“I feel older,” she shot back, adding, “what have you done with your eye?”
They both knew she wasn’t talking about the ones currently in Lila’s face, but the one currently back in her cabin, stored in its velvet box, its surface neither brown nor blue but black as pitch. Black as the eye she’d lost to a doctor’s scalpel back in her London, before she’d known about other worlds, or the magic they possessed, let alone the term Antari.
The eye she’d traded for a favor.
“I do wear it, now and then,” she said. “But I’ve found that people are fools. Showing them your power is like showing them your hand at cards. Make them guess at it instead, and they’ll almost always guess wrong.”
The door opened, and Valick returned, looking steadier on his feet. He crossed the room and set the spelled blade on the desk.
“That’s still mine,” said Lila as Maris took up the dagger and eased it from its sheath, studying the pearl surface. She frowned, wrinkles cracking like ice across her skin.
“Do you know what this does?”
“It kills people.”
Maris rolled her eyes. “Ordinary knives kill people. This uses a person’s own magic to destroy them. It taps into the power in their blood and turns it against their body.…”
Lila straightened, interest piqued. She remembered the way the man in the tavern seemed to catch fire from the inside out, just before he turned to ash. She wondered what it might do to a bone magician. Would they come apart like a string of pearls, or collapse like a sack of boneless meat? And what would happen if it skewered an Antari?
“… with a single cut,” finished Maris.
“Right,” said Lila. “So … it’s a knife. And it kills people.”
Maris shook her head. “What a shame that all your power doesn’t come with sense.” She tugged open a drawer in her desk.
“Still mine,” muttered Lila as the blade vanished inside.
“Consider it payment for boarding my ship. Now get out.”
“But I just got here. And you haven’t even said why you called. Unless it was simply to catch up. I know it must get lonely—”
“Out of my chambers. Valick, show Captain Bard to the lower deck. Don’t let her touch anything.”
Lila rose, hands splayed. “Come now. Even I wouldn’t be foolish enough to steal from your ship.”
“Someone was,” said Maris, and before Lila could ask, she emptied her glass and nodded at the door.
Lila made to leave, but halfway out, she glanced back. There was something she had been wanting to ask. Something she had to know. “The strongest magic in the world is on this ship. If there were anything here that could help Kell…” Her voice tightened, betraying her need.
Over the last seven years, they had searched, tried tinctures, tried spells, tried every fucking thing under the sun. And nothing they’d found in the three empires, or any markets, black or hidden or otherwise, had been able to fix what was broken in him.
Eventually, Kell had stopped looking.
But she hadn’t.
“I would pay the price,” she added.
Maris pursed her lips. “Clear one debt before you take another.”
Venom rose like bile in her throat, but the captain held up a hand to cut her off. She looked suddenly tired. “If I had anything that could restore Kell Maresh’s power, or ease his suffering, I would give it…” She almost said freely—Lila saw her shaping the word—but Maris had more sense than that.
Instead, the old woman shook her head, and said, “But I don’t.”
The words landed like a heavy door swung shut by the wind. And this time, when Maris waved her away, Lila turned and followed Valick out.
* * *
If Red London’s night market had been scraped off the avenue beside the Isle and piled onto a boat, tents and stalls crowding every inch of space, it still wouldn’t have held a candle to the Ferase Stras.
The ship was twice the size of her Barron, a maze of halls and decks and cabins, spaces piled like a stack of books on a too-small table.
Lila had always been good at making maps. Not the kind on paper, but the ones that lived in her head, maps of town alleys and city streets, multiple worlds consigned entirely to memory. She could walk a road and learn it with her feet, and never get turned around a second time—and yet, there was no point aboard the Ferase Stras. Maybe it was magic, a spell designed to alter memory, or maybe it was simply the chaos and clutter, the dazzling distraction of a hundred powerful things.