They were ensconced in the highest room of Brygstad Palace, where they often stole a night alone when the High Prince was away. The walls were hung with tapestries, the window clammy with the heat of the fire. This was where the royals would give birth. Beneath a starry vault.
On other nights, they would abscond to the Old Quarter, to a room Jannart held at an inn called the Sun in Splendor, which was known for its discretion. It sheltered many lovers who had fled from the laws of the Knight of Fellowship. Some, like Jannart, were locked in marriages they had not chosen. Others were unwed. Others had fallen for people who were far above or below their station. All loved in a way that would see them pay a price in Virtudom.
That day, Edvart had set off with half the court, his daughter, and his nephew to the summer residence in the Bridal Forest. Jannart had promised Edvart they would join him soon to hunt the fabled Sangyn Wolf that stalked the north of Mentendon.
Niclays had never been sure if Edvart knew the truth about his relationship with Jannart. Perhaps he had closed his eyes to it. If the matter became public, the High Prince would have no choice but to banish Jannart, his closest friend, for breaking his vow to the Knight of Fellowship.
A log collapsed in the fire. Beside it, Jannart was poring over his manuscripts, which were fanned across the rug in front of him. For the past few years, he had forsaken his art to pursue his passion for history. He had always been troubled by the calamitous loss of knowledge in the Grief of Ages—the burning of libraries, the destruction of archives, the irrevocable ruin of ancient buildings—and now that his son, Oscarde, was taking on some duties in the duchy, he could finally lose himself in knitting the holes in history together.
Niclays lay naked in the bed, gazing at the painted stars. Someone had gone to a great deal of effort to make them mirror the true sky.
“What is it?”
Jannart had not even needed to look up to know something was wrong. Niclays heaved a sigh. “A wyvern on the edge of our capital should dampen even your spirits.”
Three days before, two men had ventured into a cave west of Brygstad and happened upon a slumbering wyvern. It was well known that Draconic beings had found places to sleep all over the world after the Grief of Ages, and that if you looked hard enough in any country, you might be able to find one.
In the Free State of Mentendon, the law declared that, if discovered, these beasts should be left alone on pain of death. There was an ubiquitous fear that waking one could wake others—but these men had thought themselves above the law. Drunk on dreams of knighthood, they had drawn their swords and tried to kill the beast. Not best pleased with the rude awakening, it had eaten its attackers and clawed its way out of the cave in a fury. Too listless from its sleep to breathe fire, it had still managed to maul several residents of a nearby town before some brave soul put an arrow through its heart.
“Clay,” Jannart said, “it was two arrogant boys playing the fool. Ed will ensure it does not happen again.”
“Perhaps dukes are naïve to such things, but there are arrogant fools the world over.” Niclays poured himself a glass of black wine. “There was an abandoned mine not far from Rozentun, you know. Rumor had it among children that there was a cockatrice in there that had laid a clutch of golden eggs before it went to sleep. A girl I knew broke her back trying to get to it. A boy got himself lost in the darkness. He was never found. Arrogant fools, both.”
“It amazes me that after all these years, I am still learning things about your childhood.” Jannart arched an eyebrow, mouth quirked. “Did you ever seek the golden clutch?”
Niclays snorted. “The notion. Oh, I tiptoed to the entrance once or twice, but the love of your life was an abject coward even as a boy. I fear death too much to seek it.”
“Well, I can only be grateful for the softness of your spine. I confess to fearing your death, too.”
“I remind you that you are two years my senior, and that the arithmetic of death is against you.”
Jannart smiled. “Let us not speak of death when there is still so much life to be lived.”
He stood, and Niclays drank in the powerful delineation of his body, sculpted by years of fencing. At fifty, he was as striking as he had been on the day they had first met. His hair reached his waist, and it had darkened over time to a rich garnet, silvered at the roots. Niclays still had no notion of how he had held on to this man’s heart for all these years.
“Very soon, I mean to whisk you away to the Milk Lagoon, and there we shall live without name or title.” Jannart climbed onto the bed, hands on either side of Niclays, and kissed him. “Besides, you are likely to die before me at this rate. Perhaps if you would stop cuckolding me with Ed’s wine—” His hand snuck toward the glass.
“You have your dusty books. I have wine.” Chuckling, Niclays held it out of reach. “We agreed.”
“I see.” Jannart made another, half-playful swipe for it. “And when did we agree this?”
“Today. You may have been asleep.”
