by Anna Holmes
To my great surprise and moderate discomfort, he bursts out laughing. “Righteous fury is a new one for my repertoire, actually.” He pauses. “How….do you start a conversation like that?”
I tilt my head back down. “Are you actually asking?”
Instantly, the surliness is back. “Forget it.”
“No, I’m actually asking if you’re actually asking. If you are, you just, well, it’s kind of like any other conversation, except instead of talking about the weather or the state of the country, you talk about how you feel about her and ask her how she feels about that.”
“And how do you do that without feeling like you're going to drop dead?”
“Oh, you don’t,” I assert. “That never goes away. Weren’t you engaged?”
“Yes, but it didn’t…there weren’t exactly conversations so much as a general sense of sequential obligations.”
“You’re a real romantic, Lieutenant.”
He folds his arms over his chest—not angrily, but like he's attempting to hold his rib cage together. “Should I be?”
“You’re right. Don’t. That would be strange.” I lean forward, folding my hands between my knees. “Besides, I can’t talk. My first conversation with Caelin was at swordpoint.”
“Well, what about the big one?”
“Big one?”
“This one. Which of you felt like you were going to drop dead?”
“Er, well…there were several over the course of a few days, so, both of us? Then she almost actually died.” I make a face. “Never mind. Don't ask me. I'm terrible at this.”
Clanging in the direction of the ladder down to the hold alerts us to Caelin’s impending return, and Bannon turns to me, a deathly serious look on his slowly unclouding face. “Not one word to her about this, you understand?”
“Which her?”
In response, I get a glare. “Either, you nincompoop.”
Caelin springs up from the hold. “Oh, dearest, he likes you!”
“You did just hear him call me a nincompoop, yeah?” I ask.
“Riley communicates primarily in reports and insults," she answers, plopping down to the bench at my side. “He doesn’t waste them on people he doesn’t like at least a little.”
“Bah,” Bannon says by way of reply. “Did you get anything out of her?”
“Not much. She was busy informing me of just how much she thinks of me.”
“How much do we need her?” Bannon inquires. “We have the doctor.”
I rest my forearms on my knees, dropping my head. “Don’t forget that she’s the one who fetched him. There’s some bit of information she’s holding hostage.”
“And how do you propose we go about getting it?”
“Have to back her into a corner somehow.” I push at my temples. I experienced enough arguments with her to remember very well how much dancing it takes to get her to cede ground. I wish it hadn’t taken until very recently to realize that most couples don’t treat disagreements like a tactical undertaking, but I loved her perhaps too thoroughly and without asking the right questions. I stand stiffly. “Wish me luck.”
“Alain, are you sure?” Caelin’s question carries an unspoken weight of anxiety too heavy to mean simply concern for my feelings about talking to the person at the center of my nightmares.
I grasp her hand, place a kiss on the back of it. “I don’t think I’m in a fainting mood, love. If you hear any loud noises or I’m gone more than a few minutes, then you can worry.”
She favors me with one of those smiles that could chase shadows away from even the darkest places in the world. I don't think she knows how I hoard those, carry them with me to counter those repeating nightmares. I can’t help it. I double back to leave a kiss on her forehead, then hurry off to one of those dark places.
Jori sits with her back pin straight against the wall, her arms still caught up behind her. There are an assortment of crates strewn about the hold, but instead she’s chosen the floor, perched on top of awkwardly folded legs. Her eyes are closed, and her chest rises and falls in a recognizable pattern—she’s trying to manage the energy trapped in her body without hope of release. She doesn’t open her eyes, but she still flips the vestiges of her short haircut out of her face. “This must amuse you,” she says.
I sit on one of the crates directly across from her. “Not really.”
“Oh,” she says, surprise in the elongated single syllable and her arched brows. “Because I thought you enjoyed jerking me around.”
“I’d much rather you get out of my life entirely. But you just keep showing up, and I can’t help but wonder why that is.”
“You’re lots of things, loftleng, but stupid isn’t one of them. Think about it.”
“That word doesn’t belong to me anymore,” I tell her.
“Don’t think I’d let you throw it away so easily.”
“Do I get a say in the matter?”
She laughs abruptly. “You never did make choices in your best interest.”
I know better than to engage this. Soon enough it’ll become a debate about every time I tripped up in pursuit of a greater ideal, and I neither have the desire nor the time to relive what she considers my every mistake. “Look. Neither you nor I want you in prison.”
“Oh, is that so?”
“Yes,” I answer, and it’s not so much a lie. “We both know that will end with people dead. Help us, and perhaps we can come to an arrangement.”
“I’m fairly certain your queen doesn’t find me as attractive as you, so somehow I doubt that.”
I lean forward on my box. “Nuthatch has already made his bargain.”
“So you don’t need me at all.”
“Who could the raven be?” I wonder aloud. Her eyes open, and she looks directly at me. I shrug. “A nuthatch is a songbird. Bet I can guess who its partner is. And assuming my guess is correct—and you’re right, I’ve never been stupid—that means you were complicit in performing illegal magic. On an individual who did not consent. In the interest of developing a weapon of war after the signing of a peace treaty on Elyssian soil. Between that and the time you ordered the murder of the queen, I don’t know if there’s a judge who’d feel a twinge of guilt sending you to the gallows.” I stand. “I would think about whether it’s worth it to keep their secrets.”
