38. THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY-EIGHT
FANKALO
Location: Casowhatan Sea
Fankalo stroked Killari at the Rogue’s Rapture’s helm.
When it had become clear the Tera’thian fleet was not in pursuit, most of the crew had retreated below deck to eat.
The ship was devoid of sound besides the flapping of sails and slapping of water against the hull.
The bird regarded her warily, as though she were the cause for Fankalo’s sour expression.
It had been a very, very long day. Never mind getting up midway through the night to avoid decimation. The ensuing hours had been a logistical nightmare. Six ships lost to flame. Nearly two hundred fatalities to smoke or sea in the scramble to vacate the harbor.
The intention had always been to move into the new headquarters outside Casowhatan, but not for another moon cycle.
The barracks were still under construction.
As a result, two thousand heads needed shuffling and re-accommodating in the meantime.
As compliant as the raider captains were in absorbing an extra twenty sailors apiece—levied by additional resources—she dreaded the next meeting with their arithmetist. Almost as much as her overused throat dreaded her next inevitable command.
But, of all the day’s insanity, Calver’s fucking note was by far the worst of it. She took a final glance at her response.
‘I’ll tell you everything. Abort Steila. Cul’Mon has weapons you’re not prepared for and I won’t risk you. I’ll send a skiff pick you up in Thaligan before we move to Dreiden warehouse south of Casowhatan. You can stay.’
She tucked it into Killari’s canister and popped the rosemary oil vial.
The bird took off southeast over the Casowhatan, in the direction of the spark that was her blood brother.
The moment was redolent of when he’d left to watch the Red Wing recruitment all those years ago.
Back then, the midnight lines of bad Luck had felt like they might suffocate her. She’d begged him not to go.
They were nothing compared to what her trained mind could feel now.
Calver hadn’t listened then. Why would he listen now? Her mouth pressed into a line. Considering what Calver now knew and, in mocking parallel, what he didn’t, why would he?
Fankalo closed her eyes and reached out to the endless tendrils of Fate.
Her foresight was obscured. There were too many futures around this, and many of them felt so foreboding they blotted out anything else she might have seen.
She sifted for ones that felt auspicious, following their threads as far as they went.
There was no pinprick of opportunity, like she often felt against overwhelming odds. Only a continual web of darkness.
Impossible. She refused to believe it: that in a world of infinite futures, not one held a lucky outcome for him.
She sank deeper. Deeper still. Deeper than she’d dared to stay before when there were no positive options to explore, only varying shades of charcoal.
She followed one that seemed neither positive nor negative.
It curved beneath an obsidian curtain. And then…
The loose lines she followed formed more than impressions.
They blurred into images. Calver reaping.
Calver burning. Calver beheaded by Cul’Mon.
Fankalo sucked in a breath. In all the years of training her power with Drogus through meditation, she’d never reached such depth.
Never witnessed the possibilities. Her skin prickled, and she steadied herself before continuing to sort through thread after harrowing thread.
Calver captured. Calver forced back into genetic servitude. Calver bleeding out. Calver poisoned by veilstrike. Almost all showed Calver’s imminent doom, even the few where Calver had responded to her letter and arrived in the warehouse. And then—
Calver’s arms wrapped around a woman with long, raven-black hair and dark eyes. She pressed herself into him. She was—they were—
Fankalo took the mental equivalent of a trip into a mud puddle. Her eyes blinked open. Chaos’s unruly bush. How was she ever going to get that image unburned from her brain? She felt so filthy she had half a mind to jump overboard.
Calver had never once made use of her sex workers. He wouldn’t even let her set a hand on him, let alone embrace a person. But… the futures were infinite.
At least he wasn’t dead.
Shoving the shock aside, she focused on her brother again. The prior thread had gone, thankfully. In its place were others. All ended in death. In some, he made it as far as the coronation before his line cut out. Her stomach pinched. Her throat swelled. That was enough of that for one day.
Fankalo was almost glad when Mitek surfaced to the command deck to distract her: Mitek, who had basically crawled up her asshole until they’d put half a day between them and the Tera’thians. Almost.
He slid a poison pill into her hand. “Time for our dose.”
“Thanks.” She washed it down with a sip from the canteen at her belt.
