Chapter 27
The very moment Carolina and Ophelia were gone, Carter turned to Wyatt with his eyes wide. “Are you alright?” he asked.
Wyatt touched his neck, feeling for any blood or cuts, but Carolina had left him unharmed. “I’m fine,” he answered. But he glanced around the alley, worried about any of the pirates they’d beat up coming back. “Let’s get out of here.”
He rushed out onto the street and led the way toward the docks as quickly as he could, and every step closer to his ship, the panic in him rose. He thought it would be fine to go out because Carolina rarely left the ship, that’s what Rue had told him anyway, and there was little risk of anyone else on Omen’s crew recognizing them. Well, he’d been wrong, and because they hadn’t left Piers behind on Sky’s Honor, he’d potentially risked it all. Now Carolina Trace herself knew they were following, and there was no telling what she’d do with that information, and he didn’t know if it was safe to try and warn Rue.
So, when the three of them reached the ship and stormed into his cabin, locking the door behind them, he finally yelled, “Dammit!”
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Carter said.
Wyatt wasn’t listening. He’d begun to pace from wall to wall in his room while he dug his nails into his palm.
“Wyatt,” Carter implored, “don’t spiral.”
“What if she attacks us?” he barked, stopping in the middle of the floor.
“She still doesn’t know what ship we’re on, right?” Carter pointed out. “And if Rue told you where to meet them next, then we don’t have to follow closely enough for them to find out. ”
Wyatt inhaled deeply, latching on to that comfort and using it to calm himself down. It was the immediate threat of attack that frightened him the most, but Carter was right — as far as they knew, Carolina hadn’t identified their ship. So he nodded, exhaling in a heavy sigh and releasing his tender palm from under his nails.
Carter looked over at Piers, who Wyatt had almost forgotten was there because he hadn’t said a word. “Piers?”
Piers paced to Wyatt’s desk, where he set his hands on the surface to lean over it and stare down for a few moments. When he finally looked up, he asked, “Was Miss Parker telling the truth? Is the emperor killing his own people?”
Wyatt looked at Carter, hoping Carter would give him some clear sign as to whether he thought Piers could be trusted. All he did was shrug. But maybe it was time to bring the bounty hunters in. At the very least, he could give Piers some information that wouldn’t implicate him and Carter and see how he reacted, and then decide if he should reveal more.
“Yes,” Wyatt said.
Piers straightened up. “ Why? ”
“He’s cursed,” he answered, “like she said.”
“What does that have to do with killing thousands? Tens of thousands?”
“Glasoro will fall in five years unless Anseau gives up the throne,” he said. “Instead, he’s harvesting twelve islands on a rushed schedule in order to build a support underneath Glasoro, in hopes it will prevent the fall.” Piers huffed a hard breath and turned away from them, pacing to the far wall as Wyatt asked Carter, “He doesn’t believe me?”
“Give him a second,” Carter said.
Piers paced back to the desk, mumbling to himself about twelve islands, and asked, “Is that why there were support ships at Remigan?” Wyatt nodded, and so did Piers as he stared down at the desk again for almost a minute. “Right, then, why is Beecher here?”
Wyatt hesitated for a moment before deciding there was little risk in revealing that. “Carolina Trace bears a similar curse to the emperor,” he answered.
“Her bracelet,” Piers told him, “it’s laibralt.” Wyatt must’ve looked confused by that, because he added, “It’s extremely conductive, and used rarely for powerful spells. ”
“I see,” Wyatt said. “Well, in order to break it, she’s after something called Ascension, which would give a witch indescribable power.”
“Power to break the curse?” Piers asked.
“And then some,” he answered.
“Simon wants this Ascension too?” Piers said. “To break the emperor’s curse?”
“Yes,” Wyatt said. “But we doubt that’s all he’ll do with it.”
“Right,” Piers huffed, shaking his head as he paced one circle before looking at them again. “So that’s why he’s here with you? You’re helping him get it?”
“Officially,” he answered, “those are our orders.”
Piers’ head cocked, and he looked from Wyatt to Carter and back again. “And unofficially?”
Wyatt looked at Carter again too, because this was the part that he wanted a second opinion on. The part that could implicate them both.
