It also meant Nathaniel had come to learn what seasickness was like, the opposite of the land sickness Tovanians experienced when away from the motion of their ship-cities. It meant his breakfast was plain, unsalted rice porridge, lacking the bits of dried fish, onion, and fried bread most everyone else had before them. It wasn’t what he was used to eating, but at least the ginger tea was soothing, even if it was a bit strong.
Akeheni picked up her spoon and ate a few bites of her steaming porridge before catching his eye. “You should still keep taking your potion.”
Nathaniel nodded, biting back a wince at the thought of the terrible-tasting medicine the ship-city’s onboard apothecary had given him. But it had quelled his nausea up until this morning, enough that his stomach no longer roiled when the ship-city sometimes did.
Of the many conversations happening around him, Nathaniel only understood the ones happening in Ashionen. Akeheni was kind enough to speak to him and some of the higher-ranked Ashion officers he traveled with in the trade tongue. Nathaniel wasn’t ever offended when he was excluded from strategy meetings, left to wander sections of the brightly painted ship-city with an escort. Akeheni might have agreed to take him on, but the vivisection scars on his chest still gave her people pause.
Even though he wasn’t privy to battle plans, Nathaniel still knew when maneuvers were underway. It was difficult to miss when the ship-city’s sirens suddenly punctured the early morning camaraderie, calling everyone to their stations.
Akeheni stood before anyone else, pushing her bowl into the bin sunk into the wood at the end of the table. Nathaniel hastily followed her actions, along with everyone else, until the bin was filled. Someone flipped the top panel back around and bolted it into place, ensuring that whatever happened in the next few hours, none of the flatware and cutlery would be pitched around the mess, creating a hazard.
Nathaniel lost sight of Akeheni in the initial rush of sailors exiting the mess, but the sailor assigned as his escort for the day appeared by his shoulder in seconds. Matiu flashed him a tight smile before speaking to him in the trade tongue. “Let’s get you back to quarters.”
Nathaniel nodded jerkily and let Matiu lead the way out of the mess. The small gas lamp above the door with its spinning mirror never stopped flashing; neither did the ones scattered down the corridor Nathaniel found himself in. He kept close to the wall like Matiu, letting Tovanians who clearly had places to be rush past him. The Ashionen officers who’d been out and about were doing the same, all of them knowing this wasn’t their ship, wasn’t where they could fight, and the best course of action any of them could do as passengers was to stay out of the way and be prepared to evacuate if need be.
Nathaniel, like the other Ashionens, had run through emergency procedures with the Tovanian crew since the moment they boarded. He knew the way back to his berth, the colors painted on the walls changing as Matiu turned down a different direction at a cross-corridor. While some walls held murals, those never went to the floor. The solid colors and integrated stripes helped show which direction on the ship one was in when all you had to navigate by was iron walls.
They were halfway there, if Nathaniel judged the paint correctly, when a searing pain wrenched itself from one side of his chest to the other in the space behind his ribs. He fell to his knees with a strangled cry, one hand going to his chest in a useless gesture. He gripped the fabric of his shirt since he couldn’t reach skin, cold creeping through his torso.
“What’s wrong?” Matiu asked.
Nathaniel could only mutely shake his head, trying to breathe when his ribs didn’t seem to want to expand around the clockwork metal heart that kept him on his road. It took time—long minutes, going by the increasingly frantic escalation of Matiu’s prodding, who was surely late to his station in the middle of an emergency—before Nathaniel could uncurl himself from the ball he’d sunk into.
Every muscle in his torso throbbed, bones aching, the weight of his clockwork metal heart heavy in a way he rarely noticed, thanks to the alchemy and magic Ksenia and her wardens had worked into him. But there, in the middle of a Tovanian ship-city, Nathaniel felt as if his heart was an anchor that could drown him.
Something wanted him to kill—that distant thought hovered at the very depths of his mind, cradled in a tangle of magic he knew Caris had helped to unstitch one note at a time from everything that made him a person. Ksenia had tied it all back, barricaded that foreign magic from all that he was with her own skill.
But pushing it aside didn’t mean it was gone, and Nathaniel could sense the gap between his own free will and that of theKlovod’s desire was as razor-thin as an emergency fence in the poison fields with revenants clawing for a way in.
And theKlovodwanted in.
Matiu helped him to his feet, keeping him upright. Nathaniel swayed there for a moment—thenlurchedwhen a distant, echoing boom from below shook its way through the framework of the ship-city. Matiu shoved him against the wall to brace them both. He grimaced, head tilting as the sirens abruptly changed tone to something Nathaniel couldn’t parse.
“What is it?” Nathanial asked.
“Depth charges were deployed, far too close to the hull. Whoever is on duty knows better than to deploy them like that.”
Nathaniel knew the ship-city had Tovanian magicians whose magic was tied closely to the sea. Their repertoire included spells that specialized in mapping the area beneath the waves surrounding a ship-city in search of underwater threats or leviathans during hunts. It was why Tovanian ship-cities were so effective at hunting submersibles. The magicians should have been able to warn the rest of the crew on duty of an incoming attack.
But they wouldn’t if any of them wererionetkas.
“Akeheni,” Nathaniel rasped. “I need to speak with her.”
Nathaniel couldn’t be sure that request came from him or whatever bits of theKlovod’s control was—hopefully—held at bay by warden interference.
Matiu shook his head. “She’ll be on the command deck and will have no time for you. I’m to get you back to your berth?—”
Nathaniel reached for the Tovanian, gripping his wrist with shaking fingers as crew ran past them. The sirens rang in his ear with a warning that seemed to rise and fall in time with the click of the gears in his clockwork metal heart. “TheKlovodis trying something. She needs to be warned.”
He knew theKlovodwasn’t a secret amongst the Tovanians. They’d accepted two treaties and a shared alliance based on the knowledge of foreign interference. While no one had solid proof, too many pieces placed Eimarille at the center of a web of machinations that had ruined so many lives. Nathaniel wouldn’t let the ship-city sink because of her.
Matiu gripped him by the arm and turned them back the way they’d come. Nathaniel let himself be hauled forward on shaky legs until he could get his feet back under him, the pain in his chest settling into something like a metronome his breath kept time to.
It took time to get to the captain’s deck, the location high up top with the best view of the horizon on the ship-city. Nathaniel hadn’t been allowed up on his initial tour of the ship-city, but Tai got him through the checkpoints and pushed him through the open doorway being guarded by a crew member outfitted with both a pistol and a heavy blade.
The captain’s deck was a space ringed by glass windows that circled the entire room, giving an undisrupted view of the horizon. Nathaniel could see for miles, nothing but waves beyond them and no other ship breaking up the brightening vista. His attention was jerked back to the chaotic scene they’d stepped into, with officers shouting at each other and into radios, people entering and leaving with a clear destination in mind. He couldn’t understand anything that anyone was saying, but Matiu didn’t hesitate to lead him through the fray.
Sailors manned a section of the command area that looked to be some type of analytical machine. They faced the prow of the ship-city, the lower outside decking in view, along with the heavy guns that were being cranked into position. Nathaniel only got a glimpse of what the sailors were working on before Matiu pushed him toward the area behind them, where officers huddled around a navigation table filled with gridded maps. Amidst the group of Tovanians listening to Akeheni’s orders, one person stood out.
