by Alex Lidell
“Secure the gun!” Rima hollers. Two of the crew leap onto the rogue weapon, which spins and slides chaotically in answer to Clay’s magic and the undulating ship. Even in a calm and natural sea, it takes a team of at least four men to control a great gun, so the two seamen’s efforts at taming the magically spurred beast come to nothing. The gun rolls over Red again, quickening the dying man’s end.
Rima kicks Clay in the stomach.
The great gun’s wildness dies away, but there is nothing to be done for gravity. Still loose, the gun carriage rolls down the sloping deck to crash into the ship’s hull with a deafening crack that draws horrified breaths.
Bald, holding on to the shrouds with one hand, points a pistol at Clay’s head and cocks the hammer.
“Put that away, you idiot,” Rima hollers, and for once, I agree with the captain.
“He’s going to get us killed,” Bald snarls.
“Kill him, and you are following his body into the deep,” Rima tells Bald. “This idiot is infinitely more valuable than your carcass.”
My heart stills, but after a moment, Bald uncocks the pistol and puts it away. With the tension easing, I am finally able to get a grip on my wind. We all catch our breath as the schooner responds to the rudder once more.
Clay and I temporarily relegated to the background, Rima’s sailors inspect the hull for damage and debate whether we can continue sailing or require a stop for repairs. Clay hugs his knees and shakes, small metal tools popping up and down in rhythm to his sobs.
The crew scurries to secure the metal objects before Clay can wreak more havoc than they can fix.
Rima’s boots appear before me again. “Can you control him?” he demands of me, jerking his chin toward Clay.
“No.” My eyes flash. “And before you think I’m lying, realize I’ve as little desire to go down to the bottom of the river as you do. Given that my twin has just sent a great gun on a murderous rampage, you might wish to reconsider your plan.”
The enormity of what I just said hits me. How powerful is Clay? I’ve never heard of a Gifted able to control that much of the element. Quinn told me he’s never met a wind caller with my power either. Whatever Clay and I are, we aren’t normal. And when we are together… I keep my thoughts to myself, waiting until Rima moves away before sliding my fingers toward Clay’s.
We sit half a foot apart, but the inches are endless, my heart pounding harder the closer my bare skin gets to my twin. When I’m but finger’s width away, my magic explodes inside me. Together, together, together the magic begs me, orders me. Whole, whole, whole.
I freeze, the memory of our last connection all too vivid in my memory. The cost of Clay gaining awareness was the loss of my own. “Clay,” I whisper.
“Clay,” he echoes, his gaze staring at the now-dormant great gun. Blood streaks down my twin’s thigh, his perfect doll-like face trembling in pitiful terror. But that gaze is steady. A message?
Did you free that gun on purpose, Clay? Did you deflect the whip? Are you trying to tell me something? Give me some sign. Something. Anything. Tell me what you want before I do something stupid to us both.
Clay stays still.
I study the great gun again. It takes the whole crew to wrestle it back into its port and lash it down with rope. Breaking it loose must have taken every ounce of Clay’s effort. An ultimate feat of control, or utter lack of it.
If we could break the gun free again and use it against the crew, we could take out the men. Or sink the schooner. I don’t know. But I do know that my wind will do little good. I can’t blow the crew off deck without capsizing the schooner, and anything smaller will result in Clay being tortured. The very same wind that gives life to a ship at sea is also its ultimate enemy. No, it’s Clay’s magic, not mine, that can save us. But to do that, Clay needs the presence of mind that I have. He needs my mind.
I swallow. We narrowly avoided disaster when I’d surrendered my awareness to him by accident. If I do it on purpose now, will it make things better or worse? Will my hard-won rein over my own magic help or count for nothing? So many variables. So many unknowns. The biggest one, the one that truly sends terror through me, has nothing to do with magic, though. If I surrender my mind to my twin, will I ever get it back?
Before I can reconsider, I grip Clay’s hand and entrust my twin with my life. With both our lives.
Chapter 45
As my hand connects with Clay’s, the now-familiar bouquet of combined power ripples through me.
