Page 107 of The Space Between Stars

Except for Gelhard, who proved particularly sour about it—but Gelhard was sour about everything.

Drogus folded his hands behind his back, his smile easy. “Aha. And yet, you have chosen the slow route to the Rollard Isles.” Fankalo loved the sound of his voice. His accent made his words thick like taffy.

“Using my Luck to find the currents and using my Luck to stick to them have inherently different outcomes.” If they followed the current, she didn’t say, it would end in certain death.

Drogus hummed low. He was a good tutor, better than most. Helpful, but not patronizing.

“Thacklore told my father you commanded your own ship in the Chori Navy during the Gray Period.”

“I commanded a fleet.” It was a gentle correction, not a boast.

“Did you know Captain Kotar Avelius of the Green Wing?”

“No,” he chuckled. “I was not what you would consider ‘friendly’ with Nelfinden command. Quite the opposite. But years can change many things. Why do you ask?”

“It’s just someone I’m looking for.” It had been a shot in the dark, but no one she’d asked seemed to have heard of Kotar Avelius. “So if you were an enemy of the Nelfinden state, shouldn’t you be in prison?”

“There is a deeper story to that. But the short of it is that I was forsaken and left behind on Nelfinden soil—shamed—after our loss at the battle at Casowhatan. I evaded capture. But only by taking refuge in Chira’na’s encampments, where I faced many years of struggle before Thacklore recovered me.”

It was a vague answer. Then again, it had been a sensitive question. The refugee camps outside of Chira’na were horrifying. Worse than the Kaidechi slums. She would have rather faced execution than be forced to stay there.

“How many years?”

“More than ten.”

The response shocked her into silence. The captain of a fleet, with more power than most men ever dreamed of, had spent her entire lifetime squatting in the dirt, begging for notes. How could a person fall so far? How could he stand it?

“So long… Have you ever thought about what you might have done with those years?” She regretted the question the moment she asked.

Drogus’s eyes were as cold as the sea, but they didn’t hold a drop of anger. “No sense in waging war with time. There is only hope in making peace with it, no matter what it robs of you. I am indebted to Alberous Keane. Where most Nelfinden captains would not have taken on Chori help, he did. A second chance is a blessing seldom received.”

Drogus’s expertise had certainly proved to be worth any risk. It wasn’t as though the Rapture operated within the laws of the Nelfinden state anyway.

“I’m glad you’re here.”

A smile cracked his gray-streaked beard. “As am I. I once had a daughter like you. Eager to learn and smarter than she had any right to be.”

Fankalo shifted, stomach squirming, and considered correcting him.

Drogus’s arms folded behind his back. “Ah. They have informed me of this. But your disguise won’t pass much longer. What are you going to do?”

“What I’ve always done.”

He hummed in a way that said he didn’t fully agree. “Take a tip from me. Men would die for their captain and their king. But a queen, without a king”—he squinted one eye at her conspiratorially—“that is special. There is no telling the lengths a man will go for her. If given the opportunity, be a queen.”

Something bubbled inside her that stretched from her belly to the tips of her cropped curls. Her arms steadied on the wheel, the warm breeze feathered her skin, and everything was delightfully perfect as she watched Killari dive off the starboard side to seize a fish.

Then a sudden pain blossomed across her backside from a kick as violent as it was well-placed.

“Fuck you!” Mitek screamed at her before running away. His maniacal laughter trailed him as he dropped through the hatch below deck with the reckless abandon of a stone thrown into the sea.

Fankalo sucked in through her teeth and rubbed at her stinging buttocks. Fates behave, that was the second time that day.

“What did you do to him?” Drogus asked, bushy, peppered brows pulled into a line.

Fankalo laughed. “Nothing. That’s just how ‘fuck you’ works.”

He squinted. “I don’t understand.”