Chapter Two
The sand slips beneath my feet as we climb up the dunes as fast as our feet will carry us, the camp stirring into action behind us now that someone has sounded the alarm.
Larus is ahead of me, moving faster than I’ve ever seen him. When I step into his tracks, I understand why: he’s using his magic to compress the sand into steps. They fall apart in a moment, but they’re much better than the alternative.
“It’s not far up here to the nearest road,” he says, looking over my shoulder to check if we’re being pursued. “We should be able to make it.”
“Should? Larus, they’ll kill us if they catch us.” I nearly lose my footing as I miss one of Larus’s steps, but he reaches back and catches me by my tunic, pulling me back upright.
“Guess we better not let them catch us,” he says, and he laughs.
He laughs.
Is he insane? “Are you having fun?”
“Sylvie, I’m an old man. It’s been a long time since I got to do all of this, the running and the fighting. I thought I’d lost my taste for it, but it’s the first time in years that I’ve felt alive.”
An arrow whizzes past and embeds itself in a palm just inches from Larus’s head.
“Can’t catch me, you bastards,” he says.
I’m…I’m not sure how to feel. On the one hand, I must have known intellectually that Larus was, at one point, an entire person of his own, with wants and needs and preferences like anyone else.
But to see him in action, really in action and not just sparring with me as training, is something else.
Larus has been steadfastly serious for as long as I’ve known him, not even losing his composure at the bottom of the bottle like so many do, myself included.
I guess what he really needed was a little adventure of his own to get him out of his shell.
I can appreciate that.
“There!” he cries, pointing at a break in the line of low-growing palms that separate the marshes from the dunes. We run for the road as more arrows fly past.
From a great distance behind us, Adria yells, “Stop them!”
“Can’t stop us now,” says Larus. We’re nearly to the river.
But there’s nothing there. The river is dark and empty before us with not a boat in sight. The marshes surround the road on both sides—the only way to go is forward into the river.
Into its crocodile-infested waters.
“Your armor,” I say to Larus, panting from the run. He’ll drown in that chainmail even if the crocs don’t get him. “You have to—”
“No,” he says. “We’re not swimming.” He points across the width of the Mara at something approaching.
It’s cloaked in a heavy shadow, but I can see it clearly: it’s a boat. It looks like an ordinary fishing vessel, small and marked with the god Arnan’s trident, but its oars are withdrawn and its sails are black for better concealment at night.
“The Umbra,” he says.
This must be his niece’s ship. The Umbra cuts through the Mara like a knife, the wind-born at the sails giving it so much power that it seems unaffected by the current. It reaches the dock moments before we do, colliding into it with a woody thud as voices gather on the road behind us.
“What took you so long?” says a woman’s voice, warm and rich like poured honey. “I waited for you in Faros.”
“Couldn’t shake the tail,” says Larus. “Sylvie, meet Captain Octavia of the Umbra. Octavia, Sylvie.”
Octavia steps out from behind the wheelhouse onto the deck, leaning over the side to help me up. I clamber into the boat gracelessly, underestimating the drop from the railing to the deck below.
“The better for hiding,” says Octavia by way of explanation, stepping down from a stool. “I’ve heard you know much about such things.”
In her black Enezian clothes and captain’s hat, Octavia cuts an imposing figure on the deck.
I quickly see the family resemblance with Larus—same broad nose and bright eyes, same brown skin, same effortless elegance in dress, same bald head, although obviously that’s a more recent development for Larus.
“Was this your inspiration?” I say, gesturing to Octavia’s lack of hair. “It looks better on her.”
“Most things do,” he replies.
With both of us on board, the shadows are lowered again, and the Umbra takes off into the Mara, crossing to the opposite bank before lowering her sails once more to glide silently through the dark.
I pull myself up to look over the railing at the dock and Nithyrian war camp as we leave it behind, trying to spot my sister among the fire-born gathered with torches on the road through the marsh. Though I can’t see her, I mutter, “Goodbye, and good riddance.”
I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again, and if I do, it will be too soon.
A wind-born leans against the mast, his chest heaving with the exhaustion of their last maneuver.
A pair of dark-haired women who look like twins sit across from him.
They give me half a wave each—shadow-born then, since they can see me.
I follow Octavia and Larus into the cramped wheelhouse, Larus stumbling through the darkness until Octavia lowers the window shades and lights a candle within.
