Chapter 3
Finch
It’s another damp day on the island, the air thick with rain as I wander through the woods. I’m soaked through by the time I head back to the house, mentally bracing myself for what I’m about to walk in on.
I bloody love my ship and my crew. But they’re a bunch of nutters, honestly.
“Cap.” Jack approaches from out of nowhere, making my tentacles whip up as if they’re ready to throw a punch. “I found something. More names on the list.”
Someone else has been busy, it seems. Jack’s been travelling in his raven form, going all over the kingdom to check if the arrest warrants have spread.
“Where?” I ask.
“To the north. It’d be at least a few hundred miles by road, I’d say,” he tells me.
I nod, that’s not too bad. Over two weeks later, and it seems like the king’s memories aren’t coming back to him as quickly as we’d feared.
“How many more names?” I ask. Just how fast is the net tightening around us?
“Only a couple,” Jack replies. “Slim Tony and Silvertooth.”
He’s standing in front of the front door even though it’s pissing with rain and my hood is plastered to my head.
I’m already drenched, and I’d prefer not to develop webbed feet to add to my oddities.
My eyebrow shoots up as I sidestep him before Jack reluctantly allows me through the door into the entrance hall.
He then stands awkwardly in front of the door beside the kitchen.
Something about the way he’s clearly trying to block my movements has my suspicions triggering.
“What don’t you want me to see?”
“I, er, brought some things back with me,” Jack says. “A bag of books and newspapers that Kit asked for.”
“All right, he asked for them, did he?”
Jack nods, but there’s an odd look on his face, one that I don’t know how to interpret. He looks like a child caught doing something he shouldn’t have.
“He’s reading them,” he continues.
Quite often I’m bemused by people. They never say what they mean or mean what they say, and this occasion has me entirely confused. So, of course, I push past him into the room to see whatever Jack’s doing a terrible job of hiding.
The door swings open to a little living room, with a broken sofa at one end and a rotting window seat beneath the huge bay window.
And I immediately comprehend what he was trying to tell me.
My brother Kit is reading the pile of newspapers, and books that Jack brought him.
In itself, that’s not unusual. After all, he’s a man who’s curious about a lot of things.
The issue is that he’s reading all of them. All at once.
Kit has laid out the pages and plastered all over the floor while he’s sitting in the middle of a circle of them, like he’s a witch trying to absorb their knowledge with a ritual.
“Kit? How are you doing there, fella?” I ask, pulling off my sodden coat and leaving it to drip dry over the door before kicking off my boots.
He doesn’t seem to hear me. He’s too lost in working his way through the pages, turning them at a frantic pace and muttering under his breath.
And, well, I’m not used to being the more lucid brother.
Even before the labs, Kit was always better at coping with the world.
I still recall the look on his face when he was raising the alarm and getting me out of that cell.
Kit had somehow got himself loose and confused the shit out of the idiots holding him, and then he came for me.
He stood there and, with one touch, left the sadists testing on me pissing their pants in the corner.
Then he tore their memories clean out of their heads, cursed the land, and everyone of those fuckers who knew what they’d done to us.
If it weren’t for Kit, we probably wouldn’t have got out.
“Kit?” I crouch down beside him, but his eyes are totally focused on the pages in front of him. “What’s happening here, fella?”
Glancing up at Jack, I earn a sheepish grin. “He’s been like this for hours, ever since I gave him the bag. Doesn’t seem to hear a word I’ve said to him.”
“It’s late,” I say to the room at large, because that sounds like a thing someone should say in this situation. “Jack, you’ve been flying for hours. You should head to bed.”
“Are you sure?” He hesitates, but now that I’m looking at him, I notice he looks a little haggard.
“Sure as sure can be,” I tell him. “Get yourself to bed.”
He nods and then potters off out the door, leaving just me and my brother.
My trousers are sodden and sticking to my legs, but I plop down onto the floor beside Kit anyway and reach for a page.
Scanning it, I grab another and then another before chuckling to myself.
The pages all focus on King Wildrake. His likes, dislikes, his family history.
There’s even a story from his latest garden party, complete with an artist’s rendering of what it might have looked like.
