by R J Theodore
Talis grinned. That put their shots, even fired with the wind behind them, at an advantage over the warship’s longer guns. “I could kiss him. Tisker, keep us within that range for a little bit. Let’s annoy the Imperials for a while.”
She followed Kirna below. Sophie met her at the next deck down, twisting the buckle on her coveralls like she’d just spilled her captain’s best rum.
“Captain, the cannonball hit the great cabin. Made you a new exit, and I’m afraid the folding desk was a total loss.”
Talis smirked. She could live with that. The draft through the new hole in her bulkhead was worth not having lost the water tanks, or their powder stores.
“Good, fine. Go with Kirna. They’ve grown fond of practicing alchemy out in the open and we’ve got a temporary advantage on the warship for cannon range. Make sure we use it.”
She left Sophie and Kirna to the ballistics and went to her cabin. Cold air tugged at her within, and several loose bits of clothing and charts flapped as the direction of the air changed, but Sophie had secured anything that needed securing.
The other ship’s cannonball was lodged at the base of the forward bulkhead, but it wasn’t threatening immediate harm, so Talis could deal with that later. Might have to bunk in a passenger cabin for a while until they could patch the damaged hull section, but first they had to get out of the line of any further cannon fire.
She felt the ship tack again and shut the door on her cabin to return to her place above decks.
The accessway steps rattled under her feet, matching the concussive pops of their aft cannons firing. She crossed to the railing and watched the shots fly true and long, thunking into the forward hull of the warship, forming blossoms of raw exposed timber in the dark paint of its hull.
The fog bank was close again, on their starboard side. Another half hour or so, and they’d be able to come back around and lose themselves—and the warship—within its murky depths.
Cannons fired again; only the flare of light from the powder came from within the fog bank itself.
“Brace!” She barely had time to yell the word as cannons flew past them, wide of the mark.
Realization struck her like sun full across her face. Fortune’s Storm wasn’t the mark. She was a Bone barque in Rakkar skies on this side of an aggressively guarded Cutter border.
Five Bone battleships emerged from the fog bank, flying formation straight for the Imperial warship.
And in the span of five heartbeats, the balance shifted. The warship slowed and came about. She might have a hundred cannons, but she was a slow, heavy target for five nimble Bone ships, each with forty of their own cannons. The crew of the warship shouted their amended orders. Back to the border, tail tucked, to hold their original position.
The relief burst forth from her crew, even from the alchemists, with a cheer. Talis joined in and along with the anxiety-shedding laughter that followed.
“Too close.” She said it under her breath. Those who knew it didn’t need to be reminded. Those who didn’t, didn’t need to be burdened with it. Louder, she barked the return to course. The sooner they crossed into Vein skies, the less she’d feel like the Veritors were breathing down her neck.
Chapter 35
Emeranth glared in the mirror while the dressmaker finalized her hem. Annie stood by her side, holding pins and tape for her new master, but the childhood friends hadn’t been allowed to speak. Emeranth hadn’t even been allowed to hug her. Or rather, Annie hadn’t been allowed to hug back, only curtsy when Emeranth finally released her, with a murmured ‘Your Grace’ by way of greeting.
Nothing had been the same since Uncle disappeared. Her carefully selected council members had each recused themselves. She suspected those few she trusted had been frightened off by those she didn’t, perhaps under threats to them or their families. But she had no proof, had heard nothing of the sort. There was no one left to tell her anything true.
She’d been moved to the royal chambers the night before. Big empty rooms where once she ran when she was frightened, to sit in Maw’n’s lap while she and Faw’n discussed the day’s events, drank tea, and comforted each other. Now those rooms were cold and bare, no matter how Lita built up the fire in the hearth.
Emeranth was angry with Uncle, though she didn’t know why. He’d saved her, the night her parents died. But it was the first in a long line of changes that she didn’t want and didn’t know how to stop.
This dress was part of another change. Her requests had been ignored. The dressmaker was careful to avoid eye contact as she presented exactly the sort of frilly, nonsense child’s frock that Emeranth had wanted to avoid.