I limp my way to the ladder, barely get a hand set on a rung when she bursts out, “Ne mascht thelingst?” Could you be so cold?
I know it’s a provocation. I know I shouldn’t respond, but it’s hard not to. I whirl back around. “Could I? Tell me, Jori, which of these choices were mine? Was it me who pretended to love you long enough to turn you into some abomination? Me who pretended to die? Was any of it real?”
“You don’t know,” she says, her voice low, “what he exacts from people.”
“You could have told me. Instead you piled lie on lie on lie.” I can feel the unnatural hum already, my pulse thudding in my veins, the prickling starting on the surface of my skin. “Let’s pretend for a moment that you have some perfectly good explanation for all you’ve done. If you’re truly remorseful, if you want to clear your conscience, here’s a good start. If it’s not, and this is all another manipulation, you’ve been given your shot to potentially save yourself. Let’s call this a productive conversation and quit while you’re ahead.”
She stays quiet a moment, watching me. Calculating her escape routes out of the proverbial doghouse, I think. “Look at you,” she says at last.
I don’t have to. I can feel the crystals poking up from my arm. I take in a breath, push it out deliberately. I can’t tell whether that was meant to be admonition or admiration, but either way it makes the skin under these strange deposits crawl. “Think it over,” I tell her as calmly as I can muster, and then start my lopsided way upward.
I’ve lost track of the time. Dark fell a while past at the aqueducts and we’d been in the air a while. Any other time I’d wait for morning for politeness’ sake,
but I can’t get Elle out of my head. I stand on the doorstep and fish in my belt pouch for the key that stayed there throughout the war and found its way back the second my things were released from the slave camp. There’s still at least one lamp burning in the windows past the curtains. The light will have to assuage my guilt. The lock clicks and I push open the door with a familiar creak.
Nothing has changed. The sitting room is dark, but I still find my way around the ends of the sofas and tables without running into anything, still avoid the edge of the rug that likes to trip people. Lights come from two predictable directions— the study on the first floor and the second room from the top of the stairs. The large clock sitting in the passage from the sitting room to the dining room clicks loudly as it ever did. Somehow it frays the edges of my nerves more than it used to. I push past the old wooden chairs coming untucked from the dining table and move further into the smell of dust and paper and my father's subtle cologne, my fist ready to knock on the doorframe.
I don’t make it that far. A blade sets itself on my shoulder from behind. “Don’t move,” my father orders, voice stone.
I instinctively fling my hands away from my body, heart hammering the air out of my lungs. “Papa, it’s me,” I pant. “It’s just me.”
The blade—a wood planer; what did he think he’d do with that?— clatters to the floor. He spins me around by the shoulder and immediately pulls me to him. I’m not a little boy anymore, but the comfort of my face pressed into his shoulder, the stronger scent of his cologne mingling with the faint musk of the pipe he smokes when he’s stressed, is overwhelming. I squeeze my eyes shut and close my arms around him, his also-webbed hand moving over my hair. He pulls me back at last, his hands still on my shoulders. “Boy, what in the blazes are you doing sneaking in like a burglar at this time of night?”
I laugh, pushing a tear from my face with the heel of my hand. I haven’t seen him since a few months after Caelin’s coronation, haven’t been back here since my branding. “You’d rather I wake the entire household?”
“You know we’re all up.” He looks at me for a moment past spectacles I haven’t seen before, the well-worn lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes folding again. “Son—what’s wrong? What—?” His hand finds his way to my face, thumb settling on the scales the cryst left behind on my cheekbones. “What’s this?”
I can’t seem to summon an explanation. I can’t even look him in the eye, knowing that this is likely the first he’s hearing of all of this. “Papa…there’s a lot happening right now. Have you heard from Mother lately?”
“No,” he answers tentatively, his expression shifting a few times. It’s a complicated question I’ve just asked him, even if there’s only a yes or a no. I hadn’t been meant to overhear their last conversation in person, and yet it was hard to avoid. He told her off for favoring me over Elle, and her response was to tell him she was taking me to Rosalia. He told her she was welcome to leave, but that I’d be staying. She did. He was never quite the same after that—both happier and sadder. I can’t say Elle and I were particularly sad. “Did you need her?”
“No. No. It’s….” I look down and struggle to find a way to put this into words. I’m not actually sure what I need, aside to have the Nuthatch-Arrow thing check on my sister. There were some other vague ideas about uncovering something in her things, my father knowing something, but I can tell from his tense posture he’s as in the dark as I am.
Father’s face darkens. “What did she do?” He leans forward to try to look me in the face. “Alain?”
“She did something so that I would be—special, I guess. My magical talents aren’t natural.”
“That—that can’t be…you were always—your teachers always said you…,” he trails off, his expression distant and horrified.
“Before I was born, Papa. And at least twice just to me after. It’s…backfiring now, somehow, and we’re trying to fix it, but I was worried for Elle….”
