Spark

by Anna Holmes

  “You’re sure? You could get even more powerful, take them all out—”

  “No,” I say immediately, coldly. Guilt sets in shortly thereafter, and I amend, “I don’t want to become what they wanted me to be.”

  Elle tilts her head from side to side. “I can appreciate that. So the good news is whenever we’re done with it, you can melt the whole thing down. Hopefully that helps a little bit.”

  I’m not generally a destructive person, but the idea of wiping that focus off the face of the earth has its appeal. If they kept the plans, they can make others, of course, but it will take time and money and expertise resources. It’s petty, but I want to cost them. “It does, strangely.”

  “I thought it might. I’m jealous. I don’t get to smash my doctors’ stuff.”

  Her doctors mean well instead of treating her as an experiment, but I know to her it doesn’t feel much different. “Well, you can help with mine. You’ve got a good imagination; we could make that cathartic.”

  She giggles a little, and despite everything, I smile. Elle looks up at the gathering clouds. “I miss having your stupid face around.”

  “I miss my stupid face being around.”

  “So why don’t you come visit before you start exploding next time? Are we too provincial for you, big city boy?”

  “No, no,” I say with a laugh. “Logistically, it’s tricky. I’m pretty visible, whether I want to be or not.”

  “Ah, so you’re too famous for us,” she accuses with a grin.

  “For someone so smart, you sure make a lot of assumptions, Little Fish.”

  “You’re not correcting me.”

  “Because it’s so patently ridiculous, it doesn’t need a correction.”

  “Now who’s assuming?” I let go of her hand and wrap my arm around her shoulder, pulling her head against me so I can mess up her hair. Elle squawks. “Not fair. You’re too tall. I can’t do it back.”

  “Who said anything about fair? Being a big brother gives you a certain prerogative.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Besides everything else, you mean?”

  “Everything—do you not remember winning every single argument when we were younger with ‘because you’re older, Alain, you should know better’? Oh, and who got to share every treat he ever got? Ah, right, your big brother. You bet I’m taking hair mussing privileges.”

  “You wait. Someday I’m going to be taller than you, and then we’ll see who’s mussing whom.”

  I laugh quietly. “I’m pretty tall, you know. You've got some significant catching up to do.”

  “I’ll get there,” she says confidently. “And someday I’m going to teach at that school of yours, too.”

  I don't doubt that, at least. “Maybe you’ll be the head of the Arcanum.”

  “Does that make me your boss?”

  “It would.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll do,” she declares. I slacken my arm so that she can stand up straight again. She pats my arm, the crystal bits clinking together. “I’ll get you fixed up, brother, don’t you worry.”

  Easier said than done, of course, but it is a little more easily done after hearing her confidence. Elle doesn’t waste words on idle comfort.

  She’s more like our mother that way, and only in that way.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Caelin

  It turns out that I hate airship travel just as much when it’s a private bronze and steel crystless airship as when it’s a public stone monstrosity propelled through the sky by barely controlled magic. Give me a horse and a couple of days and I’d be much happier, and much less nauseated. Unfortunately, as strong as Navigator is, he couldn’t compete with an airship for time, so flying it is. I give his face a pat and palm him an extra carrot when Rust isn’t looking.

  The hold is deceptively large. There are six horses down here—the five we came with and a spare Riley picked up at the guardhouse when he dropped our prisoners off under the guise of a prisoner transfer. There are crates of goods, room for more, and a quieter than normal Jori Crow, strapped thoroughly by her chest to the pipes along the wall. No antagonism now, from either of us. I hate her, to be sure, a little ball of molten rage that bubbles every time I catch a glimpse of her. I’d have liked nothing more than to have kicked her out of the hatch once we gleaned everything we needed from her, but frankly, she’s “died” before, and as much as she mocked me for it, I don’t kill unless I have to. She tests that resolve. Sorely.

