A scream jolted Seth awake, and he knocked his stupid head on the cot’s sheet metal housing above him. A thunderous timpani bang echoed through the vessel’s steelshod corridors, then another. “Seth,” someone roared. “Seth, can you hear me?” Oh, saints.
Seth rolled out from his sleeping spot, bumping the footlocker out of the way. “I’m here!” His voice was still thick from his unplanned nap. “I—”
Another piercing scream interrupted him. A man stumbled past the open door, sword flailing in his fist, his hair and jacket crackling with fire. Ofelia followed shortly after, saber bared, and the scream cut itself off with a distraught gurgle.
Ofelia’s face popped into the door frame. “Hello, Mr. il Gutierre.”
“Saints, is that him?” Annalise stumbled into view. “Seth! Are you hurt, love?”
“No,” he said. “No, I’m okay. I was—”
“Did you pick outta your cuffs, then?”
“They didn’t catch me. I just—”
“You what?”
“I kinda ran off,” Seth said. “But I think I used my—”
“You kinda ran off?” Annalise scowled. “You gave me a bleeding heart attack.” She dragged her executioner’s sword to her shoulder. “Stay right there and don’t get killed so I can come back and feckin’ kill you.”
Ofelia, echoing down the hall: “I think we’re all clear.”
“Stay,” Annalise repeated, and stomped out of view.
An auburn-bearded man in his mid-thirties edged past, his clothes roughspun, his hands cuffed at his front. A gun of piratical provenance was in his fist. “Afternoon,” he said. “Name’s Corbin. Cheers for the rescue.”
“Don’t cheers him,” Annalise called. “He’s in trouble.”
Corbin gave Seth an apologetic shrug and then he was off down the hall with the al Ydrises. Seth stood, fidgeting on his feet, then recalled that he was a grown man and had a sword, and followed the pirates’ erstwhile hostage out.
He stepped over a beheaded corpse and the shining pool of blood its stump was producing. He shimmied past the sprawled-out legs of a guy with a cloven chest, the pale cap of his collarbone gleaming in the red mess. Behind a shut door, a dog held forth a frenzy of barking.
Seth emerged into a cockpit full of brass instruments and patched seats.
“I said stay, Seth.” Annalise emerged through another doorway, as her daughter picked through the cockpit’s cabinets and shelves. Corbin, leaned on a wall behind them, acknowledged him with a tilt of the head.
“I can watch your corners,” Seth said. Annalise grunted and flapped a dismissive arm at him, and he saw the blood gleaming on it. The black blood. His heart skipped. “Have you been shot?”
“Fella with a popgun there.” She gestured to the hall behind them. “I’ll live. Small bore, no bone. We’ll dig it out the meat when we’re ashore. Right after I’ve given you a paddling, you bleeding chancer.”
“Healing circle first,” Ofelia said. “Paddling second.”
“No need.” Annalise swiped sweat from her face. “It’ll heal on its own. I can even use the arm all right, see? You know how many times I’ve been shot?”
“Seth, tell mother—”
“We’re getting the circle out and fixing you,” Seth said.
“Don’t you start.” Annalise stabbed her finger at him; it shook with the wince of her injury. “You get the dress-down, mister.”
“Honestly, mother, we’re four beads fuller,” Ofelia said. “Not even Tiago could begrudge you.”
“You underestimate your brother’s begrudgery.” Annalise set her Verdugo sword aside and crouched by a corpse slumped in a rear seat. “You know who might have the key there, Corbin?”
“Wish I did,” Corbin said. “They kept me in the dark most of the time. Not sure who’s the honcho.”
Annalise indicated the man’s cuffs with a jerk of her chin. “You pick those, il Gutierre, you’re halfway out the doghouse.”
“Got it.” Seth hurried to Corbin, eager to be useful. He lifted them, and they clinked. And he made eye contact with the man, and saw the tension in his jaw.
His dog. They’d kept it alive. They’d scolded it, but they hadn’t kicked it.
