The Kingdoms of Dust (9 page)

When the night faded and dawn was a growing pressure in the east, she finally fell silent. “That’s not all, but perhaps enough for one night.”

“Thank you.” His voice was rough, as though he’d been the one talking. His brain burned, the stifling fog of humanity stripped away.

“Thank you, for the gifts and the company. Perhaps I’m lonelier out here than I’ve realized.” She smiled, then lifted her veil again. “But I don’t think we should make a habit of it. My position is perilous enough—yours is wirewalking.”

“You’re right, but I wish it were otherwise.”

“There are safer places for such as us. Nahasheen would welcome you.”

Asheris blinked. “The Tower of Whispers? I thought it was a myth.”

“Silly jinni. What do you they teach you in Mazikeen? No, Nahasheen is very real, and the teachings of Eblis are followed there.”

Nearly all his knowledge of the Eblite heresy had come from his human life. Eblis was called a man or a spirit or a demon depending on the book, but most accounts agreed that he had preached the commonality of flesh and Fata, peace between the worlds. The church had driven his followers out of Assar, but legend held they traveled west across the burning sands, to build a fortress in the mountains on the Ninayan border. A perilous path to follow chasing a rumor.

Raisa led him to the door. The morning breeze was a shock after the warmth of the blue room. “I’m no haruspex, to read your future in blood, but I know a dark road when I see one. Walk it carefully.” She laid a hand on his cheek like a benediction. “I’ll ask the jackals to look after you.”

He turned his head to kiss the hollow of her palm. Her smile reached her eyes, but they were sad as well. She closed the door, leaving him alone in the ashen gloom of the necropolis.

I
syllt had thought all her tears behind her, but she cried again the first night at sea. Perhaps it was the irrevocable sense of loss she felt as the shores of Erebos faded into the distance, as though she would never see any of the places she’d called home again. Perhaps it was the sea rocking her like long-faded memories of her mother’s arms. Perhaps salt called to salt.

She woke the next morning and scrubbed the brine from her cheeks. She was no sibyl to hear her future in the sighing of the waves. There was no point in looking back.

Moth’s bags sat on the other side of the closet-size cabin they shared, but the girl’s bunk looked untouched. Isyllt was no stranger to sleepless nights, but they became less and less appealing with each passing year.

The sun was high and fierce and the wind carved the water into glittering whitecaps. The deck tilted rhythmically, tarred boards warm under her bare feet. The roar of the sea rose around her, punctuated by creaking ropes and the shouts of sailors. Salt and sun weathered everyone alike, but from their voices she thought the crew were mostly Assari. The last time she’d sailed had been to and from Symir, and most of those voyages were a blur—on the journey south she’d been distracted with grief over her break with Kiril; on the trip home she’d been sick with fever and her freshly crippled hand. This voyage might be a happier one, but she wasn’t willing to bet on that yet.

Laughter and raised voices drew her to the main deck, where she found a ring of sailors gathered before the mast. Inside, Adam and Siddir circled with knives drawn. Moth stood on the sideline, gesturing to one of the sailors—wagering, Isyllt suspected.

Adam was still too thin, ribs corrugating his sides and the knobs of his spine sharp through his skin, but his color was healthy again. Black stubble covered his scalp, not yet long enough to lock. More reassuring was the grace he’d regained. He crouched lightly on the balls of his feet, teeth bared, waiting for Siddir to attack.

Siddir smiled in return, close-lipped and cat-smug. He moved like a cat, too, languid and intent, one hand rising and falling in lazy feints. But despite his slow, controlled movements, he couldn’t disguise his stiff left leg.

He wasn’t trying to, Isyllt realized a moment later—he was using it to lure Adam close. A feinting stumble drew the mercenary in, only for Siddir to catch his wrist left-handed. A sailor’s shoulder blocked Isyllt’s view; when she craned her neck to see around him, Adam was on his knees, his right arm twisted behind him. A small red blossom unfolded on Siddir’s shoulder.

Moth groaned, and the sailor beside her laughed.

Isyllt’s face felt stiff and strange. It took a moment to realize she was grinning. She slipped back to her cabin before Adam or Siddir noticed her, to fetch a knife. Not her bone-hilted kukri—she wouldn’t risk losing that over the side—but a long curved blade of plainer make. She relied on magic in a fight far too often.

She returned to find Siddir on his back, Adam’s knee on his chest and knife at his throat. “You cheated,” Siddir said with a laugh.

“I didn’t think spies knew the meaning of the word.” Adam rocked back and pulled the other man up. Sweat sheened his face and his breath came sharply, but there was a light in his eyes Isyllt hadn’t seen since she walked into the
Çirağan
.

Siddir grinned. “It’s only cheating when the other side does it. Two falls out of three.”

“Wait.” They both turned as Isyllt spoke. The crowd fell back to let her through. “Let me have a dance.”