Jannart gave up and rolled onto the bed beside him. Niclays tried to ignore the tug of remorse.
They had quarreled about his weakness for wine many times over the years. He had curbed his drinking enough to stop him losing hours of memory, as he often had in his youth, but his hands shook if he went too long without a cup. Jannart seemed too weary of the subject to fight him on it these days. It hurt Niclays to disappoint the one person who loved him.
Black wine was his comfort. Its thick sweetness filled the hollow that opened whenever he looked at his finger, empty of a love-knot ring. It blunted the pain of living a lie.
“Do you really think the Milk Lagoon exists?” he murmured.
A place of lore and lullaby. The haven for lovers.
Jannart circled his navel with one finger. “I do,” he said. “I have gathered enough evidence to believe it existed before the Grief of Ages, at least. Ed has heard that the remaining scions of the family of Nerafriss know where it is, but they will tell only the worthy.”
“That rules me out, then. You had better go alone.”
“You are not getting away from me that easily, Niclays Roos.” Jannart shifted his head closer, so their noses brushed. “Even if we never find the Milk Lagoon, we can go elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere else in the South, perhaps. Anywhere the Knight of Fellowship has no sway,” Jannart said. “There are uncharted places beyond the Gate of Ungulus. Perhaps other continents.”
“I’m no explorer.”
“You could be, Clay. You could be anything, and you should never think otherwise.” Jannart rolled a thumb over Niclays’s cheekbone. “If I had convinced myself I was no sinner, I would never have kissed the lips I longed to kiss. The lips of a man with rose-gold hair, whose birth, by the laws of a long-dead knight, made him unworthy of my love.”
Niclays tried not to stare like a fool into those gray Vatten eyes. Even now, after all these years, looking at this man took his breath away.
“What of Aleidine?” he said.
He tried to sound curious rather than sour. It was difficult for Jannart, who had spent decades stealing between companion and lover, at great risk to his standing at court. Niclays had no such care. He had never wed, and nobody had tried to force him.
“Ally will be fine,” Jannart said, even as his brow crinkled. “She will be the Dowager Duchess of Zeedeur, wealthy and powerful in her own right.”
Jannart cared about Aleidine. Even if he had never loved her as companions loved, they had fostered a close friendship in their thirty-year marriage. She had handled his affairs, carried his child, run the Duchy of Zeedeur at his side, and throughout it all, she had loved him unconditionally.
When they left, Niclays knew Jannart would miss her. He would miss the family they had made—but in his eyes, he had given them his youth. Now he wanted to live out his last years with the man he loved.
Niclays reached for his hand, the one that bore a silver love-knot ring.
“Let’s go soon,” he said lightly, to distract him. “Hiding like this is beginning to age me.”
“Age becomes you, my golden fox.” Jannart kissed him. “We will be gone. I promise.”
“When?”
“I want to spend a few more years with Truyde. So she has some memory of her grandsire.”
The child was only five years old, and already she would leaf ham-fisted through whatever tome Jannart set in front of her, bottom lip stuck out in determination. She had his hair.
“Liar,” Niclays said. “You want to make sure she carries on your legacy as a painter, since Oscarde has no artistic skill.”
Jannart laughed richly. “Perhaps.”
They lay still for a while, fingers intertwined. The sunlight washed the room in gold.
They would be alone together soon. Niclays told himself that it was true, as he had every day for year after year. Another year, perhaps two, until Truyde was a little older. Then they would leave Virtudom behind.
When Niclays turned to look at him, Jannart smiled—that roguish smile that teased at one corner of his mouth. Now he was older, it made his cheek crease in a way that somehow only served to make him more beautiful. Niclays raised his head to meet the kiss, and Jannart cradled his face in both hands as if he were framing one of his portraits. Niclays drew a line down the white canvas of Jannart’s stomach, making his body arch closer and quicken. And even though they knew each other by heart, the strength of this embrace felt new.
By the time dusk fell, they lay entwined in front of the fire, heavy-eyed and slippery with sweat. Jannart skimmed his fingers through Niclays’s hair.
“Clay,” he murmured, “I must go away for a while.”
Niclays looked up. “What?”
“You wonder what I do in my study all day,” Jannart said. “A few weeks ago, I inherited a fragment of text from my aunt, who was Viceroy of Orisima for forty years.”
Niclays sighed. Once Jannart was in pursuit of a mystery, he was like a crow on a carcass, driven by his nature to pick every bone clean. As Niclays craved alchemy and wine, Jannart craved the restoration of knowledge.
