“But it was Ten Polley from Bilgetown.”
“Even so. After we send Dev’s body to the Old Sand, I shall return to Bilgetown and sink her hard. I will find this Ten Polley, and I will quarter him and hang his pieces from theTouchstone’syards. I will scour the wreckage of that pathetic barge city and drown every survivor I find. Every man, woman, and child, until Bilgetown is nothing more than a footnote in the history.”
The little girl with the big eyes. Her doll stashed beneath my bunk.
“But that will not stop the war or bring Devanhan Fahr back, will it?” he asked.
I gulped the wine again. I prayed he didn’t see my hand tremble.
He leaned back and cast his gaze out the port window, put his boots up on the desk. So lean, so lithe, so like a great cat. My skin burned at every movement of his body, and I fought to keep my eyes elsewhere.
“Your mother was a greenmage, yes?”
“She was.”
“And you have none of it?”
“I didn’t care much for my mother, so I didn’t attend her magik.”
“Your father?”
“I know nothing about him. He left before I was five.”
Forge, how long had I wanted to kill the captain? Now, I was drinking with him like an equal, discussing hopes and dreams and the heartache of life. But I had to be careful. He was stillRhi’Ahrin a world at war, in the cross-tides of everything, one swift away from treason.
“Tell me, then, Aro’el. What drew you to the service of magik?”
However, he was so unlike anything or anyone I’d ever known, and I found myself yearning to untangle him. But I knew that, in doing so, I might begin to untangle myself, and those were dangerous waters, indeed.
“I wanted to be a mirrormage,” I said finally.
He smiled, but it was gone before I could blink.
“Ah, yes,” he said. “You told me on the water.”
“I did,” I said. “I want to be a mirrormage, like you.”
“Why?”
I couldn’t speak; my throat had grown tight.Damnations, my chin was quivering, and my eyes stung like salt.
“All my life, I wanted to be a bird,” I choked out. “I wanted to fly away and never come back. I wanted to soar on the winds and laugh in the storms. I wanted to live on the sea and in the sky and not the land, never the land. And it’s still what I want. I never want to be with people ever, ever again.”
Hels’ hooks.Tears.
I wiped my cheeks, and this time, his smile was warm and sad.
“A mirrormage, it is, then. I will teach you, once this is over.”
He swirled the contents of his cup, stared into it for a long moment before raising it.
“To misery,” he said.
“To misery,” I said.
And we drank.
There was a pile of books on the floor beneath the window, and he raised a hand to hover over them. The pile toppled as one slid out, rising to meet his grasp. He moved around his desk, leaned against it in front of me, and held it out.
