My heart stops raging. Stops hammering. It slumps, defeated, gone as quiet and still as Sail’s chest.
Blood draws a line from his parted lips, landing behind his ear, a small splatter in the snow.
Behind me, all around me, the Red Raids move, speak, laugh. I ignore them as I lay my hand on Sail’s cold face.
“Get her onboard.”
My palm scrapes against Sail’s cheek as I’m hauled to my feet. I try to keep looking, to keep our eyes locked, but I’m pulled away. Sail’s gaze doesn’t follow me. It just stays still and unblinking, snow landing heavy against his blond lashes where he lies.
This time, when the sound of thunder fills the air, it really is from the clouds. I look up as I’m taken toward the ships, seeing the tremble that moves through the sky.
When I’m led to the ramp of the largest ship, the wind begins to whip, lightning buckles, and a storm opens up with a growl.
The soft, hovering snowfall is gone, and in its place is a punishing surge, frozen rain sluicing down like spikes. It crashes over us, as if the clouds went angry, as if they’re lending me vengeful tears for what’s been done below them.
But not even the plunging needles can pierce through the raw ache in my heart. Because my friend—my kind, teasing guard—is dead.
Sail is dead.
All because he was trying to protect me. To stand up for me. To bolster me.
Sharp. The sorrow is so damn sharp.
When I see some of the pirates kick at Sail’s body, roughly, callously, I lose it. I start to fight, kicking and screaming. But Quarter comes over and places a brutal hold on my jaw, squeezing it to the point of threat. “Enough of that.”
The pirate behind me gets a firmer hold of my arms, keeping me still. An enraged snarl comes out of me, a noise that doesn’t sound remotely human, as I stare at Quarter with hate—so much hate for all the Red Raids, his captain in particular.
Quarter’s eyes narrow on me before his hand delves into a pocket, and then he’s stuffing a filthy cloth in my mouth, holding it there, so thick I can’t even try to bite his fingers. “Quiet,” he snaps, pushing so far back that I start to gag.
I’m shoved the last step up the incline of the ramp, sending me sprawling onto the ship’s deck. My already sore body crashes into the wood, and I nearly choke on the fabric lodged in my mouth.
I snatch out the offending gag, coughing and sputtering with breaths as I toss it away. Before I can get up, the other saddles are shoved right alongside me, and we’re all pushed together on the deck like we’re just another pile of the pirate’s plunder.
A hand appears in front of my face, and I look up to find Rissa above me. I glance warily at her palm for a moment. “Well?” she says, clear impatience in her tone.
I reach up and take her hand, and Rissa pulls me up, helping me to my feet before she lets go. I begin to mutter out a thanks, but I’m elbowed at my side.
Turning, I see one of the other saddles—Mist—sneering at me. Her black hair is in knots, her eyes red and swollen. “Watch it,” she snarls, wiping her sleeve where I happened to brush up against her.
And maybe it’s because I just watched my friend get murdered before my eyes, maybe it’s because my nerves are frayed, or because we just became captives of notoriously brutal pirates, but red-hot rage comes galloping up in me, and I’m unable to stop it.
My ribbons, all twenty four of them from up and down my spine, unravel. Her eyes flicker with confusion at their movement—confusion and then shock as they thrust forward and shove.
She goes flying back, toppling other saddles and even some pirates behind her. She screeches as she lands, and then she’s up and on her feet in an instant, not to confront me about my ribbons and how the hell I moved them, but ready to attack.
Her fingers curled like claws, I brace myself for her, but Rissa steps between us before Mist can launch herself at me.
“No squabbling,” Rissa snaps, shooting looks at both of us. “Or have you forgotten where the hell we are?”
With a ragged exhale, my ribbons go limp behind me at her words, but Mist isn’t so deterred. She glares at me from over Rissa’s shoulder, and the intensity of her hate-filled gaze throws me off-balance.
I thought that her flare of temper from before was just from emotions, from stressful circumstances. But this—this expression on her face isn’t that. It’s not distress that’s making her lash out irrationally. Not when her eyes hold such personal vitriol.
“It’s her fault we’re here!” Mist hisses.
I frown, exasperated. “What the hell are you talking about? How is any of this my fault?”
Mist looks around at the other wide-eyed saddles huddled around us. “You heard them. Protect the king’s favored.” She scoffs with an ugly, humorless sound.
I go still. Those words—Sail’s words, called out right as the snow pirates ambushed us. I hadn’t thought, hadn’t even considered, how it would sound to the other saddles.
“When it came down to it, the guards weren’t going to protect us. It was just her. Midas always keeps her safe, keeps her special. Even on this damn journey, she got special treatment, didn’t she? Don’t travel too long during the night, because we don’t want to tire the king’s favored. Don’t eat more rations, because we have to make sure the king’s favored has extra. Don’t go too fast, because the king’s favored wants to ride a bloody horse she has no business being on! It’s all her! All the time!”
