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The deck smokes, the air full of char and blood. The air thrums—as if in the aftermath of cannon, familiar, thick in his blood, ringing in his ears. His doing.
The cannons never ignited. Never needed to. It had been his doing, at the end: when he’d taken a step, he had left thunder in his wake. Had looked through the wall of fire and, by then, mist, from the other side, had watched his comrades fall. ( A dispassionate part of him thinks: they never really learned their sea legs.)
They’ll have to. And they’ll live another day to learn, if they won’t thank him for it today. He can see betrayal harden behind the smoke in their eyes—those still open, in any case—and tries not to think about the shape it takes for each of them. None of them would be the first crewmate he’s betrayed. None of them is allowed to hurt worst of the total.
It’s going to be fine, he thinks, standing at Avantika’s side, watching Bouldergut round up the standing stragglers. No one’s dead. He looks away from Jester, crumpled and bleeding blue, and the secret cavern beneath his heart is glad he doesn’t have to look into her eyes. They’re safe. I checked.
“Have them taken below,” he says, voice smoke-roughened. In some ways, the roughness makes his job easier on him, more natural with the voice he’s decided to call his own.
She tilts her head. “I will leave the handling of your crew to you, quartermaster. They have made it plain that they will listen to their captain. You may decide what becomes of them on my ship.”
The violence in her words is barely banked, but her scarred hand wraps around Fjord’s arm, thumb stroking his bicep, and the terrible stutter in his heart is familiar. Her smile, though it does nothing to nullify the threat, is for him alone. She favors loyalty, and he’s never managed to lie to her yet.
Caleb, hands streaked yellow, gives him a long look over the lingering flame before the ogre’s hand forces his neck down.
Do what you have to, he’d said.
Part of him had wanted to let the darkness take him in the fight, to wake up—whether with Vera standing over him or Caduceus’s mushroom tea in his mouth, certain, alone among his number, that he would wake—without having to decide on which side of the fire to fall. Instead, he still feels the remainder of the force that takes him when he’s weariest and lowest shuddering through him. He’s awake, bolt awake, hurt bad but damnably committed to standing. Vera’s healing hardly sinks in. “Tend to the others,” he says. “I’m fine.”
He’s not fine, he’s shuddering on his feet, but he lurches into the captain’s quarters and hardly makes it in the door before her nails are raking into his skin, her teeth are in his lip, and, fine, he’s fine, he’s alive, everyone’s alive, the crew belowdecks and Avantika and her secrets in his arm. And here’s something to do with the shuddering, exhausting energy coursing through him, reminding him with infuriating vigor that whatever else he might be, he’s not dead. Again and again, he’s not dead.
She’d never admit fear but her pulse is racing under his thumb, her throat soft and pliant under the stroke of his hand. At any time he could make a choice. At any time. They’ve trusted him this far. It’ll get them to another day.
It’s simple, at least, to be here, for Avantika to peel off his armor and lick a clean line through the ash smudged against his skin. He knows what she wants from him. Against all odds, her desires are simple—or at least, the big things she wants are bigger than him. Bigger than any of them. There’s nothing special, nothing particularly difficult, about an oath sworn, a sword bared, a body lain down warm and prone in the captain’s bed. It wouldn’t have to be him, except that it is.
He kneels, knees set against the wood grain of the floorboards, presses his face to her thigh and lets his eyes shut. She tastes of salt, a little like the sea and a little like blood, though that might be the relics left in his mouth. His tongue is raw from biting it during the fight, but she doesn’t seem to mind.
When she’s finished, she stands from the bed and guides him out to the balcony, hand coaxing his. Against the backdrop of the night-black sea, she calls the water up to lick over them both. Silent, he lets it wash him clean, salt drying tight against the sweat on his skin. The moon stares down, wide and yellow as a familiar eye.
When he looks over at her, she seems to have slipped halfway into her trance already. Face turned out to the waves, she looks almost as glassy as he felt at the end of the fight.
“Captain,” he says—testing—and she rolls her shoulders, closes her eyes for a moment.
“Today was difficult,” she says. “No?”
“Insurrection is never welcome,” he replies carefully. “Is it?”
