1. Vera
Vera
“We shouldn’t be here, Vera,” Captain Starke’s uneasy voice echoed behind me.
I brushed aside a tangled mess of seaweed hanging from the cave’s ceiling. “Never stopped me before,” I muttered.
The smell hit me first. Salt, rust, and that faint, coppery tang of decay clung to the damp caverns. My boots skimmed through shallow pools of seawater leaking in from the high tide.
Somewhere behind me, Starke sighed. “If the Twin Tides patrol finds us—”
“We’ll tell them we’re lost.” I pushed off from the wall, reddish-brown dust rubbing against my palm. “Honestly, Starke, you worry too much.”
My tone was dry, but my pulse thudded. Every nerve was stretched taut, tuned to the distant echo of the tide rushing against the shore just beyond the tunnel entrance, the drip of condensation at our feet, the skittering of rodents along the path.
Farther out in the Imarian Sea, the rest of Starke’s crew waited aboard the White Moonstone, ready to set sail at the first sign of trouble.
Starke wasn’t wrong. We didn’t exactly have permission to be sneaking around Twin Tides. But my motto was “it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
“There’s nothing here, Vera,” Starke said. “I don’t see the point in—”
“Because the rumors said he was here,” I shot back, then swallowed my sharp tone.
I took a breath. “Sorry. I know you’re risking everything for me.
Again. I just…” I trailed off, scratching absentmindedly at the scar on the inside of my forearm.
“This could be different. I feel like it was really him this time.”
Starke’s features softened beneath his dark blond scruff. His blue eyes met mine, reading far deeper than I felt comfortable. He sighed again, then tied his shoulder-length blond hair back with a strap of leather, letting it rest at the nape of his neck. “Okay, V. Let’s keep looking.”
A spider scuttled across the wall by his shoulder, its body as large as my hand. Starke swore under his breath and jumped away. I snorted. “Fates, Starke. You’re the jumpiest pirate I’ve ever seen.”
“For the last time, I’m not a pirate.”
“Oh, sorry. Salvage captain. Who occasionally trades stolen goods with the Blackwake crews. Very different.”
Starke grunted. “That doesn’t seem to stop you from using my ship every month.”
“You know I don’t care about your shady business.” I stepped beneath a low arch in the tunnel. “So you work with pirates. Could be worse.”
He muttered something unintelligible under his breath. After a couple minutes of avoiding cobwebs and creatures scurrying across the dusty floor, he said, “It seems like another dead end. You sure this is worth it, V?”
A rush of spring wind from the tunnel opening behind us sent a shiver down my spine. “I’ve come too far for it not to be.”
I’d been chasing breadcrumbs like this for nearly a year.
Little clues and rumors, each leading me to some underground cave, hidden island, or graveyard.
I told myself they were all bringing me one step closer.
Maybe this time would be it, I said. Maybe this time we’d find something that would bring me to him.
To Malek Mortep. The man behind so much pain and suffering for seven years of my life.
A year’s worth of maps and coded journals filled my pack, along with scribbled notes and broken compasses. Most of the gold I’d taken from my brother’s treasury when I left home had gone to bribing captains and informants, but Alexander Starke was different.
He was only a decade older than me, which was young for a pir—sorry, salvage captain, not yet hardened by sea and time.
I found the thirty-three-year-old in a seedy pub on Saltmourne, the island state I’d made my “home” after leaving the Veridian Empire.
Captain Starke had begged every burly drunk at the bar to sail south with him to chart the nearly unreachable Shattered Spine passage.
Nobody would take him up on it. It was a fool’s errand, they said.
Too dangerous. A row of sharp volcanic reefs, molten geysers, and low seabeds shrouded in mist stretching for hundreds of miles across the ocean.
It was nearly impossible for ships to navigate.
The Shattered Spine was the only thing separating the Triad Realm from my own empire and had only been traversed by a handful of people in recent human history.
I was one of them. I liked the challenge, and when I discovered Malek Mortep had fled up here to the Triad Realm, there wasn’t a single thing that could stop me from following.
Even memories of the ones I left behind.
“I’ll do it,” I said that night at the pub.
Dozens of haggard men turned to face me, ale slipping off their beards and laughter ringing through the air.
But Starke hadn’t laughed. We took his motley crew and headed straight into the jaws of the Shattered Spine.
