Naji was sprawled out on the bow, his arms soaked with blood, his face drawn, his skin almost blue. I knelt beside him, and he turned toward me. Pressed one hand against my face. His blood was hot and sticky against my skin.
“I can’t do it anymore,” he said, his voice like broken glass. “I’m sorry.”
“Did someone hurt you?” I felt around for a wound. “Where are you hurt? I can fix it–”
“Ananna, you don’t understand… I need blood…”
The magic. Nobody had cut him or shot him, it was the magic.
“Mine,” I said. “You can have mine.”
He shook his head, but I didn’t listen to him earlier and I wasn’t listening to him now. I drew the tip of my sword down my arm. The sting of it took my breath away.
“Here,” I said, and there were tears in my eyes and I hoped he’d think it was from the cannon smoke. “What should I do with it?”
“No…” He closed his eyes. “I don’t want… Not from you… It’ll connect us… It’s invasive…”
“What are you talking about? We’re connected already! We need to kill Captain Hariri. His wife too. I can’t find ’em in all this! Can you do it?”
He didn’t answer.
“Can you track ’em? Naji! You have to pull ’em out! I’ll kill ’em, alright? But it’s the only way they’ll stop.”
The boat lurched. Marjani screamed orders from the helm, but my head was spinning from the blood seeping out of my arm. “Naji!” I said.
He took hold of my bleeding arm. I braced myself against the deck as the boat tilted farther. Men were scrambling up in the riggings, trying to get her righted.
“Hurry!”
He ran his hand up my arm, blood oozing between his fingers. I ground my teeth together so I wouldn’t scream at the pain of it. He began to chant, and his words rolled over me and then I didn’t feel the pain no more.
His voice strengthened. He gripped tight on my wrist. My blood rolled in rivers down the length of my arm. He sat up. The shadows underneath the machines started to wriggle and squirm, and men were screaming and moaning.
He leaned close to me, and put his mouth on my ear. “I won’t make you kill them,” he whispered. “I know it hurts you.”
It stunned me, that sudden burst of kindness, that suggestion that he might care for me, might care for my well-being.
The fact that he knew it hurt me, when I hurt people.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
He stood up. The glow in his eyes brightened, and for a second I felt this weird tingle in the arm I’d cut for him, this hum of magic rippling across my skin. And then the tingle was everywhere, sparking up the air, the way it gets before a lightning storm in the desert. Naji was close to me, his body and his mind both, and I felt a surge of warmth from him. A feeling of things being right. And then I got the sense of all these hearts beating, every heart on that boat, the blood and the life of every crewman who hadn’t gotten tossed down to the deep.
I wondered if this was how Naji felt all the time.
He spoke. His voice echoed inside my head, that secret rose-petal language, like I was hearing his thoughts and his words both. A connection.
The shadows billowed up like smoke, thick enough to rip the Hariri machines into shreds, into long glinting metal ribbons. Men flung themselves against the side of the boat. The Hariri fired off another volley of cannons.
And then in all that confusion, all those glints of metal, all that smoke, all that splintered wood, I knew where Captain and Mistress Hariri were.
I didn’t see them.
I just knew.
They were on the bow of the ship, cutting their way through Nadir crewman.
I jumped to my feet. Naji grabbed my arm, turned his glowing eyes toward me.
“I know where they are,” I said.
“I know.” He blinked and I felt a surge of worry. “Ananna, I can protect you.”
“You don’t have to protect me!” And I wrenched my arm free, despite the strength of his magic – the strength my blood had given him. I leapt off the helm and followed the trail of the shadows, listening to the beating of those two hearts that wanted me dead.
“Girl-human!” The manticore galloped up behind me. I glanced at her over my shoulder. Her entire face was covered in blood. Her teeth shone like knives.
“You smell like Jadorr’a,” she said. “But I will not eat you.” She dipped her shoulder down. With Naji’s magic inside me, I swung myself onto her back.
