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She glared up at him, mouth half open. “You were there,” she said again, softer this time.
I don’t want to remember. I see it enough in my nightmares.But her eyes were impossible to deny. He felt his teeth grind together, bone on bone. The creak of wood and rope and lapping waves faded, until the wind on his face turned too hot, and all he could hear were screams. He tried not to hear them, tried to see the time before it all, when the world was different. When he was still a boy.
It was beginning to rain. The clouds pushed down above us. The temple doors were shut, everything quiet. They were all alive.
“I didn’t see it, but I could feel it,” he said, a blackness dropping over his vision as his eyes squeezed shut. There was a cool touch on his hand as Corayne brushed against his palm, her fingers small and deliberate. “Like lightning before it strikes.”
He remembered feeling the hairs on his arms stand up, the vibrations of that place unsettling his deepest core.Like the world was off balance.Her fingers tightened, and he felt it all again.
Andry forced his eyes open, half expecting to see Taristan before him, not the girl who would undo all his evils. There was only Corayne. This close, he could see a dusting of freckles on her nose, the shade of a long-worn tan over her cheeks. She looked like her father and uncle, and also nothing like them at all.
A gull called, breaking his concentration.
His hand twisted out of her grasp. “You think you can find the Spindle?” he said, putting his elbows to the rail. Shutting her out.
She pursed her lips and mirrored his movements, putting space between them. “Ehjer said they were in the Sarim, a coastal current.” Her tone shifted, hardening. It was easy to picture her on the deck of another ship, papers in hand, commanding crew and merchants. “Near Sarian’s Bay, if they were able to make it to Adira. And the monster had devoured sailors of the Golden Fleet.”
Andry sighed, rapping his knuckles against the wood. “How can you narrow that down? Ibal has the largest navy in the world.”
“Divided into fleets. The Crown Fleet patrols the Strait of the Ward and off Almasad, the Jewel Fleet the southern coast, where the gem mines operate. The Storm Fleet hunts raiders as far as the Glorysea. The Golden Fleet defends the Aljer, the Jaws of Ibal.” Her nails drummed the rail. “I’d bet every coin in the realm the Spindle is near there, in the water or close to it.”
The squire didn’t know the Ward as well as a pirate’s daughter, but his teachers had not neglected geography. Ibal was vast, a mighty kingdom of mountains, deserts, rivers, and coastlines, its cities like jewels in a shield of hammered gold. The grand port of Almasad was said to rival Ascal, and its capital, Qaliram, was even more magnificent, a wonder of monuments and palaces along the Ziron. Sacred horse herds moved through the landscape like storm clouds, moving from grassland to desert under the protection of Ibalet laws. There was the Great Sands, a sea of dunes like cresting waves, cut by canyons and salt flats. The countless oases, some large enough to support cities of their own, some little more than a few palm trees. And then the famed Ibalet coast, cliffs and gentle slopes above pale green waters, patrolled by the greatest navy in the realm. The Cors conquered ancient Ibal once, but at great cost, and their kings lived on, second only to the emperors of the north. His heartbeat quickened at the thought of seeing such things, such marvelous places, so far from the land he knew as home.
He shook his head. “That’s still a lot of ground to cover.”
To his surprise, Corayne shrugged. She looked delighted by the challenge, not daunted. “Like you said, we’ve got Valtik and now Charlie. Maybe they have something to say about that. If Taristan was able to track down an old Spindle, why can’t they?”
Andry looked over the experts in question. Both were currently occupied. Charlon crouched in the shadow of the sail, his tongue between his teeth, his eyeglass screwed in, as he painstakingly went over a piece of parchment with quill and ink. Documents of passage for when they arrived in Ibal. He looked like an overlarge toad, sweating in the shade. Surprising no one, Valtik had caught a daggerfish, striped and spiny. She deboned it bloodily on the deck, ignoring the glares of the crew. Most of the fish she ate raw, her smile red as she sang to herself, counting ribs.
Hardly a convincing sight.
The trade ship cut through the water on a sharp wind, prow breaking through undulating waves. Andry had never been out of sight of land before, and he sucked in a gasp of salt air. He expected to feel unnerved by the journey, but only hunger stirred in his belly.
He could feel Corayne’s eyes hard on his face, watching him instead of the sea. “Your mother will be in Aegironos by now,” she said, the wind in her hair again. “The ships bound for Kasa replenish supplies in the Gulf of Farers. Safe waves. A beautiful city.”
He tried to picture it. Tried to see his mother smiling beneath a warmer sun, her skin glowing again, even as she curled in her chair. He knew she wanted this, wanted to see home again, and had for years.She’s getting her wish,he told himself, trying to ease the shame beneath every inch of his body.And she’ll be safe.
“Have you been to the southern continent?” he asked.
Corayne shook her head, her lips in her teeth. “My mother has southern blood and so do I, but I’ve only heard stories of the world, from the people allowed to see it.”
“You’re seeing it now.”
She gave him a withering look. “I don’t think this counts, Trelland.”
“Maybe after.” He shrugged.Afterseemed so foolish and impossible, far beyond reach. They would probably die trying to save the realm, or in the doom that followed their failure. But the hope of after, distant as it was, felt like a balm on fevered skin. Andry leaned into it, chasing the sensation.
“I can’t exactly be a squire anymore.”Not for a queen trying to kill me.“Before he died, one of the Companions—a knight of Kasa, his name was Okran—he invited me to Benai.”Perhaps my last happy memory, before everything went to ashes.Andry wished he could step back, take Okran’s horse by the reins, drag him away from the temple and his doom. “He promised to show me the land of my mother, and her people.”
A stillness crossed Corayne’s face, only her eyes moving. Andry felt searched. She read him like her maps, connecting one point to another, reaching a conclusion he could not see.
All the same, he saw understanding. Corayne thirsted for the world more than he did. She knew what it was to look to the horizon and want.
“Maybe after,” she murmured. “Your mother can show you herself.”
The hope guttered in his chest, slipping through his fingers. It left behind an ache. Something told him that dream would never come to pass.
Andry did not sleep down below, where the air was tight and the sailors stank, belching and breaking wind all night. Only Charlon and Sigil could bear it, though perhaps the bounty hunter kept close should her fugitive take any opportunity to attempt escape. Even if they were in themiddle of the sea. Valtik was gods-knew-where, somehow able to disappear even on a trade galley.Probably hanging from a rope over the side, luring turtles for their shells.
