by Julia Knight
Skrymir looked out over the ruin of the harbor and nodded absently. “Is it safe?”
“Safe enough.” The crews had settled down in the last few days. Still nervous, some of them, still unsettled and unsure, but the violence had subsided. Holden hoped the same could be said for the people in Remon. They’d be safe—if the mages hadn’t got back in control. “We won’t be long.”
Holden ducked into the captain’s quarters, where Van Gast was sleeping. The wound was healing well enough, but the man…they’d taken his ship back, yet he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t seem to care about anything, because although Josie had managed to live, she wouldn’t speak to him, to anyone except Skrymir and the boy. Van Gast’s spark had gone, the panache, drained away with his blood maybe, or with the poison that was drawn out of her. All he did was drink brandy and sleep.
He slept now, the new day’s light just touching the edge of the bed. Van Gast lay on his back, one hand in a fist, his eyes squeezed tight shut as though warding something off. Holden shook him gently to wake him. The eyes blinked open with a start and Van Gast sat up straight in the bed with a grimace of pain. His skin was grey-tinged and slicked with sweat.
“What do you want?” Van Gast’s voice was still slurred with last night’s brandy.
“We’re at Remon.”
“And? I told you, I don’t care. Just put me off somewhere. Not here though.” He shuddered.
“And I want to show you. Come on, get out of that bed.” Holden had wanted to show Josie too, show her what she’d helped him do, but he couldn’t even get past the door.
Van Gast glared at him sullenly but he swung his legs out of bed, careful of his wound still, and muttered to himself as he dressed. “Didn’t take you long to get bossy.”
Holden led Van Gast up the hill, past all the little houses with their identical doors and identical flowering shrubs. Only Remon wasn’t as ordered now. They walked past two houses burned out and another with the doors hanging off. A dead mage lay in the middle of the road and Holden stopped beside the body. He couldn’t conjure any pity for the man. At least it seemed the worst was over here. The yoke was lifted.
Van Gast labored on up the hill in the growing light. The darkness that had seemed to brood over Remon with the threat of violence lifted as they passed the mage.
“Are we almost there yet?” Van Gast was sweating with the effort. “And why did you bring me?”
Holden stopped to help him, and a gaggle of children ran past, shouting, laughing and giggling. Sounds Holden had never heard here before.
Holden nodded at the children. “For that.”
Van Gast frowned. “Children. So?”
“When did you ever hear a Remorian laugh?”
“I—” Van Gast looked after the children thoughtfully and followed Holden.
Van Gast’s wound was healing well enough, but this hill was probably too much for him. Yet Holden needed him to see. The marketplace no longer had stalls in neat little rows. No longer clean, or ordered. Stalls lay broken or overturned or trading in haphazard places. Cats and dogs ran wild among them, picking at the bits of food spilled over the flagstones. Some traders were out, bakers with their bread, spice merchants weighing and sifting, silk merchants showing off their wares, and everywhere there were bubbles of talk and laughter and life behind eyes that had once been dead.
Holden and Van Gast carried on in silence, up the hill to a little house that looked over the harbor to a far horizon. By the time they made it, Van Gast was almost spent.
“This one,” Holden murmured.
Van Gast frowned at the door, then up and down the street. “How can you tell? They all look the same.”
“This one.” Holden pushed open the door. The hallway was strewn with scraps of paper, an overturned cupboard that spilled clothes onto the tiles, and the remains of some crockery. Holden went inside, Van Gast half a step behind.
“Not a tidy person, then?”
Holden shut the door behind them and went in farther, his breath rasping. He could only hope he was in time, that the chaos they’d witnessed around the rest of Remon, the dead bodies, the looted shops, had not come here. That she hadn’t suffered when he’d lost his bond. Her bond to him would still be intact. How many men would take them from their wives?
He opened the door into the main room. A shadow detached from the rest in the room, someone getting up from the chair by the fire. The fire in the grate was dying but in the faint glow Holden could make her out.
