42. FORTY-TWO
FORTY-TWO
FANKALO
Location: North Sea
Fankalo sat on the mizzen deck, hair a meadow of dark tangles.
Eyes closed, hands outstretched, she pulled at her Luck lines until they started to blur.
Years of daily meditation had improved her ability to decipher them, but on days when she couldn’t think straight—days like today—the futures mingled in a dark cloud.
She couldn’t determine which beginning led to which end. It was an answerless sea.
The ocean smelled the same before peace or war.
Hands slammed down on Fankalo’s shoulders. “Gotcha!”
She gasped and startled to her feet. Mitek beamed at her, sunlight glinting off his silver tooth. “Been out here a real minute, eah? I thought that, after an entire morning of focused boredom, you might enjoy one moment of abject terror.”
Fankalo fought to slow her hummingbird heart. “Wait here while I get my tanka so I can thank you properly.”
“There’s a storm coming in. I know you’re focused on this afternoon, so I thought you might miss the more imminent rain cloud.”
Their entire future depended on this afternoon and the meeting they had planned with Pazir’s king. She looked west, where the sky darkened. Of course she knew it was going to rain. That wasn’t what he had come here for.
“How’s Calver?”
She had tasked Mitek to check on him when she left.
Over the last months, her brother had been better.
Perhaps not his old self, but present. Sane.
She’d employed Calver with altering the distortion cores they’d begun to manufacture in the Rollard Isles.
He’d taken well to having something to do with his hands.
Then they’d left for Pazir, and suddenly he was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown.
“Same as when you came out here.”
Fankalo rolled her lips over her teeth, recrossed her legs, and closed her eyes.
“The crew’s concerned. How do you feel about keeping him sedated until he pulls himself back together?” Mitek said from behind her.
“And would you sedate me, were I struggling? Or would you try to help me?”
“You and your brother share nothing in common, Brat.”
“Except a womb.”
“He’s screaming. Digging out his own nails against the wood of your door.”
She had thought they were finally past this. She closed her eyes tighter, gulping against the swelling of her throat. “Fine,” she managed. “Just enough to help him sleep.”
“Do you want to be the one?” Mitek asked, almost sounding empathetic.
“No. I—it’s alright. You take care of it. I’ll just be a little while longer. I’m still working on the best way forward.”
“Aye.” Mitek squeezed her shoulder and moved below deck.
Fankalo settled back into the familiar trance of sifting through Fate lines, but it was worse now than before.
Long minutes passed, her frustration mounting.
She had been growing stronger, seeing further and more precisely into the future.
Drogus had thought she was close to a breakthrough.
That her powers were at the precipice of true manifestation… only for this block.
“A conduit cannot distort.”
She searched for a way over the cloud. Around it.
She followed each thread, pulling at them only as fast as they disintegrated into an occluded mass.
Still, the same outcome sat on the far side of it.
Victory. Wealth. Opportunity to build and grow, but…
impressions of Calver kept flitting into her path.
Even those slipped away as she tried to focus on them.
How refreshing. More Calver problems.
“What’s the word, Captain? Still set for disembarkment?” Mitek again, but he’d said ‘Captain’ in his ‘command voice’ and not ‘Brat’ like an idiot. Fankalo opened her eyes to a bustling upper deck. There were too many crew members—important crew members, new crew members—around for familiarity.
She disconnected from her trance, letting the Luck lines slip from her conscious mind. It was hard to determine how long had passed, but a light mist peppered the air.
“Yes.” She found her feet and, spotting Drogus several paces away, moved to where both of her Hands could receive command.
“We will disembark with the crew, keep our army in sight, and fleets in reserve.” Years of treaties, trades, and alliances, and she had amassed nearly two hundred ships under her allegiance for this particular stunt.
Just for today, they all flew the same banner, they all obeyed her command—and, of course, if anything went wrong, they would abandon her on the beach in Yalusa faster than a stone fell through aether—just for today.
Tomorrow would be a different story. “Drogus, what word do you have from reconnaissance?”
Drogus cleared his throat and rumbled, “Zeb says we can anticipate a small opposition from Prince Zafeen on our arrival.”
Pazir’s estranged youngest prince was a Tera’thian sympathizer.
