Page 20 of The Song of the Void

Rushing wind filled my ears as I plummeted towards the deck, whipping my hair in tiny stings against my face. I flailed to try to catch a handhold in the mast, a stray rope, something, anything⁠—

My hand brushed against the rough fabric of the mainsail, that vast sheet of white that propelled us forward with the help of the breeze. Purely desperate to keep myself alive and mostly intact, I shouted with effort and stabbed my saber into the sail. An awful ripping sound accompanied the gaping tear in the fabric as all my weight dragged the sword through the sail. But as I hoped, it slowed me down enough that when I slammed onto my side on the deck, instead of breaking all my bones, I only heard a tiny crack. Pain shot through the arm I landed on, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t broken or dislocated. It just hurt like Mourner Hell.

“Zephra!” Captain Larsel boomed, beelining towards me like a starved tiger shark. I scrambled to my feet, nursing my tender arm. My entire right side pulsed with an odd mix of numbness and pain. The captain’s face contorted as she turned her glare on me from the pieces of the sail that now flapped uselessly in the wind. “What was that? You just ruined our mainsail!”

“She didn’t have a choice, Captain. She would have broken her neck falling from the crow’s nest like that,” Gatelo said, snatching his saber away from me.

“What were you two fighting about?”

Reiven’s carefree voice floated from up above. “It was an honest duel, Vetti. Calm yourself.” He swung down from one of the rigging lines and alighted on the deck on his feet, far more gracefully than my crash landing.

Captain Larsel raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s ‘Captain’ to you, lad. If it was truly an honest duel, then you both are to blame for the damage to my ship. I’ve half a mind to throw you two in the hold until you get along.”

Reiven scoffed. Good to know that he wasn’t only an asshole to me. “We’re passengers, not crew members for you to punish, Captain.”

Lucky for Reiven, Ashkade chose that moment to poke his head out of the door that led belowdecks. If he hadn’t, Captain Larsel might have actually blown his bodyguard’s head off his shoulders with the double-barreled pistol she carried at her hip.

“Timebreaker!” she shouted. “Permission to punish these two idiots for destroying our mainsail with their foolishness? I say a minimum of three nights in the cell in the hold.”

“Uh…” Ash’s eyes darted between all of us as he tried to put together what had happened. “They’re probably sorry⁠—”

“I’m not,” Reiven said immediately.

“I’m only sorry I didn’t stab him in the dick.”

Ashkade rubbed his forehead like a tired grandfather, rather than the sixteen-year-old boy he was. I almost felt bad for giving him so much trouble. “What happened? I heard a massive thud.”

I jumped in with a colorful explanation of our fight, with Reiven interrupting occasionally to make a snarky comment.

“Rei, you coulda killed her, droppin’ her from that high!” Ash said, throwing his eyebrows up.

“I had a perfectly good grip on her until she slashed my arm.”

“Captain.” With a nod, Ash sealed our fates. “Throw ‘em in the hold.”

Reiven’s company would never get any better. We each claimed a corner of the cell in the depths of the ship and refused to look at or speak to one another.

I hummed the lullaby that had been driving Reiven to insanity as I nursed my tender wrist. At the very least, the minor sprain gave me something to focus on, aside from being stuck in an enclosed space with a man I despised. Aside from all the memories this situation dredged to the surface of my mind.

Darkness. Chains. Tears, pain, and smoke.

I blinked it all away and focused on the flame that flickered within the lantern on the wall far outside our cell. It sent just enough light scattering through the iron bars that I could breathe normally. The last time I had been held captive in the bowels of a ship, it had been nearly pitch-black.

Stop thinking about that, I ordered myself, running my finger along the grain of the wooden planks beneath me. This isn’t his ship.

Reiven didn’t comment on my song. In fact, he slept through it for a while, and soon, I had gotten a few hours of shuteye myself. But the moment he woke up, I had to bite my tongue to maintain our implicit pact not to speak to each other. The Human paced back and forth like a caged beast for a straight hour. His shadow darkened the space around me whenever he passed in front of the lantern, and I couldn’t help but tense every time.

At some point, he got bored with pacing and decided to work out to pass the time. He yanked his shirt up over his head and began doing pushups and then sit-ups on the dingy wooden floor, enveloping our tiny space with his musky scent. It was part of his daily routine. I just usually left the quarters we shared when he did it before.

Now I had no choice but to listen to his quiet grunts of exertion. I tried to ignore him and focus on the light of the lantern, or even the slight pain in my wrist, but his presence ground into my nerves until I snapped.

“You know you smell like smoked herbs all the time? It’s awful.”

The first thing either of us had said in almost a day.

He slowly turned from where he had been repeatedly punching the wooden wall, and leaned back against it as he stared at me. “Oh, good, I was hoping it would bother you.” He snatched his shirt off the ground and fiddled with it. The lantern light gave his eyes the appearance of smoldering coals and made his sweat-slicked skin glisten.

My gaze drew to his exposed stomach and chest—maybe it was because he had just been exercising, but his muscles were especially tight and pronounced. Of course, it made sense he’d keep himself in top form since he was the Timebreaker’s protector, but I wasn’t prepared to be impressed by his physique.