The second day of their voyage, Isyllt remembered her diamond’s new occupant. Siddir stopped her when she would have brought the ghost out and questioned him, however.

“Transporting foreign sorcerers is one thing, especially if you keep that ring out of sight, but the crew will never countenance necromancy on the ship. Summon a ghost here and we’ll find ourselves swimming home.”

Adam spent the days resting and practicing by turn, with Isyllt, Bashari, and Moth, and occasionally with the sailors. He lost as many rounds as he won, but his muscles firmed again and his hands peeled and toughened as salt and sun baked the lingering illness from his bones.

He’d joked with Xinai, years ago, about becoming pirates. Before she’d chosen revolution and the ghosts of her past over their partnership. The roll of the sea had called to him then, sun and wind and brilliant endless blue. A freedom he’d never felt on land. Now the ship was just another cage to pace.

As he measured the length of the weather deck one morning he felt eyes on him, and turned to find Moth perched on a coil of rope in the shadow of the forecastle. Still awake, he thought, not up early. She seemed completely nocturnal.

He stopped his circuit, shade sliding cool across his face. Moth blinked as he crouched beside her.

“Your eyes— I thought it was a mage trick at first, but it’s not.”

“No trick. I’m no mage.” He stretched his legs in front of him and waited for the inevitable question.

“How, then?” At least she didn’t ask
What are you?
Many weren’t so circumspect.

When he was Moth’s age, he’d lied as often as not, just to see the asker flinch.
I drink demon’s blood. My father was a wolf.
The truth had grown rote with time.

“My mother was Tier Danaan. Do you know what that means?”

Moth cocked her head. “I’ve heard stories. I didn’t think they were real.”

Adam chuckled humorlessly. “The stories likely aren’t. They’re not blue, or giants, or shapeshifters, or any sort of demon that I know.” Thought having met a few, he understood why Valls and Celanorans thought they were.

“So what are they?”

“I don’t know. Witches, maybe. They live in the high forests in the Aillerons and rarely venture south. They live with beasts—that much is true—and speak to them. The way mages speak to spirits or the dead, perhaps. I’ve never understood it.”

Moth watched him expectantly and he sighed. “Only my mother was Tier. I’ve always guessed my father was eastern, but I don’t know. However I came about, I didn’t pass muster when I was born. She left me with a Tzadani caravan when I was only a month or so old. They named me and raised me.”

“And?” Moth prompted when he fell silent.

“Isn’t that enough? Bandits attacked the caravan when I was twelve. Slaughtered nearly everyone. Some of the children—including me—they kept to sell. I escaped.” His voice was flat; the memories had lost the worst of their sting after twenty-six years. Except when nightmares found them. “I ended up in Selafai and eventually became a mercenary.”

“Did you ever find your mother again?”

“No.” He closed his eyes against rising images: white tattooed faces; shining yellow eyes; the smell of pine and snow and hot animal musk. Those memories could stay buried. “Blood only matters in the spilling. I made my own family after that.” And lost them again, one by one.

“Oh.” Moth hunched forward, elbows on her knees. Her teeth dented her lower lip. “I wish my mother would have given me to the Tzadanim,” she said at last. “That might have been easier.”

She picked at the coiled rope, releasing the scent of hemp and brine. “I’m androgyne. Not exactly a boy or a girl.” She eyed him sideways, looking for a reaction.

Adam nodded. “I guessed as much. You don’t smell like a girl, exactly.”

She looked away, olive cheeks flushing scarlet. “In Erisín I would have joined the hijra when I turned sixteen.” Another sideways glance. “Do you know what
that
means?”

“Only stories.”

She snorted. “Whatever else is or isn’t true, it means I’d become a prostitute.” She shrugged, not quite succeeding at nonchalance. “I grew up in the Garden. I’ve seen flowers there get rich and retire. And I’ve seen them dead in an alley with their throats slit.” Her jaw tightened. “It’s not a worse life than any other, maybe, but I didn’t want it chosen for me.”

“So you found Isyllt.” Children with no families found their own; children with no opportunities made them. Sometimes those opportunities turned them into killers and spies, but there was always a worse fate.

Moth nodded, but her mouth flattened. “But now—” Her voice dropped. “I don’t think she wants me here. I’m a burden.”

Adam frowned. “It isn’t you. Her burdens are all in her head. She doesn’t know how to share them and it makes her prickly and skittish.” How many people had he driven away or fled from because of his own ghosts? “At least you’re not old and decrepit like me.”

“You’re not old!” Moth said, too quickly.

“Your eyes go wide when you lie. You should watch that.”

She blushed again.

“Don’t worry. Spend enough time with spies and you’ll learn.”