“To the bow!” I wound my fingers in her mane and pressed myself low against her back. We pressed on together, the shadows sliding over us like water.
I still couldn’t see the Hariris, but they were there, I knew it, I could feel the proximity–
Off in the distance, a pop.
Warmth spread across my belly. Pain. Warmth and pain. I looked down.
Blood.
The smell of smoke and metal.
Someone was laughing. A woman. Shrill and mean. I recognized it–
“Girl-human! You are body-hurt!”
“She shot me,” I said, cause I couldn’t believe it.
“Yes, Ananna of the Tanarau,” said Captain Hariri. He lifted up his pistol, pointed it at me. The barrel loomed huge and dark. “She shot you.”
Lightning arced across the boat.
The Hariris both crumpled like rag dolls.
I blinked.
“Lightning doesn’t move sideways,” I said. The world was spinning round and round. The pain in my stomach was dazzling.
I wasn’t gonna scream. I wasn’t gonna cry.
And then I heard a voice like roses and darkness, and I smelled mint and medicine, and strong sure hands wrapped round my chest, and I was tumbling, tumbling, tumbling into the warm soft sea, but I was safe. That I knew.
I was safe. I was protected.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I woke up in a room made of light.
I blinked and rubbed at my eyes and slowly things started moving into focus: a big open window lined with gauzy fluttering curtains, the kind you use to keep bugs out. A table with a water pitcher. A bed, which I was in.
Otherwise, the room was empty.
When I tried to sit up pain exploded through the lower part of my stomach, and I fell back, gasping. I put my hands on my stomach. I wasn’t wearing my Empire robe no more, but some kind of thin dress, and through the fabric I could feel the thick weight of a bandage.
I remembered the pop of Mistress Hariri’s pistol, the swell of pain. Had the Hariris captured me? No, they were dead. Lightning had cut them down… No, that wasn’t right, either–
“Hello?” I nudged myself up on one shoulder. That didn’t hurt too bad. “Anybody around?”
No answer but the wind rustling the curtains. It smelled of the desert.
I lay back down. Stared up at the ceiling. It looked kinda like the clay they used in Lisirran houses, only it was red-orange, like a sunset.
Footsteps bounced off the walls.
“Hello?” I tried to sit up again, grinding my teeth against the pain.
“Ananna? What are you…? No, lie back down.” Naji darted up next to the bed and pressed me gently against the soft downy pillows. “You shouldn’t move yet.”
He wasn’t covering his face, and in the room’s bright sunlight the twists of his scars made him look concerned.
“Where am I?”
“The Island of the Sun.” Naji straightened up and walked over to the table, covered with scraps of parchment with brownish-red writing and vials of dried plants. He set something on it – another vial. “You woke up earlier than I was expecting. That’s good.”
“Did I die?” I asked. I couldn’t remember nothing about what happened after the battle. How far had we been from the island when the Hariris struck? Not far: Jeric yi Niru had shot down seabirds…
“No.” Naji sprinkled some of the plants onto one of the scraps of parchment and folded it into a package, the ends t
ucked inside themselves. “You came close, very close, but… I pulled you back.”
He slipped the paper package underneath my pillows.
“With magic?” I hesitated. “Blood magic?”
“Yes.” He sat down on the bed beside me, leaned up against the wall. “Medicine wouldn’t have saved you.”
“Oh.” I paused. “Did it… did it hurt you bad? When I… when she shot me?”
Naji turned to me. “Yes,” he said, but his eyes were soft, like he hadn’t minded. “And I worked to save you, and that made the pain go away.”
“I’m sorry.”
He looked at me long and hard. “Don’t apologize.”
Then he brushed his hand over my forehead, pushing the hair out of my eyes. His touch startled me, the cool dry skin of his palm.
“Rest,” he said. “I’ll be back to check on you.”
“Wait,” I said. He stopped. “How long we been here?”
