by Sam Farren
So: Varn would care, Kouris would be disappointed in me for letting things go this far, and I'd have let myself down.
“Okay,” I said, clenching and unclenching my fists. “I'm going... I'm going to stop Gavern.”
I snatched a bag from the corner of my room, stepped towards my dresser and tried to picture what Gavern actually looked like. There might've been some similarity between him and Queen Nasrin, I supposed, but I could only think of him as a brute, daring the sea to swallow him whole for the ownership he claimed over it.
I pulled drawers open, blindly grabbing shorts and vests, thinking we'd need food. A few days' worth, at the very least. Who was to say how many stops we were making along the way? Most people, I thought dully, would've packed a weapon or two when it came to assassinations, but I had all I needed poorly concealed within me.
The faded sounds of Kouris and Varn talking in the next room drifted through the wall, and I dropped my bag at my feet.
I couldn't do it.
Not now that I realised this past month had been leading up to this moment. That Varn hadn't just been getting in bar fights and reacquainting herself with the sea; she'd been planning this out the whole time, and I was complicit.
I sat on the edge of my bed, light burning, boiling, fading. I gripped the key hanging on a chain around my throat and leant forward, staring into the fog that enveloped my mind for whole minutes. Longer, perhaps.
Varn came strolling back into my room, letter written, and placed her hands on her hips as she scowled down at me.
“Oi. No backing out, Rowan,” she said. “And what's all this about? You said you were getting good at this whole glowing business. We ain't got much time! Let's get going.”
“Can't,” I said, shaking my head. “I can't do it.”
Varn, for as much as she indulged in seeming as annoyed as a person possibly could be throughout every waking moment, didn't react with anything close to surprise.
She shrugged, saying, “What's the big deal? We've all done it. Only difference is, you ain't gotta rely on any weapon. You don't have to get too close, and you don't have to worry about the mess. It's easy. It's no big deal, Rowan. The guy's a bastard, and the Queen wants this done. That kind of makes it okay, right?”
“I'm—maybe I'm not like all of you,” I blurted out. The words slipped free before I had the chance to force them to fade in my throat.
Varn stepped forward, huffing a dry, humourless laugh.
“You ain't like one of us? I hate to break it to you, Rowan, but you live in a town of pirates. You eat with pirates, drink with pirates, work with pirates. What, you reckon you're somehow above us all 'cause no one's ever seen you stick a knife in someone? Reckon you can carry on not being like us when you live with someone like Reis? You've seen the sort of stuff they can do, right?”
I looked away, teeth clenching together hard enough to spur on a headache. Varn was right. I might not have used a blade to take a life, but I'd stolen, I'd helped the pirates plunder small villages across the coast and I hadn't blinked when they'd bragged about the ships they'd sunk and the lives they'd taken in the taverns; I hadn't thought twice about the way Reis had those men's hands cut off, until...
“I didn't mean it like that. I know I'm not better than any of you, I just, I don't think I can do it, Varn.”
“Well, you ain't gonna find out for certain sat here. Come on,” Varn said firmly, moving to grab me by the shoulder.
I knocked her arm back and she tensed, staring down at me as though she couldn't tell whether she ought to hit me or dodge a punch I was about to throw. I stared up at her, jaw set, determined to be immovable, knowing there was nothing for me in Kastelir. They had a resistance, and it'd been built up without our help; it was patronising to assume they needed us now.
“Rowan,” Varn warned, and I shot to my feet, unwilling to let her tower over me. I grabbed the front of her vest in a fist, dared to pull her close, and a long, low note rolled through the air like thunder.
“The hell?” Varn murmured, knocking my arm back.
Whatever scuffle I'd been about to lose was forgotten, and Varn scrambled onto the bed, clinging to the windowsill and leaning out. I hurried to do the same, recognising the sound of the horn too keenly, and when my eyes adjusted to the pounding of the sun outside, I saw that it was happening all over again.
