bed in a riot of clashing colors. A glass of brandy on the desk, half drunk—most unusual. In Holden’s experience, Van Gast didn’t believe in half-drunk anything.
Van Gast had been behaving oddly, to say the least. Or maybe this was how he usually was, a thought that made Holden’s stomach churn. He didn’t really know that much about the man, when it came down to it. He didn’t mean to pry, but the open slip of paper was there on the desk for all to see. A message from Josie.
The door opened again behind him and Holden turned, feeling guilty for intruding. Ilsa stood there, looking beguiling in her new dress. The pale green brought out the chestnut in her hair and she glowed. The bodice was low cut and it looked as if she’d made it even lower. The silk clung to every curve. Holden could barely tear his eyes away, until a tiny little worm of a thought popped into his head. Why was she coming to Van Gast’s quarters dressed like that? He struggled to find words, any words that would bring her back to him.
“You look very beautiful” was all that came to mind.
Ilsa smiled, a pale wan thing full of the ice between them, and came in. Her perfume wafted round Holden, of jasmine and spice. He couldn’t recall her ever wearing perfume before. “Where’s Van?”
Holden dropped the note back onto the desk. “Gone to the Godsquare.”
Ilsa came to the desk and glanced at the note. Holden burned with the nearness of her—and the distance. She picked up the note and then dropped it as though it was of little consequence, but her lips pinched.
Holden wanted to take her hand, wanted to kiss her as he had done once, kiss her to make it all better, to soothe her, comfort her. But her hunched shoulder was cold, her eyes colder.
“Ilsa—”
She cut him off with a turn of her shoulder, her hands rattling among the things on Van’s desk. “What do I have to do?” she asked, her face turned away, her voice small and afraid. “What do I have to do to make you come back to me?”
He wished she’d look at him. Any way, even the cold way. “I never left you. Please, Ilsa, I just want to make it right between us, but I don’t know how. I don’t know what you want, how to make you happy.”
He took her hands in his one but she pulled them away, her face scrunched in a frown. Her mouth worked as though she too struggled for words, and then she ran for the door, slamming it behind her. Holden hesitated, just a fraction, but enough that by the time he followed her, determined to do anything, say anything to make it up to her, make it right whatever it was, she was gone. Down the gangplank and disappearing into the crowded wharf under a sunset sky.
Tallia was right behind her.
It didn’t take Van Gast’s little-magics to know something odd was going on. Holden tried to calm his mind, tried to remember how patterns and order had once soothed him. But there was no pattern to this, no comfort in the straight lines of the planks along the deck, in the complicated tangles of rigging or in the equally tangled streets and shanties he could see. All was chaos and swirling shapes, like his mind.
He took a firm grip on himself, a deep breath that did nothing to calm him. Van Gast—something was going on, and Van Gast was in the middle of it, he was sure. Up to his neck in ten thousand gold sharks’ worth of trouble, and Holden knew just where Van Gast was going to be. Waiting for Josie by Herjan’s temple, waiting for a woman he’d betrayed and hoping she’d forgive him.
He could help Van, warn him perhaps, or he could follow Ilsa. It was time to make a choice, and he strode down the gangplank and out into the teeming, swirling chaos.
Chapter Seven
Van Gast let the crowds buffet him, kept his thieving hands in his pockets for once and his eyes open. The itch in his chest throbbed and burned, waxed and waned. Trouble somewhere, everywhere.
He came out of the delta, away from the vast, slow Est River that floated down all manner of things to trade from the interior. Over a last low bridge, dodging the slow water-raptor at the end, and onto the broad plaza that fronted the