Vasry let out a contented sigh and crossed to the hearth as their guide vanished into another room. He returned moments later, carrying three mugs of something sweet and steaming.
“So you run the port house, then,” said Vasry, taking a cup.
“No, no,” said the man. “I’m just looking after it, while the clerk is at the fair.”
He gestured to the long table. Like everything in the room, she realized, it was made of ice, several skeins of thick cloth draped over the top. As they took their seats, Lila looked around the hall. The whole place reminded her of a fairy tale: quaint, and welcoming, and too good to be true.
The man drifted off to tend the fire. Lila watched him go, and felt Kell watching her.
“What?” she said, without meeting his eye.
“Not everything is a trap.” The words made something tug behind her ribs. At being watched, but more so, at being seen.
“Am I that easy to read?”
“No,” he said simply. “But I like to think I’m learning.”
Lila forced herself to relax and take up the drink. The cup was warm against her bare hands, the wine—if that’s what it was—hot and sweet. She downed it in a few short gulps, and rapped her fingers on the table, rising to her feet.
The light outside had not changed. She didn’t know what time it was, or how long it would be until the dock master returned.
But she did know one thing: she had not sailed to the edge of the world just to stop there.
She made her way to the fire, and the man now tending it.
“Well then,” she said. “Which way to the lightless fair?”
IV
NOW
“Land!”
Stross bellowed again as Lila vaulted out of the hold, still holding the broken bottle of summer wine. Kell followed, frowning, in her wake.
Dusk was falling over the coastline. Back in the capital, he mused, the setting sun would have cast everything in red and gold, infusing the city with a warm and constant glow. But here, the light landed with a tinny glare, glinting off the serrated sprawl of buildings that spilled down from the rocks and into the bay below.
So this was Verose.
He tried not to think too often about London, or what his brother and family might be doing at this moment （he’d followed Lila to the end of the world and back, and it had been worth it）。 Seven years with the Grey Barron, and most days, he felt at ease on the ship, if not among the crew.
But places like Verose were a reminder of how far he was from home. Even at a distance, the city looked sharp enough to cut their sails.
The crew assembled now, all hands on deck.
There was Stross, the first mate of the Barron, stocky and sober, scratching at a black beard that had started to show grey, his temporary cheer settling back into sterner stuff as they approached their destination.
And Vasry, standing beneath the sails and looking, as he always did, like he was posing for a portrait, his chin up and his blond hair pulled back as he put his meager wind skills to good use and guided them to port.
Then there was Tav, small and scrappy, and currently heaving his guts up over the side of the ship after having a little too much fun this afternoon, even for a ship pretending to be a pleasure vessel staffed with rowdy pirates.
And last of all, Raya, dropping like a sparrow to the deck, black braids fluttering behind her.
Raya, who’d come aboard the ship after the lightless fair, and never disembarked, despite Lila’s vocal aversion to new blood.
“I think I’m in love,” Vasry had said the next morning, and at the time, none of them had paid it much attention, because, frankly, Vasry fell in love the way other people fell down after too much wine, so Lila probably assumed it would sort itself, and they’d put the girl ashore at the next port. But then Raya turned out to be a decent water worker and an even better cook, and Vasry surprised everyone by staying smitten, and Lila grudgingly let the girl stay.
Nearly seven years on, she still didn’t speak a word of Arnesian, seemed to take pride in the fact, but she had as many expressions as Kell had frowns, and was good at saying everything that needed saying with a look.
And on top of it all, she could fight, a fact they’d discovered when the Barron ran into trouble with a raiding ship, and the girl had swiftly conjured a pair of swords out of ice and driven one through the nearest pirate as he tried to come aboard.
Lila liked her more after that.
And Kell liked not being the newest person on the crew.
Now, as the Grey Barron pulled into Verose, he scanned the line of ships already there, and found the one they wanted mooring three vessels out from the leftmost side of the dock. A Veskan craft with bloodred flags and wings scorched into the pale hull. Eh Craen, it was called.