It was late, and the Night Spire had sailed on from the picked-over bones of the Copper Thief. The thirteen pirates she hadn’t killed would be waking soon, only to find their captain dead and their ship sacked. It could be worse; their throats could have been slit along those inked blades. But Alucard preferred to let the pirates live, claiming that catch and release made the seas more interesting.
Her body was warm from wine and pleasant company, and as the ship swayed gently beneath her feet, the sea air wrapping around her shoulders, and the waves murmuring their song, that lullaby she’d wanted for so long, Lila realized she was happy.
A voice hissed in her ear.
Leave.
Lila recognized that voice, not from the sea, but from the streets of Grey London—it belonged to her, to the girl she’d been for so many years. Desperate, distrustful of anything that wasn’t hers, and hers alone.
Leave, it urged. But Lila didn’t want to.
And that scared her more than anything.
She shook her head and hummed the Sarows song as she reached her own cabin, the chords like a ward against trouble, even though she hadn’t found any aboard her own ship in months. Not that it was her ship, not exactly, not yet.
Her cabin was small—barely big enough for a cot and a trunk—but it was the only place on the ship where she could be truly alone, and the weight of her persona slid from her shoulders like a coat as she closed the door.
A single window interrupted the wooden boards of the far wall, moonlight reflecting against the ocean swells. She lifted a lantern from the trunk’s top and it lit in her hand with the same enchanted fire that filled Alucard’s hearth (the spell wasn’t hers, and neither was the magic). Hanging the light on a wall hook, she shucked her boots as well as her weapons, lining them up on the trunk, all save the knuckled knife, which she kept with her. Even though she now had a room of her own, she still slept with her back to the wall and the weapon on her knee, the way she had in the beginning. Old habits. She didn’t mind so much. She hadn’t had a good nights’ sleep in years. Life on the Grey London streets had taught her how to rest without ever really sleeping.
Beside her weapons sat the small box Kell had given her that day. It smelled like him, which was to say it smelled like Red London, like flowers and freshly turned soil, and every time she opened it some small part of her was relieved that the scent was still there. A tether to the city, and to him. She took it with her onto the cot, sitting cross-legged and setting the object on the stiff blanket before her knees. Lila was tired, but this had become part of her nightly ritual, and she knew she wouldn’t sleep well—if at all—until she did it.
The box was made of dark, notched wood and held shut by a small silver clasp. It was a fine thing, and she would have been able to sell it for a bit of coin, but Lila kept it close. Not out of sentimentality, she told herself—her silver pocket watch was the only thing she couldn’t bring herself to sell—but because it was useful.
She slid the silver clasp, and the game board fell open in front of her, the elements in their grooves—earth and air, fire and water and bone—waiting to be moved. Lila flexed her fingers. She knew that most people could only master a single element, maybe two, and that she, being of another London, shouldn’t be able to master any.
But Lila never let odds get in her way.
Besides, that old priest, Master Tieren, had told her that she had power somewhere in her bones. That it only needed to be nurtured.
Now she held her hands above either side of the drop of oil in its groove, palms in as if she could warm herself by it. She didn’t know the words to summon magic. Alucard insisted that she didn’t need to learn another tongue, that words were more for the user than the object, meant to help one focus, but without a proper spell, Lila felt silly. Nothing but a mad girl talking to herself in the dark. No, she needed something, and a poem, she had figured, was kind of like a spell. Or at least, it was more than just its words.
“Tyger Tyger, burning bright …” she murmured under her breath.
She didn’t know many poems—stealing didn’t lend itself to literary study—but she knew Blake by heart, thanks to her mother. Lila didn’t remember much of the woman, who was more than a decade dead, but she remembered this—nights drawn to sleep by Songs of Innocence and of Experience. The gentle cadence of her mother’s voice, rocking her like waves against a boat.
The words lulled Lila now, as they had back then, quieted the storm that rolled inside her head, and loosened the thief’s knot of tension in her chest.
“In the forests of the night …”
Lila’s palms warmed as she wove the poem through the air. She didn’t know if she was doing it right, if there was such a thing as right—if Kell were here, he would probably insist there was, and nag her until she did it, but Kell wasn’t here, and Lila figured there was more than one way to make a thing work.
“In what distant deeps or skies …”
Perhaps power had to be tended, like Tieren said, but not all things grew in gardens.
Plenty of plants grew wild.
And Lila had always thought of herself more as a weed than a rose bush.