He could swear he caught the ghost of a grin on Narron’s face. “No, sir.”
They rounded the bend to Godhallem’s main waterway. Outlined against the ink-black canvas of the night sky was the mast of his brig, seadragon sigil roaring silver in the moonlight.
When Ramson had instructed Narron to ensure that the ship was loaded, he’d requested that some specific items be packed. Supplies aside, this included an entire roost of seadoves. He’d also put in a special equipment request. “The blackstone armor and weapons are onboard?” he asked Narron, just to be sure.
“Aye, Captain.”
Ramson gave a grim nod. “Good. The magen in Cyrilia are…something else, altogether.”Especially,he thought,those whetted into weapons and cruelty by their mad monarch.He’d make sure his squad was briefed and fully trained to face Morganya’s Imperial Inquisitors—powerful Cyrilian Affinites trained to fight in her army.
Ramson’s squad stood waiting for him, shadows lined in silver against the river of the waterway. They clicked their heels together and saluted as he boarded. He inclined his head and gestured at Narron.
Ramson escorted Ardonn to the captain’s cabin. The scholar looked drained even from their brief walk across the Blue Fort just now; with a grateful exhale, he lay down on the bed and shut his eyes, his breathing whistling in the silence of the confined quarters.
“Thank you,” the man whispered hoarsely, “for taking a chance on me.”
Ramson looked down at the emaciated figure without pity. “I’m not taking a chance on you,” he said. “I’m giving you the chance to right just a few of the wrongs you’ve made in your life.”
He left and locked the door, then went to lean against the mizzenmast and watch his First Officer brief their squad on the mission. Narron was telling anyone with a morsel of reluctance to jump overboard now, before it was too late.
The boy would make a fine con man, someday.
One by one, Ramson’s men turned to him and pressed their fists to their chests.
An entire squad, following him to the ends of whatever this mission brought them. Twelve men on a wild-goose hunt.
Ramson kept his gaze on the horizon as the gangplank was pulled in and the anchor hauled. The sails bloomed, full-bellied in the wind, the sea began to move beneath them, and the clouds began to retreat. He remembered the feeling of standing at the shores of his kingdom after Ana had left, staring out at the waves that seemed to push and pull at the land in an endless rhythm, at a horizon where the sky reached for the sea in all eternity.
He could never live with himself if he simply stayed in Bregon and waited for Ana to die. No matter what their story would be, no matter how it would all end, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake of watching the shadow of her ship disappear over the skyline.
His heart was his compass.
He simply had to follow it.
Cool orange light across her eyelids, flickering tendrils of shadows. Cold air on her cheeks. And…pain.
Linn awoke to the scent of smoke.
She was trapped between the branches of a Kemeiran pine, draped like a piece of cloth. The pine needles jutted into her arms and legs, but besides a few scrapes on her cheeks, her skintight shirt and breeches that King Darias had gifted her as a uniform had absorbed most of the damage.
With a few wriggles, she extricated herself, swinging into a crouch to untangle her chi.
Only, a large branch had torn through it. The fabric bore a huge gash across its center, gaping like an open wound. Linn winced. Like her daggers, this chi had become an extension of herself. She’d kept it strapped to her person since Kaïs had gifted it to her when they’d escaped the Wailing Cliffs together. With it, she’d learned to fly again. With it, she’d found herself.
Without it, she felt…incomplete.
Linn freed the contraption from the tree anyway. Strapped it to her, tangled fabric and snapped wood and all. A part of itwas for practicality—she couldn’t risk leaving any signs that she’d been here—but for the most part, it was for sentimentality.
She’d lost all sense of time and direction from her fall, but it appeared as though an entire day had passed; the sun now slanted over the thick canopy and the breeze had cooled. Her leg, too, was hurting, the pain pulsing. Growing.
She needed to find shelter, and medicine, before nightfall.
Linn turned and began to limp in the direction of the smoke. It came in drifts with the wind, growing stronger, until at last, she found the source.
Against a twilit sky, a dark column of smoke wound into the clouds.
The forest parted before her to reveal a village. Through the thinning tangle of branches and leaves, Linn could make out the gray-shingled roofs, tiles ridged like the scales of a fish, curving at the ends. Clay walls flashed pale between the trees, yet as she approached, she saw that parts of the homes had been singed black.
Closing her eyes, Linn wound her Affinity through the forest and into the dirt roads of the village, between buildings that stood as no more than shadows to her wind.
