She was dressed like a man, like a sailor, a black-and-red captain’s sash across her front.
At first glance, he could tell she was from the borderlands, the coast where Arnes looked onto Vesk. She had the build of a northerner and the coloring of a local, her rich brown hair worn in two massive braids that coiled like a mane around her face. Her eyes were open, unblinking, but they looked ahead with an intensity that said she was still there, and thin lines of silver shone against her sea-tanned face.
The knife in her hand was slick with blood.
It didn’t appear to be hers.
A dozen warnings echoed in Rhy’s head—all of them in Kell’s voice—as he knelt beside her.
“What’s your name?” he asked in Arnesian.
Nothing.
“Captain?”
After several long seconds, the woman blinked, a slow, final gesture.
“Jasta,” she said, her voice hoarse, and then, as if the name had sparked something in her, she added, “He tried to drown me. My first mate, Rigar, tried to drag me into that whispering river.” She didn’t take her eyes off the ship. “So I killed him.”
“Are there any others on board?” he asked.
“Half of them are missing,” she said. “The others …” She trailed off, dark eyes dancing over the vessel.
Rhy touched her shoulder. “Can you stand?”
Jasta’s face drifted toward his. She frowned. “Has anyone told you that you look like the prince?”
Rhy smiled. “Once or twice.” He held out his hand and helped her to her feet.
VII
The sun had gone down, and Alucard Emery was trying to get drunk.
So far it wasn’t working, but he was determined to see it through. He’d even made a little game:
Every time his mind drifted to Anisa—her bare feet, her fevered skin, her small arms around his neck—he took a drink.
Every time he thought of Berras—his brother’s cutting tone, the hateful smile, the hands around his throat—he took a drink.
Every time his nightmares rose like bile, or his own screams echoed in his head, or he had to remember his sister’s empty eyes, her burning heart, he took a drink.
Every time he thought of Rhy’s fingers laced through his, of the prince’s voice telling him to hold on, hold on, hold on to me, he took a very, very long drink.
Across the room, Lila seemed to be playing her own game; his quiet thief was on her third glass. It took a great deal to shake Delilah Bard, that much he knew, but still, something had shaken her. He might never be able to read the secrets in her face, but he could tell she was keeping them. What had she seen beyond the palace walls? What demons had she faced? Were they strangers or friends?
Every time he asked a question Delilah Bard would never answer, he took a drink, until the pain and grief finally began to blur into something steady.
The room rocked around him, and Alucard Emery—the last surviving Emery—slumped back in the chair, fingering the inlaid wood, the fine gold trim.
How strange it was, to be here, in Rhy’s rooms. It had been strange enough when Rhy was stretched out on his bed, but then the details, the room, everything but Rhy himself, had gone out of focus. Now, Alucard took in the glittering curtains, the elegant floor, the vast bed, now made. All signs of struggle smoothed away.
Rhy’s amber gaze kept swinging toward him like a pendulum on a heavy rope.
He took another drink.
And then another, and another, in preparation for the ache of want and loss and memory washing over him, a small boat pitching miserably against the waves.
*
Hold on to me.
That’s what Rhy had said, when Alucard was burning from the inside out. When Rhy was lying there beside him in the ship’s cabin, hoping desperately that his hands could keep Alucard there, and whole and safe. Keep him from vanishing again, this time forever.
Now that Alucard was alive and more or less upright, Rhy couldn’t bring himself to look at his lover, and couldn’t bear to look away, so he ended up doing both and neither.
It had been so long since Rhy’d been able to study his face. Three summers. Three winters. Three years, and the prince’s heart still cracked along the lines Alucard had made.
They were in the conservatory, Rhy and Alucard and Lila.
The captain sat slumped in a tall-backed chair, silver scars and sapphire stud both winking in the light. A glass hung from one hand, and a fluffy white cat named Esa curled beneath his seat, and his eyes were open but far away.
Over at the sideboard, Lila was pouring herself another drink. (Was this her fourth? Rhy felt he wasn’t the one to judge.) However, she was pouring a little too liberally and spilled the last of Rhy’s summer wine onto his inlaid floor. There was a time when he would have cared about the stain, but it was gone, that life. It had fallen between the boards like a bit of jewelry, and now lay somewhere out of reach, vaguely remembered but easily forgotten.
“Steady, Bard.”
It was the first thing Alucard had said in an hour. Not that Rhy had been waiting.
The captain was pale, his thief ashen, and the prince himself was pacing, his armor cast off like a broken shell onto a corner chair.
By the end of the first day, they’d found twenty-four silvers. Most were being kept in the Rose Hall, treated by the priests. But there were more. He knew there were more. There had to be. Rhy wanted to keep looking, to carry the search into the night, but Maxim had refused. And worse, the remaining royal guards had put him under an unyielding watch.
And what troubled Rhy as much as his own confinement when there were souls still trapped in the city was the sight of the rot spreading through London. A blackness like ice on top of the street stones and splashed across the walls, a film that wasn’t a film at all, but a change. Rock and dirt and water all being swallowed up, replaced by something that wasn’t an element at all, a glossy, dark nothing, a presence and an absence.
He’d told Tieren, pointed out a lone spot at the courtyard’s edge, just outside their wards, where the void was spreading like frost. The old man’s face had gone pale.
“Magic and nature exist in balance,” he’d said, brushing fingers through the air above the pool of black. “This is what happens when that balance fails. When magic overwhelms nature.”
The world was decaying, he’d explained. Only instead of going soft, like felled branches on a forest floor, it was going hard, calcifying into something like stone that wasn’t stone at all.
“Would you stand still?” snapped Lila now, watching Rhy pace. “You’re making me dizzy.”
“I suspect,” said a voice from the door, “that’s the wine.”
Rhy turned, relieved to see his brother. “Kell,” he said, trying to summon something like humor as he tipped his glass at the four guards framing the door. “Is this what you feel like all the time?”
“Pretty much,” said Kell, lifting the drink from Lila’s hand and taking a long sip. Amazingly, she let him.
“How maddening,” said Rhy with a groan. And then, to the men, “Could you at least sit down? Or are you trying to look like coats of armor on my walls?”
They didn’t answer.
Kell returned the drink to Lila’s hand and then frowned as he noticed Alucard. His brother pointedly ignored the captain’s presence and poured himself a very large glass. “What are we drinking to?”
“The living,” said Rhy.
“The dead,” said Alucard and Lila at the same time.
“We’re being thorough,” added Rhy.
His attention swung back to Alucard, who was looking out at the night. Rhy realized he wasn’t the only one watching the captain. Lila had followed Alucard’s gaze to the glass.
“When you look at the fallen,” she said, “what do you see?”
Alucard squinted dully, the way he always had when he was trying to picture something. “Knots,” he said simply.
“Care to expand?” said Kell, who knew of the captain’s gift, and cared for it about as much as he cared for the rest of him.
“You wouldn’t understand,” murmured Alucard.
“Maybe if you chose the right words.”