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The constant, ongoing roar of the ocean is a comfort. As she sits with her back cradled against the foremost bow of their stolen ship, Sparrow lets the noise drown out the ringing of her heart. The ship crests a wave and a cool, salt spray dashes her cheeks only to be dried soon after by the sun. Unbidden, her lips curl upwards in a way they haven’t in a very long time.
“Do you plan to sleep the day away again, Young Sparrow?” asks Garth, his heavy boots robbing Sparrow of her reverie.
Dark eyes, shining with the light of a deep and cavernous rouge, slide open and lock onto ice blue and milk white. Sparrow considers the object of her ten-year mission and wonders not for the first time if the man can even see through his distorted eye, if the man shares something of the otherworldly vision of Theresa, or simply manages with a diminished capacity. With a slow blink Sparrow turns her head up and lets her head fall back against the damp wood at the base of the bowsprit. It doesn’t matter, she supposes, so long as he may serve his function. The same with her.
Sparrow does not think about how she is pretty sure her eyes had been blue once too. It is so hard to remember, especially now, especially after-
Now, 273. Obey.
She’s not sure when her eyes slip shut again, only that the feel of Garth’s cool, callused hand upon her shoulder snaps her back to focus. His Will tastes sharp, it stands the short, black hairs that have begun to regrow on her head on end, and it runs so close to the surface of his skin that his touch is like brushing lightning. It makes her own Will burn in response.
Fire swells in her palms, ready and eager to leap at her slightest whim. She smothers it down with effort. Still, Sparrow cannot help but notice how Garth snatches his hand back, doing his best not to draw attention to the smoke coming off from between his fingers as he clasps his hands behind his back.
“Sorry,” says Sparrow. Pulling her legs beneath her, she lifts herself to standing. “Still getting used to having access to my Will again,” she offers.
Garth dips his head and steps up beside her. Sparrow twinges at the broach of personal space but refuses to retreat as the Will-user leans his elbows across the bow and stares out over the ocean. “Think nothing of it,” he says. Silence drifts between them a moment, broken only by the water and the distant cry of seagulls, but Sparrow lingers.
Ten years of stolen conversation have taught her that Garth tends to stretch his words.
“It is unwise to allow yourself to linger in darkness, Sparrow,” he says at last. “The Spire is behind us, and whatever foul deeds you were forced to commit to secure our freedom are best left in the past as well.”
The angle of Sparrow’s mouth turns wry. With an idle finger she brushes the arching length of scar tissue that stretches across both her cheeks. To Garth she says, “Right. You say that like I was some pillar of righteousness before coming to pull your ass out of hell itself.”
She sees Garth’s hands tighten in their already clenched fists. Under the dark skin of his cheek the muscles in his jaw twitch. Sparrow wonders if that’s shame, hiding behind his stoic veneer. She turns her face away, choosing instead to watch the would-be recruits they shanghaied back to freedom milling about on the deck. “Don’t beat yourself up about it,” she says. “I was plenty corrupt before.”
Garth swallows audibly. She can feel the heated debate going on inside his head and passes the time waiting for its outcome by comparing their Will lines. Now that they are free from the Spire, Garth shines a fierce blue, like a shock spell forever on repeat beneath his skin. Sparrow wonders if that’s why she perceives his Will the way she does.
Maybe, by that logic, the softly glowing red of her own lines explains why the power of inferno comes so naturally to her in turn. She traces the branching lines across her arms and considers that between them and her sun kissed skin she looks something like a glowing ember. Had her lines always shone red? Sparrow flinches at the dense fog where memory had once been. She can’t remember. Instead, out of the cold and the empty, something else comes to the surface.
Tell me your name, pet. Is it so difficult to surrender to me this one thing?
Cold fingers, hard as stone and digging into the skin of her neck press her face harder into the cool rock of the chamber floor. Where before her Will would surge to incinerate the man above her, only a vacuum remains. She shudders, her whole body a trembling leaf in the autumn wind, as wet lips press against her ear.
Submit, 273. Come now, would you truly prefer a number to the name your mother gave you? I ask only as a mark of my favor.
No.
Then there is only pain.
Sparrow blinks, and the fog fades.
“They called you Sparrow, the Lionheart once,” says Garth, at last resuming their stalled conversation. “Such a name suggests at least some strength of character.”
Sparrow thinks for a moment and perhaps remembers an echo of that name, shouted from the lips of some cheaply-bought Town Crier. She shakes her head and crosses her arms. “That was a long time ago. Over ten years, remember?” she says.
