Imagining a lake so still, it was like a mirror to the sky.
Staring at the gloom above her head and picturing a pale globe shining there.
Listening to the tempest sing.
And wondering.
CHAPTER 17
DEPARTURES
They almost didn’t make it to Galante.
The storm raged for a solid week, and though no lightning kissed the explosives in the Maid’s belly, the ocean still did her best to drag them all to sailors’ graves. Six of the crew were lost to the deep, swept off the decks or torn from the rigging. The sails on the main and mizzenmast were split like rotten hessian, the foremast almost snapped off at the root. Through it all, Cloud Corleone had stood at the wheel, as if by sheer will he’d keep his ship together. And yet Mia suspected it wasn’t the captain, but another figure up on deck who proved the difference between them all living and dying.
A deadboy.
He didn’t move from the bow for seven turns. Lips moving in silent prayer to the Mother, asking she beseech her twins for respite, for mercy, for quiet. Mia didn’t know for certain if the Mother listened, or if her daughters paid heed, but as the Maid limped into Galante harbor, torn and bleeding but somehow still afloat, Mia made her way up to the bow and leaned on the wood beside him.
He stood with those black hands on the railings, a curtain of damp saltlocks framing his face. The wind still gnashed and snapped at their heels, the water below a sea of jagged whitecaps, rain drizzling in a thin gray veil.
He was still darkly beautiful, his skin smooth and pale, his eyes black as pitch. But Mia could swear there was a little more color to him now. A faint flush of life to his flesh. A hint in the way he moved. Ashlinn had whispered to Mia of it alone in their cabin—how the closer they drew to truedark, the more … alive Tric appeared. It seemed a dark shade of sorcery, like nothing she’d ever heard or read about, but Mia supposed it made a kind of sense. If it was the power of the Night that returned Tric to life, he might seem more alive the closer to night it drew.
She wondered what he was exactly. The magik of him, and the mystery. And how much like the old Tric he might be by the time the suns finally failed.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” he asked, glancing at her sidelong.
“Just looking,” she replied.
He nodded, turning to the white jewel of Galante harbor before them. The Cityport of Churches was a curious mix of Liisian and Itreyan architecture, tall minarets and graceful domes, flat rooftop gardens and high terra-cotta roofs, hundreds of thousands milling in her streets. Cathedral bells tolled across the waves, ringing in the hour, all in time. Mia had served in the Red Church chapel here for eight months under Bishop Tenhands, and she knew the city like a boozehound knew the bottle.
“This was the place we met,” she said. “Well … met again. I’d just killed the son of a senator, if I recall correctly.”
“I REMEMBER. YOU HAD A RED DRESS ON. AND A CROSSBOW BOLT IN YOUR ARSE.”
She smirked, tossing windblown locks from her face. “Not my finest hour.”
“YOU LOOKED MORE THAN FINE TO ME.”
The smile dropped away. Uncomfortable silence hung between them like a shroud. A lonely gull swung through the sky overhead, singing a mournful song.
“Did…” Mia shook her head, looking to change the subject. “What you said out there during the tempest, about the Ladies of Ocean and Storms … was that true? About them … knowing?”
“DO YOU HAVE A FLINTBOX?”
Mia blinked at the strange question. “Aye.”
“GIVE IT TO ME.”
Mia reached into her britches, pulled out the small slab of burnished metal. It was a simple device: flint, wick, arkemical fuel. Two silver priests at a market stall.
“Just don’t drop it anywhere belowdecks, aye?”
Tric took the box in his ink-black hands, struggled a moment with the flint. Those fingers of his had once been clever as cats, deft and supple and quick. Her belly sank at another reminder that, beautiful as he was, as close to truedark as they might be drawing, out here in the sunslight, this boy still wasn’t who he used to be. But after a moment, he struck the flame, lifted the flintbox toward her.