“Do tell me more,” Niclays said, as gamely as he could.
“The fragment is many centuries old. I almost fear to handle it in case it falls apart. According to her journal, my aunt received it from a man who told her to carry it far from the East and never bring it back.”
“How mysterious.” Niclays couched his head on his arms. “What has this to do with your going away?”
“I cannot read the text. I must go to the University of Ostendeur to see if anyone knows the language. I think it is an ancient form of Seiikinese, but something about the characters sits oddly with me. Some are larger, others smaller, and they are spaced in a strange manner.” His gaze was distant. “There is a hidden message in it, Clay. Intuition tells me that it is a vital piece of history. Something of more importance than anything I have studied before. I must understand it. I have heard of a library that might help me do that.”
“Where is this place, exactly?” Niclays asked. “Is it part of the University?”
“No. It is . . . rather isolated. A few miles from Wilgastrōm.”
“Oh, Wilgastrōm. Thrilling.” It was a sleepy town on the River Lint. No wyverns there. “Well, come back soon. The moment you leave, Ed tries to involve me in hunting or battledore or some other pastime that involves talking to courtiers.”
Jannart pressed closer. “You will survive.” His smile faded and, just for a moment, there was darkness in his eyes. “I would never leave you without reason, Clay. On my oath.”
“I will hold you to it, Zeedeur.”
There existed a realm between dreaming and waking, and Niclays was imprisoned in it. As he stirred, a tear squeezed from the corner of his eye.
Rain dusted his face. He was in a rowing boat, swayed like an infant in a cradle. Figures hunkered around him, trading words, and a fearsome thirst blazed in his throat.
Dim memories swam at the back of his mind. Hands dragging him. Food being shoveled between his lips, almost choking him. A cloth over his nose and mouth.
He groped for the side of the boat and retched. All around the vessel were green waves, clear as forest glass.
“Saint—” His voice was dry. “Water,” he said in Seiikinese. “Please.”
Nobody answered.
It was twilight. Or dawn. The sky was bruised with cloud, but the sun had left a finger-smear of honey. Niclays blinked the rain from his eyes and beheld the fire-orange sails that loomed over the boat, illuminated by scores of lanterns.
A ghost ship, wreathed in sea mist. One of his captors slapped him across the head and barked something in Lacustrine.
“All right,” Niclays murmured. “All right.”
He was heaved up by the ropes that bound his wrists and forced at knifepoint to a ladder. The sight of the ship undid his jaw and shook the last of the drowse from him.
A nine-masted galleon, its hull banded with iron, at least twice the length of a High Western. Niclays had never seen a ship as colossal as this, not even in Inysh waters. He placed his bare feet on the wooden slats and climbed, chased by shouts and jeers.
He was among pirates, undoubtedly. From the jade-green of the waves, this was most likely the Sundance Sea, which bled into the Abyss—the dark ocean that separated East from West and North and South. This was the sea he had crossed when he had sailed toward Seiiki all those years ago.
It would also be the sea he died in. Pirates were not known for their mercy, or their civil treatment of hostages. It was a wonder he had made it this far without having his throat slit.
At the top, he was led by his ropes across the deck. All around him were Eastern men and women, with a handful of Southerners scattered among them. Several of the pirates nailed suspicious looks on Niclays, while others ignored him. Many had a Seiikinese word inked on to their brows: murder, theft, arson, blasphemy—the crimes for which they had been punished.
Niclays was lashed to one of the masts, where he reflected on the misery of his condition. This had to be the largest ship in existence, which meant he had been snatched by the Fleet of the Tiger Eye: pirates who specialized in the shadow-market trade in parts taken from dragons. They also, like all pirates, indulged in many other crimes.
They had taken all his possessions, including the text Jannart had died for—the fragment that was never supposed to have come back to the East. It was the last piece of him Niclays still possessed and, damn his soul, he had lost it. The thought made him want to weep, but he had to convince these pirates that they needed an old man. Sobbing in terror was not the way to achieve that end.
It felt like months before somebody approached him. By that time, the sun was rising.
A Lacustrine woman came to stand before him. Paint darkened her lips. Over her grizzled hair was a headdress, golden and heavy with razor-sharp ornaments, each a little work of art. At her side was a sword just as golden and twice as sharp. The lines etched into her brown skin spoke of many years spent under the sun.
