Chapter 7
KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
ODELIA
The fae woman brought the water bucket, unlocked my chains, and watched as I rinsed off.
Her green stare reminded me of a miffed storm roc—without the feathers.
Even when I’d flashed her a smile and stripped down completely, she remained impassive, standing in front of the door with her arms crossed, her warm skin flickering with the light of the lanterns.
The clothes she brought are clean and cool from wherever they’d hid in the ship’s storage deck.
They’re an elegant, billowy linen in off-white.
The sleeves are long enough to hide the viper ink on my forearm and the bottoms are long as well—overlarge in the thighs and tucked at the ankles and waist. I expect the fit to be cumbersome, but they go on well enough.
Why they’d have women’s clothes in this style on board beats me.
They certainly don’t belong to Tavi, whose leather pants, fitted top, and long white braids are much more “don’t fuck with me” than light feminine power.
Though she is gorgeous, in a scary sort of way.
No one brought a comb, so I run my fingers through my hair as well as I can, grinning as Tavi’s forest eyes narrow. “Enjoy the show?”
“Just making sure you don’t slip anything anywhere unseemly.”
I hum quietly, pretending to think. “Are you really worried for Rune? Or is it hard to accept you won’t be the most lethal killer aboard?”
She doesn’t blink, but lets the silence sit for long enough I don’t think she’ll speak at all.
“You favor your right side forwards,” she says, in that haunting monotone, “but that ankle is weak. No scar, so probably an old break that never set quite right. Because of your height, you don’t stand a chance at physically overpowering anyone that would be looking to kill you.
” Her eyes flick over me from head to toe, making me feel like she wouldn’t mind spilling my insides to get a better read.
“You rely on speed, or stealth, ranged weapon—since you’re still alive I’d wager you’re really fucking good with a ranged weapon.
But in a box like this—?” She gestures cooly to the cabin.
“You’re stuck. Nowhere to run. To hide. Rune has twelve inches and a hundred pound of muscle on you. So no. I’m not worried for him.”
I try not to cross my bad ankle behind my leg. Rather than admitting that I’m impressed, I tilt my head and blink twice, giving her perfect doe eyes. “Twelve inches, you say? No wonder his ego is the size of a sea wyrm. Or rather, his sea wyrm is the size of a—”
A sharp knock cuts me off, and I swear Tavi has to smooth an almost-smirk back into apathy as she turns to open the door.
The woman who greets us is like the first beam of sunlight after coming up from a three-day stint in the brig. “Come on!” she sings. “Don’t hog her all to yourself!
“We’ve just finished,” Tavi says evenly, then gestures me out the door.
Nerves wash through my stomach. There’s no way to know how this crew will react to having me around. I’m not cowed by violence, but I sure as hell don’t know how to act in the absence of it.
Outside, in the morning light, I blink longer than usual, trying to decide if I’m imagining the cheery amusement in the new woman’s dual-toned eyes.
She leans back and inspects me from head to toe.
Her clothes are the same—voluminous and cinched perfectly, betraying an athletic build and offering peeks of deep mocha skin made richer by the midnight-blue linen she wears.
It must be her outfit that Tavi gave me.
“I knew it would look great on you,” she says, tucking back a few long tendrils of her hair. “Tavi, doesn’t she look amazing?”
Her voice is low and smooth, and causes the tension I expected to feel to dissipate before it comes.
Usually, I’d cringe away from this sort of attention, but I’m too distracted studying her eyes: one the colour of sunlight through amber, the other a dark brown that matches her locs.
She turns to prod at Tavi, who remains silent, and a lightning bolt arcs through my chest as I make eye contact with Rune over her shoulder.
He’s across the deck, attention locked on me, not even bothering to hide the slow, assessing sweep that sears heat over every inch of my skin.
The feeling pools low in my belly. Traces up the back of my neck like the breath of a lover.
There’s a quiet warning in the look. We’re on a truce, for now.
We need each other, for now. And seas know he wouldn’t have gotten a single riddle out of me if he kept me in chains.
Neither of us will be lowering our guard, though.
That’s fine with me. I’ve got the riddles, he’s got the ship to get us where we need to go, and if I try to disappear the moment we’ve got all the keys, I’m sure he’ll have the good sense to not be surprised.
The new woman continues—distantly, I learn her name.
Soraya. She’s the ship’s bard. She mentions something about Bear too, but I haven’t looked away from Rune.
Can’t look away. Like the animal in me remembers our race.
Remembers I can’t outrun him. He seems amused by my attention, and one side of his mouth lifts in a smirk that heats the flame in my blood.
I nurse it, let it burn into irritation.
Anything but let myself be distracted by the absurd thought of being alone with him in his room all night.
If he finds out who I am, all bets are off.
He hates me. Nisse. The fang of the Vipers.
The ghost who ruins a ship before it knows it’s been boarded.
He would slit my throat if he knew. He’d string me up for his crew, like he said.
And he’d do it grinning The self-righteous, hateful, manipulating, sadistic—
“She’s not even listening to you, Soraya.”
Tavi’s voice rips my attention back to them. Her arms are crossed, her attention already on Rune.
Soraya follows both our gaze, twisting neatly on one foot to face him. “Ah, our fearless leader. I was just telling your pirate friend she cleans up well.”
Rune walks over then, his hand fiddling with something in his trouser pocket, his gaze decidedly not on me. He doesn’t seem to want to meet Tavi’s discerning eye, either, and the lingering dregs of warmth in my belly decide to stick around.
I can hear the smile in his voice even as I turn my attention away, feigning interest in the polished deck and intricately decorated railing. “She’s not so wet-dog looking, I’ll admit,” he says, his tone light.