“Holden?” Ilsa stumbled toward them and threw her arms around him. He gently prised her arms away.
“Ilsa, are you all right?”
She stared up at him for a second then remembered herself. “Your wish is my desire to fulfill, Holden.”
“I thought you said the bonds would die,” Van Gast muttered behind him.
“The ones the Master laid on, yes. This is different. I laid on this one. Ilsa, my wish is to take off the bond I gave you.”
She took a faltering step back but a grimace of pain twisted her face—the bond, his bond. He took her arm and pulled her close. “It’s all right, Ilsa, I promise. It’s all right. I know it’s frightening, but I don’t want you under my bond anymore.”
She shook in his arms, the way she had when he’d asked her before. When she’d been frightened even by the thought, frightened of what life would be like without the comfort of it. This last week must have been a nightmare for her, free of the Master’s bond, beholden to his still. He wanted her to be free, as free as he was. It was hard, and he woke often in the night with fear an acidic hole in his gut, but he meant to do this. He meant to make sure the Islanders never took the bond again. There was hope here in Remon now. People would get used to it, and they’d be free to do that how they wanted, free to live any way they chose, and to choose who ruled them.
“Please, don’t,” she whispered against him. “It’s all I have left.”
He slid his hand down her arm, stroked the skin down to the scar on her wrist. He didn’t love her, she didn’t love him. They were only bonded together. He didn’t want it to be like that. If they were going to be together, and nothing was sure, he wanted her to be there because she chose to. His fingers closed over the bond and he pulled. She cried out, a trembling scream of pain and terror, the bond hurting her even as he took it off. He pulled her closer as her muscles tightened and her whole body clenched, and covered her lips with his, covering her fear with his new purpose, and drew the bond out through her skin.
The scream shuddered Holden’s ears, the way she twisted with it making his hand tremble. Worse taking it off than putting it on, especially for Ilsa, who’d known no other way. He let her slide down to the floor and cradled her head in his lap as she thrashed, soothed her as best he could until it passed. Gradually the tattoo of her feet on the floor grew less, the pulse at her throat steadied and became less frenzied.
They stayed like that for long moments, her shivering against him and him lending her what strength he had. Finally he stood her up on shaking legs. She huddled in her arms, small and unsure, deathly afraid.
“Holden…I don’t know what to say, what to think, what to do.”
“Lions.”
“What?”
“I have a ship, several ships, and people to crew them. We’ve racketeers and Remorians working them together. We can do anything we want, Ilsa. Anything at all. But first we’re going to see lions.”
Van Gast watched Holden bring the woman aboard. The look in her eyes was painful. The clenching fear of the unknown, the wide-eyed stare at everything. Van Gast made his aching way to the aft rail and kept busy staring at the waves, losing himself in the ebb and flow rather than think.
He’d thought he could do it, learn to be a father to Ansen, teach him to be a rack. But now that it had all sunk in, he wasn’t so sure. Ansen was wary of him, kept out of his way as much as he could and stuck by Skrymir like a faithful dog. Van Gast had nothing left. He was lost and rudd
erless.
Holden brought the woman to the rail. Ilsa he’d called her. Some of the fear had left her now and her eyes were wide and bright with wonder in her copper-bronze face. Her mouth turned up at one corner as she watched gulls swoop on the water in the hope of a stray morsel. It was as though a blindfold she’d had on her whole life had dropped away and now she saw what had only ever been described.
“You gave her that.” Holden’s clipped accent didn’t sound so strange now. “You and Josie did. And I and every Remorian thank you.”
Van Gast stared back down at the water. He didn’t care. He’d send every one of them back into slavery if it meant getting Josie back. But his eyes slid back to Ilsa, at how she leaned precariously far over the rail to watch the fish that sported at the entrance to the harbor. She caught him watching and smiled hesitantly, the muscles on her face stiff at first. Then she leaned out farther and laughed.
“You took Josie and you had that at home.” Van Gast hated the bitterness in his voice, the resentment that festered in him.
