Page 23 of The Song of the Void

The slam of the door that led down to the brig jolted me awake.

It was morning, apparently, and Ashkade had come to see us. Well, to see me, and to let me out, like the wonderful lad he was. I threw my arms around him as soon as he locked the cell behind me, with Reiven still seething inside.

“Is it too early for me to say I love you, Ash? Because I think I might love you.” I stuck my tongue out at his bodyguard as Ash laughed.

“Oh, I’m not lettin’ you out just to be nice. I have some work for you, if you can sew. Figured we could repair the sail you ripped. They replaced it with the backup for now, but I told the captain it’d be a better punishment for you than bein’ down here. Build some character, y’know?”

No one ever said my stitches were pretty, but hey, they were functional. Besides, I’d do anything to get out of the hold, especially if it meant leaving Reiven behind to rot.

“Ashkade Taleus Synnex, let me out of here now,” he demanded, glaring like a wrongly accused murderer waiting for his end at the hangman’s noose. His arm shot between the metal bars to snatch the front of Ashkade’s vest, but our young companion merely gave him a calm smile.

“Sorry, you’re still in time out.” It pleased me to no end, seeing this frail teenager lay Reiven flat with his carefree words. He sniffed and wrinkled his nose when Reiven drew him closer to the bars with a growl. “Smells like a lemon farm in here, by the way.”

“What if she tries something on you while I’m down here?”

“I won’t try anything, Ash, I promise.” It had only been a half a day or so, but I was going to scream if I had to keep listening to the gentle slap of the waves against the hull without being able to see the ocean itself. Besides, the oppressive darkness of the hold was going to crush me if I stayed any longer. “I really don’t mind doing some hard labor to repay the captain for messing up her sail.”

As I thought he would, he wriggled out of his bodyguard’s grip and motioned for me to follow him. I blew Reiven a kiss behind Ashkade’s back as we left.

Ashkade’s room was a complete disaster, but maybe that’s just how genius teenagers live. The workbench he brought aboard seemed to have had more use than his bed. It was covered in books, tools, and mechanical pieces of who knew what, just like the table in his temporary lab in the capital.

He hurried to throw the rumpled clothing strewn about on his cot into a pile on the floor while I ogled the open chest of platinum and gold jewelry beside his workbench. That had to have been how he paid for everything. Just one of those rings or necklaces probably cost a fortune. Ashkade awkwardly picked up a well-kept pistol from where it had been hiding beneath some of his clothes and set it on his worktable.

Does he actually know how to use that?

A huge, clumsily folded piece of white canvas beside the worktable caught my eye—probably the sail we were supposed to repair. I grabbed it while Ash fished a sewing kit out of his maelstrom of tools. We sat together on his bed, and he patiently showed me the crisscross stitch necessary to ensure the ripped sail would hold together in the wind. He started on one end of the tear, and I on the other.

“You know, Rei isn’t that bad when you get to know him,” Ash said, stabbing his needle into the thick fabric. “He was a jerk to me too when we first met. One day he’s all, ‘Timebreaker, you better pay me good for having to put up with your harebrained ideas.’” I giggled as Ash tried to deepen his voice to imitate Reiven. “And the next, he’d say, ‘You know, you’re a good kid, Ash.’ At some point, he kinda stopped treatin’ me like his annoying teenage employer and more like a bro—uh…” He cut himself off and froze mid-stitch. I considered sneaking a peek at his face, but I focused on my next stitch, curious about what he would say. “Uh…friend. Yeah, he’s kinda like my best friend. ‘Cept I have to pay him to be my friend.”

I wouldn’t have expected such loneliness in the empty tone of the Timebreaker’s words. A pang of sadness struck through my heart when I finally glanced at his face. Pink flushed his freckled cheeks, and he stared at the floor, chewing on his lip.

Big sister. That’s the mask you wear around him. Put it to work, Zephra.

“Reiven seems to really care about you. I’m sure he’d still be your friend, even if you didn’t pay him.” I left my needle impaled into the thick canvas and set my hand on Ash’s thin shoulder. “And if he wouldn’t…I would. Honestly, I think you might be my favorite Human ever.”

He threw me a grin, a real, kind smile that warmed right through the ice and stone around my heart. “Me and my pretty green eyes?”

I laughed. “Yep. So…I take it you don’t have many friends?” I tried to ask gently, but his face still fell.

“Just kept to myself on my folks’ farm after they took me in. Spent more time with cows and chickens than people, y’know? Ma taught me to read and write, and I taught myself lots of other things, like how to fix stuff around the farm. Realized I was good with my hands and had the bright idea that I wanted to be a doctor.”

A doctor? He seemed like he’d make a good one.

“Then I got drafted.”

I stopped sewing. It didn’t feel right to not give him my full attention. The war between Humans and Druinns had raged for years, but it was just two summers ago that the Circle of Gold sent the decree for any boy twelve and older to be sent to the front lines. Everyone knew what they were: cannon fodder. Expendable lives that created a paper-thin wall between the real Human soldiers and the Druinn army. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to go from being a bright-eyed child on his parents’ farm to a frightened, not-quite-man on a battlefield.

Ash began to sew again, avoiding my eyes, but he continued in a somber voice. “Thought I’d be a goner in a day or two. But my hands are real steady. It didn’t matter if I was stitchin’ a cut or firin’ a gun. I still remember tryin’ to pretend like I wasn’t shaking at camp the day before we were ordered to march over the border, into enemy territory. Don’t know why they thought it was a good idea…But we marched as ordered, and everyone started to fall around me. I gave up, caught a bullet in my calf, but I ran like Mourner Hell. Didn’t realize I was runnin’ further into Terrakor until I stumbled across a Druinn civilian. I went to fire at her like some crazed idiot, but luckily, I passed out from blood loss first. She was real nice. She saved me…had to amputate my leg, though.”

My throat tightened. I tried to imagine Ash, a few years younger, with dirt and blood caked on his fair skin and clothes and golden hair, running in a forest that echoed with gunshots and screams of the dying. I silently continued to sew and listened to every word he said.

“She made this crutch for me. And we worked together to make me a new leg.” He rolled up his pants and showed me where from the knee down, his left leg was made of metal, shaped almost like the skeletal bone he was missing. A complicated-looking cog and strap system kept it attached to his stump.

“Wow, it’s amazing you made that.” I tried to brighten a little. “So, how did fourteen-year-old Ash solve a kind of magic no one else in the world understands?”

He nodded eagerly and grabbed some excess string from the spool, leaving me to finish the last few stitches in the middle of the sail. Ash weaved the string around his fingers until he proudly showed me a complex web stretched between both his hands.

What is he, part spider?