25. TWENTY-FIVE #2
A smile cracked his gray-streaked beard. “As am I. I once had a daughter like you. Eager to learn and smarter than she had any right to be.”
Fankalo shifted, stomach squirming, and considered correcting him.
Drogus’s arms folded behind his back. “Ah. They have informed me of this. But your disguise won’t pass much longer. What are you going to do?”
“What I’ve always done.”
He hummed in a way that said he didn’t fully agree.
“Take a tip from me. Men would die for their captain and their king. But a queen, without a king”—he squinted one eye at her conspiratorially—“that is special. There is no telling the lengths a man will go for her. If given the opportunity, be a queen.”
Something bubbled inside her that stretched from her belly to the tips of her cropped curls. Her arms steadied on the wheel, the warm breeze feathered her skin, and everything was delightfully perfect as she watched Killari dive off the starboard side to seize a fish.
Then a sudden pain blossomed across her backside from a kick as violent as it was well-placed.
“Fuck you!” Mitek screamed at her before running away. His maniacal laughter trailed him as he dropped through the hatch below deck with the reckless abandon of a stone thrown into the sea.
Fankalo sucked in through her teeth and rubbed at her stinging buttocks. Fates behave, that was the second time that day.
“What did you do to him?” Drogus asked, bushy, peppered brows pulled into a line.
Fankalo laughed. “Nothing. That’s just how ‘fuck you’ works.”
He squinted. “I don’t understand.”
“On this ship, we have a little game. You catch someone unaware and kick them in the ass, yell ‘fuck you’, and run away.”
His squint deepened. “A twelve-year-old should not do these things.”
She shrugged, hands steady at the wheel.
“How do you win?”
“You don’t.”
Drogus’s chin lowered, as if he were chewing over the concept. “How do you lose?”
“You don’t. You just keep kicking people in the ass.”
“Hmmm.”
The thought struck her that Drogus’s intellect might raise him above such things. His loss.
“Watch, though. I can figure out where he scurried off to. And when I get him, I’ll kick him twice.”
Fankalo closed her eyes, feeling out with her Luck while meditating on Mitek clenching his backside. An impression assaulted her with hurricane force. Her hands slipped from the wheel, and she stumbled several steps backward.
Calver.
She could sense him: a deep, endless pool, brighter than any celestial body. He was close—practically on top of her. Just out of sight. Her eyes scraped desperately at the northern horizon, void of anything but the space where sky met sea and the first phantom stars of dusk glowed.
“Drogus. I need you to get my father,” she commanded.
Drogus, unaware of what she’d sensed, clicked his tongue and laughed.
The enormous sound coming from his wine cask of a chest would have been contagious in any other circumstance.
“You want me to wake Captain Keane just so you can kick the idiot in the ass? You may be a little queen, but I will do no such thing.”
She shook her head. “I can’t explain. But it’s urgent. Please, hurry.”
Drogus gave her a searching look before dipping his chin and proceeding below deck.
Fankalo turned from their trajectory for the Rollard Isles to sail northeast. She whistled, gaining eyes from the deckhands—Kairo, Vamar, and Marni—and old Zeb in the crow’s nest to signal their new destination. They moved without question. The crew had long since taken her word as law.
“Hang on,” she whispered, opening herself to her brother’s impression, which grew stronger with every passing breath. “Don’t disappear on me.”
Tension coiled in her stomach as the bad Luck destination darkened. Drogus returned with her father begrudgingly in tow.
“What’s this then, lad?” he asked, blinking away the lingering harrows of sleep.
She relinquished the wheel to Drogus, then dug into a pouch at her waist for a bundle of warrior’s plume and kanna rolled in paper. Her father took the stimulant with a grateful tousle of her hair and stuck its tip in his teeth. He lit it with a match.
“There’s a ship ahead.” Any ship in northern waters was a danger.
“You’ve redirected?” he asked, shading his face against the last clawing rays of light from the west.
“My brother’s on it.”
For the time it took to hoist a flag, they were both wordless. All her hopes and fears passed between them in a glance.
He pulled air through the paper, and smoke curled around his head. “You’re certain?”
It was suddenly difficult to swallow. In the weeks before their sabbatical in Chira’na, the Rapture had encountered another crew of raiders in the isles strung about northern Chori: their insides turned outwards, their bodies on stakes—skewers for the birds that set to feasting.
The mark of the Shadewalker had been left in char on the beach.
“Positive.”