Soraya admonishes him and he laughs as if she hasn’t just overstepped with her captain. Suddenly, all the sky in the world isn’t enough oxygen. I need to step away. Need to find somewhere else to be other than their orbit, this strange, rotating crew of the lethal and the jubilant.
“Odi!”
The name tips the world even further off balance, and my heart somersaults over itself.
If we were close enough to shore, I’d leap into the water, already past the point of being on edge from the open interest and apparent friendliness.
The thought of running spikes my adrenaline further, knowing Rune wouldn’t let me go without a chase.
Bear is trotting over, all lanky arms and legs and perfectly buttoned collar.
He weaves through other crew members who pretend not to eye us, but he hesitates once he’s close, and I try to wipe any trace of emotion off my face.
“It’s okay if I call you Odi, right . . . ?” he asks.
Rune, Tavi, and Soraya have turned to look at us, waiting for the answer.
There was only ever on person in my life that called me Odi.
That version of me has been buried with her for a long time.
But Bear sucks his bottom lip ring while waiting for my answer, like he’s honestly nervous he’s offended me.
The thought makes my throat tighten in an absurd way.
Again I think that he shouldn’t be here, on a ship that flirts with death.
“Better than wet dog.” I hear myself say absently, forcing my gaze up to the sail. It’s full sheets and the wind is in our favour; The Gilded Hart slices the water like a blade. If I close my eyes, maybe I could still pretend that I’m running.
“She’s not capable of making friends, Otto.
” Rune’s tone has gone flat enough that I finally look at him.
His blue hair is down in long waves. His shirt is a darker tone of the same colour, sleeves so short it would be easy to believe he’d ripped them off to make space for his arms. Every outfit he wears seems perfectly tailored and colour coordinated.
He catches me looking, but when our eyes lock, the warmth from earlier is long gone.
“She’d probably kill anyone who gets too close, if only to eliminate her weaknesses.
Besides, once she has what she needs,” he says, holding my gaze, “she’ll be gone.
If she doesn’t try to kill us all in our sleep before then. ”
I clench my teeth and offer him a sickly sweet smile, ignoring Soraya’s grin and the quiet warning on Tavi’s face. “Don’t tempt me.” I turn back to Bear, trying to temper the savageness in my eyes to something soft and foreign. “I’d never kill you in your sleep, of course. Then who would cook?”
Bear smiles and scratches the back of his shaggy brown hair.
“Ha, well, anyway, I was just coming to see if you wanted some breakfast? Everyone else already ate. Maiden Stone had fifteen different spices to choose from but”—he drops his eyes to the deck and waves vaguely in Rune’s direction—“Captain says I can only pick two each time we stop or they’ll weigh down the ship and we won't be able to catch pirates”—his eyes snap back up to mine—“Oh, sorry. I mean, not that you aren’t a pirate but like, that we captured you.
Anyway, this morning they had fresh cut octendrils in the market so I got some but we will have to salt and dry ’em because we need to save some for the trip.
It’s really lean but rich in protein and as long as you use salt from the east current instead of the west current, you can’t even taste the octoxin. Do you like—”
Rune sighs like an exhausted father. “Otto.”
Otto goes quiet, and the rest of the ship has too. A broad man with a long scar down his arm grins at our group. A woman with pale skin and razor sharp nails coils ropes, her eyes trained our way. Two men on the starboard side cast glances back at me, their faces twisted in disgust.
A slow feeling, like poison, crawls from the tips of my tingling fingers and up my arms, and with it comes a longing for my hood.
Before, I could stay obscured even around others, safe in knowing that when they saw the cowl, they saw death, but never the woman beneath.
Here, there’s nowhere to hide. I could take any of Rune’s crew one-on-one.
But if enough stood against me at once, I’m not foolish enough to think I’d live through it.
Maybe I should have tried harder to get away last night.
The silence stretches until Rune steps closer and sweeps his eyes over the onlookers. “Everyone back to work!”
Otto, of course, nods in a way that rocks the whole top of his body. “Right. Sorry Captain. Anyways.” He turns his baby-blue eyes back to me. “Wanna see the quail?”
“I—”
Rune steps between us to catch his eye again, pressing two fingers into the younger man’s chest. “Don’t let your guard down.”
Then he’s gone, offering me his back like a dare.
The ship is gorgeous. If I hadn’t seen the royal sigils in Rune’s office I’d have suspected his sponsors by the elegant nature of the woodwork alone.
The figurehead is a water elemental without a trace of wear or barnacles.
There are no bad patches, no missing or forlorn rail posts, no cracked deck boards that leak into the lower levels.
There are four rowboats in neat condition and a handful of mounted crossbows to pair with the cannons I saw below.
This ship is as well equipped as the Sea Bane.
Luckily, most of the crew carries a blade of some kind. It shouldn’t be hard to steal one.
Bear leads me down a cramped flight of stairs.
There’s only a few bodies down here, most consumed in their own tasks, but two men and a woman hover to one side, doing nothing to hide their suspicion.
My hands itch for a blade. I wait for them to follow, maybe corner us, but they don’t move.
Then, we’re past the crew’s hammocks, and all the way to the opposite side of the ship where a thin door separates an isolated set of stairs that lead back up—beneath the raised captain’s quarters I assume—and to a small, tidy galley.
I glance behind us before the door closes, but Bear rushes to the cast iron skillet on the counter and slaps something down into oil that sounds like it’s already hot.
There’s a single table bolted to the floor, a wall of locked cabinets behind him, and a vent directly overhead that seems to suck the smoke up and out through some trick of the wind.
His head disappears behind the end of the counter, and when he pops back up he’s holding a long, short crate that cheeps softly as he places it down. “See?” He grins, his skeleton hand earring waving back and forth as he urges me to look inside.
And I do.