  After Alain left, she clammed up. I don’t know if she had run through the rest of what she knew or without her intended audience, she didn’t want to put on her show, but aside from a few terse answers to Nuthatch’s questions, that was the most we got out of her. She didn’t set off the earring in that whole time, but at this point it’s like saying at least she let the dog live when she slaughtered the family.

  She knows. She knows how her choices have impacted Alain, and yet in all of her monologues, not a single apology, not even an acknowledgment of the horror she visited on him again and again. My fist tightens around Navigator’s saddlebag as I dig around for the curry brush. It takes everything I have not to fling it at her. I unearth it and set to work on the nasty set of brambles tangled in the feathering on his right leg.

  At length, after I’ve tended to the horses and bundled the sullied hay, I make my way back over to the ladder. “Should have kept to mucking stables,” Jori mutters as I pass. “The world would be better for it.”

  “The marvelous thing about Elyssia,” I tell her over my shoulder, “is that I can do both, and those who have a problem with it can eat stable muck.”

  She shrugs. “Probably tastes better than your food.”

  I want to laugh. She's clever. Some of the things she spews are funny. I like to think, if things had been different, if she didn’t treat people like her own personal puppets to be mangled and discarded, if she didn’t hate me so virulently, that we might have been friends. “Get back to me when you’ve had to eat reshtachl for a month. Then we’ll compare.”

  Her mouth quirks up, but the little smile gives way immediately to a look of revulsion, like she’s actually eaten reshtachl. I would think that the nature of a country where the upper class eats imported foods and the lower class gets sausage made from rat would be immediately apparent. I had the extreme misfortune when we ran out of rations one winter and ate a captured Legion camp’s. I wouldn’t say I've a refined palate by any means—I’d eat bread and cheese in some combination for every meal if I could—but Rosalia’s “rat food” is vile. Sourly, she says, "As though your peasantry eats any better.”

  “Ask about the dinner halls sometime. I haven’t the time to spend on history lessons for someone determined to close her ears to them anyway.”

  “I know of your father’s feeble attempts. It does nothing for the farmer in the wilds or the beggars on the roads, with no means to get to a town.”

  “No, it’s not perfect, but by all means, let’s not even try to help who we can, then,” I say, throwing a hand up. "Better than treating our poor as an inconvenience as you do. And most everything is better than spending a second more arguing with a soulless creature who conjures empathy only when it’s convenient.” I slap my hands on the cold metal rungs of the ladder and start my way up.

  If she calls after, I don’t hear it past the blood rushing in my ears and the angry thumping of my heart. I let her get to me. It’s what she wanted, and I delivered it. When I arrive in the cabin, flushed and probably visibly steaming, Tressa glances my way from her spot next to the table, since padded with some cushions. “Don’t let it bother you. She’s trained to do that, and very well, it seems.”

  I cringe. “Did everyone hear that?”

  She turns to look at the rest of the cabin. August, as usual, is riding in the worn, upholstered seat next to Nuthatch, enthralled. Gavroth seems absorbed in some calculations, Elle looking over his shoulder. Riley consults some maps and points to an instrument near the helm.
“I have a little better hearing than most. I think you’re fine.”

  “Where’s Alain?”

  “Resting. There’s a little bunkroom back there.” She indicates a portholed door, the window obscured with blue flowered curtains.

  “Resting?” I say, surprised. “Voluntarily?”

  “Yes and no. I think if he wants to survive where we’re going, it's somewhat necessary.”

  I nod and find myself a chair so I can sit alongside. “How’re you holding up?”

  She leans her head back and smiles slightly. “All this going on and you’re worried about me?”

  Riley had her arm slung over his shoulder when they limped into camp, but she was walking mostly under her own power, which is an improvement. “Is that so bad?”

  She grumbles. “It’s not as bad.”

  “Still bad.”

  “Kai says my legs are mostly nerves and bones, so it’s not much of a surprise to either of us.”

