Vethara
AVANEER
Avaneer steps off the prow onto what remains of the rail and takes a long, unhurried look at the wreckage. Splintered boards. Bodies that are either very dead or wishing they were. The particular smell of things that have been opened by force and left in salt air.
He breathes it in.
Then he turns, unhurried, and gestures once to the herald at his shoulder.
The herald, to his considerable credit, does not look at the bodies.
He does not look at the undead still dragging itself in circles near the forward mast, or at the holes in the rail, or at any of the various things scattered across the deck that suggest the recent and enthusiastic end of a great many lives.
He simply lifts his chin, draws a breath, and announces, in a voice that carries with the full confidence of a man who has done this in worse conditions and expects to do it in worse ones still—
"His Royal Highness, Crown Prince Avaneer of Thrykis. Commander of the Thren Vanguard."
The words ring out across the ruined deck and die against the water.
Somewhere in the wreckage, nothing answers.
Avaneer straightens his cuffs. Satisfied, he steps forward.
Behind him, his men move in silence, which is how he prefers them.
They fan out across what remains of the deck without being told, because they have done this before and they know what looking for survivors means when Teorin has been involved.
It means looking carefully, and stepping over things, and not reacting to whatever they find.
Avaneer does not look for survivors. He looks for humans.
He picks a clean path between the bodies because he is wearing new boots and the blood is still wet enough to be an inconvenience, and he surveys the wreckage with the particular disappointment of a man who has arrived at a feast after the table has already been cleared.
One of the undead is still moving near the forward mast, dragging itself in a slow circle that suggests something important has been removed from its lower half. He watches it with mild interest.
Nothing useful left anywhere. He can already tell.
"Teorin," he calls.
Nothing.
He steps over a section of collapsed rail, sighing through his nose.
His men are efficient, he will give them that, but their efficiency had apparently cost him whatever had still been breathing on this ship when they came alongside, which is deeply inconsiderate of them. He makes a mental note to say so.
One of them signals from the far end of the deck.
Avaneer makes his way across, and he is perhaps halfway there, picking his path between the wreckage, when the hull beneath his feet shudders.
He stops.
The sound reaches him before he can place it, a pressure more than a noise, something that moves through the wood and up through the soles of his boots and into his chest in a way that does not feel like any power he has a name for.
He looks down, instinctively, though there is nothing to see through the boards.
Then they come. They burst from below the waterline, erupting through the hull in two places at once, and they are moving so fast that Avaneer gets almost nothing.
A shape, dark and vast, wider than it should be.
The suggestion of something that is not wings and is not not wings either.
A sound that is not a cry and is not silence.
They hit the open air and they are already gone, climbing at a speed that feels like an insult to the concept of observation, swallowed by the grey sky before he can turn his head fully to follow them.
He stares at the place where they were.
The holes in the hull sit open and quiet, the water pushing gently through them, unbothered.
He stares at those too. Then he continues walking, because he is a prince and princes do not stand in the middle of wrecked ships staring at holes in the hull, and he finds Teorin at the aft railing with one hand braced against it in a way that looks casual if you are not paying attention.
Avaneer is always paying attention.
He takes in the hood still drawn forward, the set of Teorin's shoulders, the particular quality of stillness he carries when he is waiting for something to finish happening inside him that he does not intend to discuss.
And then Teorin turns at his approach, and for just a moment — a fraction of a moment, the length of a blink, less — his eyes are wrong.
Something red moves through them, bright and total, there and then gone so quickly that Avaneer spends the next two seconds genuinely uncertain whether he saw it at all.
He keeps walking. He does not break his stride.
Teorin looks at him with eyes that are entirely, perfectly normal.
Avaneer looks back, pleasantly, and files the moment somewhere he will not examine until he is somewhere private and has had a drink.
There is a tear along Teorin's left side where something has opened him, the dark fabric of his coat pulled apart and the wound beneath it clotted rather than closed. His expression is the one he uses when he intends to communicate that nothing is wrong and would prefer not to be asked about it.
Avaneer looks at him. At the wound. At the deck around them, at the shape of the carnage, at the very specific and total absence of anyone else still standing.
"Cousin," he says pleasantly. "You look terrible."
"I look fine."
"You look like someone fed you through the hull of a ship.
" He pauses, glancing back the way he came, taking in the full scope of the destruction with fresh eyes now that he has something to compare it against. "When word reached me of the Gyarin attack I sent this ship ahead.
Had a feeling you'd need it." He looks back at Teorin.
Then at the deck. At the holes in the rail and the bodies and the general state of everything. "And look at the poor thing now."
Teorin says nothing.
"Not a single breathing human left on it either," Avaneer continues, with the mournful air of a man tallying two separate losses of equal weight. "Do you understand how far I sailed for this?"
"Half of this," Teorin says, "is your fault. Saving me was the least you could do."
Avaneer looks at him.
Then he looks at the wound again, more carefully this time.
The tear in the coat. The depth of what sits beneath it, clotted and closing with a patience that has no business existing.
He does a quiet, private calculation, the kind that requires no particular effort, just familiarity with what wounds do to things that are merely what they appear to be.
"That wound," he says, almost to himself, "would have turned anyone else."