“No.” She leans back, bare hip flush to the rail. He thinks again how easy it would be to push, all these early choices he will have to explain someday if he doesn’t justify the outcome. But her fingers trail on the railing and the scratches on his back ache, knowing and wanting more despite the will of his thoughts.
Nobody died today and he has nothing to regret, yet. There’s a version of this where he only loses things he never really had.
She is smiling, the curl of her lips almost soft. He wonders who she was before she was chosen, before she filled the ocean with blood in his patron’s name. He tries not to think too far down that line—the gods forfend she should wonder anything similar about him.
“Thank you for your service, quartermaster,” she says. If the threat is still in her heart, it has tucked itself out of sight. “I remain glad to have you aboard.”
So the captain doesn’t sleep, but she lies back in her bed with her hair like a damp red fan on the pillows and her eyes wide and unseeing, part of her lost to the world. He’s learned through repetition that she doesn’t sleep as he’s known it, learned through tests understands that she might as well be: though her eyes are open, the bright canniness behind them goes somewhere else.
There are always eyes on him. Seeing and blind.
He closes the door behind him as quiet as he can, doesn’t meet Bouldergut’s eye as he slopes off down the halls.
Vera stands outside a door belowdecks, one he called his own quarters not so long ago. Inside, he thinks he can hear the soft moan of the sickbed—the comedown of magic, the healing in progress. “Shouldn’t you be in there?” he asks.
They’re fine,” she says to him, impassive, unasked. “Or when they wake up they will be.”
“And—” He doesn’t swallow his words, doesn’t give an iota of himself away. “The prisoner?”
She jerks her chin to the end of the hall, to another set of stairs. Behind her, he hears another sound, too muffled to distinguish, and he doesn’t think about Jester falling, Nott held in rictus at a twitch of Vera’s fingers, Caduceus choking on smoke. No one was going to stay down.
Below he finds a lone guard, not one of the sailors he knows. Human, tan-leathered, a broken front tooth Fjord sees when he smiles. It’s not a nice smile. “The brig was gathering dust,” he says. “Thanks for putting it back in use, quartermaster.”
Fjord jerks a thumb over his shoulder, silent. The man doesn’t move. “Some might be disinclined to leave you alone down here,” the man says, crossing his arms. He comes up to Fjord’s shoulder but Fjord knows better than to take comfort from that. “After your crewman lit up her boat.”
“You think he won’t answer for that?” asks Fjord, cold as the dank air. “You think that’s not why I’m here?”
The man looks at him with new eyes, uncrosses his arms.
“If the captain don’t like my methods of discipline, she can tell me herself. She’ll see them clear enough in the morning.” Fjord jerks his thumb again. “Now, I won’t ask you twice. Leave.”
He is stone-still as the man steps around him. Behind him on the stairs, his steps scurry, nervous. In the ensuing silence, he moves forward to the first cell. The sailor was right, there’s dust on the floor.
A faint cough. “Down here,” says a familiar voice from the far right.
Fjord’s steps falter. “You’re—” For a second his voice hitches; he has to right it himself before he continues. “Unaccompanied down here?”
“Light a torch, would you.”
Fjord could laugh. “Aren’t you finished with fire for the day?”
Caleb does laugh, then, an exhausted scrape of a sound. When Fjord draws closer, he finds the falchion in his grip—a makeshift compromise in the dark. Water soaks down to his knuckles; the eye glows in the hilt, watchful. It casts just enough light for him to make out the crumpled shape in the cell, back to the metal, his knees up to his chest.
“You’re yourself again.”
“No thanks to you.”
Turning the falchion blade-down, Fjord kneels til his face is level with Caleb’s ear. The air is cold on the back of his neck and part of him envisions Avantika slipping lithe and invisible behind him. He knows better, is sure he would sense her by now—what has all this been for if not for him to understand her so well he doesn’t have to think, for the sense of her to live under his skin? He feels nothing now, nothing but a dull ache and a deep solitude. Although he is far from alone here. He rests his forehead against the metal crosshatch of the brig.
“I am sorry,” he says, so soft he hardly feels like he’s saying it aloud. Caleb does not stir, does not turn, but Fjord watches the muscles in his shoulders tense minutely. “I tried to get it right. We weren’t going to come out of that alive, not the way you were going.”
“We might have left,” says Caleb.
“Might’ve,” Fjord accedes.
