“Indeed,” Dom answered, his voice oddly thick.
“It’s all right to miss him though. It’s all right to feel this hole.” The advice was as much for himself as it was for Dom.
As before, the Elder sniffed, turning to stone. “Sorrow is a mortal endeavor. I have no use for it.” He jumped up from the boulder, his face wiped clean of any emotion.
Andry joined him, standing with a shake of his head. “Sorrow touches us all, Lord Domacridhan, whether we believe in it or not. It doesn’t matter what you call the thing ripping you apart. It will still devour you if given the chance.”
“And how do I defend against such a thing, Squire?” the Elder demanded, his voice rising. Luckily, Corayne did not stir. “How do I fight what I cannot face?”
In the training yard, the knights would bash their gauntlets, clutch hands, pull each other up after a particularly nasty blow. Without thinking, Andry raised his own fingers, palm open, an offer as much as a plea.
“With me,” he said. “Together.”
Dom did his very best not to crush the squire’s fingers as they locked hands.
“It’s your turn for watch,” Andry muttered, wincing under the strength of Dom’s grips.
But it was worth the pain.
23
BELOW THE PRIEST’S HAND
Corayne
Corayne had heard stories of Adira from nearly every member of her mother’s crew, her mother included. The card tables, the concubines and brothels, the night markets hawking goods from all over the Ward, stolen or otherwise. Real dragon scales, ancient and crusty, in the curio shops. Spindletouched mages brewing up tonics and poison outside taverns. Thieves’ gangs and pirate crews outfitting their companies. The crown of Treccoras, the last Cor emperor, had been won in a game of dice in the House of Luck and Fortune, then immediately lost to the marshes. But the history was there too; she’d heard it mostly from Kastio. When moved to talk, he spoke of distant years, centuries long since passed, as if he were reciting from the pages of a university tome, or had an impossibly long memory.
It had been Piradorant once, truly the Adoring Port, beneath the ancient empire. The small city and surrounding territory had sworn allegiance to Old Cor long before her armies arrived. There was no conquest. She was a willing bride, and the Cors treated her as such. Her walls were gilded, her streets wealthy. She blossomed, a flower basking in the light of a doting sun. But the empire fell, night came, and the world moved on in its shadow. The stumbling kingdom of Larsia grew and eventually chafed with the might of neighboring Galland. The Larsians fought to defend their border from encroachment. The city now called Adira filled the cracks between.
Wedged between warring kingdoms, often cut off by battle or blockade, Adira survived through less than honorable means. Pirate ships regularly ran Gallish blockades to feed the hungry city. Cutthroats and rogues slipped around entrenched armies. Within the walls, the city rotted like an apple. The King of Larsia did not have the strength to wrest it back from the criminals who controlled it, and Galland would not bother. The Gallish kings cared for glittering capitals and vast expanses of rich land. Not a fortress slum on a marshy peninsula, its streets bristling with rusty knives and gutter rats. Adira adapted to the world as it was, becoming what it needed to be.
The peninsula had a gray-green look as they approached from the north, a spit of land shoved out into the Bay alongside the mouth of the Orsal. The river flowed through marshland, belching silt into the bluer salt water. Adira sat at the peninsula’s head, the city walled in by a crown of mossy stone and wooden palisade. A stone causeway zigzagged over the marshes, through the worst of the mud, with no less than six drawbridges, all of them pulled up. It was a Cor-built wonder, like the roads, aqueducts, and amphitheaters within the old borders. There would be no assaulting Adira from land, not by any army upon the Ward.
As they rode onto the causeway, Corayne caught sight of the docks before the mist closed it. The sails of a dozen ships crowded the harbor like needles in a pincushion. Pirates and smugglers all. Not a single flag of a lawful kingdom. Corayne smiled as she had in Lecorra, drawn to this place, rooted in it somehow. But this time it wasn’t the Spindletouched echoes of Cortael she felt. This was the land of her mother, of Hell Mel.
Andry balanced her obvious excitement with naked fear. His eyes locked on the first drawbridge, drawn up against the sky like a flat hand ready to fall and crush them all. The squire of a noble court had no place here. He already stuck out like a sore thumb, even next to Dom. And that was a very high mark to clear.