Only then did the blade leave my throat.
I took my first full breath in hours, days perhaps. My knees buckled, and I gripped the boat’s side, heaving.
Heavy feet stomped across the deck in my direction, and I threw my arm over my face. But when I opened my eyes, it was only Patrick.
Patrick taking his father by the collar of his coat and dragging him back. Patrick throwing his fist with full force into his father’s nose.
“Fuck!” John shouted, clutching his face with both hands and toppling. The boat tipped. John shook his head and groaned. “God almighty. Right jab’s improved, eh?”
Patrick’s chest heaved with such ferocity I thought he might attack again. Instead, he scrubbed his own face, pointed a calloused finger in John’s, and said, “Touch her again, and I’ll forgo myself a father.”
John raised his hands, abandoning the flow of blood from his nose. “Lord. Easy, son. I weren’t gonna hurt her, and you know it.”
Patrick advanced again, only this time, he did not box him, he simply leaned to push his face as close to his father’s as he could come. “Not anotherhand on her,” he said clearly, deep enough that it reverberated in my own chest. He thrust a finger at me and turned to address Theo and his father both. “Not a single fuckin’ hand on her, or I’ll cut it off.”
He breathed like a steam engine, and he crouched there on the deck, a hand dragging over his face, every muscle in his body rolling beneath the surface.
I silently begged him to look at me. To say something.
But he only growled a curse, stood, and retreated down into the cabin of the boat.
The door slammed against its frame.
“Lord,” John said once more, only this time with a sort of foreboding. His eyes moved from the door to me, as though I held a grenade or a loaded revolver. He sighed. “Tore his heart out, I take it?”
My throat closed over.
He grunted in understanding. “The pretty ones always do.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEENNINA
Traveling out of Belavere City via stolen narrow boat was treacherous.
First was the regularity with which we passed other boats, their hulls gliding within inches of ours, the passengers aboard staring out the windows or from the stern. It forced Patrick, Theo, and me to stay below, where we drew the curtains and hoped John (who had quickly decrypted the coal engine’s mechanisms and taken the helm) could guide us in the right direction.
In the city, water Charmers turned the currents of the canals and left Crafters to steer the tillers without steam chests coughing soot into the air, but outside the city’s network, the drivers were left to paddle or shovel coal, sputtering to their destinations unaided by magic.
John Colson sat out there in broad daylight, wearing his bowler hat and whistling, hardly the man I’d envisioned him being. I’d imagined a man much like Patrick. Contemplative, watchful, meticulous. But John seemed closer to Gunner in demeanor. There was gravel in his voice, and he carried himself with violence. Like Donny, he spoke unchecked. He was, in every part of his appearance, Crafter-hewn. Tall and broad shouldered, like Patrick. His face heavily lined and bearded. He did not look out of place as he moved coal from bin to chest, picking dry blood from his whiskers.
The cabin of the narrow boat was filled with soft bench seats lining the walls from one end to the other, a tiny aisle down the middle. The cushions,while finely embroidered, smelled damp, and with the windows closed, I soon felt mildew in my hair, spores colonising my nostrils.
I peered out of a hole in the threadbare curtains as yet another narrow boat passed by, and for a moment, a child stared out of his own porthole and met my eye, his forehead wrinkling against the glass.
And then the boat was gone. My view was replaced with the brown water of the black-bricked canal, grass and ravenous shrubbery barricading the entire length of it.
“We should be skirting around Gilmore soon,” Theo murmured, his voice unsure, as though it might offend.
And it did. The three of us hadn’t uttered a single word to one another since leaving the deck and hiding below like mice. Patrick’s knuckles were bleeding. Theo could make eye contact with no one.
I felt shell-shocked, like my bones hadn’t yet settled back in place. My eyes begged to close. My ears rang in a soothing way, my nervous system seeking to numb itself.
Across from me, his knees careful not to glance mine, sat Patrick, his head in his hands. He, too, did not look my way.
All that calamity. Now nothing except damp, uncomfortable silence.
Theo cleared his throat. “Does—do you think your father knows the way?” His eyes swept the window at the rear, where John’s legs could be seen before the tiller. Patrick’s father sang in low tones that floated down into the cabin.
“The way to what?” I asked, my voice odd and hollow.
