42. FORTY-TWO #3
“But you did, Cal. There’s no fixing this. They’re calling for your blood. Begging for it. And I don’t blame them.” A tear plummeting toward the floor. “Twenty-six. Husbands. Fathers. Friends. Zeb… fucking Zeb, Cal.” Seal broken, her eyes were streams. “I can’t protect you any more.”
Katlas Dreiden had written that, while the cost of victory was blood, blood’s value was subjective to the commander. It mattered not that Calver had won his sister the battle. He would never argue against where she placed her worth.
The Survivor pressed against him. He pressed back. It was what had gotten him into this situation. He had to resist. Had to. Its pressure worsened. He grabbed his hair, tried to clear his mind. It didn’t help. The creature’s desire to take hold was excruciating. He screamed.
A part of him registered that Fankalo had backed away.
He flicked his hands with a frantic fervor.
“I tried, Cal. Preservation knows I did. I can’t help you any more. I have to let you go. You can’t be here anymore.”
Exile. She was exiling him. Why not eliminate him? Fankalo did not need his protection. She had a literal army at her disposal. Friends. Allies.
“Are you still determined to finish what we started?”
“Yes.”
“Then I have an excuse for not killing you on the spot. We’ll drop you at the next port.”
Therein lay his Preservation: not of mercy, but of necessity. He was the only one who knew the way.
{What irony that some blood is worth the sacrifice.}
“I don’t wish for anything anymore. I look at my odds and make my own future.
And no matter which way I turn the possibilities, you don’t have a place in it.
” She pressed a fist into her mouth and turned her back.
A sob cracked her chest. She paused, as though she might say something else—goodbye, maybe.
Instead, she nodded, straightened, and walked away.
Calver washed his mind with a void mantra, fighting his ever-failing battle against his foe.
He couldn’t call for her. Nothing would come of him going after her. He couldn’t comfort her, like a brother should have done.
But Fates witness: with his one last chance at redemption, he would not let her down.
Approaching footsteps thunked against the planking. They couldn’t have reached port yet. And Fankalo wouldn’t come back to see him.
Would she?
Calver lifted his chin. It was not his sister, but her Hand, Mitek, his dark braids swinging with the tilt of the ship.
Loud, prone to antics, but deceivingly capable, the man had a certain charisma that most of Fankalo’s crew seemed to fawn over—though it never seemed to extend to Calver.
Calver hung his head, unwilling to make eye contact.
Fankalo usually assigned Mitek work she found of import but wouldn’t make time of her own for.
Mitek leaned against the wall and let a long, disquieting silence flit through the bars of the brig. Finally, he spoke in a low, sharp tone that said everything it needed to.
“Ho, Reaper.”
Calver gave nothing in the way of a response. It didn’t seem to bother Fankalo’s Hand. Little seemed to bother him beyond Calver himself.
“Were it up to me, you’d be bones scraped clean by the scavengers of the deep by now.” He paused. Calver knew he wasn’t waiting for a response. He was simply unhurried in expressing his hatred. “But it ent.”
The Survivor’s memories filled in the necessary knowledge. Mitek usually took meals beside the one they called Zeb.
Calver lifted his chin. Mitek stared him in the eye.
Square-faced, scrappy, hyper-expressive, a pipe stuck in his teeth, Mitek had always seemed to put on a front.
But there was no lie in his expression now.
He lit the pipe and pulled, exhaling a cloud of stimulant into the brig.
The curls of green smoke sifted through the rare rays of light piercing through pinholes in the hull.
“An orphaned slumling spoke to a king today, and won his tribute. Enough to raise legions. She’s really something, eah?
If anyone could succeed in this gambit—it’s her.
” Mitek took another long pull of smoke, releasing it slowly through his nostrils.
Its haze settled into the tight space. Still, his eyes pierced it.
“But if there is a single flaw that she possesses, a single chink in her armor that could fuck it all up, it’s you. ”
Calver flinched.
“I’m gonna tell you something once, Reaper.
Do us all a favor: get yourself quietly to that Tera’thian coronation, and kill yourself.
I don’t care that you’re above me on the fucking food chain.
I don’t care about your fucking reflexes, or your dowaga, or that you can rip a throat from someone’s neck with a casual swipe.
I don’t care what you might do to me, because if there’s one thing I’ve figured out, it’s that living a long cushy life doesn’t matter if it’s done with your tail between your legs.
” Mitek flicked the burnt end of his paper to the floor and smothered it with his boot.
“If you try to come back into her life, even if she asks you to, I’ll make sure it’s the last thing you ever do. ”