He stops.
The sound reaches him before he can place it, a pressure more than a noise, something that moves through the wood and up through the soles of his boots and into his chest in a way that does not feel like any power he has a name for. He looks down, instinctively, though there is nothing to see through the boards.
Then they come. They burst from below the waterline, erupting through the hull in two places at once, and they are moving so fast that Avaneer gets almost nothing. A shape, dark and vast, wider than it should be. The suggestion of something that is not wings and is not not wings either. A sound that is not a cry and is not silence. They hit the open air and they are already gone, climbing at a speed that feels like an insult to the concept of observation, swallowed by the grey sky before he can turn his head fully to follow them.
He stares at the place where they were.
The holes in the hull sit open and quiet, the water pushing gently through them, unbothered.
He stares at those too. Then he continues walking, because he is a prince and princes do not stand in the middle of wrecked ships staring at holes in the hull, and he finds Teorin at the aft railingwith one hand braced against it in a way that looks casual if you are not paying attention.
Avaneer is always paying attention.
He takes in the hood still drawn forward, the set of Teorin's shoulders, the particular quality of stillness he carries when he is waiting for something to finish happening inside him that he does not intend to discuss. And then Teorin turns at his approach, and for just a moment — a fraction of a moment, the length of a blink, less — his eyes are wrong. Something red moves through them, bright and total, there and then gone so quickly that Avaneer spends the next two seconds genuinely uncertain whether he saw it at all.
He keeps walking. He does not break his stride.
Teorin looks at him with eyes that are entirely, perfectly normal.
Avaneer looks back, pleasantly, and files the moment somewhere he will not examine until he is somewhere private and has had a drink.
There is a tear along Teorin's left side where something has opened him, the dark fabric of his coat pulled apart and the wound beneath it clotted rather than closed. His expression is the one he uses when he intends to communicate that nothing is wrong and would prefer not to be asked about it.
Avaneer looks at him. At the wound. At the deck around them, at the shape of the carnage, at the very specific and total absence of anyone else still standing.
"Cousin," he says pleasantly. "You look terrible."
"I look fine."
"You look like someone fed you through the hull of a ship." He pauses, glancing back the way he came, taking in the full scope of the destruction with fresh eyes now that he has something to compare it against. "When word reached me of the Gyarin attack I sent this ship ahead. Had a feeling you'd need it." He looks back at Teorin. Then at the deck. At the holes in the rail and the bodies and the general state of everything. "And look at the poor thing now."
Teorin says nothing.
"Not a single breathing human left on it either," Avaneer continues, with the mournful air of a man tallying two separate losses of equal weight. "Do you understand how far I sailed for this?"
"Half of this," Teorin says, "is your fault. Saving me was the least you could do."
Avaneer looks at him.
Then he looks at the wound again, more carefully this time. The tear in the coat. The depth of what sits beneath it, clotted and closing with a patience that has no business existing. He does a quiet, private calculation, the kind that requires no particular effort, just familiarity with what wounds do to things that are merely what they appear to be.
"That wound," he says, almost to himself, "would have turned anyone else."
Teorin says nothing.
"Straight to undead," Avaneer continues, conversationally. "No intermediate steps. Just—" he gestures vaguely at the bodies around them. "That."
"Are you finished?"
"I'm making an observation."
"Make fewer of them."
Avaneer looks away, obligingly, with the expression of a man who has filed the observation somewhere he intends to return to later at his leisure. Alongside, he notes privately, the other thing. The thing that had lasted less than a blink and may or may not have happened at all.
He decides, again, that he does not want to know.
"These undead came from the snow villages, Avaneer." Teorin's voice carries the particular flatness of a man who has been waiting to say this for longer than is comfortable. "The northern ones. Along the coast. Where you and your men used to massacre entire villages."