  That doesn’t exactly tell me much, but I can see by the set of her mouth that she’d rather not get into it. I pause. “How are…other things?”

  Her gaze wanders over to her brother. “The same. We haven’t spoken much. I think he’s giving me space.” She makes quotation marks with her hands and pulls a face. “Really I’d just like to take him in a room and yell at him for a few hours, but there hasn’t been much of an opportunity for that, and if I’m being truly honest, I don’t know what good it would do.” She glances over at me. “You think I should forgive him, don't you.”

  “I haven’t said anything of the sort.”

  “I think you were going to.”

  I cross my arms and laugh, leaning forward in the chair. “What makes you think that?”

  She scrunches her face up and makes a balancing scale sort of motion with her hands. “You’ve got that whole…forgiveness thing going on, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. By all means, please enlighten me.”

  “Oh, you know. The prisoners and the prince and Gavroth and August and you gave that Kelvin guy a second chance and Crow isn’t just flat out dead, so you kind of made it your…thing.”

  I can’t help a snort. “It’s not my thing, it’s just something that seemed right at the time.”

  “So it figures you’d think it’s the right thing to do now.”

  “I haven’t said that at all!”

  Tressa touches the crook of her finger to her chin contemplatively. “So you don’t think I should forgive him?”

  “I didn’t say that, either.”

  “So what do you say?”

  I fish carefully for words. I was a one and only child, long awaited and much loved, and my parents had hoped and hoped for a sibling who never came. I don’t know at all what she’s going through. At last, I start, “I don’t know if I could ever come back from a lie like that. But my only brother is my heartbrother. I don’t know if it’s different when you were raised together.”

  “He was my only friend,” she answers quietly. “For so long. Even—even when he was posing as Simon, it was so…easy to talk to him. He was familiar and frustrating and my fiercest protector. I don’t know if he knows what to do when he’s the one who hurt me, and I don’t know if I do, either. Does one Kai outweigh the other?”

  “I can’t answer that for you,” I say, hoping I’ve managed to be gentle about it. “I don’t think you need to rush for an answer yourself, either.”

  Tressa nods, wiping furtively at an eye with the back of her hand and passing it off as a peek at a porthole. “I was so sure you were going to tell me to forgive him.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  Nuthatch calls over his shoulder, “You’re going to want to see this.”

  I stand, a little jelly-kneed, and make my way over to the front of the cabin. My stomach gives a lurch as we clear the cloud layer and I get a good look at just how fast we’re hurtling toward the coastline. The ocean glints ahead of us in the weak, momentary sunlight. My whole body instinctively clenches. I know Fran is different, but that’s only so comforting when you grow up with three universal truths—no magic can heal, everyone dies, and airships do not work over the ocean. Well, we already broke one of those rules, so I guess I can only dig my fingers into the back of Nuthatch’s seat and hope to break one or two more.

  Without so much as a lurch, Fran moves from passing over land to passing over water. We don’t plummet into it. We don't even wobble. A laugh bursts from my chest and my grip slackens. “We’re not dead.”

  “No, of course we’re not dead,” Nuthatch answers. “Airships used to operate all over the world, you know.”

  “I know that,” I return.

  “It’s much costlier to operate like this. There are a few in service elsewhere, but the Legion stopped investing in anything other than cryst.”

  I finally turn away from the window. The push and pull of the waves compared to the forward movement of the ship were making me nauseous. Riley stands directly behind me. I slip past and grasp him by the shoulder, pulling him back in the direction of Tressa. I plop him into the chair, then hurry over to the hatch to the hold and close the trap door. When I return, I block the conversation from the rest of the the cabin with my body and keep my voice low. “I need to ask a favor.”

  Riley crooks up an eyebrow, and Tressa leans forward. “Anything.”

  He shoots her a frown. “Are you quite back to ‘anything’ capacity yet?”

  “Stuff it, Lieutenant. What is it, Caelin?”