She must be shadow-born too. “He looks at least a decade younger without all that grey, doesn’t he?
” Octavia asks me once we’re inside. “And he moves like it, too.”
“I didn’t know he had it in him,” I say, but this must not have been the right thing to say because Octavia’s lip stiffens.
“You would know better than we do.”
Larus gestures to Octavia to sit beside him on the bench. “You can’t hold that against Sylvie. I swore an oath to House Verran.”
“An oath,” she says, flipping her hand at him in a dismissive gesture. “Just words. This is family. Blood, Larus. We didn’t see you for years. Decades. My whole life.” She keeps her back turned towards me, and I’m not sure if I should even be in here.
“Sylvie is family to me. I won’t have you insult her.” He glances back at me in apology. “Your mouth speaks, but it’s Mama Adama’s words that come out.”
“Mama Adama raised me. And I stayed by her side like a daughter ought to. Like my mother did, God rest her soul.”
“God?” I regret the word the second it passes my lips, but I’ve never heard anyone reference a single “God” before. I hope they’ll forgive me the intrusion.
Octavia lifts those bright eyes and stares like she’s looking straight through me. “Yes, girl. God. There’s one God, and that’s the sea.”
“You mean Arnan.”
Octavia spits drily at the ground. “The sea God is no ‘Arnan.’ Pfft.” She laughs bitterly. “‘Arnan.’ That’s some Selaran bullshit from when they tried to claim us. The sea is a wild thing, deadly and beautiful. It could only be a woman.”
“What’s her name?”
“God does not have a name.” She looks at Larus incredulously, like she’s thinking, did you teach her anything?
And she’s not wrong—he didn’t teach me any of this.
He taught me Nithyrian culture, Selaran history and politics, but he never taught me much about Enez.
He rarely spoke of it, to be honest, but I won’t mention that to Octavia now.
“Some folk on the Islands still practice the old ways,” Larus explains. “Some, not all.”
“Some folk on the Islands aren’t fools that lick the boot that once stomped them.”
Larus shakes his head. “It isn’t that simple, and you know it.
Mama wants it to be, but it isn’t.” I try to recall what Larus taught me of our history with the Enez Islands.
My understanding is that although Enez was never part of Selara, they largely adopted our language and some of our gods and culture during hundreds of years of cultural exchange.
Larus’s own feelings against Selara seemed to be based more on their treatment of Nithyria than Enez.
But he hasn’t been home in decades. Maybe things are more complicated than he let on.
“And anyway, what’s done is done. I am sorry I missed Lina’s passing. I heard it was quite the send-off.”
“You could see the fire from Pella. God protect her.”
She makes some sort of mark across her chest, and Larus repeats her gesture. “God protect her,” he says.
“I am sorry for what I said to you,” says Octavia, holding out a hand for me to shake. It doesn’t seem like she’s insulted me much, but judging from the heaviness of her tone, she must have injured me greatly from her own perspective. “A friend to Larus is a friend to me.”
I take her hand and shake it firmly according to Selaran custom, which surprises her. “Such a grip. At least you taught her something.”
We chat for a time as the boat slowly drifts back downstream. I was right about her age—she’s in her early thirties, though she hasn’t yet married and, like Larus, doesn’t intend to. She serves as a spy and a smuggler for Larus’s mother, her vessel capable of going places larger boats can’t travel.
“This is not my only ship,” she explains, “but she is my wiliest one. She’s nearly impossible to spot unless you wield shadows yourself. And even if you spot her, she moves so light and quick you’ll never catch her.”
Even without nautical experience, I see how a ship like that could come in handy. I’m not certain she’d be willing to help us beyond what Larus has already asked of her, but I’ll do my best to stay on her good side just in case.
It’s easy enough to do since few people have more grievances with House Verran than I do. When at one point she suggests Larus should have stolen me and raised me back in Port Limin himself, I agree wholeheartedly.
“I would love to see it,” I say. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. To see the world.”
“A voyager’s heart,” says Octavia.
We join her in raising a glass to that—a strong, dark rum that surprises me with its sweetness—and for a moment, I can almost forget everything that has happened. I could travel with Octavia, sleep in a bunk beneath the wheelhouse, maybe take the place of the shadow-born twins for a time.