Tomorrow was her coronation day, and she was being backed into a corner. Treated like a child. They wanted to scare her.
After Uncle disappeared, Patron Demir brought the aliens to meet her again. But this time they weren’t asking for help. They told her how things would happen and that adults with more experience were going to help her, and she should just follow their instructions and try not to worry. She’d told him that she didn’t want the aliens in the palace, and they’d carried her off to bed as though she’d had a tantrum. Someone occasionally came to tell her something important had happened, like when they said the borders would open so people could come to watch her ascend to the throne.
But now she would take control. Becoming Empress meant she had the authority to tell the aliens they weren’t welcome any more.
She frowned, imagining casting the aliens out while wearing this ridiculous dress. It was still cut for a princess, gathered high with a ribbon and flounced with too much fabric in the wrong places. She looked like a doll. Wearing it, she knew she’d have as much power to rule as a doll would.
The dressmaker bustled around her skirts, saying nice things about how pretty she would look, until she said how proud Emeranth’s parents would be and Emeranth began to sob. Her attendants rushed the dressmaker and Annie away. The sadness in her friend’s expression dragged Emeranth’s heart along with her. She yearned for how things used to be. For studying with Annie and Catkin and spending her evenings with her family.
Tomorrow, she would be dressed in this nonsense, paraded about, and crowned. Then she would—in front of an entire crowd in the capital of Cutter skies so that everyone would eventually know what she said—tell her people to send the aliens away.
It was the only thought that brought her comfort.
Left alone with the dress, Emeranth gathered up her needlework kit. She used the narrow silver scissors to snip away the layers of flounce in the skirt and spent the rest of the evening stitching the remaining lace along the seams into some semblance of dignified design. She held it up, satisfied that she had undone the dressmaker’s indecency. The dressmaker would probably have fainted to see the destruction of her craft. Emeranth hoped she did see it. She should have made the dress Emeranth, soon her Empress, told her to.
She hung the dress on the door of her wardrobe. Lita entered to see her to bed and gasped at the sight of it hanging above a pile of pastel lace and tulle, but said nothing. Emeranth smiled to herself.
Still, she could not sleep that night, and in the morning, someone had to use makeup on her to hide the dark circles under her eyes. Then they had to blush her cheeks because they’d covered up her natural tones. Then they added lipstick because they’d gone too far already.
Everyone agreed, standing around and judging her like a chicken at a faire, that she looked beautiful. Everyone ignored Emeranth’s changes to the dress.
And then she was led downstairs to the front doors of the palace, which were open wide. Beyond the carpeted top step and a podium, a crowd waited in the courtyard, filling the stone-paved yard and beyond, back out the gates to the city streets. If she tried to run, she’d never make it through all the people without being grabbed.
Waiting with Demir and some of the oth
er lawmakers was the well-dressed Yu’Nyun and a retinue of other aliens dressed almost as fancy as their ambassador. She balked in the doorway, but someone lifted her by the waist, out onto the carpet, as though she’d only been too short to make the step over the threshold.
As she took a hesitant step forward, a movement caught her eye. It was her, on a large piece of glass, like a reflection but not a mirror image. There were several of them, inside the courtyard and outside, visible on the sides of buildings.
The aliens made sure everyone would witness this. Emeranth fought the urge to bite her lip. She could use this. Tell everyone not to listen to them. There were so many people there, and not just her Cutter subjects. She saw Vein and Bone people—even Breaker people like Catkin, and Rakkar people, who she’d only seen in illustrated books. They would go home and tell their people what she said. If she was Empress, they’d have to listen.
She took a deep breath and stepped forward. Since that night Uncle had woken her in her bedroom and everything had gotten so awful, she finally knew what to do.
She behaved perfectly while they introduced her. She was thinking so fast, she barely heard what they were saying about how she would show them how important it was to listen to the aliens. It was almost time.
Then she felt a prick at her neck.