He had long since been on his father’s shit-list for trying to turn the crown towards subservience.
“He will try at all costs to keep his father’s purse strings in Ani’s court.
His men plan to storm the beach to prevent your arrival to the capital. ”
“What do you think?” Mitek asked, hands wringing—from nerves or excitement, she couldn’t tell.
Disinherited or not, Pazir’s crown prince had resources.
Given enough supplement from the Tera’thians, his ‘opposition’ could be worrisome, though she doubted it could match even her farce of a fleet.
Would they surrender? She reflected on her Luck.
If they advanced, she still felt a positive outcome.
But what happened between now and then had as much clarity as the impending downpour.
Everyone waited on her answer. Their time stretched thin. She wouldn’t get another shot at this.
Fankalo lifted her chin in false confidence. “What is a prince to a deity?”
Drogus bowed his head. “We sail for you, queen.”
Mitek cackled and began loading the bit strip on his tanka. “I love it when you talk in delusions of grandeur. If you’re in, I’m in.”
CALVEROUS
When Calver woke, the smell of smoke punched through the familiar dank and rot of Fankalo’s room.
The deck of the Rogue’s Rapture tilted beneath him, following the sway of the ocean, but the world kept spinning far beyond it.
He might have surfaced over the Survivor, but a different fog dampened the corners of his mind.
Killari sat at the window, her feathers glinting bronze in the low light. A haze of rain clouded the air beyond her. She tilted her head at him in a way that struck him as terribly uncaring, considering the… smoke.
Calver struggled to put mind to matter. Smoke meant fire. Fire on the Rogue’s Rapture meant only land or death. Screams sounded in the distance, and Calver’s spine stretched dagger-straight. There came a faint clanging of steel, the whinnying of horses.
Where was Fankalo?
The Survivor shifted forward to regain control.
No.
He was on his feet, dowaga and holster slung across his back.
Cupboard to hatch, hatch to deck, deck to railing he stumbled, bumping against walls and ladders, boots feeling like weights at the end of his legs.
The screaming amplified as wind whipped his dark curls across his eyes.
The boat was at anchor in port. Palms and lush vegetation dotted the skyline up to the taupe-walled city ahead. Yalusa. Pazir.
It took far too long for his sluggish mind to discern what was happening.
He pried into the Survivor’s memories and pieced it together from their shared memories.
Fankalo had been planning this farce for months.
Years. A presentation of every able body she could muster, in uniform, to appeal to the Pazirians for a loan: sums to fund their growth, in return for their protection from northern invasion.
He lumbered forward, down the gangplank and onto the dock.
He trudged to the beach where bodies collided in a frenzy, seeking a flash of wild dark hair.
The breath of a tanka bit feathered his ear as it zipped by, its relentless path stopped only by a body behind him.
Nothing stopped a bit quite like human flesh.
“Calver!” Her shriek might have split the sky.
Fankalo’s bodyguards lay dead in the sand beside her. A dozen encroaching enemies surrounded her. Her brown eyes found his through the haze. He bolted to her side, dowaga in hand—though he’d be lucky not to cut her in half in this state.
He lifted his blade, but perhaps didn’t need to: Fankalo’s shot was impeccable. She took out each of the men moving in on them with a bit placed carefully between their eyes.
“Calver, help them!”
The words fished his laggard mind to the surface. He’d never heard her beg like that.
His eyes flashed over the battle. Bits swarmed, a cloud of biting flies.
Cosalts were branches swaying in unseen wind.
Deadly force, all around. One by one, Fankalo’s forces fell to the beach.
She didn’t need him to rescue her—she could do that herself.
But the enemy had identified her as a commander, and she was too overwhelmed by their onslaught to defend her own bodies.
Calver swept the dowaga, gutting a Pazirian soldier in a clean stroke.
The motion seemed to take hours. The sky overhead was still grey with the dregs of a passing storm.
Moisture hung in the air, saturating the world around them in sweat and smoke and blood.
Through the mist of his mind, he understood.
An ambush. He scanned the beach and the rise—a couple hundred men, perhaps, to Fankalo’s hundred, and the enemy had better ground.
He looked over his shoulder to see. As many ships as there were men waited offshore, bearing the Ratka.
Fankalo’s fleet for hire. They were just there for show.