Buildings were burning. Boats and cargo alike had been set ablaze along the docks, and in the distance, the silhouettes of colossal ships broke apart the ocean. There were three of them, each the size of the biggest ship Mahon boasted, and as fire swept through the town, not again, not again, pounded between my temples.
It wasn't until Varn looked my way that I realised I'd been murmuring the words out loud.
Not having time to deal with me, she yelled out “Reis!” and stormed into the hut. I followed, and Reis and Kouris were out of their rooms by the time the first ship's cannons fired against us. Holstering their gun, Reis left the hut with a look that could've stopped a raging storm in a heartbeat.
Kouris rushed out first, taking wide, swift strides through the sand, and as Varn and I ran past Reis, they called out, “Better get to work, kid,” at me.
The crackling of flames was interspersed by swords clashing together, and people – our people, Gavern's people, voices blending together – screaming out in victory and pain alike. I'd witnessed plenty of fights in my time there, many of them grave, but I'd never seen an assault on this scale, and I doubted anyone else had. The ships had stopped once they were in firing range and Mahon's cannons were firing in return, and half of the ships that had sailed out to meet Gavern's were already halfway to sinking.
A man charged towards us as we drew towards the town and Varn let him come close, let him – and me – believe that he was going to be able to slash his blade across her throat; falling into stance, Varn grabbed his face, and with an ankle hooked around the back of his leg, threw him to the ground. In his trip down, he'd forgotten about his sword, but Varn hadn't. She grabbed it by the hilt, using the pommel to embed his nose deep into his skull.
“Go! Help people!” Varn said, claiming the sword for herself. “Gods. Don't need to be a necromancer to know it reeks of death around here.”
There had to be a hundred of them. Gavern wasn't sending negotiations, this time, wasn't sending a ship with a skeleton crew to make some sort of point. What wasn't burning had been reduced to rubble, and the women of Port Mahon fought as if they had been fighting for hours, for days; as though I was the only one who realised this had started minutes ago.
“Felheim!” someone bellowed from across the street. It was a woman I knew, a woman who'd helped me haul in nets full of writhing fish, only now, there was more than sweat on her brow.
She brandished her blade, ready to strike, and stood guard over someone I didn't recognise. She was slumped against the side of a crumbled wall, unmoving and empty, and all because of the dagger in her chest. Fights were unfolding and concluding all around me and people were starting to take notice of me; I couldn't waste any time, couldn't afford to be gentle.
My knee scraped against the ground and I gripped the hilt of the knife, pulling it loose and seeing, in my mind, the blood run and run, spilling without end. I froze for half a second, but my powers moved without waiting for me. The wound sealed shut, barely spilling a drop, and with a gasp, the woman startled herself back to life.
Dropping the knife, I kept on running.
Port Mahon shook, and as clearly as though I was there to see it happen before me, I knew what had become of the jail. It'd been struck by cannon fire. The walls had come crumbling down, and the jailers would be too busy fending off the attack to stop a solitary prisoner from escaping. I bolted towards the jail, weaving between fights breaking out and burning buildings, unable to bring myself to ignore cries for help. I worked so quickly that I couldn't tell who I was healing and who I was reviving, needing to get to the jail, needing to stop her.
I
didn't falter. What could she do that I couldn't, without her chains and knives?
I rounded a corner, heart in my throat, and stared up at the jail as I skidded to a stop.
There wasn't a scratch on it. None of the walls had been knocked down, the door wasn't beaten in; the scaffold in front of the building wasn't burning.
Immediately doubling over, I clutched at the front of my shirt, trying to catch my breath. If I had found the jail split open, prisoners pouring out, I don't know what I would've done, other than watch them escape, frozen.
Climbing from the back of a cart onto a stack of crates, I found a foothold in the form of a window frame and managed to scramble atop one of the roofs. The fire hadn't spread this far back, nor had the fighting; it was bad, but not as bad as it had first seemed, out there on the docks. As Gavern's ships sunk, sides splintered by cannon fire, the pirates of Port Mahon turned from defensive to vicious, no longer interested in holding anything back, now that the buildings around them weren't being turned to rubble.
