Kai rolled onto his arm, smothering the flame beneath him even as fresh pain seared his side. He caught sight of Simon through the shimmering air, above the wall of flame that had parted them; theArabidae’sgreen-and-gold flag, now black and blinding orange on the deck. Simon clung to the bannister, a stricken expression tilting his brows. Kai struggled upright, a hand on his own knee; then faltered at the stretch of the skin on his arm, gritting out a yell through his teeth as his raw shoulder smacked the ground.
“I’ll get her,” Simon blurted, over-loud even with the roar and groan and crackle of the crumbling ship. Kai’s head snapped up at another mournful groan from the mast; what was left of it. He rolled again, biting down hard on his own pain and trembling as he got one knee beneath him, struggled halfway up.
But Simon was already a shadow in the stairwell, the gleam of his eyes catching the unforgiving light as he gave the mast a final wary glance.
“No,” Kai yelled. He skirted the crackling flag, arm raised like a visor against the scorch of it, eyes melting in his skull.
“I’ll find her, wait for us,” Simon yelled back, voice wavering like the heat on the air.
“Simon,stop!” Kai roared.
The boy was gone, not even his footsteps audible beneath the hiss and snap of the fire, and Kai did not wait for him to turn back. He darted around seeking a patch of untouched deck, a way forward, but the fire was everywhere. A growl slipped from him in awful harmony to the dying bellow of the mast, but it renewed something in him, made it easy to grit his teeth and brace himself, shove aside the crawling pain in his shoulder as he faced the flames and—
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
A thick arm seized him around the middle, and Kai was momentarily stunned, too caught off guard to fight back as he was dragged away from the flame. Rage soared in his belly, and he wrenched the arm back, spinning to shove its owner away.
“They’re down there, they’re still down there—”
Pike did not waste time arguing, but immediately seized two handfuls of his shirt and tried, again, to haul Kai back toward the ship’s edge. He grappled for Pike’s arm, but the remnants of his sleeve went taut under the sailor’s grasp, and Kai stumbled under the sudden burst of pain, swallowing a scream and a lungful of hot air.
“Whoever’s down there is not coming up again,” Pike grunted, words barely audible beneath his struggle with Kai’s weight. “We’ll be lucky ifweget off this ship.”
“Get off,” he roared, but Pike only hooked an arm around his middle and pulled.
And without his bidding, Kai felt his body react to the sloughing of his blistered flesh. React, too, to the tightening of his swollen lungs with every passing moment that he didn’t find Simon and Eda. Kai did not decide to hit him; it just happened.
The impulse snapped through his spine, exploded through his unharmed shoulder, his whole arm cocking back, full weight thrown into the blow that sent his knuckles ploughing into Pike’s face. The sailor stumbled, dropped, and the whole deck shuddered. The mast gave one last crackling wail—
—and collapsed in a graceful sweep of raging, orange light.
Kai had no knowledge of having fallen, and yet here he was on the deck, blinking up at the dulled stars through a soot-pepperedsmog. Angry light pulsed in his periphery. The distant roar in his ears might have been the fiery tides of the Underking himself.
This time, when Pike’s thick-fingered hands hauled him upright, he did not fight. He let the sailor drag him away. But not without one last glance at the burning mast, where it now lay, thick with impenetrable, ravenous flame—
Smothering the mouth of the lower stairway.
Chapter Twenty-One
Gerard
When Doran had come knocking for his lunch and complained about the watery stew, Marie told him there were no potatoes.
“The Laune Market’s been near abandoned for weeks,” she’d grumbled. “You tell Her Majesty we’ll be scraping the back of the stores for peas and corn until the winds die down.”
He’d sneered at her.
“And what, exactly, do you think Her Majesty can do about the damned winds, old woman?”
They all knewpreciselywhat Avette could do about the winds, but Marie hadn’t risen to him.
“I’ve many mouths to feed,” she said tersely, “and most of them know how to saypleaseandthank you. Take your stew and go. You want potatoes, you can wait until the winds die down.”
The thing was, Ger was pretty sure theyhadpotatoes. There’d been a large sack of them in the storeroom just yesterday. He remembered, because later on, when Avette had frozen Bertha’s gulp of tea in her throat and watched her suffocate on the solid stream, Ger had closed his eyes and brought himself back to the kitchens. Back to where it was warm, and nobody was choking to death in front of him. To where he’d sat on a low wooden bench, chewing a fresh bread roll and watching Jack haul a bulking sack of muddy spuds across the tiles, shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the long lines of tension in his smooth forearms.
He’d smiled at him as he passed by.
So yes, Ger was fairly certain theydidhave potatoes. But when Doran finally fucked off, and Marie whipped a teatowel off a chopping board laden with what looked suspiciously like cubed spuds, he didn’t question it. Not even when she snatched his half-empty bowl out from under his nose and nudged him toward the stove.