His shoulder brushed hers. “Doing alright?”
She nodded, but the closer he came to her, the more she wanted to be anywhere else.
“Want me to get the navigator to give you reprieve?”
“Not necessary. It’s my shift.”
She couldn’t let him get any closer. Not with his sudden forwardness. They’d weathered the worst things imaginable together; he could weather her rejection too. He’d give up on her soon enough—realize why they wouldn’t ever work. He might be an idiot, but he wasn’t that big an idiot.
“Are you doing alright?”
“Yeah.” But the veins in his neck bulged. “But I can’t wait to rid that guy from the face of the earth.”
This aggression wasn’t like him either. It was for the best that she didn’t tell him about Calver’s last correspondence. In fact… she remembered the illusory vision of Calver suffocating under the effects of veilstrike. Best to keep all things Calver to herself, for now.
In fact…
Her gut turned in on itself. Mitek could be the one feeding information to Thyatira. Since the loss of Zeb, only four knew the full scope of the Shadewalker’s operation. If she was taking her blood brother and Drogus under observation, she would need to suspect Mitek too.
Mitek.
She’d spent a decade learning the art of deception alongside him. And he had all the telltale signs: he’d been acting differently for months. Always needing to know where she was and who she was with and…
He’d been the one to suggest Calver was working against her. Putting her attention elsewhere. He’d been the one to suggest a collaboration with Thyatira since the beginning. He’d run every meeting with his envoys. Some privately.
Fankalo bit her cheek to stop herself from questioning Mitek on the spot. With the number of times she’d gone against the codex, the possibility that he’d lost alignment with her values wasn’t out of the question. And he’d held a grudge since the moment she let Calver go free after Pazir.
Even Gelhard had once been her father’s closest friend.
Mitek mistook the sounds of the sea and whatever expression she wore in place of their usual banter for worry. His brown eyes brightened and he smiled at her. “It’s a setback, Bratty, but we were bound to have a few. It will all land as it should, just you wait.”
Fankalo let the corners of her mouth rise in false confidence, despite her heart having dropped into her stomach. “The way I see it, we’re ahead of schedule.”
“There are only two options, eah? We take down the fucking Tera’thians…” He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Or we take down the fucking Tera’thians.”
A legend would not show weakness.
CALVEROUS
Three nights passed in companionable misery.
The flame in Calver’s muscles, unaccustomed to so long on horseback, grew so severe that he questioned whether walking might be superior.
Then the moon traced its way across the sky and Dex stayed vertical on his mount, so Calver did the same.
Neither made mention of their chafing or fresh blisters as they nursed them when they settled to rest. They rode at dusk, and when the day broke they stretched and hobbled, sparred and slept.
When a tenday remained before the Red Wing’s expected arrival in Steila, they dipped into an arroyo that faded into a stretch of grasslands.
For days they had pressed the horses at a canter, moving them twice the distance they’d been accustomed to walking over the weeks with the Red Wing.
With the change of scenery, the horses’ stubbornness won out: they refused to move.
Calver dismounted to coax his animal forward. He led the way on foot with only the moon to light the hissing, waist-high grasses. When the fear passed, they mounted again and rode slowly through the remainder of the night.
As the first rays of sun reddened the horizon, Calver looked to Dex, who was holding his body sideways in an attempt to find comfort. The exhaustion in his stony expression vanished when he saw Calver looking at him. Calver could remember having that sort of pride, once.
“There’s a rock formation. Ahead,” Dex called. “It could be a good place to take cover for a rest?”
Dex’s vision was superior to Calver’s, but as Calver strained his eyes, he did see a mass on the grassline, darker than the space around it.
A spike of fear shot down Calver’s spine.
They couldn’t be far from the northbound distortion locomotive guiderail that had once connected Kaidech to Seraphinden.
Fourteen years had passed since he was last in these grasslands.
A voice had beckoned him toward something he didn’t understand, promised him everything he wanted, and taken everything that made him human in exchange.
Calver blinked hard, quashing the churning at the back of his mind.
They were too far north—not the same rock, not the same cave.
Besides, there was nothing to fear out here, anymore.
The worst that could have happened already had.
He nodded to Dex, and they made for it.