Not legs. Not feet.
A tail. Like theirs.
Fire ripped through my body. A raw burn started in my bones, ringing through flesh and blood. They deposited me along the pebbles and the shipyard waste on shore beside Cebrinne. Her raven hair hung in limp waves, saturated with the sea. Her turquoise eyes shone as brightly through the night as they ever had during the day, armored with the silent pledge of brutality. She reached for me, bracing on a hip and a single elbow. Her dress had been shucked away, leaving her in that sleeveless shift she usually wore underneath. Mine had, too, though I couldn’t narrow in on the moment I’d lost it. Waves of nausea broke over me, sending me heaving to the side as Cebrinne grasped my hand.
We wrung ourselves together, both of us trembling. Cebrinne hissed and spat at the sea people as they walked by like a drenched, wild kitten, promising to scratch at anyone who came too close. But for all their efforts to trap us during the minutes before, they ignored us now. They dragged the boy with gray eyes behind them.
Blood trickled from his ear, an open cut gracing his cheekbone. A tattoo ran the length of his back, wrapping both sides of his body to sit under the V of his abdomen. He was perhaps twenty, slender but solid. Hands bound behind him, something about his balance seemed strange. They halted him before Thaan, grasping his shoulders and shoving him down to his knees at Thaan’s feet. He flung away from them in a savage whip of his body then spat at the ground between Thaan’s legs.
Deimos’s fist connected with his jaw in a crack that split the whooshing tide. Unable to block the strike, the boy rocked sideways, landing on his shoulder.
Deimos dropped to lean over him, sending blows into the young man’s skull.
Cebrinne and I observed numbly, too drained and filled with agony to do anything but hold ourselves upright and stare. I couldn’t even find the energy to be confused, though nothing made sense. The sound of fists against flesh and bone invaded my ears, but I was too empty to try to rationalize why the young man was taking a beating.
Thaan didn’t flinch. He watched, bored, head tilted slightly to the side. The people watched as well, expressionless. As though deadened to the prospect of punishment. “Enough,” Thaan finally said.
Deimos leaned into his heels, shoving to his feet and backing away, leaving the boy to pant softly into the loose stone. He slowly pushed himself back onto his knees, blood hanging in thready strands from his mouth, and cast a glance over his shoulder at me. Then turned back to Thaan with a quiet, crazed laugh.
“Jealous at being played at your own game, Thaan?” he asked, flashing crimson teeth in a wide smile.
“It appears so, Pheolix,” Thaan said. “Another stay in the mines seems a worthy prize.”
2
Cebrinne
“What were you dreaming about?”
Selena blinked at me, blue eyes vibrant in the dark. I waited for her mind to adjust. For sleep to recede and waking thoughts to ascend. She pushed her sable waves from her eyes, rolling onto her hip to better see me. “About playing skip-chalk as kids. Back in Cypria.”
The memory dashed behind my eyes. A simple one. Happy. Shapes and numbers etched in white along the gangway. Rolled dice. Small feet bouncing across a map of fate’s invention.
Laughter.
I gave a slow nod, though we both knew it was a lie. Nightmares visited Selena almost every night. The soft moans from the bed across mine weren’t borne from tossing dice over a chalk pattern. She’d been dreaming of that night again.
The night we’d first transitioned.
Ten years ago.
I sighed slowly, my stomach crumpling as it always did when I remembered that night. I never dreamed of it, though. I rarely dreamed at all. “Come on,” I said. Then stopped and smiled. “Happy Birthday.”
Selena straightened, smiling back. “Happy Birthday.”
We dressed in the dark, ears focused on the muted breaths flowing from the apartment beside ours. Deimos and Thaan would sleep for another hour. Not an abundance of time, but enough. She laced my corset for me, then turned so I could do the same.
“The silverspire?” she asked.
I twisted my hair over my shoulder, combing my fingers roughly through the strands. “The balcony. Next to the juniper tree.”
Selena ducked out of the room in a quiet swish of skirts as I gathered our tools. A knife of opal. A vial of crushed mugwort. Dust of white seashells. The feather of a dusk-whispering owl. I rolled the bundle into my soft leather pouch, tying it to my waistband as Selena appeared at my shoulder.
“Ready?”
My breath didn’t escape my lungs until we were outside, and even then, it only trickled out, shallow and thin as we darted between the shadows hung along the curtain wall. Across the sky bridge and down one of the southern towers, our quiet feet seeking the refuge of the cliffs.
I knotted the leather cord a second time. “Ready.”