“We sailed in yesterday evening.” His face hardened. “It seems your manticore is the daughter of the island’s pride leader, so our plan for a quick getaway would be distressingly rude. They want to give us a feast when you’re better.”
My expression must have told him something, cause he said, “They swore they will not force us to engage in cannibalism. Still, most of the crew have opted to sleep on the boat.”
I kinda smiled at that. No wonder the manticore had been so demanding of me. Wasn’t a manticore thing, it was a royalty thing. Well.
“When you sleep,” Naji said, “the dreaming will help you heal faster.”
“Oh.” I frowned. “I didn’t think blood magic could save people–”
“Blood magic can do whatever I will it to do.”
I didn’t say anything to that, and Naji gave me a nod. I expected him to leave, but instead he walked over next to the window and pushed the curtains aside and looked out. I watched him for a little while, as the curtains fluttered around him like butterflies. The wind blowing in was hot and dry and smelled of clay. It made me sleepy. Or maybe it was the spells he cast, the little packet of dried herbs under my pillow.
It didn’t take long before my eyes refused to stay open, and I curled up on top of the blankets and the dreams came in like the wind.
They were dark and strange, those dreams, and I was back in that black-glass desert, only this time I wasn’t scared. Nobody was searching for me. I just wandered across the desert, the glass smooth and strangely cool beneath my bare feet. I wore that same dress I’d had on when Naji and me crossed the desert together after I saved him, on our way to the canyon that was supposed to hold a cure to his curse. Sometimes I thought I saw creatures made out of ink and shadow. I’d turn to look at ’em and they’d dart out of my line of sight, but they left dark streaky trails in their wake, and when I touched them my fingers came back sticky with blood.
When I woke up again it was dark outside and my stomach didn’t hurt no more. Torches flickered pale gold against the walls. Naji was gone.
This time I was able to sit up, but it exhausted me, and I leaned against the wall and took deep gulping breaths while my heart pounded against my chest. The bedside table was still littered with Naji’s parchments. I picked one up. It was in his language, and I didn’t recognize the alphabet, couldn’t match the letters to the sounds.
And yet I could hear his voice inside my head, gruff and throaty, chanting the song that had saved me. I couldn’t read the parchments, but I could understand it.
Weird.
“Ananna?”
It wasn’t him, it was Marjani. I dropped the scraps of parchment, and they fluttered across the top of my bed like flower petals.
“Naji said you had woken up–”
“Yeah.” I gathered up the parchment, my movements slow and heavy like I was underwater. “He told me there’s gonna be a feast.”
“Don’t remind me.” Marjani rolled her eyes. “They’ve already begun preparations. I’ve had to reassure them about fifty times that we don’t mind eating ‘servant food’.”
I grinned.
We sat in silence for a little while, the shadows sliding across the floor. I thought about the shadows in my dream, the shadows that had led me to the Hariris.
“How’s the boat?” I asked.
“Got us here.” Marjani sighed. “Still working on repairs, although it shouldn’t be much longer. A day or so.” She paused. “Jig’s up on Captain Namir yi Nadir, by the way. Crew figured it out during the battle. Good news is they don’t seem to mind.”
“So Jeric yi Niru doesn’t have nothing on us no more.”
“I suppose that’s true. He’s still an eavesdropper. Untrustworthy.” She sighed. “Only lost about ten men, all told. A few more were injured. I’m going to give them a higher cut for it. Next time we do some honest pirating, anyway.”
“So you’re the captain now?”
“That’s what they’ve been calling me.” She smiled at me, a real smile. “Naji makes them nervous now that they know about his magic, although I think they’ll tolerate him being onboard on account of him blasting those damned metal bugs out of the sky.”
She looked at me, then, and I knew she was looking for the story, about the Hariris and who I really was. Marjani knew subtlety. I’d warrant she’d won the crewmen over long before the battle – why else would they’ve listened to her when the Hariris attacked?
She’d won me over a long time ago, too.
