The scribe snatched the boon and flashed his treasure at the servitor. Rhaif’s moldering rind was quickly exchanged for a riper slice, and both men moved to the draft-iron oven.
The chaaen-bound woman leaned closer. “Since we must wait for your cheese to warm…” The lilt faded from her whisper. A sharp point stabbed into his side, expertly positioned at his kidney. “Perhaps we can talk.”
He turned enough to spy through the slit in the silk that hid her face. The coppery eyes that glared back at him, though, were familiar enough.
He closed his own eyes in defeat, at the impossibility of his circumstance.
It was Llyra hy March.
* * *
STANDING AT THE cabin window, Pratik wondered for the hundredth time what he was doing here. He had agreed to accompany the thief and his stolen treasure with the hopes of presenting such a valuable trophy to the Imri-Ka, to use such a prize to possibly win his own freedom.
He fingered the iron collar around his neck. He still remembered both the happiness and terror when the band had been fused around his throat. He still had a scar from the hot metal, which burned his tender flesh despite the insulation of a ceramic neck shield. The collar marked his esteemed accomplishment of earning the Highcryst of alchymy, but it also forever bound him to his master, Rellis im Malsh. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be free of this weight. He imagined he’d float off his toes if this anchor was ever cut away.
Even that dream was mixed with both hope and dread.
He lowered his hand.
Back at the Anvil docks, Rhaif had not warned him about the change in ships until the last moment, leaving Pratik no choice but to follow. But where did this new path lead? Would it still end at the throne of the Imri-Ka? Or would he forever be an outcast, a Chaaen who had broken his bind, always on the run?
He had tried to raise these concerns with the Guld’guhlian thief, but any real answers were rebuffed. Too much remains up in the air, Rhaif had said with a wave at the wyndship, trying to use mirth to blunt the ambiguousness in his words.
Pratik had even considered approaching one of the other Klashean groups on board, to reveal the subterfuge, to beg for forgiveness. But he knew such a path would likely end in his death, especially after the fiery destruction of a ship bearing the Klashean Arms. He had been partly to blame for that tragedy.
Then there was the one other matter, the truest reason he stayed silent.
He turned to the bronze figure.
Shiya stood before the other window. She had seldom strayed from that spot for the past two days, bathing in the bright sunlight. She had even stripped off her byor-ga and remained unabashedly naked, exposing as much of herself to the Father Above as possible. Under His bright gaze, her bronze had melted, turning impossibly soft and warm. Her plaits of hair had shivered into loose filaments so fine that they could be brushed from her cheeks or tucked behind a curl of ear.
Someone, with a casual glance, could easily mistake her for any other tanned woman, one of exceptional beauty. It was only her eyes that gave her unnaturalness away. They were distinctly glassy and glowed with an inner fire that could not be ignored. The energies turned her azure eyes into the deep blue of a lightning-struck sea. He found her gaze, whenever she deigned to look at him, to be frightening and inexplicable, yet also mesmerizingly beautiful.
Pratik did not understand any of the alchymy that fired through her, that gifted her with life and vigor. A debate warred in him. Is it even alchymy? Or is she truly god-touched? It was this wonder that kept him alongside her and Rhaif. No matter the answer, he sensed she was a creation from beyond their oldest histories, maybe even before the Crown was first forged in fire and ice, what the Elder tongue called Pantha re Gaas, the Forsaken Ages.
So how could I possibly forsake you myself?
He shifted to her window, to study her closer. Something of late had troubled him about her, but he could not narrow down what it was.
With her face in the full sun, her cheeks stirred in hues of rich coppers, from pinkish to a darker red. Her lips gathered those hues, creating a rosy aspect that accentuated the bow of her mouth. Her lower belly and legs, partially shaded below the windowsill, remained a deeper bronze, swirling in tones of browns and murky yellows. The back half of her, turned away from the sun, was equally dark, accentuating the breadth of her hips and curve of her buttocks. His gaze drifted around and up to the swell of her breasts, no larger than ripe plums, but perfectly formed with dark bronze areolas and nipples lifted to the sun.
He continued to stare at the full breadth of her sculpted beauty. It would be easy to accept how a goddess might want to instill her essence into such a form. He wanted to run his hands down her curves, but not how a man might wish to fondle such a woman, more like a scholar wanting to explore and understand the mystery standing there.
Confused by her, by his own feelings, he turned from her to the window.
Below, the cliffs of Landfall fell behind the stern as the wyndship abandoned the heights of Cloudreach and sailed high over the Bay of Promise. Ahead, the vast sprawl of Azantiia hugged the coastline to the north. From this height, he could make out the star-shaped castle ramparts of Highmount. Stretching from the city’s harbor, thousands of white sails dotted the blue seas. On the opposite side of the city, scores of balloons rose and fell from the mooring docks that spread over thousands of acres. Some of the ships were as large as The Soaring Pony, many others smaller. Then there were warships that dwarfed their own craft, moored in their own yokes to the northeast.
Pratik had visited the city a few times with Rellis on trade or diplomatic missions, but he had found the place chaotic and unruly. Nothing like the empire’s capital of Kysalimri, which meant kissed by the gods, which the city certainly appeared to have been. He pictured its flowing gardens, its white palacios, and its thirty-three spires topped by golden figures of the holy pantheon. Under the obsidian fist of the Imri-Ka, order was vigilantly maintained. All the baseborn castes had their role to play, like the cogs of a great machine, and no one dared step from their assigned tasks.
Except for me.
This new role, free of caste and rule, both excited and frightened him in equal measures. He had always dreamed of his freedom, to rid his neck of its iron collar, but where would this path lead? The danger was great, but he did not fear death. He had lived all his life with a dagger at his throat, where any misstep would end him. No, what truly kept his chest tight was to imagine a life of self-determination, to be truly free of the great machine that was the Klashe—and then have such a hope dashed in the end.
That would be worse than any death.
He stared out the window as the wyndship lowered toward Azantiia’s docks, tacking against the winds that blew forever east at this low height. Over the past days, as the Pony had crossed the seas from the Guld’guhl territories, the ship had ridden the two streams that flowed in opposite directions across the Crown. The ship would rise high and brush into the hot winds that blew forever west, carried along by that steamy current until the heat grew too much, then the ship would lower into the colder streams flowing the other way, tacking against that tide. Then, once cooled, back up they’d go. Over and over. Lifting and lowering. Like a sailing ship across the swells of a sea.
But now it looked like they would rise no more.