“Can we trust you, Piers?” Carter asked.
“That depends on what you’re about to say,” Piers answered. “Because what Anseau is doing has already gone too far.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “You trust him with that power? You trust Beecher with that power?”
“No,” Carter told him. “That’s the point of all this.”
“We’re working with my contact on Omen to prevent anyone from Ascending,” Wyatt added.
“Beecher has to suspect that,” Carter said to Wyatt. “Why else would he hate you so much?”
“Maybe,” Wyatt agreed.
“So,” Piers said, “if Sovereign found out what you’re really doing…”
“We’d surely be tried for treason,” Wyatt said.
Piers’ cheeks puffed as he blew out a hard breath, and Carter said, “Piers, we need to be able to trust you with this. You can’t even tell your fathers if you think there’s any chance they’d turn us in.”
Piers nodded at that as he leaned to set his hands on the desk again, drumming his fingers on the surface while he thought about it all for another minute. Eventually, he said, “I don’t think they’d turn you in.”
“They’re bounty hunters,” Carter pointed out. “They’d probably make a fortune from turning us in.”
“Probably,” Piers agreed. “But they’d never support what Anseau is doing to those islands, not in a million years, and I already told you they don’t trust Beecher. ”
“Do you think they’d help us, if we needed it?” Wyatt asked.
Piers shrugged. “I can try to convince them,” he said, and paused to think for a few moments. “I think there’s no way they’ll agree with letting Simon Beecher Ascend. If they don’t agree with what you’re doing either, the most they’d do is try to get us off at the next stop and we’d part ways. I know they’ve always tried to keep me from getting caught up with Sovereign, but…” He sighed. “You guys are my friends, and I think you’re doing the right thing, and I want to help you.”
“You’re our friend, too,” Carter said, walking over to him and sticking out his hand, “we wouldn’t have trusted you with this otherwise.”
Piers shook with him, and as Carter let his hand go to slap him on the shoulder, he looked at Wyatt. Wyatt nodded his agreement, and it made Piers grin. “Should I tell my fathers, then?”
“Tell them,” Wyatt said. “I’m sure they’ll have questions. Carter and I will wait here.”
Piers nodded, but as he turned to head for the door, Carter said, “Wait,” and Piers stopped to look at him. “Abner won’t… he won’t want Ascension for himself, will he?”
Wyatt’s eyebrows shot up, but Piers didn’t hesitate to shake his head and say, “He’s not the type.”
Carter nodded. “Alright. We’ll be here.” Once Piers was gone and the door was closed behind him, Carter asked Wyatt, “What about Commander Parker being behind his daughter’s warrant? Do we tell them about it?”
Wyatt considered it for a few moments before shaking his head. “No. I don’t think it’s relevant to our situation with Beecher, and I wouldn’t want the Commander to get in trouble.”
Carter agreed, and then they stood there silently, waiting for Piers to return with or without his fathers. After several minutes, Wyatt began to pace, and Carter sat at his desk and leaned back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, throwing a paperweight into the air to catch it repeatedly. It felt like an eternity, and every minute that passed by, Wyatt grew more and more worried that Piers wouldn’t return with good news.
Eventually, there was an urgent knock on his door, and while Carter instantly straightened up in the seat, Wyatt called, “Come in.”
But it wasn’t Piers or his fathers who entered. It was one of his crew, who announced, “Sir, Omen is leaving port. ”
Wyatt and Carter dashed out of his cabin, racing to the bulwark where they could see for themselves that Omen, which had been docked several slips down, was pulling out. But, though they’d rushed out to see it and it was ahead of schedule, it came as no surprise. Perhaps Carolina was hoping to see which ship would follow them. Fortunately for Wyatt, Rue had already told him where to go.
“Make sure any crew members who disembarked are back in three hours,” Wyatt told the man who’d come to get him. “That should give them enough of a lead.”
“Yes, Sir,” he said.
As he left, Simon Beecher stepped up to his side with his hands clasped behind his back, and asked, “Has there been a new development?”
“Omen is on the move,” Wyatt answered, “that’s all.”
Beecher hummed, leaning forward to say past Wyatt, “Mr. Hann.”
Carter cleared his throat and practically stammered, “Mr. Beecher.”