Father’s head snaps up as though he can see through the floor to her room. His mouth curls down in disgust. “All those years—she let me call in doctor after doctor, and she never said a damned word. She knew what the problem could have been, but—”
But Elle doesn’t have magic, so Mother couldn’t be fussed. I reach out and put my hand on his shaking forearm. “I know. I have someone with me now who might be able to help in the morning.” The doctor seems relatively certain the potion will take hold and he’ll have finished at least mostly transforming from Nuthatch into Arrow again, which I really couldn’t care less about, but I think Elle might mind the two voices. “Can I see her?”
In spite of everything, Father chuckles weakly. “You know I’m not the one you need to ask, boy. Elle sees who Elle wants to see.” He pauses, then looks past my shoulder out the window. “Is…that an airship in our yard?”
“Oh— yes. They’ll be moving soon.”
He waves me off. “Hells with it. The port’s a mess these days anyhow with all of the reconstruction.”
“Reconstruction?” The unease I’ve been carrying like a stone in my gut these last few days gets a bit heavier. I’d suspected the choice of the Northern Shore for the envoy’s arrival was a jab at me, but the Legion tends to only make jabs when it’s not too much effort. It only expends effort when it really needs to. “What are they rebuilding?”
“I’m not really sure. I tend to keep to the parts of the port where ships leave from the water and not the sky.” He frowns slightly. “Why?”
“Something to look into for later,” I say. I slip a little past him and move toward the stairs. “Would it be all right if I go seek an audience?”
Father steps up to my side and gives my shoulder a shake. “What’re you asking for, lad? This’s your home. No matter what fancy titles you accumulate.”
I can’t help the slightest tremor of my lip, the thick feeling in my throat. I swipe at my eyes again and give him a watery smile before heading up the stairs. The second to last one still groans when I put any weight on it. It is still my home, even if for too long I didn’t treat it that way Father hadn’t wanted me to enlist—not so young and not at all, really. I came back only twice and fleetingly, too taken with my new life and new love to spare much of a thought for what I’d left for them. Since I started putting myself back together, I’d been too afraid of drawing attention to them to come back. So it was letters and visits to the castle for them and this poorly thought out emergency visit for me. And now I can’t help but wonder what I’d been thinking, trying to avoid coming home for so long.
Unlike the rest of the house, Elle’s room has changed, but then, that’s not much of a change, either. She never did like it to stay the same for too long. The door is covered in what has to be its seventieth coat of paint. This time, it’s a near perfect replication of the harbor outside, as though I were looking through a very long window during the day and not a door at night. It’s marginally disorienting. I reach out and knock on the sky. “Whaaaaat?” Elle yells from inside the room.
I blink still more hot welling tears away, leaning my forehead against the door and laughing. “Is that how you say hello to your favorite brother?”
A gasp and a few hasty footsteps later and the door gets jerked out from under me. There she is, still a little slip of a thing in her nightdress but at least an inch taller than the last time I saw her a few months back, her gawping face peeking out from between the curtains of her silky black hair. And so very blue. I stand a little stunned for a moment, then take her bony chin to my gut as she tosses her arms around my waist. “You great—stupid—codfish,” she sputters. “You should have told me you were coming!”
My winded gut ekes out a laugh. “With what? A bird?”
“You’re the wizard,” she answers into my shirt. “You figure it out.”
I’d remind her that there’s no such thing as wizards, but she knows. The kid has actually read the dictionary. There wasn’t much else for her to do from
bed after she raced through every book Father could get his hands on multiple times over. I place a quick kiss to her forehead. She’s warm, warmer than a seafolk ought to be, but not as bad as she's been. “You’re checking on me,” she accuses.
“I am not.” I am, and she knows that, too, but she favors me with an eye roll and leaves it at that. “Can’t I check on my little sister?”
“I guess, if it means you come visit.” She thumps her head against my torso again. “Father misses you.”
“Oh, Father misses me, does he?”
“You’re only all he talks about,” she groans. “‘My son teaches at the University’ this and ‘Alain’s helping put the country back together’ that. Every client, every builder, every craftsman knows your whole life story.”
Given that I don't know my whole life story, I highly doubt it, but I glance back to the closed door down the hall—the door that's been closed since the night our mother took off—and back down to Elle's fever-flushed skin. She looks back at me, her face falling a little. “Why—why are you here? What's going on?”
I’ve never been more determined to find out.
Chapter Fifteen
Caelin
Morning peeks in Alain's bedroom window in grays and blues. The light makes his skin stand out even more against his white bedsheets. We’re tangled together in this bed, clearly meant for a single smaller human, his head tucked in the hollow of my shoulder. I can’t see past the wild mess of his hair, but I think, based on the depth and slowness of his breaths, he’s finally back to sleep. Slowly, carefully, I ease free of the snarl of his long limbs and set about climbing out of bed and dressing as noiselessly as I can. Before I head downstairs, I pause in the doorway to check that he hasn’t suddenly evaporated or melded into the bed.
He’s still there, rolled slightly forward in my absence, and thoroughly sound asleep. I convince my lungs to release the breath they took hostage, brace myself on the doorjamb, and start downstairs.