“She’s not mine. She never was, not really. Now she’s her own. Because of you.”
Van Gast snorted. “Me? You shot him.”
“I shot him because Josie loved you and wanted you free, and I couldn’t deny her that.”
Van Gast’s mouth twisted with words he couldn’t say. Holden had everything he’d wanted—his freedom, his wife—and taken Josie from him doing it.
Only that wasn’t true, was it? No, he’d managed to fuck it up all on his own. She might have forgiven him the ship, but not the doubting.
A flicker of movement caught his eye. His ship, Gast’s Ghost, was moving away from the wharf. Neither he nor Holden had given any order. He leaned over the rail to get a better look. Skrymir was at the wheel, grinning stupidly, Ansen holding on to one of his tree-trunk legs. What was he—Josie. There she was, leaning over the rail, watching him. The purple had faded from her face now and, though too thin, she looked almost back to normal. Physically.
“What’s she doing?” Holden stood next to him, his voice incredulous.
“She’s stealing my ship.” He nodded in her direction, accepting. “I owe her that, and a lot more besides.”
Josie turned from the rail and shouted out orders that sent men scurrying to obey. More sail snapped from the yards, and the Ghost turned for the harbor mouth. The wind caught her, bellied the sails and scudded her away from him.
“Van.” Guld, shaking on Van Gast’s arm. “Van, you have to see.”
He didn’t take his gaze off the ship. Off her. “Not now, Guld.”
“Um, actually, yes now. She left you something.”
“What?” He dragged his eyes away, down to what Guld was holding. The wedding knife, with something wrapped round it.
“She left it on your bed.”
Van Gast unraveled the scrap of cloth wrapped around the knife and almost dropped it. Josie had never learned to write other than making a few wobbly letters. But there, scratched laboriously on to the cloth. A V and a J, twined together. Trust me. The knife had no oil in it. Ready to be used. To show him what he needed to know. He didn’t look up, not just yet. He wasn’t sure he could. He wasn’t sure he could breathe.
“Holden, which way is she going?”
“I’m not—wait. Estovan, on that heading.”
Of course Estovan. The one place where they wanted his head as bad as anything. Where he was worth more dead than alive. The stupidest place for him to go. Only she’d be there too, and maybe he had a chance with her, a chance to get her forgiveness. A small one, but a chance. He slid the empty knife into his belt, the scrap of cloth into a pocket in his shirt, near his heart, and looked up.
Josie flicked a last glance over her shoulder. Her eyes held Van Gast’s, just for a heartbeat. Then she grinned at him, that lopsided smile that always shivered his heart. Josie, the stupid-but-exciting thing, the never-quite-in-his-grasp thing. Like the sea. Ever vicious, ever loving, ever changing. Capricious, volatile, and all he ever wanted. Never gave up till the end of the chase. Rob, kill or delight, that grin said. If you can catch me.
Odds were one in three. But he was Van Gast, wasn’t he? Finest racketeer on the mainland coast. The racketeer. When had he ever let a little thing like stupidity stand in his way?
Fuck it. Let’s do it.
About the Author
Julia Knight lives in Sussex, U.K., with her ever-patient husband, two kids and the world’s daftest dog. Her interests include motorbikes (men in leather), wrestling (half-naked men covered in muscles, sweat and baby oil) and exploring new ways to get a giggle out of life. She was recently diagnosed with bipolar, prompting cries of “Tell us something we don’t know” from people who know her, and making sense of much weirdness in her life. It also gives her an excuse when she does something daft. Which is often. Her first book, Ilfayne’s Bane, won the 2010 EPIC award for fantasy romance, with the same awesome editor as Ten Ruby Trick. Ilfayne’s Bane, together with the sequel Love Is My Sin, and a red-hot historical romance novella—with pirates!—named The Wicked Lady, are available from Samhain Publishing.
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ISBN: 978-1-4268-9106-9
Copyright © 2011 by Julia Knight
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