“Clay.” I tug on his arm.
His face turns to me. His eyes are clearing.
This time, I don’t dare indulge in marveling at the amazingness of it all. I have too little time before my mind slips and words will no longer come. The wind around us picks up, only my recent training keeping a storm at bay.
Lub dub, lub dub, my heart beats, catching a cadence to complement my twin’s. We have one consciousness to share between us, and two sets of magic. And that will have to do.
“We are in trouble,” I say, letting my mind yield itself slowly to him, giving Clay the use of my mental focus to orient himself.
“Great gun,” Clay says, straining with effort. “Weapon.”
So he had been sending me a signal. A wave of fear and relief washes over me. Clay has a plan, and the strength to make it happen. All he needs now is my mind.
“Take it,” I say quickly. “The helm is yours.”
Despite having braced myself for it, the slip into Clay’s reality is dizzying. While my senses still function, they report information at an alarming and increasingly disorganized rate, each new morsel competing with instead of complementing the other.
The sun reflecting off the glassy water is so blindingly bright, it feels as though small needles are jabbing my eyeballs. The ropes binding me to the mast burn my flesh to the bone, the searing coming from the inside out instead of outside in. The water lapping the schooner’s hull echoes through the whole ship over and over, like strikes of a great and never-ceasing gong. Baboom. Baboom. Baboom.
I try to speak but can’t find my tongue, as if my muscles have forgotten the nuance of speech. Through the sensory assault, I understand just enough to see the impotence of my own body. The terror of watching my mind slip away, breath by breath, is more terrible than anything I’ve felt before.
Through squinting eyes, I see a great metal beast pull free of its binding and roll across the deck. It hits a man. He falls overboard. I cringe at the deafening thud of his body hitting water and try to cover my ears, but can’t. Nor can I protect myself from the chorus of howling breaths, and screaming deck planks, and thumping boots, and cracking fingernails.
The last belong to the boy holding my hand. With his other hand, he’s snatched a knife from the air and now struggles to saw through the rope around me, the blade’s serrated edge moving quickly. The rope’s fibers crackle and screech as they tear. I try and fail to pull free of the boy’s crushing grip.
The rope falls away from me, blood returning to my suddenly free and painful limbs. I want to flee but freeze as the deck shifts and the metal beast starts sliding toward me. I need to move. I know I do. But I don’t know where. Everywhere is just as loud and bright and dangerous as where I am now.
The boy holding my hand snatches me to the side. My head hits hard, and it hurts. I try to wriggle away from him, but the boy holds fast. He speaks to me, his words low and soothing and steady.
The beast rolls and rolls. Where it hits, bodies fall and splinters fly. Viscous crimson liquid, thick and coppery, pools on the deck. The liquid slithers onto my face like slime. I shut my eyes.
Suddenly, there is a great crash and a bigger splash.
I shut my eyes tighter and hum to drown out the chaos.
“Nile.” The boy holding me tugs on my arm. His voice comes in bursts. “Nile, you need to come back. Please. Can’t do this myself.”
Something pushes against my consciousness, like an invisible hand stanching a bleeding wou
nd. The noises, smells, pressures, and lights around me order themselves into a complete mosaic as Clay shifts the balance of our shared mind. Slowly, I begin to comprehend the hard surface beneath me as the wooden deck of a swaying ship. The beast of metal that rolled wildly before knocking a hole in the rail and falling overboard had been a great gun. The boy beside me, whose awareness I now share, is my twin.
And the scrawny, yellow-eyed man pointing a pistol at the two of us, his tattooed face sprayed with blood, is our enemy.
I send a gust of wind toward the pistol just as it fires. The yellow-eyed man jerks, and the bullet flies high and wide over the waves.
The man’s eyes widen, and he curses, throwing down his now-useless pistol. He won’t stop, though, I know it in my bones. I know this man, though recalling his exact name is hardly worth the effort, and he is evil.