But he’s come too far. Surely Caleb, who wants so much, understands this. The fear in Fjord’s heart when Uk’otoa speaks is balanced by a hunger he sees alive and thriving in Caleb, far closer to the surface than Fjord keeps his own. They were headed to the same place, once, but he thinks their learning has far surpassed the Academy. He is a student of a different school now.
“They would’ve died,” he says again. “At least one. You weren’t careful.”
“And you were?” Caleb asks. Now he does turn: the dim yellow light of the eye gives him a jaundiced cast, pulls shadows from the hollows of his cheeks. His voice lowers, dangerous. “I do not like to be controlled like that, Fjord. My mind is my own.”
There is a cold stillness in his face that Fjord has never seen before. This he does regret, but once through the fire, what choice did he have? “I wanted them to think it was—something else, in you,” he says haltingly. “I didn’t want her to think you’d gone against her with a clear head. I wanted her to think you might be brought back.”
Caleb meets Fjord’s eyes, level and cold. “That was in error,” he says. “If I look to kill her, please believe, I wish her to know I mean what I do.”
It shouldn’t be you, thinks Fjord, and for a moment he can feel her ankle slipping through his fingers under the waters of Urukaxl. Then: It shouldn’t be her.
It should be me.
He can still see the aftermath—and he lets himself, now, makes himself look back. Vera’s hand in the air, Nott freezing. A thrown knife through Jester’s calf, making her buckle and choke against the ashen floor of the ship. Avantika with her arms raised, the arch of her throat and spine one of familiar ecstasy as the sea poured abovedecks, rendering the air the grey-white of leached salt. The Nein giving ground, step by step. The thrum of Uk’otoa in the back of his head. And Caleb’s words, as clear as his patron’s.
“You said you’d do what needed to be done, too,” he says. “If it came to that. If you stopped trusting my judgment. I made a call and I notice I’m still standing.”
“Yes,” Caleb says. “Because I know that upstairs our crew is healing. You have not lied yet. I watched you. Because when you lay the madness on me, Fjord—and I have not forgiven you for this,” he says, softly, so softly, “and I may not for a long while, but I did not strike anyone down. Nor was I so moved. I could watch myself from the inside, and though I was not myself, I notice that I did not hurt anyone. I made a rather poor show of myself in the fight, didn’t I?”
Again, Fjord remembers Avantika, the rise of the waves, the joy on her face. The clarity in her eyes, watching him. The stillness at the core of her, when he stumbled through the clap of thunder back to her side, as the sound rippled among the Nein. It had not been enough. Would not have been.
He had raised his hand and felt Caleb resist. Only for a moment. Then, when he might have expected a locked door, he found the other man’s mind swing open to him. As if in invitation.
And yes. He had not asked him to strike.
“You say you won’t forgive me,” he says. “But I know what giving in feels like. You might have thrown me off, and you didn’t.”
“A favor.” Caleb’s eyes gleam bright as the serpent’s. “One, believe me, I will collect.”
“You trust me.”
“No,” says Caleb, but his fingers curl around the metal bars of the brig in a seeming involuntary gesture, and then he is close enough that Fjord can feel his breath warming the metal, same as his touch. “If you truly believe you can master this, I wish to see where you will lead. What power draws you forward.
“You gamble with high stakes,” he says. “If I see it tipping against our advantage, I will end the game.”
“Please,” says Fjord. The cold has leached into his knees, his bones still aching from the day. He rests his forehead against the falchion, where it meets the bar, and yet again he has found his way into a position of abjection. Even to Caleb, like this, on the far side of a set of prison bars, this is the only way he knows how to convincingly swear: looking down and letting someone else bend his neck. “I’ll hold you to that.”
“But you are not dead yet,” says Caleb, at length. “Live, then, and do your best. Convince me it was worthwhile.”
“She’s going to have you punished, you know,” Fjord says, quick enough that he stumbles over his words. “I think I can hold her off the rest, but you—it’s going to be public, and it’s going to be nasty.”
Caleb’s laugh is sharp and harsh and sudden enough to jerk Fjord back into standing. “She may try,” he says. “She thinks I cannot handle pain?”
