Crack.
Niya bit her tongue. Blood pooled in her mouth as she forced her focus once again on the half-faded band on her wrist. She had found a way out.
She would be free.
Free from this ship.
Crack.
Free from any more pain the man behind her could cause.
Crack.
Pain she wondered if he enjoyed inflicting to hide his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Crying Queen sailed topside, leaving Esrom and entering waters much closer to the Valley of Giants. Despite the days of travel this saved, Alōs sat in his chambers unhinged.
He hadn’t felt like this in a very long while.
He hated it.
Alōs could always control his emotions. He allowed very little to get under his skin.
But now it was as if worms wriggled all around.
His gaze loomed over the silver sandglass on his desk, the grains filtering to fill the bottom more than the top. Alōs curled his hand into a fist, holding back the urge to swipe the bloody thing out of his view, to hear the satisfying crash of the glass shattering against his floor, sand spilling out, no longer counting down his failures.
Swiveling his chair around, Alōs looked out to the morning light bathing the azure sea beyond his windowpane. He was being stretched too thin. Too many things to command, to find, to fix, to forget, to hold in. Which role was he meant to play today?
Cold: Cold was the only solace he had, where he could escape within and keep still. Cold allowed him to think clearer. Be solid. Strong.
Though even he knew the problem with ice was how easily it broke under the right tool.
Niya seemed to be the pointed hammer, forged in heat, swinging down again and again.
And he had brought her aboard.
Alōs rubbed against the throb pounding along his temples.
Finding Niya in his parents’ bedchamber, so close to their lifeless bodies, his fragile brother by his side, had erupted an anger in Alōs he had never before felt. All in that room were the last bits of his past that kept light in his dark heart. And Niya had been witness.
He had felt raw and exposed standing there, her blue eyes pinned on him, triumphant smile on her lips. It was intolerable and something he had to quickly remedy.
Yet despite it all, he had not enjoyed carrying out the fire dancer’s sentencing as he might have suspected. Perhaps it was because she’d so willingly followed him back to the ship, both of them silent in their own thoughts. She hadn’t put up a fight, either, as her punishment had been voted upon by the crew, before she’d been turned to take her lashings. Such a powerful creature resigned to her fate. It felt . . . wrong. Even if she had brought it upon herself.
But Alōs had to do it. Had to satisfy his pirates. Had to follow the rules that he had set upon his ship. Those who disobeyed were punished. Alōs had killed the last pirate who’d been so foolish as to follow him in Esrom.
And though he had threatened to end Niya’s life, he truly did need her help.
Alōs let out a steadying breath as his magic stirred with his annoyance.
Niya was right. She held powers greater than any other of his crew and connections in the Thief Kingdom that could be extremely advantageous come the time Alōs required them. So there Alōs stood, finding himself in the unfortunate position of having to take any advantage he could to regain the other part of the Prism Stone.
He needed Niya’s willingness to aid him, not just her obedience. And with her possible shortened sentence, she had her incentive to do so.
But if Alōs was not of a mind to take Niya’s life for her breaking his laws, something of equal measure had needed to be carried out for his crew to not revolt. It was also the only way Niya could get back in her peers’ good graces and how he could hold his position of power. His pirates would have found their own punishment for her if Alōs had not, bringing chaos in the form of revenge onto his ship. Alōs could not have that. It was better he be the one in control than those who would not stop until she was sent to the Fade.
New crew members were always looked upon skeptically, but one who so quickly played them for fools was as good as dead.
His pirates had wanted blood, so blood was what he’d given them.
Alōs kept it to eight lashes, however, and none strong enough to do severe damage. His restraint while in his rage surprised even him. But just as he needed her help, he needed Niya healthy, not healing once they reached the Valley of Giants. He hoped she understood the lightness of her punishment.
His hands still vibrated from the memory of the whip as it had met its mark. Leather to flesh.
He shook his palms out.
He was changing. Again. And Alōs wasn’t sure it was in a way he desired.
Leaning back in his chair, Alōs listened to the slow trickle of the silver sandglass behind him.
He was growing tired. Tired of the chase, the scheming, the race to always be making up for his past. But most of all he was growing tired of cruelty.
And that was a dangerous problem.
He could not survive the life he’d built if he was not ruthless.
Even from birth Alōs had been required to be harder, cerebral rather than playful, for he had been meant to be king. He had to be capable of making decisions many could not. This had produced a certain amount of apathy in his blood from an early age. “To rule with respect,” his mother had told him, “one must place a kingdom above themselves, place the fate of many above the sentencing of one.”
But now his parents were dead. His younger brother was to be the new king of a homeland on the brink of exposure and collapse. Ariōn would never survive.
The problem with a civilization hiding for millennia under the lost gods’ protection was that it grew weak. Why build fortifications or learn to fight when it was not needed? Esrom had grown soft in its comfortable bubble under the sea.
The continuous sound of grains falling echoed loudly in his ears despite Alōs’s best efforts to ignore the intricately carved sandglass on his desk. Time lost. Hope lost.
The worst of it was that he was to blame for this race against time. Though he hadn’t realized the exact consequence of his actions then. He’d been merely a young boy desperately looking for a solution, a fix for an outcome he couldn’t bear—his younger brother’s death.
It was springtime in Esrom when Ariōn was born. A time filled with festivals and parties and music in the streets. The palace was abuzz with merriment at the news of the young prince, yet deep in the royal chambers, a somber mood lay hidden. Ariōn had been born too early, too frail, and would not take to his mother’s breast.
Alōs stood beside his father as they kept watch on the queen in her bed, the small bundle of the new prince in her arms. She sang a soothing lullaby to the babe. For two nights she did not stop even as the tune grew more haunting, sands slipping away. Alōs watched his younger brother’s brown skin grow pale. But it seemed Ariōn had been born with the queen’s strong heart, for on the third day he finally turned and latched on to suckle.
That was the first and only time Alōs would see his mother cry.
Yet despite Ariōn’s fragile beginning, he persevered. He grew from babe to child to young man, all while ignoring his quickly shortened breaths after the smallest of exertions. Nothing as trivial as fatigue would stop Ariōn from convincing Alōs to partake in every sort of mischief. Ariōn was able to laugh and joke and radiate a light stronger than his future could hold. And Alōs was deeply in love with him.