She was flanked by six pirates, including a moustachioed giant of a Sepuli fellow, whose bare chest was so smothered in tattoos that there was no virgin skin left on him. Giant tigers ripped dragons apart across his torso, and the blood swirled amid sea foam to his shoulders. A pearl sat right over his heart.
The leader—for leader she unquestionably was—wore a long coat of black watersilk. Her missing right arm had been replaced by an articulated wooden substitute, complete with an elbow, fingers, and a thumb, fitted with a cage over her shoulder and secured with a leather strap across her chest. Niclays doubted it was much use to her in the heat of battle, but it was a remarkable innovation, quite unlike anything he had seen in the West.
The woman regarded Niclays, then marched back into the crowd of pirates, who parted to let her through. The giant unraveled the ropes and bundled Niclays into her cabin, which was decorated with swords and bloody flags.
Two people stood in the corner. A thickset woman with freckled brown skin and lines around her mouth, and a bone-thin man, tall and pale, who frankly looked ancient. A tunic of tattered red silk came past his knees.
The pirate sprawled on a throne, accepted a wood-and-bronze pipe from the man, and inhaled whatever vapors were within. She considered Niclays through a blue-tinged haze before addressing him in Lacustrine. Her voice was deep and measured.
“My pirates do not usually take hostages,” the freckled woman translated into Seiikinese, “except when we are short of seafarers.” She arched an eyebrow at Niclays. “You are special.”
He knew better than to speak without permission, but inclined his head. The interpreter waited while the captain spoke again.
“You were found on the beach in Ginura, carrying certain documents,” the interpreter continued. “One of them is part of an ancient manuscript. How did you come into possession of this item?”
Niclays bowed low. “Honored captain,” he said, addressing the Lacustrine woman, “it was bequeathed to me by a dear friend after his death. I brought it with me when I came to Seiiki from the Free State of Mentendon, hoping to find some meaning behind it.”
His words were passed back to the woman in Lacustrine.
“And did you?” came the reply.
“Not yet.”
Her eyes were shards of volcanic glass.
“You have had this item for a decade and carry it on your person like a talisman, but you say you know nothing about it. A fascinating claim,” the interpreter said, once the captain had spoken. “Perhaps a beating will inspire you to tell the truth. When a person vomits blood, secrets often spill out with it.”
“Please,” he said, “it is the truth. Have mercy.”
She laughed softly as she answered.
“I did not become the lord of all pirates by showing mercy to thieving liars.”
Lord of all pirates.
This was not just any pirate captain. This was the dread sovereign of the Sundance Sea, the conqueror of myriad ships, a mistress of chaos with forty thousand pirates under her command. This was the Golden Empress, the enemy of order, who had clawed herself from poverty to construct her own nation on the waves—a nation beyond the dominion of dragons.
“All-honored Golden Empress.” Niclays prostrated himself. “Forgive me for not showing you the appropriate respect. I did not know who you were.” His knees screamed, but he kept his brow against the floor. “Let me sail with you. I will give you my skills as an anatomist, my knowledge, my loyalty. I will do anything you ask. Only spare my life.”
The Golden Empress took up her pipe again. “I would have asked your name, had you proven the existence of your backbone,” was her answer, “but you shall be called Sea-Moon now.”
The pirates at the door roared with laughter. Niclays winced. Sea-moon—the Seiikinese term for a quarl. A spineless jelly in the clutches of the current.
“You say you are an anatomist,” the interpreter said to Niclays, pausing every few moments to listen to the captain. “It so happens that I need a surgeon on this ship. My last one thought herself a cunning poisoner. She wanted vengeance for the ruin of her shit-heap of a village, so she dropped the gold silkworm into my wine.” The Golden Empress sipped from the pipe again, then breathed out a curl of smoke. “She learned that salt water is just as deadly.”
Niclays swallowed.
“I do not like to waste what I can use. Prove your skill,” the Golden Empress told him, “and we may talk again.”
“Thank you.” His voice split. “Thank you, all-honored captain. For your mercy.”
“This is not mercy, Sea-Moon. This is business.” She reclined in her seat and spoke again. “Be sure to be loyal to me,” the interpreter continued. “There are no second chances in the Fleet of the Tiger Eye.”
“I understand.” Niclays mustered his courage. “All-honored Golden Empress, I have one more question to ask, if I may.” She glanced at him. “Where is the dragon you took from the beach?”
“Below decks,” came the translation. “Drunk on firecloud. But not for long.” She raked her gaze over him. “We will speak again soon, Sea-Moon. For now, you have your first surgery to perform.”