Seth seized Corbin’s arm as the gun rose. He wrenched the barrel away from his head. Whether Corbin had intended to hold him at gunpoint or blow his brains out, he’d never know. He bore Corbin to the ground, and the gun roared a shrill ring into his ears and tore across Annalise’s side.
“Fucking saints,” Annalise barked, spinning around and clutching her hip. “Twice?”
Seth was attempting to apply some sort of chokehold to the thrashing Corbin, with no training to speak of. Ofelia’s boot sank swiftly into the man’s gut and he sprawled; the al Ydris daughter was upon him, sword point stuck in his face. “You fucking dare move,” she hissed. “Give me a reason.”
“it glanced, girleen. Hold your water.” Annalise hauled her Verdugo sword back into her fist.
Seth clambered out from his grapple with Corbin. “You are getting circle-mended on the ground.”
“Fine. Fine. Fair enough. Bit ridiculous otherwise, at this point.” Annalise gingerly patted her perforated side and winced. “Right, then, Mister Corbin. Who the bleeding fuck are you?”
Corbin il Mandrak coughed and spat a glob of pinkish loogie onto the sheet metal. “Just take my head, Verdugo. Do what you’ve got to.”
“In due time,” Annalise said. “I came to rescue you. If that’s banjaxed, I’ll at least understand why.”
Corbin slumped on the rear side of a cockpit seat. “They came asking me to come back. I said yes. They didn’t kidnap me.”
Ofelia kept her sword trained on him. “You’re not a shepherd, then.”
“I tried,” he said. “But no. I’m not a shepherd. Nor a nobody. I’m Red Corbin. I’ve killed—” He smirked. “I don’t even know how many Legion lapdogs I’ve killed. Two dozen at least. I’ve burned stormships with their howling crew aboard. I’ve feasted on the riches your crow king leeches from the continent. I hid like a coward and I retired to scrape a half-life out of Shipfarrok chalk, but I never once bowed to any Verdugo or saluted any Exark. And I’ve beheld the world from Heaven, and I’ve seen it one last time. And that’s enough.”
“This is a confession, then, Corbin?” Annalise asked.
“Aye, it is.”
“You could’ve kept your mouth shut, you know,” she said. “Had me well fooled.”
“And then done what? Wander back down to the sheep and the stillness? Pretend I’m alive?” Corbin sighed. “I wanted to be someone new. Isn’t that the saddest thing you ever heard? Someone new. As if you could bear yourself. As if you could come back without going away first. There’s no going straight. You think so, and then you walk long enough, and you see that you’ve been a few degrees off. And now you’re crooked for miles.” He got to his feet. “They said I belong here. That I was fooling myself otherwise. They were right.”
“What about Soya?” Seth asked.
“I love her.” Corbin shrugged. “But not enough. I thought it might be. I thought it was. But when that ship broke cloud cover, and I heard the thunder inside it, I woke up from a five-year coma.” He turned to the horizon. The bright sky bisected his pupil as he stared out the window. “You’ve killed the men and women I spent the best and freest years of my life with. I’d sooner go with them than with liver spots and crooked knees and the endless fucking sheep of Sheepfuck.”
Annalise paced behind Corbin, sword shouldered. “Do you love your people, Corbin il Kolossi?”
“Some of them.”
“Do you repent your crimes against them?”
Corbin gave this a soft, derisive laugh. “Some of them.”
“Do you give praise to Hundred Saints, and to the Sorcerer General, and the deathspell beneath which he shelters us?”
“No,” Corbin said. “I reckon the Sorcerer General can go fuck himself, in fact. Give Soya my dog and tell your pale army you killed the scourge of the Kanjir skyways.”
“I will,” Annalise said, and then there was the sound of rushing air and a dark shadow lashed across Corbin’s throat, and his expression barely had time to change—a widening of the eyes, a parting of the lips—and then it froze forever as his head tipped from its housing.
Annalise shoved the body forward with her boot to keep the arterial fountain away from her. It sprayed a fan of red across the misty sky.