I helped him chart it, creating maps to try and find a way through for future traders.
It was a good arrangement. So, I stayed.
Over the past year, Starke let me use his ship to get into places across the Triad Realm that wiser men would avoid.
In exchange, I worked for him for free. I may have spent most of my life sequestered, but I was a quick learner.
I studied what those around me did and made myself useful.
Whatever he needed: cartographer, logkeeper, some light smuggling.
Starke was the closest thing I had to a friend, although the word felt…unfamiliar. I wasn’t sure if I knew how to be a friend anymore. Not after the years spent in a cell, waiting for something worse than death. Not when I’d abandoned the last person who meant something more to me.
“My songbird…”
I shoved away the memory of gray and green eyes, of a husky voice that still made the frayed edges of my mind seem a little less jagged. I couldn’t think about him right now. I couldn’t think about us and everything I’d given up on this relentless pursuit.
Starke and I ventured farther, and the tunnel sloped downward as the air grew colder.
The glow from his lantern illuminated shapes on the walls.
Random lines and circles, crude depictions of bird wings, fragments of script in some ancient language I couldn’t decipher.
The Fates only knew how long it had been there—or who drew it.
I brushed a hand along the nearest wall, fingers lingering on the faded, pointed tip of a beautiful wing. It made the skin at my shoulder blades prickle with the imprint of my magic. Magic I hadn’t felt in a year, ever since I left the Veridian Empire.
I buried the pieces of my past beneath the cloak of this new life. A life unburdened by my magic. A life where nobody knew what I was, and nobody could use me. A life where I could start over, where I could figure out who I was without the chains.
Maybe I should feel guilty for keeping my identity such a massive secret from Starke, who risked his life for me weekly. There were probably a lot of things I should feel.
“Looks like words,” Starke commented, bringing his lantern to my shoulder to illuminate the wall. “Just not any language I recognize.”
“How long do you think it’s been since someone was down here?”
He shrugged. “There’s no telling. There aren’t any ports this far south, and the closest village is about an hour north.”
“So we’re the only ones down here for miles.”
“Us and the patrol. They’ll find us if they get too close. My ship isn’t exactly small, V.”
“You men and your sizes,” I mumbled under my breath, following a bend in the tunnel.
He had a right to be worried, though. Of all three island states in the Triad Realm, the Twin Tides patrol had the nastiest reputation.
Another reason I felt bad making Starke put his salvaging license on the line for me.
Again. I had no clue why he still put up with me, honestly.
“We’ll be fast,” I added. “I promise.”
Most of the other trails we’d followed over the last few months in hopes of finding Mortep had been pointless. But this…this was different. I could just feel it. A tug beneath my ribs, faint but persistent, the same instinct that had driven me to follow my mortal enemy into a brand new realm.
Vengeance was a powerful motivator, and I had enough of it to ignite the entire ocean.
The tightly-packed dirt floor shifted and sent rocks clattering under our feet. The sound jolted through me, sharp and sudden.
Chains rattled against the stone. Distant cries echoed off the walls, ringing in my head like a mangled symphony. A wave of pain ripped down my spine when he plunged the needle in my arm again. My magic was strangled as my blood boiled, and claws scraped beneath my skin.
“Just breathe, Songbird,” a quiet voice murmured. I counted my breaths, pushing past the agony and crawling toward his voice. “Breathe with me. It’ll pass, you just have to breathe.”
I sucked in a breath as a rock slid out from under me and I stumbled, only for Starke’s hand to steady me. His fingers lingered on my arm before I quickly pulled away, my chest tight.
A crunching sound made us jerk our heads to the right, down a darkened stretch of tunnel.
Without thinking twice, I crept forward, heart hammering in my ears.
If I had my powers, I could light the darkness in an instant, but magic didn’t exist here.
I hadn’t felt mine since I left the borders of the Veridian Empire.
I didn’t necessarily miss it, though. Magic made things convenient, sure, but the more you had, the more people wanted to use you.
Besides, being without them heightened the thrill of the chase.
The racing adrenaline, the bite of fear, the truth that I had nothing up my sleeves if we ran into trouble.
It was often the only way to know I was still capable of feeling something.
Shadows flickered off the walls from light cast by Starke’s lantern. I held my breath as we rounded another bend and stopped.
The passage ended in a solid wall of rock.