I hurry to match steps with Soli. “Where are we going?”
“The women’s quarters.” She shoots a look at my clothes. “I thought you might want to put on something more . . . presentable.”
I stop short. Presentable?
Soli continues on a few paces before she realizes I’ve stopped. She turns and frowns. “Come, Ava. Don’t you want to look nice?”
“Soli.” My mouth has gone dry, and my heart is beating high and tight. “What is this? Enough games. Tell me true.”
Soli sighs and sags her shoulders, then addresses the baby. “Your modrie Ava won’t let us have any fun, will she?”
“Modrie?” I echo. I can’t breathe. “Soli, what . . .” My crow pings at my side. I should be making my way back to the sloop now.
“Hurry on.” Soli doubles back the way we came, throwing her words over her shoulder. “But I’m telling it true. You have to see for yourself.”
I tap out a quick message to Rushil as we walk—RUNNING LATE. DON’T WORRY—and hurry to catch up with Soli. We arrive at the pair of doors closing off the captain’s quarters. Saeleas is still there in the wood, words scrolling out from her mouth, only now I can read them. Women of the air . . . The last time I stood here, I was soaking wet and shaking with fear and shame. An echo of that feeling flutters through me.
Soli raps her knuckles on the wood, and the doors open. I step inside with her, each of us holding tight to the other’s arm. Floor pillows and thick rugs still lap over each other in drifts, but the lights have been tuned brighter, and with only some dozen people gathered around the captain’s dais, the room feels near naked. They stand as we draw near, and it clicks for me what’s different. A few among the gathered are women. And one of them stands out more than the rest, with her clay-red hair and green eyes.
Llell. What is Llell doing here?
But then the man at the center of the group turns. My steps falter. A pair of ozone-blue eyes. Bruised half-moons of tired skin well beneath them. His dark hair has grown long enough to tuck behind his ears. The stiff, embroidered stole of the captaincy drapes heavy on his shoulders.
“Luck?” I can barely breathe the name.
He looks up. Confusion passes over his face as he looks from me to Soli, and then back again.
“It’s her, Luck.” Soli’s voice shakes with excitement. “I found her.”
Luck blinks. He sucks in a breath. “Ava?”
I nod. “Right so. It’s me.”
He steps down from the dais and closes the distance between us in a few heartbeat-quick steps.
“How . . . ,” I start to say.
But Luck clutches me to him, as if he’s been starved for me this whole time. “Thank the Mercies,” he says into my hair.
My body locks to his with a force that shakes my bones. Luck, alive.
“I thought you were dead,” I say into his shoulder.
He rocks me side to side, strokes my hair, kisses the crown of my head. “I’m not dead. I’m not dead,” he repeats, as though trying to make himself believe it so much as me. “But Llell said they . . . she said they bathed you for burial and everything.”
“They did,” I say. “But Iri helped me slip them, and I went down groundways to my blood modrie—”
“Your blood modrie?”
“Right so.” There’s so much to tell. I look around the room. Besides Llell and Soli, I don’t recognize anyone, though the man with his arm around Soli’s waist must be her husband, Ready. “Is Iri . . . ?”
Luck shakes his head. “When we went to bargain with your father, she was already long dead. Soli tried to talk on it with some of the women, but she said they wouldn’t even speak her name.”
Some part of me knew it would ravel up this way. I knew it the moment I saw her fall, but the blow of it still rings me through.
“You’re bound to be weary,” Luck says. “Come, we can sit and talk in my quarters. We have all the time we need, now.”
Rushil, I think faintly, and glance down at my crow. He’ll be waiting for me. But this is too important. This is the sort of thing what stops.
“Right so,” I hear myself say.
“Very good.” Luck claps his hands to dismiss the small crowd around the dais. They all file out except Llell, who I mark now is wearing a flowing ther-red dress, and Soli with her baby in her arms.
“Would you find some food and drink for our Ava?” he asks them.
“Course.” Soli sends me a smile. Llell grimaces, but follows her without a word.
Luck steps back to look at me, gripping my arms as if he fears I’ll ghost away. “When your father said you had gone off with that groundways woman, we counted you dead. We were sure she took you down to the Earth with her. None of us thought you’d be strong enough to bear up under it.”
“I bore it.” I swallow down the memory of the curling, bitter pain of my first few months down groundways. “It was none easy, but I bore it.”