Simon looked at Wyatt again and said, “The three of you looked distressed when you returned to the ship not long ago.”
“I’m sure we did,” Wyatt said.
Beecher let out a low, grumbling noise before asking, “ Why? ”
And he said the quickest thing he could think of that wasn’t the complete truth, “Saw a group of pirates tailing Trace and helped her out of an ambush.”
“You helped her?” Beecher asked. “She saw you?”
“Would you rather we had let the pirates kill her?” he asked. “How would you Ascend then?”
Simon grunted, was quiet for several long moments, and then asked, “Who was the pirate that attacked her?”
Wyatt shrugged. “Someone named Penny.”
“And where are we off to now?”
“Breezeport,” he answered. Without saying anything else, Simon left his side and began pacing toward the ramp. “Where are you going?” Wyatt called after him.
“I’ll be back soon, Mr. Kim,” Beecher answered.
Confused, Wyatt looked over at Carter, who grimaced and said, “I don’t think that’s good at all.”
Wyatt groaned, folding his hands behind his head and pressing his thumbs into the base of his skull to try and relieve some of the forming tension. He wanted to convince himself that not everything was going wrong, but then Piers came up from below deck.
He hurried over to Wyatt and Carter, and said, “I told them.”
“And?” Carter asked.
“They kicked me out,” Piers answered. “Said they needed to talk about it.”
Wyatt sighed heavily, worried that meant that they were talking about whether to turn him and Carter in for treason. “We’re dead,” Wyatt mumbled.
“Don’t worry,” Piers assured him. “They were trying to keep neutral faces, but I could tell they were interested in what I was saying.”
“How long do you think they’ll talk about it?” Carter asked.
Piers shrugged. “No idea. Sorry.”
There was nothing else to do but nod, and no matter how nervous Wyatt was about the result, he tried to relax enough to kill time peacefully. While Piers and Carter brought out some dice, he sat nearby on the deck to draw in his sketchbook. He filled a new page until the sun went down and it was too dark to keep at it, and then a crew member came to tell him that everyone, including Beecher, had returned, and they were ready to leave port. While they took to the sky, he followed Carter and Piers down for dinner, and it was halfway through the meal that Gerald and Abner finally emerged from their cabin.
The two men sat at Piers’ side across from Carter and Wyatt, nerve-rackingly quiet for almost a minute while Wyatt struggled with whether to acknowledge them. Until Gerald finally said, “We need to talk.”
Wyatt nodded. “We can go to my cabin.”
They agreed, and so Wyatt left the rest of his meal and led the other four up to main deck and then to his cabin. He held the door open for all of them, made a paranoid glance around to see if Simon Beecher was watching him as usual, and then closed and locked the door behind them. Gerald and Abner both had unreadable expressions, and Wyatt swallowed nervously while waiting for them to say something, because he didn’t know how to start.
Gerald was the first to speak, and he told Abner, “Check.”
Abner breathed into his hands and started to summon something, but Wyatt wasn’t expecting it to be so large, and when a full-sized nightwing stood before them, he scrambled back until he was pressed up against the door.
“What are you doing?” he asked .
“Making sure we’re alone,” Abner said.
The nightwing stood menacingly before them, its head on a swivel as it searched the room with its massive ears perked forward.
“Who else could be here?” Carter asked.
“Beecher,” Gerald answered.
“We’re alone,” Abner said as the nightwing settled and stalked to his side, and he dispelled it with a wave of his hands.
Gerald immediately asked, “What happened on Remigan?”
Wyatt glanced around in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what were your orders there?” Gerald clarified. “And what did you actually do?”
Wyatt hesitated, though he didn’t know exactly why until Carter said, “You’re asking for a direct confession.”
“You can trust him,” Piers said, and mumbled quietly to his father, “and you can try not to sound like such a bounty hunter.”
“Everything you told us puts us in direct opposition to the emperor’s ambitions,” Gerald said to Piers. He then told Wyatt, “That means we’ll be hung at your side if you’re caught. So, tell me why our son put our lives in your hands.”
“My orders at Remigan were to bring extra troops to oversee the harvest,” Wyatt said. “The civilians were restless, and the officers in charge didn’t feel there was enough Sovereign presence to maintain order.”