The restless boredom broke on the twelfth day with the sight of birds. The thirteenth brought the distant smudge of the Assari coast. Adam spent much of that afternoon on the forecastle, rolling a borrowed spyglass between his palms and trying to determine what particular smudge he was looking at. He’d seen plenty of maps of Khemia, but had never set foot on the southern continent.

He smelled Isyllt and heard the familiar rhythm of her steps before he felt her warmth beside him. “What can you see?” she asked, leaning against the rail to his right.

“I’m not sure. I think that blur”—he pointed—“is Sherazad.” The westernmost of Assar’s large ports.

Isyllt grinned, an unguarded happiness he hadn’t seen during their stay in Kehribar. Her nose was sun-reddened and pale freckles dusted her cheeks and shoulders. “I hope so. I’ve always wanted to see the library there.”

They stood in silence, sailors’ voices faint beneath the rush of waves. The pale glitter of Isyllt’s eyes warned him before she moved. She reached up—slow and careful, letting him see the motion—and stroked the side of his head. The rasp of stubble shivered to the roots of his teeth.

“It is a pity.”

He caught her left hand, turning it palm-up to study the scars. She tensed, but permitted the touch. An assassin’s blade had pierced her palm three years ago, severing tendon and cracking bone. He’d helped her bind the wound. “So is this. My hair will grow back.”

She glanced away. The sun caught the edge of her irises as her eyes narrowed, paling them like light through old ice; the tips of her lashes gleamed auburn. Too gaunt and cold to be beautiful, but she had the sharp elegance of a blade. Like any weapon, he hated to see her edges blunted.

She came to him that night, salt and wine clinging to her skin. Past midnight, but Adam lay awake on his cot, restless with the rhythm of the sea. Memories had chewed the corners of his mind since they left Kehribar, slipping away like quicksilver when he tried to pin them down. The familiar knock ended another round of chasing his tail.

Isyllt came inside when he called but lingered in the doorway, steadying herself against the ship’s sway. Through the warped glass of the porthole the moon silvered the waves, just enough light to show the pallor of her face in the gloom. Desire sharpened her scent, sharpened his pulse in turn.

It had nearly happened once before, as another ship had carried them away from the ruins of Symir. The same silence in the dark, the same awareness that might have led to more. But she’d been sick and injured, and Xinai had been a fresh wound, and nothing had come of it.

“Do you want me to go?” she said at last, her voice rough.

It was grief that brought her here, grief and loneliness. She didn’t need him to tell her that. The darkness left him longing for things he couldn’t name.

“No.”

Her hands were cold, her lips flecked with brine. Her weight against him was warm, though, and it had been longer than a year since a woman kissed him. Her tongue moved against his, bitter with wine. Tentative at first, then demanding; her teeth caught his lip and he tasted the bright heat of blood. His hands knotted in her hair, pulling her closer. She made a soft noise against his mouth and he felt it in the pit of his stomach. His hands moved under her shirt, tracing the ridges of her shoulder blades, the smooth slope of her back and the furrows of her ribs. Her hands were callused, but the rest of her skin was silken over bone and too-lean flesh.

Her nails left welts down his back and his teeth carved crescents in her shoulders. Both of them bruised knees and elbows against the wall. Her hipbones were as sharp as he’d imagined.

Afterward, they lay tangled together, not speaking. His breath, not fully recovered from the fever and cough, rasped loud in the tiny cabin. Isyllt’s hair fell free of its knot, and oily, salt-stiff strands wrapped his fingers and tickled his cheek. She traced idle patterns across his stomach and chest, following the lines of old scars. Her touch tingled—her magic reading all the brushes with death written on his skin.

“What is it?” she asked eventually. Her fingers brushed his jaw and he realized his teeth were clenched.

“Xinai.” It was, he thought a heartbeat later, a stupid thing to say. Isyllt snorted. “Not just her.” He rolled onto his side, tucking his left arm under him awkwardly. If either of them had been a healthy weight, they wouldn’t fit together on the bed. “Something about the assassin in Kehribar was familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“Do you know many women who kill with plumbatae?”

His chuckle pressed his chest to hers. “No. I do seem to have a fondness for dangerous women, though.”

Isyllt, Xinai, Sorcha: the only women in the past twelve years who had been more than an evening’s distraction, and all of them deadly. And Brenna—laughing, black-eyed Brenna, who had been worse than dangerous. Treacherous. The thought of her still made his hands ache. For years he’d thought of her only as a thief and a traitor; now he realized she had probably been a spy.

Isyllt pried open the fist he hadn’t noticed making. “You could try meeting nice women. It might be more restful.”

“I wouldn’t know where to look.” He moved closer and ran his palm over her flank. She laughed and lay back on the thin mattress. Laughter became a muffled curse as her elbow cracked against the wall again. Skinny and a spy, but she was warm and close and he trusted her enough to fall asleep in her arms. He lowered his mouth to hers.