His fingers flick open his pouch, a gesture Fjord knows by now instinctively. A flinch wrenches his body straight and alert, though what set of consequences he fears he couldn’t put into words. For a moment, sorrow crosses Caleb’s face, an expression that leaves his face as swiftly as it comes. In his hand, a small knife, dull as a kitchen-blade and battered with use, the one he uses to chip off bits of gem and stone.
Then his fingers flip hilt and blade and he drives the blade unflinching into the back of his hand, where he holds the bars. A thin stream of blood trickles down his wrist to Fjord’s fingers.
“Your Captain will not be the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” says Caleb, who has not looked away.
The rivulet of blood snakes down Fjord’s arm, all the way to the falchion, which seems almost to stir in his hand as the blood tracks down its blade.
“You know it won’t be her hand.”
Then—then—Caleb takes a breath.
“So much the better,” he says. “I will trust you so far: I do not expect you to doubt me.”
Nobody leaves the ship that night.
The dawn breaks far too early, swathing the harbor of Darktow with familiar mist. The sky is pale orange behind it, hardly a color at all. Here, the world constricts to the ship. (And no one is coming after them, he thinks, and they have no one to answer to on the land. No one to account to at all, except the coiled thing that whispers beneath the waves.)
Here on the decks, the world binds in still tighter: to the lap of the waves and the soft rock of the boat, to the sound of Avantika’s boots pacing back and forth on the deck. Men in the crow’s next, guns below. The Nein lined up and weary and healed, if down two of their assumed number.
At the captain’s side, Fjord meets none of their eyes. He has slept just long enough for the healing to take proper effect, not long enough that his nerves have settled beneath his skin.
He says, loud enough so they can hear, “They’re mine. Don’t punish anyone for one man’s transgressions. They’re new to you, but not to me.”
A soft hiss. Beau, he thinks, and looks up in spite of himself. Though the traces of the fire have been cleaned from the deck, she looks more than singed. Turning away, he catches Caduceus’s eyes and is unsettled by what they must see. Yasha turns her back. When he sees blue, he blinks away.
He lowers his voice. Even so, the lie struggles its way out of his throat: “I know their loyalties.”
The captain—for so she is now, her title restored, her composure absolute—traces the dirt and looks the dregs of the Nein over without interest. “Discipline is your duty, quartermaster,” she says. “I think your judgment will be revealing.”
She presses a fingertip to the line of his armor where breastplate buckles to pauldron, a finger slipping into the weak spot and stroking down. Even here, perhaps especially here, perhaps because of the disgust and rage he knows waits at his back, heat flushes through him indistinguishable from shame.
They’re all alive. That’s the main thing. Someday, if he lives to explain himself, he’ll tell them why. Or Caleb will have to. Six lives to weigh against the balance of his acts.
Seven.
Bouldergut pulls Caleb, wrists bound, to the front. The captain tucks her thumbs into her belt, then slides her hands together, tweaking and unraveling a few swift knots. Not all of them. She presses the unwound coil of knotted rope into his hands. Reading her face is like staring directly into the sun behind the fog: a bright, inscrutable pain.
“As I said,” she says. “Discipline is your duty.”
With her large rough hands, Bouldergut presses Caleb to his knees. He slumps, but when he looks up, his soul is elsewhere. He is looking somewhere over Fjord’s shoulder.
“Yes,” he says, a thin unkillable smile on his lips. “Do your worst”
“Hug the mizzen,” Bouldergut says in that deep rumble of hers, and Caleb sighs as he reaches out, arms spread against the weight of the mast. Knees still bent, forehead pressed to the wood.
Fjord takes a step behind his kneeling form, glad not to look into his face. “Once you’ve done your penance, you’ll be welcomed back into the fold in good grace.” His voice is too loud in his own ears. People seem to listen fine, but he’s never much liked speaking too long with too much authority. The rope is rough in his palms.
“Oh, yes.” Caleb’s voice is soft and sardonic. “Make me sorry.”
Fjord closes his eyes when he lays the first strike. Hears, feels, knows from experience the weight of rope to flesh, even through cloth. The sound of his heart in his ears is louder even than the captain’s steps. After a moment, he realizes she is no longer walking.
That’s for Beau, he thinks, holding onto the part of him deep inside that’s looking out and looking ahead. That’s for Beau and her rage, for the promise of her own heart that she asked him to keep, the offer to handle the captain herself, the negotiations with the Plank King. That’s for them living out another night on the shores of Darktow, not chased from its shores with more fire than even Caleb himself could light. One life.
