"We would snack," Avaneer says, to the horizon. "On souls, from time to time."
"You would level them."
"Level is a touch dramatic," Avaneer answers, plucking a loose thread from his lapel, examining it briefly, and releasing it to the wind. "Besides, it was not without purpose. Alarna refused to align. We were hoping that leaving our...leftovers in the surrounding villages would encourage them to open their wards. Use their lightcraft for the greater good. Motivate them, as it were." He brushes something invisible from his shoulder. "How was I to know they'd say fuck the world and hide behind their wards forevermore?"
"You know what happens," Teorin says, with the patience of a man who has moved past the point of genuine surprise andarrived somewhere considerably colder, "when you massacre entire villages without cleaning up your mess."
"Yes, yes," Avaneer says, with the serene acceptance of a man who has just been handed a bill he intends to dispute later but recognizes is technically valid. "The undead." He paused. "In my defense, I despise the smell of burning flesh. It lingers on everything. My coat, my hair—" he touches his hair briefly, as though the memory alone is offensive. "It took three weeks to get it out last time. I simply cannot be expected to clean up under those conditions."
"You massacred entire villages."
"And I looked impeccable doing it," Avaneer says. "One cannot have everything."
Teorin regards him for a long moment with the expression of a man who has known this particular person his entire life and has never once been surprised by him and is still, somehow, perpetually exhausted by him.
"You're always sloppy, Avaneer." His voice is flat. "Let us not forget the Tavern incident. In Veynar."
"I simply made a suggestion to my men?—"
"A command." Teorin does not look at him. "When you're a prince, it's a command."
Avaneer considers this. "Details," he says.
"It leveled a district."
"A small one. And besides, I hear the ale there was terrible. Perhaps it was all for the best."
Teorin says nothing, which is somehow worse than if he had said something.
"I do wish to return to Veynar soon, as it happens." Avaneer's tone shifts into something lighter, almost wistful. "Unofficially, of course." He rolls his eyes with the practiced languor of a man who has been waiting on a particular thing for an unreasonable length of time. "Father still hasn't planned the invasion." He says it the way one says the tailor still hasn't finished my coat. "So until he does, I suppose I'll have to make my own arrangements." A pause, and then something genuinely warm moves through his expression, the particular warmth of a man thinking about something he finds deeply, personally satisfying. "If for no other reason than to fuck with Sevrin. It does bring me so much joy."
Teorin says nothing, which in this case functions as acknowledgment.
Avaneer straightens, brushing a final piece of debris from his sleeve with two fingers. "Many people," he says, in a different tone now, lighter on the surface and less light beneath it, "are going to be very, very displeased with you regardless. The wards. The girl going through without you." A pause, precisely weighted. "Nox."
Something in Teorin's expression doesn't change. That is the tell. Not a flinch, not a reaction, just the specific stillness of a man choosing not to have one.
"I'm aware," he says.
"I, however," Avaneer continues, pleasantly, "find that I am having a wonderful time."
Teorin pushes off the rail and walks past him toward the prow, pulling his hood forward, his step evening out as whatever is happening beneath his coat finishes happening. By the time he reaches the prow he walks like himself again. Unhurried. Inevitable. The thing that Avaneer has spent a comfortable lifetime standing slightly behind, because it is a good place to be when something is about to happen to everything in front of it.
"Are we going after her?" Avaneer asks.
Teorin does not answer.
Avaneer does not care about the answer anyway. He is still disappointed about the lack of humans. He looks once more at the holes in the hull. At the sky above them, empty and grey. At the undead still left standing at the far rail, patient and still, all of them facing the same direction. Toward the wards. Toward what waits beyond them.
He thinks about the snow villages. About last season, and the particular untidiness of a good massacre improperly finished, and the smell of burning flesh that he refuses to tolerate, and the way these things have a habit of coming back around when left unattended.
He thinks about what came through the hull. The speed of it. The wrongness of it, the way it didn't fit inside anything he already knew, the way he had stood there for just a moment unable to name what he had seen.
He thinks about a wound that would have turned anyone else, closing on its own. One man standing on a ship full of the dead, waiting for a ride, unbothered.
He thinks about something red, there and gone in less than a blink, that he is still not entirely certain he saw at all.
He looks at the poor ruined ship one final time.