“I’ll try to catch sight of it before we lose daylight,” he said, pulling up a scope.
As he stared into it, Fankalo didn’t let her eyes leave the horizon. Her heart fluttered against her ribs. Closer still. If she did not reach him now, the nearest he had been in six years, she would never forgive herself.
Gelhard trod to the upper deck, his face a mask of fury. “Have you lost your senses? We cannot steer this boat any farther into new Tera’thian territory.”
Her jaw jutted. “Then I will take the dinghy and paddle the rest of the way.”
Gelhard turned to her father. “Captain, I beg you to turn south. Whatever phantom you are chasing is not worth it.”
Fankalo wrapped her arms around her father’s waist. She had grown taller—as tall as Mitek, even—rising to the height of his shoulder. “In this perfect life you have given me,” she whispered, “he is the only thing that has been missing. I cannot let him go.”
Her father’s black eyes stared into her. He cupped her face. “There is no thing a man wouldn’t do for his daughter.”
Daughter. Her lips popped open at the word—his first break in the facade they had maintained for so long. She burrowed her face into his powerful chest. No more hiding now. She had the final assurance: he would accept whatever she was, or chose to be.
“But Fankalo,” he continued. “When a captain chooses a course like this, he does so knowing his entire crew will pay any toll he crosses.”
A memory of Calver tickling her until she laughed helplessly floated from the depths of her mind.
And one of him giving up the honeyed cake a stranger in the slums had passed him to her.
Those memories were distant now, but they were as real as the starlike impression in her mind.
His heart beat just a league away from her own.
“Yes, Father.”
Like an apparition, a dark smudge appeared against the indigo waters of the horizon. Her Luck squirmed. She ignored it. There was no risk she would not take to bring her brother back.
“That’s it,” she said. And be damned whatever Gelhard thought. “That’s him.”
Gelhard calmed. “It’s… not a ship.”
As they drew closer, a pressing sense of foreboding rose from her stomach into her throat. The impression of Calver neared in her mind, but all around it swirled the jagged, writhing lines of bad Luck.
Something was wrong.
The closer they moved toward the smudge, the worse the feeling became.
“Driftwood,” Gelhard said, his tone bitter. “There’s a man on it.”
A man? Her head spun. How old was Calver now? Six years her senior—that would put him near enough a man. Somehow, all this time, she had imagined that when she found him, he would still be a twelve-year-old boy.
Her father looked through his own scope before setting it back into his belt. “Send out a skiff. This is now a rescue.”
“Yes, Captain. And then we can get out of these cursed waters.”
Ten minutes passed. Fankalo watched as the three men in the skiff hauled the slumped form of a naked giant from what looked to be little more than a floating beam.
She shook. Harrowing tethers of Fate pulled her away, back in the direction she’d willingly steered them from. But there was no enemy vessel. Why?
Her knuckles were white on the wooden rail at the bow, her muscles in rigid contest with it. Faster. Faster.
The skiff returned, the rescued figure aboard but indiscernible from so far away.
She waited, ready to see the face she’d dreamt of for years.
As the skiff rose on the pulleys toward the main deck, its oarsman, Timbre, signaled something to her father she couldn’t catch sight of behind the rigging.
Her father sucked in a breath and looked at her with a more severe expression than she’d ever seen.
Something was truly wrong.
A stinging began behind her eyes. Calver was dead—she’d found him only to lose him. But… that wasn’t right. She still felt him. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—feel such light from a corpse.
Her father moved to her side. “I need you to get below deck.” His urgency sent a renewed spike of alarm through her.
“What?”
“Now. Find Mitek. Sit with him a while. I’ll collect you soon.”
“Father, I—”
“That’s an order.”
She froze. Something swelled inside her, raging to be free. Her hands squeezed into fists. Her stance widened. “Let me see him!”
Their eyes locked in contest, neither moving, neither caving.
Then her father picked her up, tossed her over his shoulder, and strode toward the hatch into the berth.
For the time it would have taken to spew a stream of profanities, she was too shocked to do anything.
Then she flailed. Kicked. Pounded with fists.
She brayed like a fated beast, Chaos curse any scrap of propriety.
Her father pinned her arms to her sides with brute strength. She fell still. He would not do this to her for nothing. Hot tears were dripping down her cheeks by the time they made it into the hold and he set her on a crate. Her brief moment of composure ended.
“How could you?!”
“Fankalo.” He set his hands on her shoulders. “That is not the same boy you lost in Kaidech.”