Death took the city, and I had to wade my way through it; had to work out how many of the dead counted amongst our numbers, how many there truly were to save. I remained up on that roof until the fighting finally turned in our favour. Gavern's men tried to retreat, only to be chased down by a handful of pirates at once, and the only ship of theirs remaining had been claimed by our people.
Time wasn't a factor, not for me. If someone was dead, they could wait. I stayed on that roof for a full half an hour before daring to slip down, as terrified of Gavern's men as any unarmed person would be, and once I was on the ground, sought out the injured and the dying first. I went where I was needed, skin dulling as I washed away burns and closed slit throats, moving onto the next person before I could feel the wounds rattle around my own bones.
“Oi, Felheim,” someone called from above me. I was knelt on the floor, in the midst of bringing back somebody who'd had her head beaten in with what looked to be a rock, and looked up to find Cal blocking out the sun. “Didn't I ask you if you were a necromancer a couple of months back?”
“Yeah,” I said, attention back on the dead woman.
Hand on her shoulder, I started piecing together her shattered skull, and Cal crouched down next to me.
“Why you been hiding it away?” Cal asked, more angry than curious. “I've had to toss the bodies of friends in the sea, 'cause that's as good of a funeral as you're gonna get around these parts, when all the time, you could've helped 'em. They'd be here right now, if not for you. What's your excuse, then? Where were you the last time Gavern hit Mahon?”
“I—” I started, tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth. Cal grabbed my arm the moment my patient was alive again, and pulled me onto my feet.
“That all you gotta say for yourself? Not that it'd make the blindest bit of difference—unless you wanna go fish their corpses out,” Cal sneered, face pressed close to mine.
People had gathered to watch me work, and after all I'd done for Port Mahon that day, over the past few weeks, they weren't going to let Cal push me around. Someone took hold of her shoulder and said, “Easy, Cal,” as they pulled her back, but her eyes were still fixed fast on me. Stepping back, I made no reply. There was no way to defend myself, and I knew that plenty of the onlookers surrounding us agreed with her.
People had died, and not just because of Gavern. Dozens of people had been lost throughout my stay in Mahon, yet I hadn't done a single thing to help them when I could've.
Ignoring the pull of what remained of Gavern's men strewn through the streets, I made for the docks, where it had all started.
“Posing as merchants,” one woman spat, “Started unloading and then razed the place.”
The docks had been burnt clean through in the centre, and what remained on the outskirts was hardly safe to walk on. Those who weren't injured or fighting gathered on the edge of town, and I pushed my way through the crowd, towards the screams. In the centre, three of Gavern's men were being restrained, and a fourth went flying across the hard ground as Varn swung a crowbar at his head.
“Where the hell is Gavern!?” she demanded, pulling the crowbar over her shoulder and bringing it back down against his skull before he had a chance to answer.
The man grunted and gurgled and, frustrated, Varn gripped him by the throat, knelt on his chest and hit him over and over, inviting death in with every shriek. Everyone gathered watched unblinking, but even the hardiest pirates were fighting not to look away. Face and chest splattered in blood, Varn stood, kicked the corpse and shouted, “The rest of you better be a lot fucking more cooperative.”
Sneering, she wiped the crowbar off on her shorts, and picked her next victim. The interrogation was barely a swing under way when Kouris cut between the two of them, gripped the front of the man's shirt and lifted him four feet off the ground.
Kouris grinned, all of her fangs lining up inches from the man's face, and I saw him pale in a way he hadn't at Varn's treatment of his comrade. He fought to get out of Kouris' hold, futilely kicked his arms and legs, and it dawned on me that he didn't know what she was. All he saw were tusks and horns and golden eyes, a clawed giant who could surely do so much worse than a woman with a crowbar.
“Tell us where Gavern is,” Kouris growled, words thicker than they needed to be, “Or I'll eat you.”