Teorin says nothing.
"Straight to undead," Avaneer continues, conversationally. "No intermediate steps. Just—" he gestures vaguely at the bodies around them. "That."
"Are you finished?"
"I'm making an observation."
"Make fewer of them."
Avaneer looks away, obligingly, with the expression of a man who has filed the observation somewhere he intends to return to later at his leisure. Alongside, he notes privately, the other thing. The thing that had lasted less than a blink and may or may not have happened at all.
He decides, again, that he does not want to know.
"These undead came from the snow villages, Avaneer." Teorin's voice carries the particular flatness of a man who has been waiting to say this for longer than is comfortable. "The northern ones. Along the coast. Where you and your men used to massacre entire villages."
"We would snack," Avaneer says, to the horizon. "On souls, from time to time."
"You would level them."
"Level is a touch dramatic," Avaneer answers, plucking a loose thread from his lapel, examining it briefly, and releasing it to the wind.
"Besides, it was not without purpose. Alarna refused to align.
We were hoping that leaving our...leftovers in the surrounding villages would encourage them to open their wards.
Use their lightcraft for the greater good.
Motivate them, as it were." He brushes something invisible from his shoulder.
"How was I to know they'd say fuck the world and hide behind their wards forevermore? "
"You know what happens," Teorin says, with the patience of a man who has moved past the point of genuine surprise and arrived somewhere considerably colder, "when you massacre entire villages without cleaning up your mess."
"Yes, yes," Avaneer says, with the serene acceptance of a man who has just been handed a bill he intends to dispute later but recognizes is technically valid.
"The undead." He paused. "In my defense, I despise the smell of burning flesh.
It lingers on everything. My coat, my hair—" he touches his hair briefly, as though the memory alone is offensive.
"It took three weeks to get it out last time.
I simply cannot be expected to clean up under those conditions. "
"You massacred entire villages."
"And I looked impeccable doing it," Avaneer says. "One cannot have everything."
Teorin regards him for a long moment with the expression of a man who has known this particular person his entire life and has never once been surprised by him and is still, somehow, perpetually exhausted by him.
"You're always sloppy, Avaneer." His voice is flat. "Let us not forget the Tavern incident. In Veynar."
"I simply made a suggestion to my men—"
"A command." Teorin does not look at him. "When you're a prince, it's a command."
Avaneer considers this. "Details," he says.
"It leveled a district."
"A small one. And besides, I hear the ale there was terrible. Perhaps it was all for the best."
Teorin says nothing, which is somehow worse than if he had said something.
"I do wish to return to Veynar soon, as it happens.
" Avaneer's tone shifts into something lighter, almost wistful.
"Unofficially, of course." He rolls his eyes with the practiced languor of a man who has been waiting on a particular thing for an unreasonable length of time.
"Father still hasn't planned the invasion.
" He says it the way one says the tailor still hasn't finished my coat.
"So until he does, I suppose I'll have to make my own arrangements.
" A pause, and then something genuinely warm moves through his expression, the particular warmth of a man thinking about something he finds deeply, personally satisfying.
"If for no other reason than to fuck with Sevrin. It does bring me so much joy."
Teorin says nothing, which in this case functions as acknowledgment.
Avaneer straightens, brushing a final piece of debris from his sleeve with two fingers.
"Many people," he says, in a different tone now, lighter on the surface and less light beneath it, "are going to be very, very displeased with you regardless.
The wards. The girl going through without you. " A pause, precisely weighted. "Nox."
Something in Teorin's expression doesn't change. That is the tell. Not a flinch, not a reaction, just the specific stillness of a man choosing not to have one.
"I'm aware," he says.
"I, however," Avaneer continues, pleasantly, "find that I am having a wonderful time."
Teorin pushes off the rail and walks past him toward the prow, pulling his hood forward, his step evening out as whatever is happening beneath his coat finishes happening.
By the time he reaches the prow he walks like himself again.
Unhurried. Inevitable. The thing that Avaneer has spent a comfortable lifetime standing slightly behind, because it is a good place to be when something is about to happen to everything in front of it.
"Are we going after her?" Avaneer asks.
Teorin does not answer.
Avaneer does not care about the answer anyway.
He is still disappointed about the lack of humans.
He looks once more at the holes in the hull.
At the sky above them, empty and grey. At the undead still left standing at the far rail, patient and still, all of them facing the same direction.
Toward the wards. Toward what waits beyond them.
He thinks about the snow villages. About last season, and the particular untidiness of a good massacre improperly finished, and the smell of burning flesh that he refuses to tolerate, and the way these things have a habit of coming back around when left unattended.
He thinks about what came through the hull. The speed of it. The wrongness of it, the way it didn't fit inside anything he already knew, the way he had stood there for just a moment unable to name what he had seen.
He thinks about a wound that would have turned anyone else, closing on its own. One man standing on a ship full of the dead, waiting for a ride, unbothered.
He thinks about something red, there and gone in less than a blink, that he is still not entirely certain he saw at all.
He looks at the poor ruined ship one final time.
He decides, firmly and with great conviction, that he does not want to know.
Then he smiles, turns to his herald with a small nod, and follows his cousin.