Luck pulls me to him again. “I’m sorry. On me and all my crewe, I’m sorry.”
“I’m well.” I move back a slip. “Well and healed.” I shake my head and wipe my eyes against my jacket shoulder. “But you, I thought they would have sent you out to meet the Void, same as me.”
Luck nods. “My father was talking on it, but he wanted us clear of the spaceport first, so the station authority wouldn’t interfere. Only it ends up some on our crewe thought he was taking too many brides, turning out too many boys. I s’pose it was some too much, what passed with you and me. They said it was my rightful time to take a firstwife, and he had tried to take her instead. So they mutinied. My mother and her brothers came and got me from the brig, and the rest . . . It was his body we sent out to the Void, not mine.”
“You killed him?”
“Yes.” Luck grips my hand. “I don’t regret it. I thought he had killed you, Ava. I thought his hand brought about your death. So I took the captaincy from him.”
“The captaincy?” I can barely keep pace with what Luck is saying.
“And I turned the ship around,” he says. “Came back to claim you from the Parastrata, but you weren’t there. They said at first they had put you out into the Void. But Llell . . .” He stops. “I knew something else had happened, only I couldn’t fix on what until I talked your father into telling me.”
“You talked my father into telling you? How?”
Luck smiles sheepishly and shrugs. “You know, the Æther’s some known for its rice-wine stills.” He glances up to the door where Soli and Llell disappeared. A worried look flits across his face. “Among other things.”
“Other things?” A twinge of unease spiders down my throat.
“I’m sorry.” Luck kisses me hard on the top of my forehead. “Forgive me, Ava. I’m sorry I took their word you were dead. But I’ve found you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you now. Not ever again.”
His words curl around me, strong and warm like his arms and shoulders. And I want, oh, I want it to be true, that this man has the power to keep all hurt from me. For him to be the balm to all my cares . . .
“Luck, tell me.” My throat stays tight. “What other things?”
At that moment, Soli and Llell return with a cold pitcher of rice wine and a tray stacked high with crisp cakes, soft cheese, and dried apricots.
“Does it matter?” Luck laughs. “Small things. Nothing to worry on. What’s important is, I’ve hammered out a peace with your father’s crewe again. We’ve written up new trade agreements, and now you’re alive. You’ll be my wife, Ava. Isn’t that all we ever wanted?”
“Your wife.” I roll the word around in my mouth. He’s right, isn’t he? It’s what we wanted. But something isn’t right. Crewes always seal a trade agreement with a marriage, and my betrayal with Luck was some gulf to overcome. It would have taken a grand gesture on his crewe’s part to bridge it.
“Your firstwife, you mean?” I ask, to be sure.
Luck hesitates. His eyes go back to Soli and Llell. A
nd then I see it. My heart stops. The subtle round of early pregnancy buds out from the waist of Llell’s red dress. Her hair coils tight in marriage braids. She cuts her eyes up at me, and a tiny smirk twists the corners of her mouth.
“What . . .”
“Ava.” Soli steps in, her voice low and gentle. “There wasn’t any other way to seal the peace with your father. After everything that happened, Luck couldn’t afford to lose the crewe’s respect, not with his captaincy so new. And Llell helped us . . .”
Luck looks sick. “We can still make our life the way we talked,” he says. “You can learn reading and figuring, and when you’re not with child, you can be on Fixes. Or whatever duty you choose.”
“I don’t . . .” I frown.
I look at Heart in Soli’s arms. For a moment, the image of me in an ther-red dress flashes before my eyes, me lying in a birthing bed, a dark-haired child asleep on my chest, and Luck beside us, watching over us. But then I see my grandmother, young and pale, drunk on love, unaware of her own fast-approaching death or the fate the Mercies held for her daughter.
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know if I want to be with child. . . .”
A troubled look crosses Luck’s face, but he blinks it away. “I understand. You’ll need some months healing after what you’ve been through. I can wait, Ava.”
“No,” I say more firmly. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Did something happen to you down there?” He straightens. “I don’t care if the Earth made you barren, Ava. I want you still, no matter what.”
“No,” I manage. “It’s only . . .” Luck’s eyes search mine, and a part of me wants to collapse against him, give him everything, anything to make the hurt on his face go away. No matter that Llell is firstwife. He loves me. Isn’t that all that matters?
But Miyole and Soraya. And Rushil.
