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They didn’t seem to be stuck. Rather, Chang En seemed to have ordered his fleet to sit completely still. Rin scoured the decks for any sign of activity—a lantern signal, a flag—and saw nothing.
What were they waiting for?
Something dark flitted across the upper field of her spyglass. She moved her focus up to the mast.
A man stood at the very top.
He wore neither a Militia nor a Republican uniform. He was garbed entirely in black. Rin could hardly make out his face. His hair was a straggly, matted mess that hung into his eyes and his skin was both pale and dark, mottled like ruined marble. He looked as if he’d been dragged up from the bottom of the ocean.
Rin found him oddly familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen him before.
“What are you looking at?” Kitay asked.
She blinked into the spyglass, and the man was gone.
“There’s a man.” She pointed. “I saw him, he was right there—”
Kitay frowned, squinting at the mast. “What man?”
Rin couldn’t speak. Dread pooled at the bottom of her stomach.
She’d remembered. She knew exactly who that was.
A sudden chill had fallen over the lake. New ice crackled over the water’s surface. The Kingfisher’s sails suddenly dropped without warning. Its crew looked around the deck, bewildered. No one had given that order. No one had lowered the sails.
“There’s no wind,” Kitay murmured. “Why isn’t there a wind?”
Rin heard a whooshing noise. A blur shot past her eyes, followed by a scream that grew fainter and fainter until it abruptly cut off.
She heard a crack in the air far above her head.
Admiral Molkoi appeared suddenly on the cliff wall, his body bent at grotesque angles like a broken doll on display. He hung there for a moment before skidding down the rock face and into the lake, leaving behind a crimson streak on gray.
“Oh, fuck,” Rin muttered.
What seemed like a lifetime ago, she and Altan had freed someone very powerful and very mad from the Chuluu Korikh.
The Wind God Feylen had returned.
The Kingfisher’s deck erupted into shouts. Some soldiers ran to the mounted crossbows, aiming their bolts at nothing. Others dropped to the deck and wrapped their arms around their necks as if hiding from wild animals.
Rin finally regained her senses. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Everybody get belowdecks!”
She grabbed Kitay’s arm and pulled him toward the closest hatch, just as a piercing gust of wind slammed into them from the side. They crumpled together against the bulkhead. His bent elbow went straight into her rib cage.
“Ow!” she cried.
Kitay picked himself off the deck. “Sorry.”
Somehow they managed to drag themselves toward the hatch and tumbled more than walked down the stairs to the hold, where the rest of the crew huddled in the pitch darkness. There passed a long silence, pregnant with terror. No one spoke a word.
Light filled the chamber. Gust after gust of wind ripped the wooden panels cleanly away from the ship as if peeling off layers of skin, exposing the cowering and vulnerable crew underneath.
The strange man perched before them on the jagged wood like a bird alighting on a branch. Rin could see his eyes clearly now—bright, gleaming, malicious dots of blue.
“What’s this?” asked Feylen. “Little rats, hiding with nowhere to go?”
Someone shot an arrow at his head. He waved a hand, annoyed. The arrow jerked to the side and came whistling back into the soldiers’ ranks. Rin heard a dull thud. Someone collapsed to the floor.
“Don’t be so rude.” Feylen’s voice was quiet, reedy and thin, but in the eerily still air they could hear every word he said. He hovered above them, effortlessly drifting above the ground, until his bright eyes landed on Rin. “There you are.”
She didn’t think. If she stopped to think, then fear would catch up. Instead she launched herself at him, screaming, trident in hand.
He sent her spinning to the planks with a flick of his fingers. She got up to rush him again but didn’t even get close. He hurled her away every time she approached him, but she kept trying, again and again. If she was going to die, then she’d do it on her feet.
But Feylen was just toying with her.
Finally he yanked her out of the ship and started tossing her around in the air like a rag doll. He could have flung her into the opposite cliff if he’d wanted to; he could have lifted her high into the air and sent her plummeting into the lake, and the only reason he hadn’t was that he wanted to play.
“Behold the great Phoenix, trapped inside a little girl,” sneered Feylen. “Where is your fire now?”
“You’re Cike,” Rin gasped. Altan had appealed to Feylen’s humanity once. It had almost worked. She had to try the same. “You’re one of us.”
“A traitor like you?” Feylen chuckled as the winds hurtled her up and down. “Hardly.”
“Why would you fight for her?” Rin demanded. “She had you imprisoned!”
“Imprisoned?” Feylen sent Rin tumbling so close to the cliff wall that her fingers brushed the surface before he jerked her back in front of him. “No, that was Trengsin. That was Trengsin and Tyr, the pair of them. They crept up on us in the middle of the night, and still it took them until midday to pin us down.”
He let her drop. She hurtled down to the lake, crashed into the water, and was certain she was about to drown just before Feylen yanked her back up by her ankle. He emitted a high-pitched cackle. “Look at you. You’re like a little cat. Drenched to the bone.”
A pair of rockets shot toward Feylen’s head. He swept them carelessly out of the air. They fell to the water and fizzled out.
“Is Ramsa still at it?” he asked. “How adorable. Is he well? We never liked him, we’ll rip out his fingernails one by one after this.”
He tossed Rin up and down by her ankle as he spoke. She clenched her teeth to keep from crying out.
“Did you really think you were going to fight us?” He sounded amused. “We can’t be killed, child.”
“Altan stopped you once,” she snarled.
“He did,” Feylen acknowledged, “but you’re a far cry from Altan Trengsin.”
He stopped tossing her and held her still in the air, buffeted on all sides by winds so strong she could barely keep her eyes open. He hung before her, arms outstretched, tattered clothes rippling in the wind, daring her to attack and knowing that she couldn’t.
“Isn’t it fun to fly?” he asked. The winds whipped harder and harder around her until it felt like a thousand steel blades jamming into every tender point of her body.
“Just kill me,” she gasped. “Get it over with.”
“Oh, we’re not going to kill you,” said Feylen. “She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.”
He waved a hand. The winds yanked her away.
She flew up, weightless and utterly out of control, and crumpled against the masthead. She hung there, splayed out like a dissected corpse, for just the briefest moment before the drop. She landed in a crumpled heap on the Kingfisher’s deck. She couldn’t draw enough breath to scream. Every part of her body was on fire. She tried making her limbs move but they wouldn’t obey her.