I feel the eyes of the other saddles swing over to me like a hook on a string.
“And then when it all went to shit, what did they do? Protected her. Tried to make it so she got away, because the rest of us don’t matter. We’re expendable. Replaceable.” Mist is sobbing now, her petite shoulders shaking. “And now we’re here, captured, and what do you think is going to happen to us?”
Rosh tries to gently take her arm, to shush her, but she shrugs him off, staring at me with that fire, that hate, burning me with it.
“Ruined. That’s what’s going to happen to us. We’re going to be ruined. Until we’re nothing. Slaves to be used and then merchandise to be sold. But the king will come for her. Bargain for her. Save his favored. But not us,” Mist says with a bitter shake of her head as more tears fall. “Not us.”
My earlier guilt may have felt like steam, but now it’s like an open wound, torn right through my gut.
All the other saddles continue to look at me as Mist’s words settle in, but I only stand there, silent, mouth dry and wound aching.
What is there to say? In her eyes, in all of their eyes, she’s right. Maybe from no fault of my own, but an ugly truth all the same.
How would I have felt, hearing that order, protect the king’s favored, if I were them?
“Alright, hush now,” Rissa says, once more stepping in, once more trying to diffuse the situation. “Regardless of any of that, we can’t afford to gain any more negative attention than we’re already going to get.”
Her normally seductive lips are pressed in a hard, firm line, her blonde tresses scattered over a dress spotted with blood that isn’t her own.
Rissa looks at the saddles, her peers, her friends. “We’re professionals. Not just saddles from the slums, but King Midas’s select chosen. If we’re going to get through this, we’ll have to perform, but we know how to do that. We know how to work a room.”
The saddles huddle closer together, a circle in the middle of a ship, backs turned on me, the outsider. Separate. I’m separate from them, even now, when we’re in the same terrifying situation. But no wonder they’ve always hated me, always kept me apart. Who could blame them?
I turn away from them, away from the exclusion, my feet taking me to the edge of the ship where I grasp the railing with white knuckles.
Right now, the one person I want to talk to, the one person I know could make me feel better, is dead in the snow with a puncture through his heart. My only friend. Dead, because of me.
My eyes scan the land below, taking in the littered bodies that the pirates left behind. Left there in the Barrens, for the clouds and winds to bury.
Beside me, the Red Raids draw up the ramp, heaving it back in place into the wall of the ship just as a horn blows, indicating that we’re on the move. Below, fire claws grumble and hiss, the vibrations of their growls shaking the boards at my feet.
But my eyes stay planted on the landscape below, sweeping, looking, searching. Where is he, where is he…
I double check my vantage point, but a frown forms between my brows because I don’t see him. I see the other fallen guards, but not him.
When the ship begins to move, slowly sledding over the slick iced ground, my gaze turns frantic, confused. There. He should’ve been right there.
I see the blood, I see the spot where it happened, where his heart emptied out. But no Sail.
My hands tighten on the railing as I continue to look, but I don’t see him. As if he just got up and walked off. Except that’s impossible. But I don’t see him, he’s not there, and I—
Raucous laughter of the pirates draws my eye to the stern of the ship, where it’s lit up from the red, swaying lanterns. But I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have.
A choked cry flies out of me as I slap a hand over my mouth. The pirates are gathered around, laughter coming from behind their red cloths, but it does nothing to muffle their cruelty.
And Sail…I couldn’t spot him on the ground, not because I was wrong about where he’d been, or that he’d miraculously lived, but because they dragged him onboard.
My horror-filled eyes are wide as I look at where they’ve hung him. They trussed up his lifeless body at the front of the ship, against a stained wooden post.
Ropes are wrapped around him, forcing his body straight against the pole. His vacant eyes are still open, looking ahead at nothing, but it was a gaze that was meant for me, a gaze that he offered with his last dying breath.
Someone shouts, “Our ship’s finally got a Sail!”
I don’t know who says it. Maybe the captain. Maybe someone else. I don’t know because my ears are roaring too loudly to hear, my eyes too blurry to see.
“Think he’ll flap in the wind?” someone else jokes. Mocking laughter is as loud as the thunder, as loud as the whips against the growling beasts who pull us.
The ship slides onward, cutting through the tides of the snow drifts, leaving behind dead Highbell guards in its wake.
And Sail’s body hangs, degraded and scorned, like a carved figurehead at the bow, the last of his blood already frozen against his chest. But those eyes of an ocean don’t shut. Though they don’t see anymore, either.
I turn and vomit on the white-washed wooden planks.