The crowd gasped. Something cold rushed from the spot that hurt, and she reached back over her shoulder, though her arms could barely lift that high in her ridiculous dress. Her hand found the hard fingers of one of the Yu’Nyun, and she looked up to see xin bending over her from where xe stood behind her. Xe held a needle, but this didn’t feel like any medicine Emeranth had ever been given before.
Her message! She opened her mouth to tell them . . . tell them . . . She couldn’t remember what she wanted to tell them. It didn’t seem to matter. A noise drowned out her words anyway, a high-pitched cry of agony and pain that seemed to surround her and flow through her, rattling her bones and pinching her lungs and pushing on her eyes.
The dignitaries gathered at the base of the steps went in and out of focus. She almost recognized the emotion on their faces. They began to surge against the steps, pushed forward by the guards in back. Everyone moved in different directions. Other people fell to the ground, beneath the feet of the rest of the pressing crowd.
By the time she realized the cry was her own, she couldn’t remember her name. She couldn’t remember what she had lost. All she knew was that she hurt, and she wanted to make everyone around her hurt. She wanted to bite them, to tear at their flesh with her fingers, to break their bones with her hands, and push and kick and scream forever.
Her vision went green, and then the last of her awareness faded into a flood of rage and pain.
Chapter 36
Getting deeper into foreign skies, it turned out, didn’t ease the burden of Talis’s anxiety. She tried to focus on sorting out her bludgeoned quarters so she could get some rest, but once she’d nailed planks across the breach and shut out the sound of the wind with oakum and pitch, she was left alone in an echoing silence with only her worries.
They had blown two alien ships out of the sky, but there were plenty more swirling in flotsam, which meant Onaya’s people, the Veritors, and maybe even the Tempest followers were still digging around, probably right that minute, to pull up whatever trouble they could.
With her thoughts closing in on her, the cannonball in the corner of her cabin seemed like a watchful eye, and the cabin she barely liked to begin with was the last place she wanted to be.
She pulled off the bandana that had kept her hair out of reach of the tar, pulled her jacket on, and headed out to find some company.
Distant pumpkins tinted the already golden deck planks with their late afternoon light as she pushed open the hatch to the weather deck.
Wake moths gathered in the swirling eddies of air at the stern of the ship, their incandescent backsides blinking instinctive signals to each other in anticipation of dusk.
Within the glass-paneled deckhouse, Sophie and Dug sat with Kirna at the table formed by the engine block. Heat rose off the ship’s running heart and from the hearth on the open engine chimney. But being used to the ambient heat off Vuur Artak, Kirna was wrapped up to her neck in a blanket and only stuck out a hand to grip her tin cup. Amos, across from her with his back to the view of the open skies, wore several layers of sweaters and a pair of gloves and pretended not to eye her blanket with envy. A carafe, a stack of cups, and more mugs were set out on the table. Scrimshaw stood to Sophie’s side, leaning extra hard on sist walking stick for balance against the ship’s forward momentum. Si made no move toward the refreshments.
“Not too long,” Sophie said, beaming at them, “and we’ll be standing on our own deck, toasting our own ship.”
From the wavering tone and sluggishness of her voice, Talis realized they’d moved past the first round. She accepted a steaming mug of coffee from Dug, and Tisker poured a glug of rum from a half empty bottle. Medicines for the spirit, best taken in combination.
This, the spirits in her mug and of her crew, was what she’d been needing. She felt better already.
But she put a hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “Let’s not toast to a ship we’re not on. That’s no way to make Fortune’s Storm treat us well for the time we’re on board.”
Sophie giggled. “Already toasted Fortune’s Storm, Captain. And, what was it before that? Moth Catcher and Im Ufite Rantor. And the Bone border guard, and fog banks, and Jones, and Subrosa, and Talbot, and alchemy, and Heddard Bay, and Nexus–”
Dug cut her off. “Suffice it to say, we have much to be thankful for.”
Sophie said, “And you, Captain. May you lead us through another one.”
