“You have a habit of using your life as collateral,” I say.
“Does that mean you will take the deal?” Lira asks.
I’d be a fool to take it and trust a stranger who claims to know the one secret I don’t. I haven’t survived this long by putting my life in the hands of my ex-prisoners. But to not take it would make me even more of a fool. Lira can speak Psáriin. She has experience hunting sirens. What if I leave her behind and then can’t even free the crystal once I have it? If I make it all that way only to drown in the final wave. The ritual is the only part of my quest where I don’t have an idea past winging it, and now Lira is offering up a plan of her own on a gold platter.
If Kye were here, he’d tell me not to even think about considering it. Good riddance, he said when we left Lira to the streets of Eidyllio, sure neither of us would see her again. I’ve got enough to protect you from without adding deadly damsels to the list. And he wasn’t wrong. Kye had sworn to protect me – not just to my father, whose money he’d taken more for the heck of it than to seal any deal – but to me. To himself. And Kye has never taken that job lightly. But I have a job too, a mission, and without Lira’s help, I could leave the world open to the evils of the Sea Queen and her race forever.
“Well?” Lira presses. “Are you going to take the deal?”
“I told you I don’t take deals,” I say. “But maybe I’ll take your word instead.”
I pull open the door to the Serendipity, and Lira pushes through ahead of me. I’m hit with the familiar smell of metal and ginger root, and there are a thousand memories that shift through my mind, each as dastardly as the next. For all the ideas a name can give, the Serendipity’s tells nothing of its true nature. It’s a den for gamblers and the kinds of men and women who never see the light of day. They stick to moonlight, far from the ornate colors of the town. They are shadows, with fingers made sticky by debt and wine strong enough to knock a person dead from a single jug.
Some of my crew takes the large round table at the back and I smile. When I left to visit Queen Galina and strike a deal for my future, an odd wave of nausea crept up into my stomach. Like ocean sickness, if I could ever feel such a thing. Land sickness, maybe. Being separated from them, especially for such an important task, left me drained. Seeing them now, I’m revitalized.
“Just so you know,” I say to Lira, “if you’re lying, I might kill you.”
Lira tips her chin up, eyes defiant and too blue for me to look at her straight. At first I’m not sure if she’s going to say anything back, but then she licks her lips and I know it’s because she can taste the sweetness of whatever insult she’s about to throw.
“Maybe,” she says as the light whimpers against her skin, “I might just kill you first.”
21
Elian
FOG POOLS BY THE open window, like the whirls of cigar smoke. With it comes the smell of dawn as the pink-lipped sky barely stays tucked behind the line of ocean. Time is lost here, in a way that can’t be said for anywhere else in the kingdom, or the world. The Serendipity exists in its own realm, with the people who could never truly belong anywhere else. It deals in deals, and caters only to traders who could never set up stalls for their goods.
Torik breaks into a low whistle as he deals another hand. His fingers glide over the cards, slick as butter, swiping them across the table in perfect piles by the stacks of red coins. When he’s done, Madrid fingers her deck blankly, like the cards themselves don’t matter, only what she does with them. Madrid is very good at adapting and never satisfied with playing the hand she’s dealt. I’d like to say I taught her that, but there are so many things Madrid was forced to learn before she chose the Saad. When you’re taken by a Kléftesis slave ship, you quickly learn that to survive, you can’t bend to the world; you have to make it bend to you.
Unfortunately for Madrid, her tell is the fact that she has no tell. She’s never willing to end how she begins, and though that means I can’t guess her hand like I can most people’s, knowing that she won’t settle makes it easy to guess what she’s going to do next.
Lira watches us predatorily, her eyes darting each time a hand moves or a coin falls from the top of a pile. I can tell that she sees the same things I do; whenever someone scratches their cheek or swallows a little too forcefully. Minute beads of sweat and twitching lips. The intonation when they ask for another jug of wine. She notices it all. Not only that, but she’s making notes of it. Filing their tells and ticks away, for whatever reason. Keeping them safe, maybe, to use again.