My gaze takes in the deck. It is bloody, with smashed bodies sprawled across it in gory heaps. Seeing the butt of a pistol tucked into the waistband of what used to be a man, I draw out the gun. It bucks in my hand.
“Sorry,” my other half says apologetically.
The yellow-eyed man freezes. “Put the gun down, Nile,” he orders. “You aren’t a murderer.”
“No,” I agree. “I’m a naval officer.”
I squeeze the trigger and let my other half ensure that the metal ball flies true.
Chapter 46
Clay and I sit facing each other, our hands and gazes gripped tight, as the joint magic and shared awareness course through our bodies. I know that the moment I let my twin’s hand go, something terrible will happen to me. And to him. So we hold on to each other.
The schooner’s crew is dead or gone, having abandoned ship when Clay loosed the second deadly carronade amidst them. Now the great gun rests on the bottom of the riverbed, while a steady wind pushes the schooner against the current. We make little headway toward the Felielle capital, but neither are we swept with the current toward the open sea.
Awareness of where we are and what’s happening shifts and flows between Clay and me. The wind rises and fall. The only steady sensation I feel is one of unity.
At some point, maybe an hour or a day later, there is a great deal of commotion. Other schooners circle around us like a pack of wolves. People come aboard, shouting and yelling and cursing.
“…bloodbath.”
“…impossible.”
“…what sort of ship moves against the current?”
“…Goddess bless and protect us. Goddess be our keeper.”
“…move them gently. We little know how badly Her Highness is injured.”
Those last words wash me with fear. These invaders will cleave me and Clay apart. It will hurt, and I will be alone again.
“Nile.” The voice beside me is not my twin’s, and yet it brushes my soul. The smell of salt and brine fills my nose, and large hands encircle my shoulders. “It’s all right.”
“This isn’t natural, my Prince Tamiath,” says a man I’ve not heard before. Fear laces his voice as others around mumble in agreement. “Look around. All the attackers dead, and the winds themselves moving the schooner against the currents? It—”
“It was the Goddess’s own will,” a familiar man answers confidently. “The Goddess is claiming Nile of Felielle as her own. Open your eyes, man, and be grateful you are here to witness the signs.”
The brine-and-salt man holding me snorts softly beside my ear, but when he speaks, it’s with a confident voice that pitches over the deck. “It is as you say, my Prince Tamiath! Nile of Felielle is one with the Goddess and the sea.” The man’s arms tighten around me, his voice lowering. “She is…injured, sir. Once we separate them…” He trails off into a meaning-laden silence.
No. My grip on my twin tightens.
The man called Prince Tamiath crouches beside me. “Do the best you can, Mr. Dana,” he says very quietly. “I’ll do what I can about the men’s attention.” With that, the prince rises and begins to bargain loudly with the Goddess, promising the deity all sorts of things in return for my being permitted to return back to the world of man in Felielle.
Once other voices join in the prayers and bargaining, the brine-and-sea-salt man holding me brushes my ear again. “It’s time to let go, Nile. I have you now.”
I am in and out of convulsions for the next week. Domenic is there each time I open my eyes, his face drawn with fatigue and worry. Occasionally, I hear Tam order him to sleep or eat, but even the prince’s word has little sway. Between jerking spells, I float in the sea between consciousness and darkness, my body refusing to obey my mind’s commands. When that happens, Domenic’s voice and scent are my only tethers to sanity, as he talks quietly to me about the sea and waves and wind, the way he had when Catsper tended my wounds.
Clay is so disturbed, he spends the week in a room with no light or noise, unable to bear even the feel of his own clothes. The joining of our magics and awareness had kept us alive, but our bodies now pay the price.
When I am well enough to sit upright, Domenic, pale faced, explains how the corridor I’d been lured down was outfitted with a trapdoor that Rima’s cronies took advantage of to block him and Quinn from following. The self-blame in his voice angers me enough to snap at him to stop being stupid, but I fail to make an impact before drifting off again.