The women crowded around did their best not to make a sound, but the man wouldn't have noticed had they broken out into fits of laugher. All he saw was Kouris, all he heard were her words echoing through his skull. I'd intended to stay and watch, but knew there must still be those needing my help. My mind was like a map that someone had scrawled lines on, pointing me towards every path as well as a few roads they'd made up, and so I headed off blindly, not caring where I started making sense of it all.
Reis was on the beach, close enough for me to spot from the outskirts of the town. They stood still, shoulders hunched, and I felt the corpse at their feet before I saw it.
No, not a corpse; it was Tae. Throat torn open and empty eyes fixed on the sun, blood and colour alike drained into the sand. A few feet from them, one of Gavern's men was crumpled in a pile, bullet hole neatly placed in the centre of his forehead.
Reis didn't notice me approach. They stood there staring, not at Tae, but at a sea-smoothed stone resting by the side of her head. I wrapped my fingers around their wrist, squeezing it to ensure they were still with me, and without crouching, held out a hand and curled my fingers towards my palm, closing the gash across Tae's throat.
She coughed the colour back into her face, not choking enough on the residual blood in her throat to warrant a second revival, and clawed through the sand for her sword. Only then did Reis react. Tae moved to get to her feet but Reis shoved the tip of their cane against her shoulder, knocking her back down.
“Ow, Cap, what—” Tae said shakily, still too disorientated to piece together what had happened.
“What the bloody hell was that, Tae?” Reis said, teeth grit. “I taught you better than that.”
“Cap!” Tae protested, fingers twisting in clumps of bloody sand, but Reis already had their back to her.
They didn't thank me. They said, “This is gonna be a nightmare to fix,” as they headed towards the docks and left it at that.
I hurried ahead of them, sure that the bodies would be brought to me, now that the fighting was over, and found that the crowd had scattered. Three of the men were still alive, chained to posts and watched over by a mountain of a woman with a mace in her hands, while the man who'd been beaten with the crowbar remained smeared across the pavement.
“Rowan,” Varn said dryly, twisting her bloodied fingers in the back of my shirt. “Come on. Time to get moving. We know where Gavern is.”
“What?” I asked, spinning around. “We're doing this now? I thought...”
“Got somewhere better to be?” Gripping my elbow, she dragged me along to the boat she'd set her sights on. “Gavern's in Ioane Point. Gods know how long he'
s gonna be there. He's got a habit of jumping from one place to another. Go on, guess why we ain't managed to catch him yet.”
“But I just brought dozens of people back to life,” I protested weakly.
A week hadn't been enough for me. The minutes it'd take to reach Ioane Point were already slipping between my fingers.
“Want a medal?”
I was following her. I was actually following her. Varn was covered in blood and grime and the stench of what she'd done clung to her like a curse, but she wasn't stopping to lick her wounds. She was exhausted, lungs burning and eyes stinging, but she was still striding forward, doing all she could to protect Canth. Cal was right. I should've been helping Port Mahon all this time.
Realising that no one else was going to take my place, I found myself on the back of the small, sleek boat Varn had claimed for her own. Akela was at the docks, fast fading in the distance, voice too small to reach me, and the ocean, the only thing that'd kept me calm throughout my time in Canth, became a cage. There was no turning back, no swimming without drowning.
The boat skidded like a stone across the surface of the sea, but Varn guided it across the waves, Ioane Point coming into view. It was a narrow stretch of land that had once been part of Canth itself, but when the seas rose it was cut off from the rest of the country, and its inhabitants retreated inland. Mere decades had passed, but the ruined buildings stood against the horizon as relics from a past age, crumbling beneath the pounding sun.
And there, framed between two misshapen towers was the largest ship I'd ever seen, draped in sails of green and blue.
CHAPTER IX
“Remember the plan?” Varn asked.
The wind had taken her side, launching us towards Gavern, and something akin to my old sea-sickness swirled within me.
