If I tell her who I am, she will hate me. If I tell her why I’m here, she will kill me.
The moth fluttered frantically as he held it to the flame of one of the table candles. It burnt pungently and when it was a blackened, wingless little husk, he dropped it onto his food plate. Dust from its wings coated his fingers. He held them up for examination and saw Cat watching him. He wiped his fingers deliberately on his black long coat, and she looked away, disgusted.
Sebastian drank more. The hall grew quieter and torches sputtered. Natives slunk out. The more sober members of his crew staggered to their chambers. The rest slept where the rum left them.
The Haru came up behind Sebastian, asking quietly if he wouldn’t like to retire to his room. The black pits of Ori’s eye sockets seemed endless. He snapped at Ori to leave him be and watched her go. Ori. The Haru who served the witch. And the witch wanted him dead or gone. To keep Selena for herself, he was sure of it.
Selena…
As beautiful as his atoll, and just as impossible to keep. A strange ache gripped his heart and squeezed.
The flask was almost empty. His whisky-soaked thoughts swirled together in a maelstrom; one thought rising above the tumult to make itself heard.
The time has come.
The candles on the table drowned in their own wax, and Sebastian was left alone in the dark, thinking of what he must do.
The time had come.
“Svoz,” he whispered, “to me.”
Undefeated
Accora walked among the rows of fauna in her greenhouse. Dawn’s light seeped through the multi-colored glass panes to drench the greenery in jeweled hues. She trailed her fingers over the broad-leafed plants and the feathery ferns, but kept her hands to herself near the blood roses. They had a tendency to snap. But she talked to them. She talked to herself. A habit born of long years in service to Bacchus. One did not converse with Bacchus. One heeded. One cowered. One begged and pleaded for mercy and was answered with pain. He did not know her worth. None among the Bazira did. High Vicar Zolin threw her to his mongrel and then walked away. Accora stopped and returned to the stand of blood roses.
“If Selena is half as strong as I think she is, Bacchus will die, surprised that such a delicate little flower has such a strong bite.” She teased the flower; it craned on its stalk for her flesh. “And Zolin will know it was a mistake to favor his rabid cur instead of its master.”
But Zolin was a tiny speck on the horizon of her thoughts. Bacchus loomed, obscuring all. She had thought of little else but his death over the last twenty years.
“I will gladly suffer Selena’s sword if I can watch that soulless monster bleed first.”
She let out a cry and snatched her hand back from the snapping blood rose. It tilted its bloom up, like a closed tulip, to let her blood slide down its stalk.
“Careful,” she murmured, dabbing her fingertip to her tongue. “She has lessons yet to learn.”
Accora continued down her greenhouse, arriving at the tray of insects impaled on pins. As Selena’s did, her gaze went first to the stowaway mantis.
“I had thought that Skye would’ve been the one to end him. She was powerful. Aluren. The High Reverent even.” She sneered. “The Aluren are blinded by their desperation.”
She thought to what she had read in Selena’s mind the night of the kafira ritual. That Skye had ordered their deaths—hers and Bacchus’s. Bacchus, she understood. But her?
“After all I have taught her.”
The betrayal stung but was not unexpected. She let her fingers trail over the glass, tracing the mantis’s body and smiled despite herself. “Such is her nature.”
And if Skye was as Accora believed her to be, then Accora was but a pawn in a much larger game. “Selena too. All of us.” Her smiled faded. “But Selena will kill Bacchus and Skye’s game board will be absent one pawn.”
Selena will kill him. The thought gave her a pleasant shiver as she recalled how her pupil had mastered the healing. The shattered ampulla. It had cut the girl, but the wounds would heal and she would be stronger for it. Free of lies, Selena would know real power and she would need power in abundance to face Bacchus. But she had distractions. Ilior was one. Her captain was another.
Julian Tergus. A false name. Accora would stake her life on it. He’d resisted the water and in so doing, remained as a blank piece of parchment.
“And so dangerous to me. A captain with a mute crew has secrets, secrets that he gladly suffers beatings and broken bones to preserve.”
She thought of the mute crewman who was not mute. Such an interesting story she’d read that night when he drank from the darkpool waters. A story gleaned in bits and pieces but bloody enough for her to know that ‘Julian Tergus’ was up to no good. No good at all.
And the girl who called herself Cat. Accora moved to a shelf of vials and bottles. Her eye picked out the pumpkin oil easily. Its bright orange color was a beacon among the drabber concoctions. She turned the vial over in her hands.
“She is not his crew,” Accora mused. “She is something else altogether and dangerous. But not to me.”
The air shifted behind her. She smelled acrid, oily smoke, and a stench beneath that: the scent of hot blood. Accora dropped the vial of pumpkin oil; it shattered over the floor, splattering a sunburst over the planking. Quickly, Accora picked up a blown glass bottle from the table before her. It was sea blue with gold veins wound in and a stopper at the top, all exquisitely rendered. She’d kept it close, ever since Ori had found the crew on her beach and had had to escape a great, hungry beast that served the captain.
“Tergus is dangerous,” she said loudly, “to Selena and to me. I am right to suspect him.” She brought the bottle close, cradling it in both hands. “Aren’t I…Svoz, was it?”
Accora started to turn but her instincts screamed. She threw herself to the ground, rolling and cradling the glass jar, as the sword came down. It cleaved the small worktable beside her, and she was showered with soil and broken pottery. Her heart fluttered in her narrow chest and she scrambled under the closest table as fast as she was able. The ground was hard on her knees but she hardly felt the pain. The sword came down again with a deafening crack. Splintered wood and more dirt wafted down but the table held. The sirrak bent to peer under. He twiddled his fingers at her.
“Halloo!”
Accora fumbled at the stopper on the glass jar she still cradled as the table was torn away as if lifted by a fierce wind. Svoz held it with one hand and hurled it at the greenhouse wall. Accora flinched at the cacophony of shattering glass, and then scrabbled backward as the sirrak loomed over her. Blood-red and hulking, he gripped a long curved blade that was as long as his arm and he licked a forked tongue over his lips.
“Fast or slow? Which shall it be, witch? Slow would be my inclination. It’s been so long, I don’t wish to rush this unless I have to.”