She turned from the corpse with a look of vague distance on her face, as if she were judging distant clouds for a coming rain. “Go rouse my son, il Gutierre. He’ll know how to fly this thing overland and sink it down.”
“He’ll be running on fumes after his Darkness,” Ofelia said. “There’s a manual in the pilot’s room. We could do it ourselves.”
Annalise scraped the blood from her boots on the pilot chair’s firwood saddle. “He’ll be sour for days if he doesn’t get the chance to steer the ship. Go, Seth. Feeli and me will clean the stiffs up.” She shot him a dagger-edge look. “And don’t fucking run off anywhere else.”
Seth’s legs wobbled with vestigial tiredness. “I won’t. I swear.”
“Are you all right, Seth?” A frantic fear blunted the poniard of Annalise’s displeasure. “Saints, are you hurt?”
“I’m—I think I used my Darkness. I think I’ve found it.”
“Saints and seraphs, really?” Elation looked odd on a face as normally staid as Ofelia’s. “What is it?”
“That bit…” Seth hesitated. “That bit I’m still working out.”
Annalise sat up from the center of the cloth and rubbed her midsection. “That’s done it,” she said. “How’s my arm?”
“Eh.” Tiago yawned and rolled his sleeve down. Every al Ydris, Seth had learned, had the same tattoo across their forearm—a curling vine design that completed their blood-magic healing circle when laid upon the gap in the cloth design. “It’ll be a scar for sure.”
“Fine, Tiago,” Ofelia snapped, from the blood-flecked washbasin. “Fine. You dig out the bullet next time and I’ll be the one watching and needling the whole time.”
“Let’s make il Gutierre do it next time,” Tiago said. “Make up for sleeping on the job.”
Seth sat halfway up from his repose in the carriage’s satin-lined interior. “Are you all ignoring how I saved Annalise from Red Corbin, scourge of wherever-it-was?”
Annalise glared at him. “We’re not ignoring it. We’re allowing you to walk around without bells tied to your neck like a bleeding sheep.”
“That would be terribly funny.” Ofelia wiped a terrycloth across her forceps. “Now that you’ve brought it up, I’m in favor.”
“Scourge of the Kanjiri skyways,” Tiago said. “I’d heard of him. A genuine menace. Had you not?”
Seth shared a collective head-shake with the al Ydris ladies.
“You didn’t miss much,” Ofelia said. “No confetti out of the stump, or anything. Unless you’d’ve asked him to sign your saber.”
“I might have,” Tiago said. “You’re reading the wrong books.” He stifled another yawn. “Wish I could’ve met him, at least.”
“Here’s what I don’t get about pirates.” Annalise prodded at her scar. “You’re a man of justice, Sunshine. No tears shed on the scaffold.”
“Sure.”
“But everyone goes away with the fairies when it’s pirates,” she said. “Even you.”
“To a point,” Tiago said. “I still would’ve killed him. Just let him do a monologue or two first.”
“We did,” Seth said.
“Piracy is a fanciful crime,” Ofelia mused. “Sky piracy doubly so. You say murder or assault, and your listener rightly frowns. But say piracy and you put stars in eyes. Who among us can’t relate to the urge to light out with a crew of vagabonds, quomodocunquizing across the United Territories in a baldrick and a ruffled shirt?”
“That’s not a word,” Tiago said.
“Shirt?”
“The quo- thing.”
“That’s absolutely a word,” Ofelia said. “When one hears of a pirate, one imagines living the life of the perpetrator, and not the victim. But the latter outnumber the former, always. And you die just the same at the hands of a rakish avatar of freedom as you do in the maw of a seraph. It’s the sense of belonging, I suppose. To an iconoclastic community.”
“Belonging.” Seth picked a blade of grass into pieces as he thought. “What if it’s belonging?”
Tiago lifted a brow. “What if what’s belonging?”
“When I used my Darkness up there,” Seth said. “One of them saw me and I… I told him he didn’t, I guess? Or that I was just minding my own business. And what you told me. About how a Darkness works. It’s what you long for. And I thought: what if my Darkness ends up being, I dunno. Summoning an image of Annalise’s butt.”
