didn’t need reminding of that. Avoiding that conversation was likely why he suggested splitting up despite the rain. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to be away from the reality staring at me: that Eld and I were heading down separate paths. If we weren’t now, we would be soon enough if the Chair had her way.

  The silence achieved peak awkwardness.

  “Buc—” Eld began.

  I ducked back under the canvas opening and whatever he said was lost in the sounds of the storm breaking against the canal waters, hammering the stone sides of the canal where it narrowed at an intersection. Sheets of icy rain c
ascaded down, driven horizontally by the wind. Joffers didn’t see me, or if he did, didn’t see me signal him to slow down. Luckily, with Sin I didn’t need him to. The magic was in my bones, which was where I wanted Eld to be. I choked back something warm in my throat and leapt.

  The rain was as cold as my soul.

  5

  Eld watched Buc disappear into the rain. He almost called after her, to tell her to come back, that it was okay to tell him what was going on in that mind of hers.

  Theirs.

  The thought made him hesitate and in that moment, Buc was gone. He’d lost his chance—which pretty much summed up the past six months. He bit hard on the corner of his lip and sank back against the cushioned seat. Have to tell Joffers the plans have changed. He winced at the thought of forcing the old man to stay out longer in this downpour. The man had likely been out in worse before Eld was born, but he’d just nearly died and that had to make a difference. Eld would tell him in a moment; first he wanted a breath to think. Perhaps that’s my problem, I’ve thought too much.

  He snorted at what Buc would say to that. Would have said … if he hadn’t bungled things up since the summer. She’d changed so much after they got back. She wouldn’t have tolerated the Dead Gods’ threats this morning, let alone shrugged off their poisoning attempt. The old Buc would have lost her shit and likely killed the pair of mages and somehow turned it all around so the mages were to blame in the first place. Today, instead of freaking out, she’d been polite—tactful, even, for her, at least. And isn’t that what you wanted? To see her mature into the formidable woman she was capable of being?

  “But is she changing or is the Sin inside her making her different?” he whispered. He could say the words out loud, in the privacy of the gondola, shielded by the rain; he could ask the question he feared the answer to. He rubbed his bruised shoulder ruefully—Buc had thought she just tapped him, but she didn’t recognize her Sin-enhanced strength. “Which leaves me analyzing her, studying her, and never knowing if she’s finally coming into her own or if I’m losing her.” Losing the woman he was in love with. Had been in love with—past tense. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

  It all came back to summer. Weeks after they’d escaped the Shattered Coast, he’d realized what he’d done by nearly dying on that beach: he’d forced Buc to choose between watching him die or using magic to save him. To her, he was the younger brother who needed to be looked after, the way Buc’s sister had taken care of her. Of course she’d chosen to save him—and in so doing, damned herself with that kiss. That kiss.

  He pushed the memory away. Even then, if I’d told her that I knew … That he knew that she had magic inside her? Or that he’d seen, in the military, how magic could twist a mage until they were merely a pawn of Ciris, doing her bidding with no thought for their own ambitions, own dreams, own life? Buc seemed to be fighting off that fate for now, a credit to her strength, but Eld knew where the path of the Sin Eater led: rot and ruin. For a moment, despite the chill in the air and the pouring rain, he felt the scalding sun of the Burning Lands on his skin, smelled the burning charnel house the mages left in their wake.

  Sin Eaters betrayed me, Buc. They cost me my whole command. Seventy souls who trusted me. I led them all to a bloody death. I failed them because I didn’t account for the twisting magic of Gods. I shouldn’t have trusted mages then and I can’t trust them now. I can’t fail again. Blinking back tears, Eld shook his head.

  “I swore I’d never tie myself to their magic again, Buc. I should have told you that, should have walked away. But I was a coward.” He gripped the edge of the seat with all his might, squeezing until his fingers began to scream from the pressure. It was better than screaming aloud. “And then after the warehouse fire … you nearly died, Buc!”

  Joffers coughed loudly over the falling rain and Eld spoke more quietly, for his ears alone. “Nearly died. And I kept thinking about that kiss on the sand. The pressure of your lips against mine. That’s when I knew it wasn’t infatuation.” His tears fell freely now. “It wasn’t infatuation, it was love. I—I was selfish, and when you needed a friend, all I could think about was becoming your lover. Of finding a way to expunge the magic from your soul and have you to myself.”

  When the sugar refinery burned to the ground around them, Buc had become trapped in a nightmarish memory of the previous time she’d been trapped in a burning warehouse. When she’d lost her sister and nearly her life. Sin had insisted that if Eld wanted Buc to recover, he had to swear to never be more than her friend, and, desperate, he’d agreed. He’d promised Sin—and himself—that he’d move on. Let time heal the rift between them.