Gerald hummed. “And what did you do?”
“For about a week, we supplied numbers to try and help keep the peace.”
“And then?” Gerald asked.
“And then a rebellion started,” Wyatt told him, “and we couldn’t find any noble reason to stop it. My contact on Omen saved me from an angry mob, and when I got back to my ship, I pulled my fleet and wrote to Commander Parker about Ascension.”
“You let the civilians take Remigan back,” Abner said.
“In a way, I suppose,” Wyatt answered.
“Why?” Gerald asked.
“What do you mean why?”
“I mean what kind of man are you, Mr. Kim?” Gerald said. “Were you afraid to fight, and now you’re covering up your cowardice?”
“ No ,” he spat, his fist clenching with offense.
“Then why ?” Gerald demanded .
“Because it was the right thing to do,” Wyatt told him. “Because I stand by my belief that those people had every right to defend themselves, and I wasn’t going to stand in their way.”
Gerald hummed again, and asked, “And why are you trying to prevent Simon Beecher from Ascending? And don’t just say because it’s the right thing to do.”
Wyatt sighed and, at first, shrugged. All he knew was that it was the right thing to do, and he hadn’t thought too deeply on why he believed that. If he was honest, finding out why he thought so frightened him. He didn’t want to know, because once he admitted to himself why he felt his attachment to Sovereign fading, there was no going back. But now Gerald was asking him to say it out loud, and so he thought about it. And he recognized it. And he knew it.
“I no longer believe that Anseau has his people's best interest at heart,” he admitted. “If he even cares at all. And I’m afraid of how many people he’d hurt with that kind of power.”
Gerald nodded, reaching up with one hand to rub at his bearded chin. He stood there in silent thought for half a minute and then asked, “What do you want from us? Why tell us all this?”
“I was hoping that, if it came to it, you’d help us prevent Simon Beecher from Ascending. Or, at the very least, not assist him in doing so.”
“I see,” Gerald said, dropping his hand from his face. “We talked about it a lot. On one hand, everything we do and have done is to make sure Piers has a good life. We’ve been bounty hunters for a long time, hating the work… and the toll on our conscience… but grateful for it all the same, because it’s kept Piers with us, and out of a soldier’s contract. This is supposed to be our last bounty.”
“I know,” Wyatt said.
“And you’re asking us to risk it,” Gerald said. “To risk the life we’ve been building for ourselves for decades. We’ve followed the law to the letter so that we could retire, peacefully, without debt to Sovereign or elsewhere and so our son could have opportunities we never dreamed of. And it could all be for nothing.”
Carter asked, “If that’s the against, then what’s the for?”
Gerald sighed, but it was Abner who said, “I have personal experience with Beecher.”
“What?” Wyatt asked in shock .
“Casters start their training with us,” Abner told him, “I was in my last year when he came to the sanctuary. I doubt he knows or recognizes me, but I’ve never forgotten him.”
“Why not?” Carter asked.
“Because he kept our healers far busier than they’d ever been, and likely more than they ever have been since. And he enjoyed doing so. The only thing that man’s ever been interested in doing is proving himself the most powerful person in the room, and I can see he hasn’t changed.”
“So,” Wyatt said, “what does all of this mean as far as where you stand?”
“It means we’re conflicted,” Gerald answered, “and we haven’t decided.”
“Dad,” Piers began to protest.
Gerald held up a hand to cut him off, and said to Wyatt, “You have our word that we won’t interfere either way, but beyond that, we’ll need more time.”
“How much more?” Wyatt asked.
“I don’t know,” Gerald said. “We may not have a decision until we’re forced to.”
Wyatt sighed but nodded. “Well, if you come up with any other questions that may persuade you, you know where to find us.”
“We won’t hesitate,” Gerald assured him.
Gerald motioned for Abner and Piers to follow him, and Wyatt stepped aside so they could leave. Piers gave them an almost sad parting wave as he followed his fathers out the door, and then Wyatt closed it behind them and looked at Carter.
“Well,” Carter said, and then didn’t say anything else.
“Well,” Wyatt repeated with a sigh.
And it seemed that was the best they were going to get.