Berras glared out between the bars. The anger rolled off him in waves. Once, they would have crashed over Alucard, too. Would have pinned him down, and drowned him. Now, he simply stepped back, out of its reach.
“Alucard,” growled Berras as he turned, and left.
“Alucard!” His brother’s voice clawed at the air, but came no closer as he climbed the stairs, out of the dungeon and the darkness, and up, up, up, to the light.
III
SOMEWHERE AT SEA
The Grey Barron sliced its way through the open water.
Its captain stood at the prow, black coat billowing like a pirate flag, her eyes—one brown, the other black—turned to the bare horizon.
Now and then Lila’s fingers drifted to the ring she wore on her right hand, one thumb running absently over the ship carved into its scorched black surface. The owner of its twin was back in London, but she knew that if she called Kell, he would come. And for the first time in seven years, he could cross the distance between them, no matter how great, and it would cost him nothing but a drop of blood and a whispered spell.
The night before she’d left, they’d lain in bed, and Lila had run her hand across his brow, and down his cheeks, trying to smooth each and every line the pain had carved in and out of Kell Maresh, until he had taken her wrist, and pinned her to the bed, Kay glinting like mischief in his eyes, as he convinced her not every change needed to be erased.
Now, Lila Bard rapped her fingers on the rail of her ship. Waves crashed up against the hull, spraying a cool mist that seemed to curl around her as she scanned the line where sea met sky, searching for the Ferase Stras.
After all, she had a parcel to deliver.
* * *
At the back of the ship, Tes folded her arms on the wooden rail, and watched the water ripple in the Barron’s wake. She’d sewn a pocket on the outside of her coat, and Vares poked out from the top flap, his small head bobbing, wings pinned down over her heart. Now and then, when the breeze picked up, the dead bird nipped his beak at the buttons and fluttered, as if he was flying.
She already missed London.
Missed her shop in the shal, and the dumplings she got from the market stall on Heras Vas, and Nero, to whom there’d been no chance to say goodbye. It had been two days since the crimson glow of the Isle vanished from the water beneath the ship, replaced by tendrils of ordinary light. More than a day since she’d seen land.
Not just any land, but Hanas.
She’d known it, of course, the lines of the cliffs she’d climbed when she was young standing out like a jagged stitch on the horizon.
She imagined her father preening over the rare objects in his shop.
Imagined Serival standing on the docks, the wind tugging at her plaited hair, one hand lifted to shield her eyes as they scanned the water for something of worth. For Tesali.
Where are you, little rabbit?
She’d held her breath as the ship sailed on, and the cliffs shrank from sight.
That first night on the Barron, when the hull rocked her to sleep, Tes had dreamed of another life. One where she’d asked to stay on Elrick’s boat, and the two of them had sailed away from London the same day they’d docked. One where she’d spent the last three years skimming from port to port, fixing any trinkets that came their way, and nothing bad ever happened.
That’s how, even before she woke up, she knew it was a dream.
The ship began to slow, the wind falling out of the sails, and Vares twitched, a small restless spasm of his bone wings.
“It’ll be all right,” Tes told the dead owl as she pushed off the rail and made her way to the front of the Barron. In her brief time aboard, she’d mended the spell in Stross’s watch, and added a hidden compartment to Vasry’s trunk, and tweaked Raya’s galley kettle so its water was always hot. She kept her hands busy, and tried to forget that she wasn’t there by choice. That she was, in fact, Lila Bard’s prisoner aboard this ship.
Soon enough, her future cell came into sight.
The Ferase Stras rose out of nothing, looking less like a vessel fit for open water and more like a stack of parts, as if several smaller boats had been broken up, and then pieced together, level upon level, a tapestry of wood, and cloth, and spell.
Tes had heard stories about the floating market.
Some said the Ferase Stras was the blackest market in the world, others that it was not a market at all, but a vault, housing the world’s most wanted and forbidden magic. Heard that even if you were invited aboard the ship, there were rooms you’d never be allowed to enter, things that weren’t for sale, to any bidder. She’d heard that the captain was a hundred, three hundred, five hundred years old, that she took payment not in coin, but life. Heard that the floating market was a myth, and that it was very real, but impossible to find without the right map.
She’d heard, too, that the Ferase Stras could not be robbed, though that was obviously a lie, since according to Lila Bard, the persalis had been housed there, safe until it wasn’t.
Still, as the ship drew near, and the lines of magic glimmered in Tes’s sight, she wondered what else about the Ferase Stras was false. And what was true.
She was about to find out.
The Grey Barron pulled up beside the market, drifting close until there was only a stride between the rail of one and the covered awning over the other, a threshold marked by a single wooden door. Lila leapt nimbly across the gap, and gestured for Tes to follow.
Vares clacked his beak. Tes’s heart quickened. She fought the urge to back away. They had told her she could not stay in London. Told her it wasn’t safe. Not until the Hand was gone for sure. It was too dangerous, they said, but Tes had a feeling they meant her. She was too dangerous. Her power wasn’t just a gift, or a curse, it was a weapon, one that could do unspeakable things if it fell into the wrong hands.
The king said she would be safe here.
Tes tried to believe him.
Lila Bard cleared her throat, and gave her a look that said she would be getting onto the Ferase Stras that day, one way or another. Her silver threads twitched in the air, and Tes felt an invisible hand against her back, warning her to move. She swallowed, and stepped onto the threshold.
Lila knocked, and a few moments later, the door opened, revealing a tall and handsome man, broad-shouldered and dark-skinned and dressed all in white. His magic was a tendril of amber light around his shoulders.
“Back so soon?” he asked Lila.
“What can I say, Katros? I’m good at my job.”
His brows went up. “So you have the persalis?”
“Well. Not that good.” Lila gripped Tes’s shoulder. “But I don’t come empty-handed.”
He looked from the Antari to Tes and back again. “Well,” he said. “This should be interesting.”
He led them through the door, into the cabin, which turned out to be an office, carefully treading the line between full and cluttered. Tes’s eyes took in everything—cabinets full of objects that might have passed for trinkets if she couldn’t see the complex spellwork threaded through them. A massive desk sat in the center of the room, behind which sat a well-worn chair, and a large black sphere in a gold stand, its threads an eerie, warning shade.
Tes’s fingers twitched, and she felt herself drifting forward to examine it closer when Lila grabbed her arm.
“This way,” said Katros, leading them out of the cabin, and down a flight of steps, into the maze that was the floating market. It reminded Tes of her father’s shop, the way there was always something to look at, and always the promise of more around the corner, or down the hall. Lila’s hand remained firmly on Tes’s sleeve as she steered her past curtains and ladders and doors until they reached the main deck, where another man, younger, leaner, but close enough in face he must have been related, stood over a table, inking a map with a minuscule brush, his white sleeves tied out of the way.
And there, sitting on a chair in the sun, a grey sack on the boards beside her, was Maris Patrol. The captain of the floating market.