Tiago scoffed. Annalise tried to turn her laugh into some kind of irritated exhalation, but he’d gotten her with that one.
“And then after today I thought, what if it’s tweaking the noses of the powerful? Or being a perfect liar? But that’s not what that was, I don’t think. It didn’t feel like I was lying, it felt like… like I was making it true.” He let the torn-up grass sprinkle to the ground. “I guess—if I really thought about it—I’ve always wanted to feel like I belong. To exist someplace, without being told to clear out or explain myself or whatever. To be accepted, I guess. Does that make any sense at all? Would it be ridiculous if my Darkness is belonging somewhere super-hard? Hard enough to fool people?”
Annalise stared at him in astonished silence.
Tiago cleared his throat. “Uh, yeah. That’d make some sense, I guess.”
“I hope you don’t take this as emasculating,” Ofelia said. “But that’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever heard.”
“We’ll need to verify that,” Tiago said. “We’ll work out some testing. And maybe build up your endurance. First time always knocks you on your ass, but you’ll get used to it.”
“Aye, well.” Annalise clambered off the circle cloth and folded it like a flag. “That’s for later. Need you and your sister to head down the hill to ol’ Sheepfuck. Someone has to go tell the Corregidor—the Karla, whatever—we found our man and more besides.”
“What about the stormship?” Tiago asked.
“Ship’ll keep.” Annalise ruffled her son’s hair. “Don’t you worry, Sunshine. I won’t sink it without ya.”
Tiago gave an affirmative nod and belted his saber to his hip. Seth rose from the carriage step, and faltered as a broad-shouldered shadow fell across him.
“Not you, il Gutierre.” Annalise’s voice was low and quiet, like thunder rolling in across a Plainland valley. “You’re sticking out here with me.”
“I should’ve waited,” he said. “Or stayed out of the way. I know. I’m sorry.”
She frowned down the ramp of her nose at him. “Sorry’s not gonna cut it, young man.”
He met her darkened eyes, made even darker by the heavy painted lids that hooded them. “What will?”
Seth lay limp against the Verdugo’s chiseled stomach, wrung-out and drooling. His breath billowed like a ragged surrender flag. His chest shone with sweat. His pulse throbbed in his ears. His legs, he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t feel them. His face was smushed in the soft space between two warm, white, wobbly pillows.
Above his head, their owner plucked the pipe from her mouth and exhaled a cloud of smoke up to the apex of the tent.
“This Shipfarrok stuff is smooth,” Annalise said. Her ankles were hooked behind his calves, trapping him in a soft squeeze between her two thick thighs.
His mind sorted through the smithereens into which the Verdugo had fucked it, seeking a reply. It furnished “Whuhh.”
“Doesn’t taste like much, though. Hay, mostly.”
Seth shifted atop his lover, reaching with one limp arm to the blankets beneath them in a bid to prop himself up.
“Ah-ah.” Her ankles rose to lock in place behind his ass, holding him fast. “Sian aig sabhail, mie Lynnokien.”
He got enough air into his lungs to ask, “Whazzat mean?”
“Means you’re staying put, boy.” She flexed her abdomen; he gasped at the silky squeeze. “Till I know you’re good and remorseful.”
“Ohh. Okay.” He nuzzled further into her sweat-slick chest. “I’ll be sorry any second now.”
She kissed his forehead. Her breath smelled like cedar smoke. “Good boy.”
“I am sorry,” he murmured. “Really I am.”
“I know you are,” she said. “And I know you’ll obey my orders from now on.”
“I will.”
The little gap in her front teeth showed in her smile. “Then no harm done.”
“I got you shot, a little bit.”
“Nah.”
“I threw off your game.”
“You remember that barn dance I did with the syndicate lads? Rescuing your tight little arse focuses me in.” Annalise replaced her pipe on the fold-out basswood nightstand. “It’s been a second since I’ve been in tight quarters like that as Annalise, is all. I tend to use Anna when I’m popping down a seraph tunnel or what-have-ye.”