  “Crow,” I say. “We’re landing soon, presumably. Alain is going to have his hands full with just being there, let alone what we’re going to have to do to him. The last thing we need is her becoming a problem, but….”

  “We need her to find the focus,” Riley finishes, pinching the bridge of his nose. “To say nothing of operating it.”

  “I need her watched. Carefully. And if she does pull something, we need her to think she’s getting away with it until we can get her…dealt with. She’s dangerous when challenged.”

  “How do you suggest we deal with her, exactly?”

  There’s not much left to suggest. My stomach churns. “I think you know what would need to be done at that point.”

  Riley looks down. Tressa frowns. “What happened to letting her face a judge?”

  “Listen, I would vastly prefer that. Partially because I think it would annoy her more. And I don’t think it’s going to come to this. She genuinely wants Alain stabilized. But if that changes between now and when we leave the camp….”

  Riley gives Tressa a bit of a look. “Understood, Highness.”

  She gives him a look right back. “Don’t let her compromise your whole forgiveness thing,” she tells me.

  I fold my arms and look at the ground. “Good advice. Which is why I’m leaving it to you two instead of handling it myself. I trust you both to act when necessary and only when necessary. Watch her and wait. We’ll know her next move soon enough.”

  Their expressions shift while they watch each other, as though they’re having an entire conversation without a single word. At last, they both kind of look at each other, resigned, and nod. Riley says, “Then the dungeon, right? Please tell me she’s going in the dungeon at that point.”

  “Yes,” I say with the slightest bit of a chuckle. “Dear gods, yes. With any luck, she’ll only ever leave it for her trial.”

  “Don’t court luck,” he groans. “It never works out for us.”

  Also good advice. I should take it more often. I glance out the nearest porthole at the advancing cluster of islands in the distance. Luck won’t serve us here. Only caution.

  The gangplank settles to the ground in a cloud of red dust. It flies through the air, stings at the eyes. Already the Little Islands have little to commend them. Even the shoreline, usually a welcoming refuge, is a nasty gauntlet of steep cliffs and jagged rocks. At my side, Alain tenses. I put my hand to his rigid shoulder. “A bit at a time,” I remind him softly.
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br />   He nods. The bags under his eyes seem heavier, but the ridges receded, leaving only the strange glittery scales, and he holds himself less self-consciously. “Will you stay with me?”

  “Of course.”

  Alain rubs at the back of his neck, puffing out his cheeks and exhaling slowly as he takes in the terrain around us. “All right, then. Might as well, since we came all this way.”

  Behind us, the doctor packs up the last of his things and hands the bag off to an already heavily-laden Gavroth. Riley steers Jori along by the shoulder, and she stops short and smiles broadly. “You must be Elle,” she says brightly. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

  Elle turns. She looks her up and down like one might assess some sort of oozing mess, then spits, “I’ve heard a lot about you, too.” Silence falls between them like a heavy curtain. Elle stares her dead in the face, then doles out a kick to Jori’s shin.

  Jori barely cringes, only the slightest wince pulling at her mouth. Alain sighs. “Ellenore,” he says. It’s generally bad form to kick a restrained person.”

  “She deserves it,” she mutters, stalking past us down the gangplank.

  Gavroth roars out a laugh. “I LOVE THIS KID!”

  Alain points a webbed finger in his direction. “Your encouragement isn’t helping.”

  “Well, she’s not wrong,” he says with a shrug.

  Alain shakes his head, looking down at the floor, then follows after Elle. I fall in behind. “There are some things there I’d rather her not see,” he tells me as he hurries. “At least, I assume they’re still there.”

  We had made some efforts to clean up the sites of the camps we found, though the Little Islands camp remained largely untouched because of the absence of records. They were either taken or torched on the way out. Similar attempts had been made at the camp at the Western Shore, but hadn’t been completed. That camp and its eastern counterpart have taken the bulk of our attention, so he’s probably correct.