The wind has picked up, crashing more seafoam up the sides of the ship. The resulting spray makes Sparrow’s eyes sting. “How old are you, Garth?” she asks, using the glove of her guard uniform to wipe the water from her face as Garth considers the question.
His shoulders bob in amusement. “Old enough that it’s rude to ask,” he says. Sparrow might have guessed by his pale hair, but she doesn’t mind his reluctance to answer, they both know he is much her senior.
“I’m thirty,” she says instead. Staring out past the distant stern of their ship, she can still see the dark, streaking silhouette of the Spire stretching high into the sky. As if Lucien means to skewer the very sun with it. There is nothing but wallowing silence behind her and Sparrow knows that Garth has already caught her meaning. She speaks it anyway.
“I gave most of my adult life to that Spire. Spent less than a single year before that earning the name, Lionheart.” Sparrow conjures a flame into an empty palm and watches as her Will lines burn even brighter, enough that their red light clashes with Garth’s everpresent blue. “The math doesn’t work out in my favor the way it does yours,” she says, and lets the flame go out.
Garth is openly staring at her now. Sparrow isn’t sure when he turned his head, but now his mismatched eyes are scanning her from head to toe. Cataloging her scars, her lines of Will, the touch of corruption hissing off her aura. Now, without their collars to keep them all but blind, it must be impossible for him to ignore.
“It should never have been your burden to rescue me,” says Garth.
“Any yet, here we are,” says Sparrow.
“Indeed,” says Garth, and silence falls yet again. But this time, Garth does not look away.
The longer she feels Garth’s eyes on her, the higher Sparrow’s shoulders start to climb. She is ever conscious of the scars across her face and neck. The Spire guard uniform hid most, but once her Will had been her own again, Sparrow had found the searing heat of her own power to be unbearable under so much material. She’d torn the sleeves from her coat, and shredded her pants to just above the knee. Now, her scars are on full display, those she had earned before the Spire, and those that had been dealt within.
Sparrow had been beautiful, once. Like Rose, strong and lovely and light. And she was still, in a way. But hers is not the kind of beauty she’d once shared with her sister. No, Sparrow’s beauty is now something twisted with darkness and ferocity. A bloodied sword, sharpened to its finest edge rather than a blooming wildflower, determined to grow even in the harshest shade.
Garth straightens from his position bent over the bow and stares at her, a grave weight in his blue eye as it lingers on her cheek. His fingers twitch as if curious to touch and Sparrow is grateful for his restraint. “I do not know the whole of what you suffered,” he says, “but I know parts. The other guards- they spoke to each other often, and without care of who heard.”
His chin dips as he speaks, as if in apology for what he could not help but know. Some part of Sparrow wants to spit at his pity, but another knows that were she in his position, she would have clamored for any word of her sole hope of salvation. She also knows that whatever he heard, it does not change the things she herself has done.
She says, “By any just law the sum of my life would be determined by what I did in that tower, Garth. Regardless of what was done to me in turn.”
Garth frowns. “The Commandant-”
“Is dead,” says Sparrow. Wisps of a low-level inferno slide off her shoulders, dispersing harmlessly into the wind. “I saw to that myself.”
She coughs blood, choking on a scream as cold rock pierces through her stomach and pins her to an obelisk. Her head cracks against the stone and Sparrow despairs.
You will learn submission, Little Sparrow. No matter how many times I must teach it to you.
Garth is struggling to regain himself, but he cannot help her. Sparrow whimpers as the stolen cutlass slips from her blood-slicked fingers. The Commandant looms, his pale face severe as he grasps her by the chin. His fingers dig into the scars he carved to cut out her druidic tattoos.
Let us go back to the start, he says. I will strike you, and you will thank me.
The hand that has not trapped her face takes the rock impaling her and twists. Sparrow screams.
Death will not find you here, Sparrow. Thank me, and beg for my mercy!
Fire burns within her. Whether it is her own suppressed Will coming to the surface or some magic Garth has worked she does not know, but Sparrow seizes it with everything she has. Sparrow reaches out her hands to cling to the Commandant’s arms and through her tears she looks into his eyes and says what she has not been able to for many years.
No.
Sparrow lets her Will bloom like she never has before, and the Commandant burns.
Though his expression does not change, Garth’s Will flares, as if he too were reliving some accursed memory. Shocks spark at his fingertips and his eye shines. “There is not a soul in Albion who would not do anything to escape such cruelty,” he says.
Sparrow bristles. “You’re wrong,” she says. “A better soul would feed the hungry. A better soul would take the blade given to kill a friend and use it to slay their enemy instead!” Her voice is rising and Sparrow has to force herself to breathe or risk making everyone on board privy to the horrors they narrowly escaped. “I spent too long letting Lucien’s foul creature make his twisted artistry out of my soul,” she says. “Now I fear I can’t undo it.”
