Chapter Seven After
VALERIAN KANE IS alive.
Cat had watched the hangings, all of them, searching for his face hour after hour, day after day.
Until the sound of breaking necks and strangled throats grew dull in her ears.
Then she feared he would meet Morovant’s fate, tortured and torn apart, then nailed to her front door.
But he did not march with the captured. He did not swing with the dead.
His bones were not at the bottom of the sea or feeding crows in the square.
And that alone was worth the cost. The diminishing numbers in the ledger. The corpses in the streets. Morovant’s body slumped at her door. The Meridian flag flying over the fort. And the gnawing shame in Cat’s gut, the one she woke to every morning and dreamed of every night.
She did not know what to call the sensation now burning in her chest. It was too many things at once—hope, relief, anger. Vindication. And desire too, all pulling her in opposite directions, overwhelming her until she could feel nothing at all.
Nothing except fear.
She told herself to try to memorize the path through the fort, to better know her prison should Fell throw her behind bars again. But the world blurred, her mind tossing like a ship in a storm.
Valerian Kane is alive.
She was a shadow next to Fell, following the navy captain back down the corridors of Fort Morden’s prison. The limestone walls glowed golden with torchlight, then blinding white as they stepped out into the sun.
The daylight shocked Cat back to her senses, and she raised a hand to shade her sensitive eyes as they crossed the courtyard. The officer’s carriage waited by the gate and Cat eagerly climbed in after Fell, though her thoughts were elsewhere.
Val is alive.
A whip cracked and the carriage rolled, catching Cat off guard. She lurched, almost falling off the padded seat and into Fell’s lap.
His lips twisted, betraying his amusement. “You seem unmoored.”
Cat bristled and settled back against her seat, painfully aware of her ragged state within and without.
“I slept on a bench last night,” she snapped back at him. To calm her shaking hands and distract her mind, she set to fixing her tangled hair, pulling apart the knots as best she could. “I beg your pardon if I am slow to return to my senses.”
“You best hope they return quickly,” Fell said. “You’ll need them to face the governor.”
His lips twitched.
Cat’s fingers froze, wound around a bronze lock of hair.
“Jasper,” she hissed.
He gave a tight-lipped smile and tapped his medals. While Cat felt sweaty and disheveled, Fell looked annoyingly put together. His infernal ring gleamed, the silver swan like a star on his smallest finger.
“You will call me Captain Fell.”
But for the circumstances, Cat might have laughed. Instead, her voice dropped to a growl.
“I am hardly fit to meet with Osprin,” she said, indicating her disheveled appearance.
Fell did not react, responding in the same prim manner. “You will call him Lord Governor or His Lordship.”
Cat’s cheeks burned. She had not set foot in Meridian high society since it abandoned the Lyrian Sea nearly nine years ago, but she was still a far cry above Jasper Fell.
Cat had not forgotten how unmoored he once seemed at a grand party years ago.
Even now, he would not know his way across a Meridian ballroom with a map and compass.
“I am hardly fit to meet with His Lordship,” she offered through clenched teeth. Now her fingers worked furiously, trying to untangle and braid her hair at the same time. “At least take me home, just for a moment. Derry will have me put to rights in—”
She almost fell over again as the carriage stopped short, the horses whinnying. Outside, the coachmen set to their work, jumping down to attend to their passengers.
Fell shrugged.
“Ah, my apologies,” he said. But his eyes told a different story. Steel gray, they flashed with his usual annoying amusement. “It seems we have already arrived.”
Through the window, Cat glimpsed the brick walls of the governor’s mansion.
Worse still was the new seal on the wrought iron gates, the Meridian lion gleaming in gold leaf, its jaws wide.
The beast split as the gates opened, allowing the carriage onto the grounds.
Beyond lay a great house with shuttered windows, surrounded by lush, tropical landscape.
She swore furiously, pulling her hair back into the best braid she could manage.
She wished for a basin and a cloth to wash her face, which felt grimy and dull.
And there was nothing to do about her wrinkled black dress at all.
If given the time, she would muster up whatever splendor she had left.
Gold jewelry, fine lace, rouge, powder. A bucket of perfume to disguise the smell of sweat and desperation.
Enough to charm Governor Osprin, or at least convince him that Catrine Rose, a noble lady of the Meridian, could not possibly have a thing to do with pirates.
