Ree waved his branches in the air. “The city is onfire. You’reflammable.”
“Oh! You have a new friend!” Dax said. “Hello.”
“Come with us,” Marin coaxed. “We’ll bring you back as soon as it’s safe. Just… let’s go, okay? You need to come with us.” She added, “Perri won’t leave without you.”I won’t either.It was sweet how he trusted his friends or fate or whatever to keep him safe. She’d rather he trust a sturdy boat and a strong wind.
Perri emphasized that with a trill.
One of the coiffed men beside Dax put his hand on his arm. “Daxicend, you should take their offer. Get yourself to safety.”
Dax frowned at him. “If it’s so dangerous, then you need to escape too. What kind of friend would I be if I just saved my own hide? No, if you’re staying—”
Ugh, this is infuriating.Didn’t he have any sense of self-preservation? She didn’t have time to convince him and his three brain cells to recognize the danger. Marin cut in. “Just bring them.” She waved at the others on the dock. “Come on, people. Everyone into the boat.” She could drop them off at either Varsun or Iva—both were nearby, and neither island, as far as she knew, was on fire.
As Dax’s friends buzzed, whispering to one another, a woman with hair and eyes both as vibrantly gold as the sun stepped forward. “I have relatives on the island of Eventrid who would take us all in. Would you be able to bring us there?”
Marin ran through the map of islands in her mind. Eventrid wasn’t on her usual route, but she knew where it was. She calculated the cost of transport before she realized she couldn’t charge them for this. You didn’t charge for a rescue. Gritting her teeth, she said, “Yes. But only if we leave right now.”
“Do you have a wind-speaker in your crew?” the woman asked.
Did she think Marin was stowing a spare sorcerer onSilver? Did she look like she was dripping in jewels? “I have a wax myrtle and a sea serpent.”
“That’s not…”
“We can get you there,” Marin said.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ree puff up his leaves at the word “we.”
“Are you serious?” Dax asked his friend, then he looked from face to face. All of them wore matching grim, worried expressions—they knew what was happening outside their walls, even if Dax didn’t. “The fighting is under control. You told me—”
A sour-faced man with feathers instead of hair huffed loudly, just as exasperated as Marin felt. “Daxicend,” he said testily, “don’t you ever look out a window? Nothing is under control. The grandmasters just didn’t want you distracted with worry about things you couldn’t do anything about.” He turned to Marin. “Is there time for us to pack?”
“I have no idea if there’s any time left at all,” Marin said, but Dax looked so distressed that she relented. “I can give you five minutes. In five minutes, we leave with whoever is on board and whatever you want to bring. I’m not risking my crew or my boat because you want to fold all your outfits.”
Dax’s friends sprinted for the stairs.
“Five minutes!” she shouted after them. She leveled a look at Dax.A half-dozen emotions were flitting across his face. “Your friends clearly love you. As does my sea serpent.”
Dax flashed a grin at her. “And how about you?”
“I think you’re utterly lacking in common sense, but I still don’t want you dead. Grab whatever is essential and get back here.”
“You like me,” he announced.
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Marin felt herself grin back. “Go.”
He ran for the stairs.
It was eight minutes, and Marin counted every single second.
She wished she’d told them to come right now, never mind their belongings. She worried that the fire had spread, the fighting had spread, and the chaos had spread and would clog the canals. Pacing back and forth on the deck, Marin wondered who was winning. It was impossible to tell from the little slivers of catastrophe she’d seen. Certainly ordinary people were losing, whoever was victorious in the end, and they’d lose even more if the revolutionaries failed.
She thought of the body in the canal and then she made herselfnotthink about the body in the canal. The fact that it had been left to float… No, she wasn’t going to think about it. She was going to do her best to make sure that she, Dax, and whoever else wanted to come didn’t turn into the corpse in the canal. She’d take them wherever they wanted to go, and then she wasn’t coming back to Alyssium for a long, long time. Not until she was sure it was over, and maybe not even then, depending on who won.
If the revolutionariesdidn’twin… Well, she didn’t want to witness the empire’s retribution. She thought of Terlu and how she’d been transformed into a statue for breaking the law. Marin didn’t want to think about how the empire would punish those who rose against it. It would insist on extreme actions, in order to exert power, and so many people would suffer.
She didn’t understand how anyone could chose to fightfortheempire. It wasn’t a secret that the emperor and his ilk only cared about themselves. They saw other people as pawns or tools. The law against non-sorcerers using magic was only the most obvious and egregious example. Yes, there were incidents where non-sorcerers caused problems, but the damage that law did far outweighed the safety it provided. And there were dozens of other examples. Tax laws that only made the wealthy richer. Tariffs that only made everything more expensive, especially for the outer islands. Education that only favored the rich. Health laws that prioritized the connected. Those who were hungry, poor, far from the capital… they were ignored or, worse, seen as collateral. There was no reason for the wealthy to be as wealthy as they were. You didn’t need spires and palaces to be happy. You needed the sea and the wind and family who loved you.
The empire was built on fear and selfishness. It deserved to fall. But she had no way of knowing if it was falling or if it was triumphing. She was just a sailor who didn’t belong in the middle of this mess.