So I finally told her everything. I told her about running away from Tarrin of the Hariri, and I told her how Naji was supposed to kill me, and that I saved his life and that in turn saved me – she already knew most of that already, just none of the details. And I told her about how I killed Tarrin in the desert.
And the whole time she kept her eyes on me, not moving or speaking, just watching me and listening.
When I finished, I expected her to do something, to yell at me for putting the Nadir in danger, or for not trusting her enough with the truth. But all she did was nod.
“I’m glad you told me.” She stood up. “You still want to be my first mate?”
“You ain’t pissed?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We all have secrets. Mine probably won’t attack us with a swarm of flying machines, but…” She shrugged. “It’s over now, right?”
“It’s over.” I pressed my head back against the wall and closed my eyes. “The Hariri clan’ll disband now. Anybody comes after us for the captain’s death, I got the right to go after him for revenge, or to send someone after him – doubt anyone’ll bother.”
Marjani looked amused. “I never understood the Confederation rules for revenge.”
“Trust me, ain’t no one in the Confederation understands ’em neither.”
She laughed. Folded her arms over her chest. “I should go. Naji said sleep would help you get better – so, please, sleep for as long as it takes. I don’t want to stay on this island much longer.”
“Sure thing.” I smiled. “Captain.”
The manticores scheduled the feast for two days after I got up and walked around the manticores’ palace garden. Naji took me down there, one hand pressed against my back as he led me out of the bare servants’ quarters and across the island’s dry red sands. As we walked, I kept thinking I heard him talking to me. But when I asked him what he wanted, he only shook his head and told me he hadn’t said nothing.
“You’re still in the process of recovering,” he said stiffly. “Things will clear up for you soon enough.”
As it turned out, the manticores’ palace wasn’t really a palace; it was big pile of red and yellow rocks surrounded on all sides by flowering vines and fruit trees and soft pale grasses. The human servants took care of the garden – I saw ’em working as I stumbled over the paths. My sunlit room was actually in the servants’ quarters, which were a series of little clay shacks lining the edge of the garden. The manticore had explained to her father that sleeping inside was a human preference, and then he explaine
d to me that these shacks were the best they had. I didn’t mind. Better than sleeping in the grass.
Naji led me into the shade of a lemon tree and helped me sit down. The palace of rocks loomed up huge and tall against the cloudless blue sky.
“That ain’t a palace,” I said.
“Manticores don’t live inside.” Naji sat down beside me. “They think it’s barbaric.”
“How do you know that?”
“I found myself trapped in conversation with Ongraygeeomryn’s father after we landed.”
I looked out over the garden. The plants swayed in the hot desert wind. One of the servant girls walked alongside a row of ginger flowers, spilling water over each one from a bucket that came up almost to her knees.
I didn’t see any servant boys.
“Do they all want to eat you as badly as she does?”
“Oh yes.” He blinked. “For the first time, I find myself grateful for the curse.”
I didn’t know if it was alright to laugh, so I just kinda squinted at him and nodded. He had covered his face to walk me out to the gardens. I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to do that, that he was handsome even with the scars, that the scars made him more beautiful than any untrustworthy pretty boy lurking in some Empire palace.
I didn’t, though, cause I knew if I did he would leave. And he only saved my life cause of his curse, but out there in the garden, the scent of jasmine heavy on the air, it was easy to pretend otherwise.
For those two days before the feast, Naji wouldn’t let me go any farther than the gardens – he said I still wasn’t strong enough – and every day at sunrise and sunset he came into my room and slipped another packet of blood-spells and dried herbs underneath my pillow. Sometimes he sang this song in his dead-rose language and I’d fall asleep and dream of the black-glass desert and a dry wind full of starlight that would blow me across the landscape and cradle me gentle as a lover.
Sometimes, even when I was alone, I’d hear him singing. I’d hear him thinking. I figured it must be leftover from the magic.
The manticore came to visit me too. The first time she came trotting up to us while Naji led me through a maze of thorny red flowers in the garden.
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