When my strength returns further, Domenic supplies me with a newsleaf, the headline TRAITOR FAILS TO KIDNAP NILE OF FELIELLE sprawled across the top. The article begins reasonably enough, explaining how a disgraced and bankrupt Captain Rima attempted to kidnap Prince Tamiath’s bride to obtain a ransom. Not exactly true, but close enough. As further details of the kidnapping are described however, my brows begin a slow climb up my forehead. “Kidnapped and bound, Princess Nile of Felielle miraculously fought off fifteen armed men and weathered a storm on open seas.”
“Rima had seven men, not fifteen,” I protest. “We were on a river, not on open sea. And when it came to fighting, Clay did most of the work. Not to mention that I was the one who created the bloody storm to begin with.”
“Oh, you are not even to the good part yet,” Aaron says tartly from the doorway to my sickroom. “Keep reading.” He stands aside to let Tamiath enter the room first. Seeing the two, Domenic bows deeply and retreats into the corridor.
“Sorry,” Tamiath says when the door closes behind Domenic. “I’ve tried telling Dana to stay but… It looks bad, and he knows it. For a while, my being here was the only way of getting him to take food and rest at all. We’ll have to work something out about that.”
“It might become a nonissue if Nile kills you outright,” Aaron says merrily, jerking his chin at the newsleaf. “She is just getting to the good part.”
Frowning, I return my attention to the text. Three sentences later, I let out a yelp. “Nile’s survival is a miracle, a gift to Felielle from the Goddess.” My voice rises. “With the Goddess’s hand on our princess’s shoulder, Felielle will never succumb to the Tirik Republic. If this is your idea of a jest, Aaron—”
“Me?” indignation fills Aaron’s voice. “Oh no, you have his almighty highness here to thank for all this.”
I twist my head so quickly, my braid takes to the air.
Tam flushes. “It wasn’t as if I had a lot of time to deliberate,” he snaps. Crossing his arms, Tam plants himself in a chair—as close as I’ve seen the prince come to pouting. “We found you glassy-eyed in the middle of a blood-drenched ship, with a preternatural wind keeping you from being swept with the current. I needed to conjure some explanation before the rescue crew bolted or else deduced your Gift.”
“And so you came up with divine intervention?” I ask.
Tam shifts his weight. “Quinn once told me that the Diante call the Gifted ‘Gods touched.’ It gave me the idea. How was I supposed to know the bloody story would catch like wildfire?”
I rub my temples, vaguely recalling the rescue crew’s rising speculations, which Tamiath settled with divine appeals. “All r
ight,” I concede, “I understand why the rescue crew bought the tale in the midst of confusion. I’ve seen wilder things in sailors readying for battle or recovering from carnage. But certainly no one else in Felielle will believe this fiction for any period of time.”
Aaron snorts.
Tamiath cocks a brow. “You’ll be amazed at what people will believe when they want to. If the Goddess wishes to deliver proof of Felielle’s coming victory and prosperity, then why shouldn’t it be you who she chooses as her vessel? You are, after all, an infallible survivor, a princess at the center of an impossible story, and, according to Mother, the only woman ever able to thaw my heart.” He grins. “It’s certainly more believable than a story of a Felielle prince choosing a Gifted bride who brings no political or financial gain.”
Groaning, I drop back onto my pillows. The discussion has drained my strength, and sleep beckons shamelessly. “Wake me up when the madness dies down,” I mumble and close my eyes. “They can’t keep at it for long.”
“Oh yes, they can,” Aaron croons as I drift to sleep.
Despite steadily regaining my strength, the next week still passes with me confined to the sickroom and sleeping more than not. Each time I wake, I find a growing heap of letters from Felielle subjects asking me to intercede with the Goddess on their behalf. Aaron fills me in on the new wedding plans, which my mother is taking charge of. “The festivities are getting grander every day,” he confides. “Ice statues of you and Tamiath were commissioned yesterday. Life-size.”
I am just over two weeks past my ordeal with Rima and three weeks short of the new wedding date when Aaron appears at the doorway and throws a wad of clothing at my chest. “Get dressed,” he says, glowing with wicked delight. “Now, Your Highness, if it’s not too inconvenient.”