They all raised their glasses in her direction, then, and belted an asynchronous ‘Huzzah!’ The cheer bounced off the glass around them and battered her eardrums. She raised her cup in return, her throat tight. “I’ll do my best.”
“The loyalty of your crew is well-placed, Captain Talis.” Scrimshaw’s starry-blue eyes, dark and impenetrable as ever, fixed on her. “You have mine as well.”
Well, damn that wonderful bony alien. She swallowed, started to speak, then had to swallow again.
“Good. That’s good. I’m gonna need all of you,” she said, raising her cup back at them. “Captain ain’t worth all the rot in the wood without her crew.”
She took a sip of the hot liquid and savored the tingle of the rum as it took over responsibility for the burning behind her eyes.
Tisker lifted one of the hotplate covers in the center of the table, then poured a splash from the rum bottle onto the exposed metal of the engine block. The liquid bubbled, danced, and popped for a moment in its mad rush to evaporate.
“To Fortune’s Storm,” he said. “Again! She’s not ours forever, but she’s one of us.”
Scrimshaw dipped sist chin, and the rest of them raised their glasses to toast the ship with another cheer as she ferried them through purpling dusk, deeper into Vein skies.
At that moment, Kirna unwrapped her blankets, revealing a long bundle wrapped in its own cover. “I have something else that could use a ceremonial toast.”
She pushed it across the table toward Scrimshaw. They crowded around as si unwrapped a new prosthesis.
Compared to the splintering, filthy peg leg si came aboard with, anything would have been an improvement. But this wasn’t just any old peg leg.
It was the personal project of an ambitious, budding Rakkar alchemist with direct feedback and critique from her accomplished mentor, enthusiastic suggestions from Sophie, and timid requests from Scrimshaw. Kirna had carefully mapped out and studied the anatomy of Scrimshaw’s intact leg, measuring every angle and anatomical landmark, along with the tensile and shear strength of sist healthy tendons and joints.
Talis had granted her full access to the Yu’Nyun tech in
the crates, and Kirna pirated parts for use in her new contraption. What she created was as much art as tool—an internal metal skeleton overlaid with ivory plates, fit together to mirror sist other leg as much as possible. There were small gaps to allow for expansion and contraction, in approximately the same places where sist own exoskeleton joined with narrow seams. Kirna also took it upon herself to carve the surface of sist new leg with a design that was at once reminiscent of Scrimshaw’s painted patterns, combined with alchemical sigils she told them would help keep it running when she wasn’t around to tune it up.
Scrimshaw donned the prosthesis, leaning forward to study sist new limb. The digitigrade toes moved against the decking, spreading and expanding slightly as si put weight into them.
Though the alien had been much quieter on this flight than their first journey together, si was now truly speechless.
“It’s brilliant,” Sophie said, speaking for Scrimshaw. “Kirna you are a serious wiz with the alchemy.”
Kirna deflected the compliment, but the skin around her mouth pulled into a grin that she appeared helpless to control. “Oh, no, I’m barely a brickawitch. Without Amos’s input, this all would have fallen apart.”
Amos harrumphed, though he looked the part of a proud father. “Calibrations would be appropriate, don’t you think?”
She directed Scrimshaw to stand, walk, sit, and crouch while she took notes and made small adjustments with various tipped drivers. When she heard a noise she didn’t like, si was forced to return the device to her. At once, she whisked it off, heading back belowdecks to the small workshop she’d made for herself, promising over her shoulder she’d only be a moment.
Scrimshaw lifted sist-self up with the walking stick, carried the old limb to the open chimney vent, and unceremoniously dropped it to the firebox below.
“I will be molting soon. I don’t know what I will become.” Si whispered it when Talis came to stand close by. Sist hands gripped the walking stick, sist head bent over it, back curved forward in what might have been a rounded stretch for someone with individual vertebrae. The body language was neither Yu’Nyun, which was too rigid and subtle for her to read, nor native, but something that was evolving to be uniquely Scrimshaw.