“You could have given me some warning,” she bit out, pinching her cheeks for color.
“Nonsense, you look fine. You look yourself,” Fell answered with a serpentine arch of a black brow.
“And by that you mean what?” Cat snapped, scowling. “A tavern wench at best, a pirate whore at worst?”
He chuckled loudly as the carriage door swung open. “You said it, not me.”
“Have I told you how infinitely stupid it is to travel by carriage in a city smaller than a country estate?” Cat said, declining the help of the coachman. He too wore a navy uniform, his bluecoat faded with road dust.
Fell followed with another chuckle, his hat tucked under his arm. Though he attempted to give off the picture of calm, Cat didn’t miss the way he fussed with his hair, tucking the black strands behind his ears. Captain though he was, Jasper Fell was not so secure in his station as he liked to seem.
“Once or twice,” he answered, offering his free arm. Cat ignored it. “Come now, we walk from here, lest our legs atrophy.”
“How I wish they would,” Cat hissed.
She longed to release a torrent of gutter-learned curses on Fell’s head, but the parchment in his coat stayed her tongue. Paper and ink were the only difference between the governor’s mansion and a cell. Between freedom and death.
My head or theirs, Cat thought once more.
This time it did not sound like a lament but a battle cry.
* * *
THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION was only a few decades old, constructed when the King sent a lord to oversee His Majesty’s Colonies of the Lyrian Sea.
By then, most of the islands had been claimed or conquered, torn between distant crowns.
The Meridian took islands of the Stills, and a few in the Furies. Great Edrin, Goldcoast. Rosby.
The thought of her own island—her husband’s island—gave Cat pause as she mounted the mansion steps.
Rosby was only a little place, barely more than a green hill amongst rough seas.
Claimed by a crown and then abandoned. My empire, her husband used to call it.
How wrong Lord Rose turned out to be, an emperor with no empire at all.
“Come,” Fell said, his hand on her back.
Cat recoiled at his touch but did as commanded. While she was free to bicker with Fell all she wanted in the privacy of a carriage or her own dining room, it would not do here, in the governor’s household, beneath the stern, slaughtering eye of His Lordship, Jon Osprin.
She gathered herself as best she could. She was a lady once and could be again, even in a stained dress. Her spine straightened and she raised her chin, shoulders squared to the task in front of her.
Survival.
Two uniformed manservants waited on the front landing of the mansion, along with two guards.
They stood like statues, near to stone. The navy ranks had swollen in recent months, with so many ships arriving from the Continent.
Sailors like Fell, who saw the Lyrian colonies rise and fall and rise again, had grown scarce.
Some had gone home to Meridia or the wealthier colonies in New Merid with what fortunes they made.
Some gave up their commissions when the war ended to live quiet lives in quieter lands.
And some—many—were dead.
Captain Fell landed somewhere between all three. Once, Cat thought he simply wanted his own ship and a captain’s command. Now, with both in his possession, she could not say what else he aimed for, what greater prize he sought.
And she did not care to find out.
Unlike the fort, the governor’s mansion was familiar ground, though she had not stepped foot in it since Osprin had landed in Archenport.
She surveyed it with a keen eye. The black and white marble beneath her feet had been freshly polished, her reflection staring back at her; the gilding on the walls, once peeled off, had been replaced, the bits of gold catching the shine of afternoon sun.
She noted new pieces of decoration around the hall—flawless marble statues, oil paintings, overstuffed armchairs, brightly woven rugs.
The spoils of the Empire hung from every corner.
And yet old shadows remained, stubborn as a bloodstain. The long gilt mirror still had a crack in the corner, the product of an ill-placed brawl. And no one had replaced the crown molding over the second archway, where a bullet had shattered a relief of the Meridian lion.
Cat smirked at the reminders of what was, small as they were.
Again, Fell touched the small of her back, guiding her through the mansion.
Cat pursed her lips, unable to do much more under the watchful eyes of navy bluecoats and the governor’s staff, who seemed to mill around every turn.
Most looked at Cat with a dismissive detachment.
She did the same, returning their haughty glances.
But Fell nodded to each of them. It gave him the look of a duck on a pond, bobbing for fish. Or a snake swaying its neck, waiting to strike.
“I believe you missed your calling,” Cat muttered under her breath. “You would’ve made a better politician than a sailor.”