“Of course you don’t. Captain Strangward has lied to you, and betrayed you. Come serve me, and I’ll teach you all about how to use your magic.”
Evan took a tentative step forward, as if pulled by an invisible tether. Then somebody wrapped a muscled arm around him, pinning his arms to his sides, lifting him so his feet barely touched the deck. He felt the bite of a blade at his throat. It had to be Abhayi, but he couldn’t fathom why.
“No!” Celestine said, panic flickering across her face. The empress extended her hands as if she could reach across the water between them.
“Leave off, Celestine,” Strangward said, his voice flat, “or the boy dies.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Celestine said, licking her lips in a way that suggested she thought he just might. “You wouldn’t murder a child.”
“I would, to keep him out of your hands,” Strangward said.
Evan hung there, frozen, thoughts thrashing around in his head. Was Captain Strangward protecting him from Celestine, or was Celestine rescuing him from Strangward? Right now, he felt like he needed to be rescued from the both of them.
No. He didn’t need rescuing. He needed to rescue himself. He slammed both heels into Abhayi’s knees, hearing a crunch when they connected. Howling, the big man fell forward, his grip loosening enough that Evan was able to roll out of the way before he was pinned underneath. Pushing to his feet, he scooped up Abhayi’s blade and ran forward and up. He swarmed up the sheets onto the foremast, swinging the blade, recklessly slicing lines along the way, climbing higher and higher until he found a stable perch astride the tops’l yard.
“Hold your fire!” the empress shouted at her crew. “If the mageling gets hurt, you’ll answer to me.”
Now everyone was shouting at him—Strangward, Abhayi, the empress. The remains of the crew crowded toward him—all people he knew. Zalazar, who’d shown him the ropes. Entebbe, who’d taught him to swim. Akira, who’d covered for him in the early days, when he thought he’d heave his guts out on his first blue-water crossing. Brody, who’d begun climbing the mast toward him, his face set and grim.
Even Brody.
“Stay back,” Evan warned, thrusting both hands toward them.
They shrank back, raising their arms in defense. Brody stopped climbing and clung there, pressing himself against the mast.
They know, Evan thought. They know part of this story, anyway. They’ve all been keeping secrets. He owed them nothing.
Changing tactics, he took aim at the Siren. He extended both hands, palms out, and made a pushing motion, in the hope that flames might shoot out of his palms. Instead, the Siren shuddered as her mains’l went taut, the masts creaking and complaining as if under the pressure of a violent squall. With the sudden beam reach wind, the vessel heeled over until seawater slopped over the far rail and the empress had to grab hold of a capstan to keep from sliding across the deck and dropping into the ocean.
Just when Evan thought she might capsize, the crew managed to douse the mains’l and the ship righted herself.
Evan stared at his hands, working the fingers, feeling the texture of the air in his grip.
Celestine pulled herself to a standing position, her lavender eyes wide with surprise, her face a mask of startlement. “Who knew?” she breathed. “We have another stormcaster.”
Evan stared down at the crowd of upturned faces, his head a jumble of questions, his heart bruised by lies and betrayal. A stormcaster, was he? He’d give them a storm, then.
Before, Evan had reached for air. This time, he reached for water. He dug a canyon beneath the Siren, building a wall of water between them as she sank out of sight. And then he let it go.
He hadn’t anticipated the backwash. Cloud Spirit bucked and rolled, and he lost his grip on the rigging and fell, screaming, into the sea.
3
POLITICS IN PORT
Evan leaned against the bollard, watching as the last of the cargo was unloaded from the New Moon and transferred to the dockside warehouse.
New Moon was a sturdy, low-slung, single-masted craft built for the coastal trade—one that Evan could pilot with one foot, in his sleep. Each little realm along the coast had its tariffs and fees—costs that could be avoided by a pilot who knew these waters intimately. Evan did.
It had been two years since he’d fallen into the sea off Tarvos. Two years he’d spent schooling himself while crewing for others.
Kadar, the dock boss, strolled over, his thumbs tucked under his purple suspenders. “A good run, Faris,” he said, pulling out his pocket watch as if it counted days as well as hours. “You must’ve had the Breaker on your heels.”
“The wind was with us several days running,” Evan said. Fair winds and following seas—the life of a stormlord mage.
“Must be why they call you Lucky,” Kadar said. His broad smile exposed the gold slides on his teeth.
“Lucky Faris” was the public name Evan had used since he’d left Cloud Spirit. It was a kind of personal joke. Not very funny.
Evan had little memory of how he made it to shore after his long fall from Cloud Spirit’s foremast. It was lucky he’d hit the water instead of the deck. Lucky that they were close to shore when it happened. Lucky he’d been a strong swimmer for as long as he could remember.
No. Lucky would be if none of this had happened. He wasn’t lucky, but he was a survivor, and so somehow he kept swimming, finding a place where the high cliffs gave way to a rocky beach. From there he’d continued south, following the coast back to Endru, where Captain Strangward had plucked him from the streets. He knew that neither Strangward nor the empress was likely to come there. The harbor wasn’t deep enough to handle blue-water ships.
Evan had spent a year hiding in Endru, working odd jobs in the port, piloting shallow-draft vessels when he could get that work, struggling between the need to stay dead and the desire to find out his history. Dead was easy. Dead was safe. But it wasn’t enough.
The empress had said that he carried Nazari blood. That should make him a princeling. Instead, it seemed to have made him a target. There weren’t many bloodsworn this far south, but now and then he’d see them in the taverns on the waterfront. Were they looking for him? Or had the empress moved on, assuming he was dead?
A year ago, he’d risked returning to Tarvos, to find better work and the answers he’d craved. He’d been worried that someone might recognize him, but that wasn’t a problem. The compound where he’d lived was gone, replaced by dockside warehouses.
Kadar and his crew had muscled into the port right after the empress destroyed it. He’d bought up all the prime real estate, rebuilt some of it, and gotten his fingers into all the local commerce. No deal was done, no crew was hired, no money came and went through the port without Kadar getting a piece of it.
In Tarvos, people said that Captain Strangward was dead and Cloud Spirit sailed for the empress now, with Tully Samara at the helm.
Evan’s heart twisted when he heard this. Strangward had been a tough master, but Evan had trusted the bond between them—the unspoken promise of honesty. He’d trusted the crew of Cloud Spirit—Brody and the others—and they had betrayed him. He was done with that. He would not give his trust again so readily. The problem was that not even a stormcaster could sail a blue-water ship on his own.
During his year in Tarvos, Evan had been given a few contracts to crew on blue-water ships, but Kadar mainly assigned him to New Moon, the one ship the dock boss owned outright. Kadar had learned that with Lucky Faris aboard, cargoes got delivered and goods got smuggled in record time, which put more money in the dock boss’s pocket.
Evan still had the share that Strangward had given him. Since arriving in Tarvos, he’d taken all the work he could get, but at this rate, given Kadar’s stingy wages, he would be old and gray before he built a stake large enough to buy the kind of ship he wanted.
There was also his addiction to books.