the boy replied, looking around at the swell and the crush.
“Listen to it,” she smiled, breathing deep. “It’s like poetry.”
He looked up at her then, his dark eyes clouded.
“Teach me a word, then.”
Mia met his stare. “De’lai.”
“De’lai,” he repeated.
“That’s it,” Mia nodded. “Very good.”
“What does it mean?”
“Sister,” she smiled.
The boy turned his eyes back to the crowded streets, keeping his thoughts to himself as the wagon rolled on. Tric walked out front, the crowd instinctively parting before him as he cut them a path along the rain-soaked thoroughfare. Mia looked about them, watchful and on edge. She began to notice patterns among the throng, obvious among the colors and threads once you looked for it. Men with white kerchiefs embroidered with death’s heads about their arms. Another group with mermaids inked at their throats, yet another with triangular scars etched into their cheeks. Like heraldry, or a familia’s sigil. The men carried themselves as comrades would, all armed, all looking somewhere on the wrong side of dangerous.
“Salted,” she murmured.
“Aye,” Butcher nodded beside her. “Rulers of the roost. The ones in wolfskins are Valdyr’s boys. Wulfguard. He has men all over the city.”
Mia noted the group Butcher was talking about—a quartet of tall and surly-looking bucks, each with a skinned wolf across his shoulders. But though the privateers in the mobs carried themselves with swagger, there was precious little trouble for a city so allegedly rife with bastardry. A few fistfights. Some vomit and blood on the cobbles. Mia began to wonder if Butcher had overstated the case—she loved the ugly sod, but he wasn’t a man to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn. Aside from having to scare off a pack of grubby urchins loitering around the wagon (Ash flashed a knife and promised to geld the first one to get too close) and a fellow flying out a second-story window as they passed, there was an almost disappointing lack of drama. Mia and her comrades soon found themselves looking down on the glittering jewel that was Amai’s harbor.
Even though the Lady of Storms had drawn her veil across heaven, it was still a breathtaking sight. Ships of every cut and kind: square-rigged caravels and three-masted carracks, mighty galleys with hundreds of oars at their flanks and deadly balingers that ran under power of both oar and wind. Figureheads carved in the likeness of drakes or lions or maids with fishes’ tails, sails stitched with crossed bones or grinning skulls or hangman’s nooses.
Mia’s eyes caught on the largest vessel at dock—one of the biggest she’d ever seen, truth told. It was a massive warship, at least a hundred and fifty feet long, with four towering masts reaching into the skies. She was painted the color of truedark, bow to stern, her name daubed down her prow in ornate white script.
Black Banshee.
“What are those?” Bladesinger asked.
The woman was pointing to two tall spires of stone, looming above the shoreline. Each was seventy feet high, pale limestone, covered in vast tangles of razorvine.
“Those are Thorn Towers,” Ashlinn murmured. “They’re scattered all over Liis. It’s where the Magus Kings used to break their slaves. Torture their prisoners.”
Butcher raised an eyebrow. “How’d you know that?”
“My father got sent on an offering in Elai.” Ash’s voice was low, her eyes narrowed as she looked at the spires. “He made the kill but got caught on the way out. The Leper Priests tortured him in towers just like those for three weeks. Ripped his eye out. Cut his bollocks off.”
Butcher and Sidonius shifted uncomfortably in their saddles. Mia reached back and took Ashlinn’s hand, saw the haunted look in her girl’s eyes.
“He died there?” Bladesinger asked softly.
Ash shook her head. “He escaped. His body, anyway. But part of him stayed in there the rest of his life. It’s what drove him away from the Red Church.”
“I’m sorry,”’Singer said. “Must have been hard to see that.”
“… It wasn’t easy.”
Mia squeezed Ash’s hand, entwined their fingers together. Glancing at Tric, she saw the boy watching them, his face like stone. Torvar Järnheim had raised his son and daughter as weapons to be used against the Ministry. Ashlinn’s and her brother’s betrayal had almost brought the Red Church to its knees. And it had cost Tric his life.
Torvar was dead now—murdered at the hands of Church assassins. Mia could see faint pain in Ashlinn’s eyes as she looked down on those towers, that dark reflection of the place her father lost himself inside. Uncomfortable