“We can assist,” said a voice at her side. Safire looked to find Atlas, the burly man who’d broken bottles of spirits and helped her roll barrels of salt fish in the hold. His clothes were dripping now, and his face was slick with rain. At his side stood a handful of other prisoners. Nodding to the helm, he said, “I’ve sailed ships almost as big as this.”
Safire looked from them back out to sea. There was something familiar about the cliffs in the distance. If she squinted and waited for the lightning, she could see the familiar shapes bobbing in the water.
Sea spirits.
“The ship wrecking grounds,” she murmured, remembering Eris’s name for them. Remembering the advice Kor didn’t take.
“See there?” said Safire, pointing to the dark silhouettes in the waves. “There are rocks just beneath the surface. They’ll put a hole in your hull and you’ll be easy prey for sea spirits.” She looked back to the masts of Jemsin’s ship, getting closer by the heartbeat. “If you can get around to the other side of them, you might be able to lure those pirates straight into the wrecking grounds.”
When she turned back, the wheel had already been taken from Torwin, who was watching Asha mount Kozu.
Sorrow stared at Safire across the rain-slick deck, wingsspread, ready to fly. Safire crossed to him in five easy strides, then mounted up.
A heartbeat later, she nodded to Asha.
Together, their dragons leaped into the storm.
Forty-Six
The soldier jerked Eris to a hard stop. Looking back over her shoulder, she found the empress staring up at the only occupied cage above them.
“Lower her down.”
One of the Lumina unhooked the chain of Skye’s cage, then slowly lowered it. The chain creaked and groaned until the bottom of the cage hit the platform with a clang.
“I should force you to watch.” The empress looked Skye up and down, taking in her filthy dress and knotted hair. As if Eris’s mother was beneath her. “I should show you the consequence of your crime firsthand.”
Skye stared back from behind the bars. For someone who’d been imprisoned eighteen long years, who’d had her very hands taken by the enemy before her, there was no trace of hatred or contempt in her eyes. Only pity.
She said not a word to the empress. Instead, Skye turned her face to Eris.
“Remember who you are,” she said, her green eyes intense.“My daughter. Day’s hope. Your father’s heir—an heir of shadows and stars.”
The empress growled an order. In an instant, they were forcing Eris out of the room, away from Skye. She looked back just as the door slammed shut, separating her from her mother.
As they marched her through the citadel and out into the daylight, Eris thought of everything her mother said. About the Shadow God’s soul, hidden in a knife, and how it needed to be returned, to free him of his prison. But Eris didn’t have the knife. And even if she did, the stardust steel cuffs on her wrists prevented her from going across and delivering it to him.
There was nothing she could do.
They put Eris on horseback and marched her through the streets of Axis. At the sight of the newly captured Death Dancer, more and more people came to look, curious about this dangerous fugitive who’d eluded their empress for so long. The manacles around Eris’s wrists were linked to chains held by four Lumina soldiers, two before and behind her, to keep her from running.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked the one closest when they passed through the final checkpoint at the edge of Axis’s border, leaving the city—and its citizens—behind.
The soldier didn’t answer, just pointed up the dirt road before them. Eris’s gaze followed it as it rose, higher and higher, up to the scarps.
Eris knew what was at the top of those scarps and what happened to the criminals they took there.
She knew what they were going to do.
When the city of Axis lay far behind them, it started to rain. Not long after that, a storm rolled in, darkening the sky.
As they reached the highest point, where the steady incline of gray rock leveled out into wet meadow, Eris saw the sea. As she stood facing that vast expanse of water, Eris realized just how alone she was. Her mother was locked in a cage. Her father—the god of shadows—was imprisoned in a place she couldn’t get to. Safire was long gone—she hoped—and far away from here.
There was just Eris now.
But that was nothing new. There had always been just Eris. It was what she was best at: being alone.
Now, though, as the ground leveled out, as they marched her through the meadow and toward the cliffs, Eris found herself wondering how things might have been different. What would her life be like if the scrin had never burned? If she’d never had to run?