“You think about wearing her to the stormship?”
She chuckled. “Saints blessing that I didn’t. If I’d have had Anna on, I’d have tossed you out the damn thing. And anyway, I hate using that Verdugo sword even more when I’m her. Just thinking argh grr why can’t I have my spear, shit fuck cunt.” This she delivered in a butchered Plainland accent. “Only thing worse than having to use that big gowl of a blade is having to use it in tight spaces. My horses for a hexis-sucking spadroon, eh?”
“What’s a spadroon?”
“Sword.”
He raised his face from her breasts. “Sword people have so many names for swords. There should be three kinds of swords. Big swords, small swords, curved swords.”
She took hold of the back of his head and buried his face back into its soft, smushy place. “It’s like those wrenches you showed me. The flathead things and all. Half the fun’s all the odd names.” She was doing something to the hair near the nape of his neck. “I want a shotel. I’ve never swung a shotel.”
He flinched as she tugged his hair. “What are you doing?”
“Giving you a little rattail,” she said. “Hair’s a bit short for it.”
“What the hell?” He gave her fingers a light smack.
“You wear a manky little rattail to the next settlement and I’ll have forgiven ya, how about.”
“You already forgave me. No takebacks.”
“Ah, fair play.” She undid whatever she’d done to his hair. “That’s the problem, see. You’re too bleeding cute for giving out.”
“You’re bleedin’ cute,” he said, in his least convincing Orwinese accent.
She giggled. “G’way outta that.”
“Ah sure look, yer a right lash.”
She cackled. “Shut up.”
“Shut me up,” he said, and she kissed him, and that was all they did for a while.
Outside, the faint conversation of Tiago and Ofelia approached. Seth hesitated; Annalise hummed into his mouth and didn’t. “Just be quiet, yeah?” she whispered. “We’re not shagging. They’re grown. They can handle a closed tent flap.”
He shrugged at her unimpeachable logic. And so the twins returned to the carriage and the business of preparing for their next village, and Seth stayed in the tent and made out with their mother.
“If you’re done screwing, we’ve gotta let the storm out of the stormship,” Tiago called, from beyond the canvas. “Village is battened down. It’ll get thunderous.”
“We’re not screwing,” Annalise called back. “Stall the ball. Be right out.” She gave Seth’s lower lip a parting nip and rummaged around in the bedclothes for her underwear. Seth paused his own search as she wriggled into her riding breeches, watched how they squeezed against her heavy thighs on their way up.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous, Annalise al Ydris,” he said.
She laughed and blew a raspberry at him, but she was blushing. “Get your trousers on, you wee sweet-talker. We’ve got a stormship to salvage.”
He sighed and nodded and pulled his shirt on—new, crisp, and black, like most of his clothes. Her arms layered atop it; she held him from behind, and her heart pressed against him with her sigh.
“Every time you’re off,” she whispered. “I pray to the Saints you’ll come back. You better always come back, you hear? Always.”
Seth brushed his lips against the rearing colt tattoo on her bicep. Sheltered and safe as he was, in the strong arms and good graces of Annalise al Ydris, he drooped and closed his eyes. “He was looking right at me. When he said that stuff. When he talked about being someone new and going crooked all over again, he looked right at me.”
“Who? The oul pirate fella?”
“I wonder how he knew. But I think he did. I think it shows on me somehow.” He tipped the crown of his head into the graceful curve her neck made with her jaw. “You know how often I thought I was finished with it? And how many times I ended up back in?”
Her arms tightened. “You’re not like him.”
“Kind of am.”
“No you’re not.” She turned him around so they were face to ardent face. “Maybe you could’ve been, once. But you’re not.”
She closed her hand delicately around the back of his neck. Her grip was so huge her fingers nearly met around his throat. Like a warm, cozy shackle.
“He never belonged anywhere but that stormship. You, little fox.” She kissed him on the tip of the nose. “You belong to me.”