That’s for Nott, who won’t thank him for this, who’ll see him pincushioned with knives for this if Caleb doesn’t tell her to stay her hand. He has to believe it—that against all odds, Caleb trusts him to do the worst thing, maybe only to do that. Another. That’s for Yasha, in silence, the banked storm. That’s for Caduceus, who knows better than to take his word for it. That’s for Jester, for the promise he made to her mother, for the knowledge she got back up, the ice-knife memory of it in his heart when he saw her fall.
Six lives. Seven. That’s for you. They made it out, and that’s all that matters, let them pick over the bones, let Caleb speak in his defense or burn his body after.
And for her, he thinks, nobody else is getting out of this if we can’t get close. And nobody can get this close.
That’s for Vandren, and that’s what jerks him back to himself. His fist is knuckled tight enough to turn the skin a pale, sick green. Caleb’s coat has split; he is breathing hard against the mast. Knees still bent.
For a moment, Fjord feels the pain in his own back, the ache in his own knees. Last night in the brig, how grateful he had been to kneel and to know and to promise his work was in service of something. It’s no good if there’s no one else to believe him, to tell him he’s on the right path.
Reward, he hears, faintly, but it’s a memory, and one that has always come with a pile of bodies in its path. He’d never hoped they would be his own party. And they won’t be, he thinks, they won’t be. If he can just keep going.
Don’t give way, Caleb had said, as he left, and any promise Fjord made to him was bound in Caleb’s own blood. So he meant it. So it mattered.
One last strike. For him, the last one of them standing. If he still counts. He forces himself to watch it land. When Caleb jerks against the mast—just once—he thinks of the relief of Avantika’s nails scraping through ash, of her teeth on his lip, of the sea stinging into on raw skin. Pain accumulated until the body carries nothing else to sully it, like an overfull mug of ale in a clean-washed stein.
“Ten,” he says. “That’s enough.” His voice is steady as he can make it. When he runs the rope over his palm to loop it, he feels blood on it, and his head goes light. Again, he says, “That’s enough.”
“As you will, quartermaster.”
Captain Avantika’s reply comes in near a whisper, too soft to be for the crew’s benefit. A private voice, and one that means he’s broken the veneer. In front of everyone, Squall-eater and Nein alike. He goes very still. Doesn’t turn back. Step careful, he thinks. There are some things for which they truly will never forgive you, for which none will live to understand you.
Power, anyone aboard that ship can understand. Lies, covert action, what happens after dark. They don’t have to know what he thinks when the door is shut.
“Thank you,” he says to the man kneeling behind him, one of seven he can’t account to today. He hesitates, then recalls. “Philip.”
As he returns the rope to the captain, her hands grab tightly against his own. Her fingers entwine with his over the damp rope, clasping them in a makeshift a vow against blood-dark hemp.
He leans down, shoulders tense with the knowledge of being watched, and whispers in her ear. Something true.
“He’s not the only one accountable,” he says. “They follow me. Their flaws are mine.”
For a moment, her lashes flicker. When she meets his eye, she has a sunstruck, glassy look about her, one he has only ever seen after she’s closed the door.
“Tell me what you mean.”
He wants it to hurt.
“Hold me accountable,” he says. “Same as him.”
Her nails clench against his fingers over the rope, tracking red against his skin. Already, he had a sense of what he was getting into. He knew the answer he’d get.
“I have never had a right hand who understood me so well.”
Fjord wonders if Caleb feels what he did when he knelt in the brig, when he will kneel in the captain’s quarters: the relief of giving in, even if it’s just the pose. He cannot imagine Caleb bending his will in truth, even when brought to his knees. They are not so alike after all.
This is the reward, she whispers this time, clasping him flush to her doorway far from the eyes of the sun and the crew, winding the bloodied rope around his neck to draw him down, and he can’t tell her she’s wrong.
The Nein doesn’t know this, what it’s like when she shuts the door. All they need to know is that when she dies—if she dies—when she dies, she will not take any of the rest of them with her. He’s the only one who needs to drown in these particular waters.
“Tighter,” he says, voice already rough, and she smiles as she draws in the rope.