Kingsbane

“While you were with Navi,” he said quietly, “I spent time in the city. I met a man named Arris in a tavern and paid him for passage aboard this ship. They’re bound for Meridian. I paid him a healthy sum, stolen from the kings’ treasury. I know, I shouldn’t have. But, God help me, I couldn’t bear to stay there, watching you lose yourself to Simon’s plans. Those castings… El, he wanted to fight a war with you as his primary weapon. I can’t think that’s the destiny you truly wanted for yourself.”

She listened to him until she couldn’t any longer. Her fury bubbled up, allowing her to speak.

“And Remy?” she managed, her words slow and full of effort. She estimated she had to endure another two hours of the black lily’s worst effects, and until then, she would remain inert and cottonmouthed.

Harkan paused. He had found them a quiet corner of the hold—a ratty canvas hammock, a fairly clean patch of floor. He had covered her bandaged hands, her castings, with his own gloves.

“I didn’t want to leave him,” he replied at last, his voice as thick as her mind felt. “You know I didn’t. But if it was a choice between going to find him and losing our chance of escaping, or getting you out of there safely… El, I couldn’t miss the moment. I had to act.”

“You didn’t.” She tried to glare at him, livid that her eyes insisted on closing against her will. “You didn’t have to do any of this. It was my choice to stay or go. You took that from me.”

He shook his head, dragged a hand over his mouth. “Please, try to understand—”

“No. I hate you. Understand that. Do you hear me? You’ve lost me. You have me here now because you’re selfish, and a coward, but actually you’ve lost me forever. Know that. Live with it.”

Forcing out those words required all the voice she had left. Eyes burning from tears, from the drug, from the battle-ash peppering the skies, she sank onto the hammock upon which Harkan had situated her and fell into a throbbing black sleep.

• • •

The Sea of Bones was calm—so the captain insisted, anyway—but Eliana was unused to traveling on ships and spent their first two days aboard the Streganna curled up on her hammock, miserable and sick with anger. A pail, one of many, sat on the floor below her; she used it often.

Harkan was not much better, which was a small comfort.

Now that the effects of the black lily had worn off, Eliana was able to observe their surroundings. The hammocks in the ship’s hold were strung up close to one another, ropes bolted to the rafters. She had counted at least seventy hammocks throughout the main hold, and not everyone had managed to claim one. The damp air quickly grew unpleasantly musky. But though the ship was small, it seemed clean enough, and the hammocks were large and sturdy.

Large enough, in fact, for Harkan to climb inside and join her.

He had been pacing the hold, convinced that movement and talking to their fellow travelers would distract him from his nausea—and perhaps supposing that allowing Eliana space would diminish her anger.

But at last he gave up and climbed quietly into her hammock. They had nothing left in their bellies, and though she was so furious with him she couldn’t look him in the face, she was too sick to shun him altogether. He was a body, as clammy as her own but solid and familiar, so she clung to him reluctantly, the ship rocking them. Even familiar sounds seemed new and strange within the walls of the Streganna’s hull—babies crying, the low murmur of conversation, laughter and the slap of cards, a distant sizzle of cooking meat from the galley.

Eliana groaned into Harkan’s hair. “That anyone could think of eating.”

“Please don’t vomit on me,” he said.

“You’d deserve it.” She wanted to say so much more than that. She wanted to rise from the hammock and abandon him, stay as far away from him as possible until they made port in Meridian, and then leave him behind forever.

But that distance would have been a mercy, for both of them—and neither of them deserved respite. He had taken her from Remy, from Simon, from the people who needed their help.

And she was terrified by the idea of facing whatever lay ahead alone, even if she had only him for company. Once, after such an egregious betrayal, she would have walked away from him and never looked back.

Once, she had existed without an Empire breathing down her neck, and with her hands free of cages she did not understand.

She slipped her right hand into her coat pocket, touched the cold metal lines of the box that held Zahra. The reminder of the wraith’s absence sharpened her anger. Her eyes grew hot at the thought of Zahra floating nearby, cooling her cheeks with the supple dark current of her hand.

“I wonder if Remy died after we abandoned him,” she said. “I wonder if he tried to find us, got separated from the others, and died with an Empire arrow through his gut.”

Harkan blew out a trembling breath. “El, don’t.”

“I wonder if he died alone, terrified, wondering why we’d left him.”

“Please don’t do this.”

“Fuck you, Harkan. I’ll do just as I please.” And then, as the boat pitched hard, her tears rose until she could hardly breathe. She swallowed against the sour tang of her upset stomach.

“I’ll never forgive you for this,” she said, her face pressed against his neck. An animal rage thrumming under her breastbone longed to tear into his flesh with her teeth, rip his throat from his body, let him bleed out and suffer as she feared Remy might have suffered, alone, in the fallen castle, without his sister there to protect him.

Instead she wept quietly against Harkan’s shirt, shrugged away his arm when he tried to comfort her, cursed him viciously every time he said her name. Though his voice was familiar, his body a welcome anchor on this tossing sea, it felt foreign to be so near him. She would never have thought him capable of doing what he had done. She would never have imagined him to be the kind of man to take her will from her, to direct her life as he saw fit rather than allow her to lead it herself, as was her right.

A terrible thought occurred to her: Had the war changed him? Had those horrible long weeks after they’d been separated in Orline done something irreparable to his character?

Or had she never really known him at all?

The feeling sat in her chest like a meal she could not digest. She did not try to dislodge it; she let it molder, barbed, between her ribs.

Sleep did not come easily after that.

• • •

She startled awake to find Harkan gone.

But someone else was watching her.

A child, standing very near in the dim light, dark eyes wide. Dark-brown skin beneath tight black curls.