She’s made too many choices out of bitterness. She’s let her rage consume her mercy too many times to ever believe she could live up to the image Hammer, Theresa, the people of Albion aspire for her. “I was never good, Garth,” she says. “No matter what the people might think. But now?”
Her red eyes burn. “Now I just hope that once I’ve put Lucien in the ground, you and Hammer and the Hero of Skill will be enough to put me down with him. Before I become something truly dark.”
Garth looks well and truly stricken. Odd, that after ten years of imprisonment only now does Sparrow catch a glimpse of true despair crossing his features. It is in the smallest things. The tightening of his eyes, the curl of his shoulders, the way his hand grasps for the tome on his hip screams of silent suffering. Sparrow should know, the years have made her intimately familiar with the pain.
The Commandant likes to make her watch. She stands at the grand window, uniform discarded and bare except for her undergarments and her collar while the Commandant observes her. Sparrow’s face is turned down to the arriving ships, to the fresh souls ferried into hell. She looks, because she has not been permitted to turn away.
You are my masterpiece, Sparrow.
Cold knuckles brush down the curvature of her spine. A palm maps the plane of her back and traces the soft lines of her flame tattoos stretching across her ribcage and up her spine. The Commandant hums. These should go too, he says. A chin nestles on her shoulder and a thumb brushes her cheek. He caresses the ruin he’s made of her face.
You are mine, body and soul, he says. The only marks you should have are the ones I permit.
Sparrow makes no protest. She can hardly remember a time she would have.
Ask it of me, pet, he commands. Beg me to cut these ugly marks away.
Hot tears tumble from Sparrow’s cheeks for reasons she can no longer fully understand. Please, she says.
Soon, he promises, and it makes Sparrow shudder. But first we have business, he says. You see those recruits down there? I want you to bring them to me, one at a time, and give them the same instruction as was given to you when you came into my care.
The Commandant at last turns her face away and Sparrow allows herself to be pushed towards the pile of her clothes. She obeys the unspoken command to dress.
You will help me demonstrate what it means to be a Spire Guard, he says. You will help me break them the way I broke you.
Sparrow hears the command, and she obeys.
She closes her eyes to the shadows of the countless men and women she’d help to break in Garth’s posture. He, at least, is not one of them, but it haunts her to no end that if the Will-user had not chosen that day to act, those aboard their very ship would have each eventually passed through her hands and to the Commandant’s.
When Sparrow opens her eyes again she turns them off into the horizon, where a slim strip of land is beginning to take shape. Oakfield grows from thought to tangible promise and she lets a breath out heavy. “We’ll reach land before the sun sets,” she says.
Garth turns to follow her line of vision and hums his own agreement. “Will this Theresa you spoke of be meeting us?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” says Sparrow. She has not felt the touch of Theresa’s mind since leaving the docks of Westcliff. At first she’d assumed the corruption of the Spire was the cause of the Gypsy woman’s silence, but now she wonders if Theresa has seen the monster that’s emerged. Perhaps Garth will receive his own message, and Sparrow will simply be left adrift and ignorant until what’s left of her identity scatters to the wind.
Garth takes her hand. It’s jarring, unfamiliar, and the scent of burning flesh immediately sours in Sparrow’s nose as her Will leaps forward in objection. Garth grimaces but maintains his grip until Sparrow can reclaim enough control of herself to reign her power in. Sparrow’s face burns with shame. “Sorry,” she says.
“It is nothing,” says Garth, and he shakes his head. “Listen to me, Sparrow. I do not know how long our paths will intertwine once we reach shore, but know this, I am in your debt.” Garth’s free hand comes up to grasp their locked palms and his Will lines brighten ever so slightly. “Whatever you may think of yourself and what you’ve done, you have earned the name of Hero. All that is left that anyone can ask of you is that you now allow yourself to heal.”
They are pretty words. And spoken down on her from Garth’s old, wizened face, she might almost be convinced they are a spell all on their own. But Sparrow is not so young and not so little anymore. She knows that there is nothing close to peace waiting for her on land, and no time to nurse the wounds of her spirit into something salvageable. That being said, she will face her fate anyway.
She pulls her hand away and turns from the growing view of Oakfield, determined to spend the rest of their brief voyage in the solitude of her cabin below. “I’ll try,” she says to Garth’s lingering look.
“That’s all I ask,” he says in turn.
Sparrow smiles, but it, just as much as her words, is a lie.