  Every time I hear his voice from her lips. Eld choked back the bile in his throat. He wanted to tell Buc about that, that the voice in her head could take her over, could speak with him. And if it speaks to me, is it talking to anyone else? But he’d been down this path once before and that time, Buc had nearly lost her mind. I just need to keep my distance. Till this blows over. Do that, and he and Buc could return to being the partners they’d been before all the fuckery happened in the Shattered Coast.

  Lately, he’d begun to wonder if he had moved off too far, if he hadn’t lost Buc forever. In most of the ways that mattered, anyway. He hadn’t realized it at first. Not until it was too late. The distance between them had grown and now he knew the space she’d taken wasn’t one of healing, but one of hurt. The past. Magic. Silence. Rejection. The warehouse and all that she’d lost with it. The Board. A long list of hurts that had been hammer blows to the wedge between them, driving them farther and farther apart.

  The Board was the worst of it. Eld had had a taste of bureaucracy in the army, but the machinations and politics and the intentionally slow, grinding process of the Company had caught Buc flat-footed. Buc didn’t know how to handle it, and that had led to the warehouse incident, which destroyed what little progress she’d made with the Board. They no longer saw her as a prodigy, merely an annoyance.

  “And I can’t tell you any of that, Buc, because we hardly speak for more than a few minutes these days.”

  Eld swallowed the lump in his throat. And because I don’t know if I’m speaking to you or to the Sin inside you. Rubbing his eyes with the back of his sleeve, he drew a shuddering breath. There were other worries there, about who had taken up the space left in his wake—Salina, Sin—but they were cares for another day. He had to tell Joffers to take the long way home or the man would have them there before Buc. Perhaps that would give him enough time to think of a way out of this mess, a way back to Buc. His lips tingled with the memory of her taste.

  No. As a friend. It was hoping for more that had landed him in this mess in the first place. And now it was on him to get them back to right.

  First Joffers. Then to think. Eld stepped into the rain, his eyes on the gondolier, but his mind was on a rocky, sand-swept beach, dead to within an inch of his life, but never having felt so alive. He longed to feel that way again the way a drowning man longs for a lungful of air. Just one gasp, one taste. One more.

  Once more.

  6

  I watched the gondola disappear into the rain, Joffers expertly poling around the bend in the canal. Joffers. I bit back a curse. I promised the man he’d have no trouble, steering for two of the Company’s own. I should have reminded Eld of that; we should have gone straight home. It would have been one time Eld’s polite streak might have come in useful. But I’d been too slow to see it and now he was gone and poor old Joffers with him. The gnawing pit within my chest sunk in on itself, sending a throbbing throughout my body. If need was a noose around the neck, then feeling what I did for Eld was like a blade in the guts. At least the noose was a clean death; I’d seen a man once who lived a week with a hand of steel in his stomach before he finally died. This particular shard had been there for months. Gods, it hurts.

  “I think he enjoys the rain,” Sin said. “Joffers, I mean.”

  “I don’t care about Joffers,�
�� I muttered, pulling my jacket up against my neck, and made for the crossroads a dozen paces away from the canal’s edge. “Not really.”

  True, the man had forgotten more about the back channels of Servenza’s canals than most smugglers had ever known. He’d handled himself well today; the woman had smashed him in the throat to keep him from crying out but he’d brought her down in the end. And I liked the way he snorted into his mustaches whenever I complimented him. But in the end, he was a tool, no different than the pole he used. To Eld, he was something more, of course, but then to Eld, everyone was something more.

  Eld. I tried to keep my jacket tight against my neck, but by the time I reached the protective overhang of the cab station, I was soaked from hair to stockings. At least it would wash any blood from me. I hadn’t been touched, but Sin and I had touched a fair number and the last thing I needed was the Constabulary asking questions. A newspaper crier had beaten me to the station, a lass in the faded grey, threadbare jacket and trousers that served as uniform for criers and messengers alike. She looked up expectantly, water dripping down her face in muddy rivulets, and shook a paper.

  “Care for the news, signorina? There’s word from Normain, just a soldo!”

  “Easy, lass,” I growled. “I’m soaked, not deaf.” I glanced at the stack at her feet and the one in her hand: all the words had run out with the rain, staining the yellowed paper black. “Why don’t you tell me the word and I’ll give you a coin for it?”

  “Silver?” the girl asked. She ran a hand through knotted, unruly gold locks and tried not to shiver in the wind. “I does it for a silver.”

  “You’ll do it for whatever I give you,” I told her. “Or not.”

  I turned away, studying the empty street, waiting for a hansom cab to show itself. In this rain it would be slower than a gondola but drier, and I was done with boats for the moment. “I’ve a ride to catch.”