“Release me!” she shouts, kicking at him.
“It’s not safe. It’s not safe,” he keeps saying in her ear. When they reach the nobles’ quarters and solid ground, she spins around and pins him to the wall.
“What. Is. Happening?” she growls.
“The bordweal. It does not like us,” Florin says.
“That’s impossible,” Cecilia says. She pushes away from him, dancing out of his reach, and darts back up the stairs, mercifully empty now that her cowardly court has fled below deck. Only the ship’s crew remains in the open. They shout instructions to each other, running here and there to the sails, the tiller, the anchor.
“Turn about!” the captain shouts. “Lower the anchor to hard turn!”
Cecilia’s gaze is drawn to the great dome of the bordweal. The steel grey has grown white, like the centre of a forge. It roils, with a sound that is part thunder, part predator. As she watches, the white flicks out a great fork of lightning. It hits the scoop where she had, only moments ago, been standing. The wood splinters, sending shards like daggers into the deck. One hits a man in front of Cecilia, stabbing into his back as he runs. He staggers against the balustrade, and does not move again.
Cecilia plucks the splinter from his body. It reminds her of a needle.
“It’s the queen!” the captain shouts at her, and it takes her a moment to understand that he does not mean her but Seymour. “She’s a traitor to Elben, and the bordweal knows it!”
Cecilia staggers towards him. “It is not her! This is some other power!”
“I’m telling you, it’s her! I want her thrown overboard, and that beast with her.”
He directs some of his crew to the hold to do just that, and Cecilia brandishes the wooden needle, still dripping with their crewmate’s blood. “I am telling you, imbecile, that it is not her. That’s not how the bordweal works, or how else would Elben bring political prisoners back to the Tower? How else would foreign diplomats enter?”
The captain pushes her wrist – and the dagger – away from his face. “It’s been years since you were here; things might have changed.”
His crew makes a run for the hold. Cecilia curses and slashes the captain’s face, once, twice, until he falls to the deck clutching bloodied eyes. She runs after the crew, but the captain isn’t the first to make the assumption that Seymour is at the root of this. Many in her court are already in the hold, banging on the cabin walls, shouting for her to be thrown out. They’re all foreigners. They grew up with the bordweal as a cautionary tale, not a real, practical defence that only acts against armies, not individual traitors.
“Get away from there!” Cecilia says, her voice carrying above the din. Those who understand not to cross her fall silent and back away. The crew, however, do not. They grab axes and rush at the locks on the two doors. Cecilia intercepts the one who is about to loose the panther, stepping in front of him and letting his momentum push him into the wooden stake. He drops his axe, and his body follows it. But Cecilia is too late to prevent the second axe. The metal cleaves with a spark and the door to Seymour’s cabin falls open.
Cecilia had half expected the room to be filled with the swirling light of the bordweal, or some such nonsense – the captain’s superstitions must have crept inside her head against her will. But no – Lady Seymour stands in the middle of the room, calm as a heifer. Some among Cecilia’s court charge forward, forgetting their queen’s orders, and lay hands on the woman. They drag her, unprotesting, from her cabin and push-pull her up the stairs to the deck, shoutingwitchandtraitor.
“You fools!” Cecilia shouts, brandishing the dagger, but her people dart out of her way, their need for immediate survival outweighing their fear of Cecilia. On deck, another lightning bolt shoots from the white centre of the bordweal, rending one of the sails in two and sending the halves crashing to the deck, aflame. In the commotion, Seymour’s captors release her. But instead of fleeing, Seymour walks steadily to the prow of the ship, as if communing with the storm. Cecilia follows her, as stealthily as she can manage. She needs Seymour alive, as an offering to Henry, leverage – Seymour and Cecilia’s silence in exchange for Brynd.
“I know you are there, Cecilia,” Seymour says over the fray. “The bordweal talks to me. It tells me you are come to capture me once more.”
“What do you mean, talks to you?” Cecilia says.
“I can barely hear it, but it is there. It has not used its voice for many hundreds of years.”
Cecilia is always hungry – hungry for food, for sex, for excitement – but she has never known the hunger that sweeps over her now. It is visceral, this desire to commune with something as ingrained in her identity as the bordweal. How dare this little creep of a girl take what should be Cecilia’s by royal birthright? She limps across the deck. There will be some kind of blood rite she can perform to make the woman’s power her own: spilling, smearing, drinking. Cernunnos would approve, Cernunnos would help, if she offered him blood.
But as she comes near, Seymour swirls round to face her. She is holding one hand out in front of her, palm up, and in that palm is a ball of bordweal light.
“Come no closer,” Seymour says.
“Or what?” Cecilia replies. Her hunger is making her reckless. More than that, Seymour is not wielding whatever power she has been granted with confidence. She holds her hand away from her, as though she is fearful of what it might do. If Cecilia had it, she would be standing tall. She steps closer. Seymour shakes her head, like a mother disappointed in her child.
“Do not mistake my caution for cowardice,” she says. She closes her palm over the divine power, squeezing it in her fist. Cecilia readies herself for some blast of pain, but nothing happens. She begins to laugh – at Seymour, but mostly at herself and her crew and court, for being taken in by Seymour’s tricks. She has no power. Maybe the bordweal is acting strangely, but this woman has nothing but a fool’s bag of japes. Cecilia could almost admire the audacity of it.
Seymour holds Cecilia’s gaze, her fist still closed.
Another lighting strike shoots from the bordweal and scatters sparks across the deck. Cecilia ducks to avoid them. At first, she thinks it is the sparks making the deck shake. Then she realises that something else is the source of the vibrations. Something deeper in the bowels of the vessel. Her laughter dies on her lips as she witnesses Seymour’s quiet triumph.
A brief silence follows the trembling, in which something clatters up the stairs. The panther, covered in splinters from its wooden cage, bounds into the open with powerful grace. Some fool must have released it, Cecilia tells herself. This cannot be Seymour’s doing.
The panther ignores the captain, sprawled on the boards, clutching his face and moaning, and turns its attention to Cecilia. The creature knows the woman who threatened it and its mistress. Cecilia turns her wooden dagger towards it. Another tremble shakes the boat, and the panther splays its paws like a colt, its advance halted. A shout comes up from below, and the cowards who had fled down now erupt upstairs.
“The ship is collapsing!” Florin shouts. He sees the panther and runs towards Cecilia. Perhaps he intends to perform some ridiculously noble sacrifice like placing himself between her and it, as if she would swoon at such a gesture. But he never reaches her. Like the molten mountain of Perfugi itself, the boards of the ship crackle, buckling up and in and out in a wave that flows up the side of the vessel and along the deck.
