“Well?” Lira presses. “Are you going to take the deal?”
“I told you I don’t take deals,” I say. “But maybe I’ll take your word instead.”
I pull open the door to the Serendipity, and Lira pushes through ahead of me. I’m hit with the familiar smell of metal and ginger root, and there are a thousand memories that shift through my mind, each as dastardly as the next. For all the ideas a name can give, the Serendipity’s tells nothing of its true nature. It’s a den for gamblers and the kinds of men and women who never see the light of day. They stick to moonlight, far from the ornate colors of the town. They are shadows, with fingers made sticky by debt and wine strong enough to knock a person dead from a single jug.
Some of my crew takes the large round table at the back and I smile. When I left to visit Queen Galina and strike a deal for my future, an odd wave of nausea crept up into my stomach. Like ocean sickness, if I could ever feel such a thing. Land sickness, maybe. Being separated from them, especially for such an important task, left me drained. Seeing them now, I’m revitalized.
“Just so you know,” I say to Lira, “if you’re lying, I might kill you.”
Lira tips her chin up, eyes defiant and too blue for me to look at her straight. At first I’m not sure if she’s going to say anything back, but then she licks her lips and I know it’s because she can taste the sweetness of whatever insult she’s about to throw.
“Maybe,” she says as the light whimpers against her skin, “I might just kill you first.”
21
Elian
FOG POOLS BY THE open window, like the whirls of cigar smoke. With it comes the smell of dawn as the pink-lipped sky barely stays tucked behind the line of ocean. Time is lost here, in a way that can’t be said for anywhere else in the kingdom, or the world. The Serendipity exists in its own realm, with the people who could never truly belong anywhere else. It deals in deals, and caters only to traders who could never set up stalls for their goods.
Torik breaks into a low whistle as he deals another hand. His fingers glide over the cards, slick as butter, swiping them across the table in perfect piles by the stacks of red coins. When he’s done, Madrid fingers her deck blankly, like the cards themselves don’t matter, only what she does with them. Madrid is very good at adapting and never satisfied with playing the hand she’s dealt. I’d like to say I taught her that, but there are so many things Madrid was forced to learn before she chose the Saad. When you’re taken by a Kléftesis slave ship, you quickly learn that to survive, you can’t bend to the world; you have to make it bend to you.
Unfortunately for Madrid, her tell is the fact that she has no tell. She’s never willing to end how she begins, and though that means I can’t guess her hand like I can most people’s, knowing that she won’t settle makes it easy to guess what she’s going to do next.
Lira watches us predatorily, her eyes darting each time a hand moves or a coin falls from the top of a pile. I can tell that she sees the same things I do; whenever someone scratches their cheek or swallows a little too forcefully. Minute beads of sweat and twitching lips. The intonation when they ask for another jug of wine. She notices it all. Not only that, but she’s making notes of it. Filing their tells and ticks away, for whatever reason. Keeping them safe, maybe, to use again.
When Kye shifts a row of red coins into the center table, I watch Lira. She quirks her lips a little to the right, and even though she can’t see his cards – there’s no possible way she could – she knows his hand. And she knows he’s bluffing.
Lira catches my eye and when she sees me staring, her smile fades. I’m angry at myself for that. I never seem quick enough when it comes to watching these moments for long enough to pick them apart and see how she works. Why she works. What angle she’s working.
I push my coins into the center of the table.
“It’s too quiet in here,” Madrid says.
She grabs the wine decanter from the table and fills her glass a little higher, until red sloshes over the brim. If Madrid is a good shooter, she’s an even better drinker. In all our years together, I’ve never so much as seen her lose balance after a night of heavy liquor.
Madrid sips the wine carefully, savoring the vintage in a way none of us have ever thought to. It reminds me of the wine-tasting lessons my father forced me to attend as part of my royal training. Because nothing says King of Midas like knowing a fine wine from something distilled in a back-alley tavern.
“Sing ‘Shore of Tides,’ ” Torik suggests dryly. “Maybe it’ll drown out the sunlight.”
“If we’re voting,‘Little Rum Ditty’ will do. Really, anything with rum.”
“You don’t get a vote,” Madrid tells Kye, then quirks an eyebrow at me. “Cap?”
I shrug. “Sing whatever you want. Nothing will drown out the sound of me winning.”
Madrid pokes her tongue out. “Lira?” she asks. “What do they sing where you’re from?”
For some reason, Lira finds this amusing. “Nothing you would appreciate.”
Madrid nods, as though it’s more a fact than an insult. “ ‘Siren Down Below,’ ” she says, looking at Kye with a reluctant smile. “It’s got rum in it.”
“Suits me then.”
Madrid throws herself back onto her chair. Her voice comes out in a loud refrain, words twisting and falling in her native Kléftesis. There’s something whimsical to the way she sings, and whether it’s the tune or the endearing grin drawn on Kye’s face as she bellows the melody, I can’t help but tap my fingers against my knee in rhythm to her voice.
Around the table, the crew follows on. They hum and murmur the parts they can’t remember, roaring out each mention of rum. Their voices dance into one another, colliding clumsily through verses. Each of them sings in the language of their kingdom. It brings a piece of their home to this misshapen crew, reminding me of a time, so long ago, when we weren’t together. When we were more strangers than family, belonging nowhere we traveled and never having the means to go somewhere we might.
When they’ve sung through three choruses, I almost expect Lira to join in with a rendition from Polemistés, but she remains tight-lipped and curious. She eyes them with a tiny knot in her brow, as though she can’t quite understand the ritual.
I lean toward her and keep my voice to a whisper. “When are you going to sing something?”
She pushes me away. “Don’t get too close,” she says. “You absolutely stink.”
“Of what?”
“Anglers,” she says. “That oil they put on their hands and those stupid sweets they chew.”
“Licorice,” I tell her with a smirk. “And you didn’t answer my question. Are you ever going to grace us with your voice?”
“Believe me, I’d like nothing more.”
I settle back in my chair and open my arms. “Whenever you’re ready.”