“Seems there’s a running theme here,” I say. “Have you taken a new special interest in the bastard king?”
“We need to find out what he likes,” Kit mutters. “Because what if he only wears embroidered underwear? What if he doesn’t wear anything under his trousers at all?”
I blink at that. “And why have you suddenly taken a special interest in that man’s underthings?”
“Know your enemy,” he says. His eyes flick up to meet mine for just a second before returning to the page. Silence falls between us as we both flick through page after page of newspaper stories and history books, even one book that’s entirely dedicated to Wildrake fashion.
“We’re not going back there,” he murmurs after a little while. “Not joining his war for him either.”
“I know we’re not. He’ll die first,” I say. “What’s going on here, my man? Are you missing your shop?”
Maybe that’s what this is about. Maybe he’s creating a new collection to replace all the stuff he’s had to leave behind back home.
Kit grunts and I grunt right back. Usually, you can’t get him to shut up, but right now it seems like all of his focus is on reading.
“How’s your lady love doing? Is she a fan of the house?” I continue.
“She’s fine,” Kit replies quietly. “Adapting.”
“And are you going to tell me what all this is about?” I wave a tentacle to illustrate all of... this.
I might not be the most observant man in the world.
In fact, I’m not sure I’m a man at all anymore.
But I can see something isn’t quite right with my brother.
There hasn’t been since we got here. Part of me wonders if he’d have been better off with the constant seasickness of us being on board my ship.
This place doesn’t seem to be doing him much good.
He’s sleeping about as much as I am, so barely at all, and I haven’t seen him eat in days.
Then Kit grins at me, tapping the page in front of him triumphantly. “He wears embroidered clothing, right down to his underwear and socks.”
I grunt. “This just says that his favourite food is carrot sticks dipped in honey. How can that be anyone’s favourite food?”
“He enjoys walks around the city. Moonlit strolls. And warmongering,” Kit adds with another grin. “Not sure we can use any of that, unless I cursed the stones he decided to walk on during his moonlit stroll.”
“You want to curse the stones he walks on?”
“No, I said I didn’t want to do that,” he replies. “I want to curse the fucking underpants he wears every day. Drain his memories entirely and kill him slowly. Or maybe we just kill him fast. What do you think?”
“You want to curse his pants,” I repeat, just to make sure I’m getting things straight. “Curse his pants, curse his socks, curse his coin purse and whatever weird little trinkets he keeps in his pocket.”
“Exactly,” he says. “You get it.”
It’s... a genius idea. One I’m disappointed I didn’t come up with.
Last time, Kit cursed the labs themselves, and that was only because he was pumped up after years of experimentation.
Unless he magically gains a shitload of power from somewhere and travels all the way to Ashwick to curse the city, we’re going to have to take a different route.
A personal curse on the king sounds exactly right.
“I’ll get started on embroidering him some underwear,” I say. “And we what, mail it off to him and hope it gets through to him?”
“We can try,” he replies. “He must get gifts all the time.” Holding out his hand in front of him, he plucks a small gold ring with a ruby embedded in it from his finger. He then mutters a few sibilant words under his breath.
My blood runs cold at the sound of his curse. The language he uses leaves my neck prickling and both tentacles reaching out to soothe me from the hisses and garbled words.
It’s not a natural language, the curse-speak. Or at least it isn’t for human-ish ears. Even for someone with a monstrous side, like me.
“Here. We could start with this.”
It’s small enough to travel easily and something the king would at least look at to see if he wanted to add it to his collection.
He then carefully wraps it in cloth before putting it into a small wooden box he plucks from his pocket.
“There’s a supply run to the nearest town tomorrow. We can ask them to post it out to him,” I say.
“All right. Good.” My brother’s shoulders droop with relief, and he opens his mouth to say something, but a giant yawn is all that comes out.
“All right, then.” I get to my feet, holding my hand out for the box. “I’ll hand it over first thing. You should get yourself to bed too.”
But Kit just shakes his head, getting to his feet painfully slowly. “I need to check the boundary. See that all the wards are holding up.”
He really does look knackered, but I’m not his mother and I can’t make him go to bed. So I head upstairs and dig out my sewing kit, wondering if this might be how we put an end to the bastard king for once and for all.