I imagine him waiting by the sloop. Waiting and scanning the crowd, and me never coming. You’re beautiful like this, you know? My old cord still tied around his wrist, the feel of his hands in my hair, our unhurried kisses, and nights under the Mumbai sky. How can I give up his love for Luck’s? How can I give up Luck’s for his? And smallones . . . my head skips back to the idea. It seems so much more a question now, not a certainty.
“I don’t know if I want smallones at all,” I say. “Not right now, anyway. Maybe when I’m some turns older.”
Luck looks as though I’ve put fire to everything he holds dear.
“But later.” He squeezes my hands in his. “You’ll want them later?”
“I . . .” My throat closes up. What do I want? The Æther under Luck’s captaincy is some freer, true. I can see that. But it’s not so changed in all. At least, not so changed as me. Would I ever get to see those worlds, the ones I’ve only ever hovered above? Would my limbs and lungs grow weak again, deprived of gravity? Would my mind lose its hard-won sharpness? Would working on Fixes and having Luck’s love make up for that?
Luck steps close so our heads rest together. “Are you worried about Llell?” He whispers. “You know you’re the firstwife of my heart, Ava, always.”
And I want, oh, I want to make him happy. I want to give him everything he deserves—love and children and all the years of my life. But I can’t.
“I . . .” How to make him understand? I move his hand from my cheek and take it in mine again. “I learned to pilot a ship, Luck. And figuring and reading. There’s so much more . . . And Miyole and Soraya, what about them?”
“Who?” Luck furrows his brow.
“Soraya, my blood modrie. And Miyole, she’s . . . she’s some like a sister to me.”
“I don’t understand,” Luck says. “Don’t you want me? Don’t you want to come home?”
Home. I close my eyes, and the image that flutters before me is of Rushil pretending to dump the whole sugar pot into Miyole’s tea, singing alongside Ankur in Zarine’s flat, Soraya poring over her lecture notes at the kitchen table, sneaking up the wobbling fire escape into the talkies, and my sloop skirting above the Mumbai skyline.
Sadness settles over me like burial finery. A life with Luck might swallow up some of my sorrows, but it would bring others, heavy as the ones it took away. I wouldn’t be the last wife Luck took. I would be secondwife, and someday there would be a third, and maybe a fourth, and then we would be the ones leaving other women’s children behind. The whole thing would start all over.
“Of course I love you,” I say to Luck. I turn to Soli with Heart clutched in her arms, and to Llell, too. “All of you. But this life—I’m not made for it anymore.”
“You’re every bit as worthy to be a captain’s wife as a girl who’s never touched the ground,” Luck says fiercely, gripping my hand.
“I know I am,” I say simply. I lean against him, taking in his warmth and smell—of grass and handmade paper, oil and air.
He drops his head. “They’ll forget all this, Ava. I’ll make them. It’ll be as though it never happened.”
“For you,” I say, and brush the dark bangs from his forehead. I look into his eyes and try to memorize their exact shade of blue. “But I can’t pretend it never happened. What I want, that changed when I changed. What I want now would only hurt you.”
“I don’t care—”
“But you will,” I say. “In a turn or two, when we have no smallones and the men are starting to mutter behind their hands. I’ll cave to please you, or it’ll eat you away. Then what will we have but guilt and regret?”
“Ava.”
“Luck.” I touch my forehead to his. “Promise me something.”
“Anything,” he says.
“Promise you won’t leave any more of the boys behind.”
Shame passes over his face.
“You know what I’m talking on,” I say.
“I . . . I won’t,” he stammers. “I never wanted to.”
“I know,” I say.
“Then stay,” he pleads. “Stay by my side. Help me remake this crewe.”
“I can’t.” I am crying now, and true. “I will love you and love you. You’ll always be my first love, but I can’t. Not any more than you can give up the Æther.”
“Ava . . .”
I turn away. Soli stands back, aghast, and even Llell looks shocked as I walk out through the great doors, head high, tears cutting bright lines down my cheeks.
I look back as the door starts to close behind me, and blink my tears away. Luck holds up his hand. Good-bye.
And I hold up mine. Good-bye.
And then I turn and make my way out to Bhutto station, back to Miyole and Soraya and Rushil and the Perpétue, and everything my life is yet to be.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEXANDRA DUNCAN is a writer and librarian. She lives in North Carolina.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
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COPYRIGHT
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
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Copyright © 2014 by Alexandra Duncan.
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