When he woke, the cold was brutal, and the sky wore the sickly purple of dusk, casting everything into shadow. It took Loth a moment to realize he was bound.
Spray dampened his face. His head pounded horribly, and his senses were sludge.
He blinked the fur of exhaustion away. In the dim glow of the lanterns, he made out a figure at the helm of the Rose Eternal.
“Captain Harlowe?”
No reply. When his vision sharpened, he saw that it was the woman from Feather Island.
No.
They had no time to go off-course. He struggled against his restraints, but there was enough rope around him to hang a giant. Beside him, Thim was also trussed to the mast. Loth nudged him with his shoulder.
“Thim,” he whispered.
The gunner did not answer. A bruise was forming on his temple.
Loth turned his head and took their captor in. She was about twenty, perhaps a touch younger, leanly built. Short black hair framed a tanned and windburned face.
“Who are you?” Loth called to her. His throat scorched with thirst. “Why have you taken this ship?”
She ignored him.
“I hope you realize that you have committed an act of piracy, mistress,” Loth bit out. “Turn back at once, or I shall take this as a declaration of war on Queen Sabran of Inys.”
Nothing.
Whoever this silent vagabond was, she had the other jewel. Fate had brought it into his path.
A hand-length case, painted with flowers, hung from a sash at her hip. That must be where she kept it.
Loth dozed for a time. Thirst and exhaustion pulled at him, and one side of his head was pounding. Sometime in the night, he blinked awake and found a gourd at his lips. He drank without question.
Thim, too, was now alert. The woman let him drink and spoke to him in a foreign tongue.
“Thim,” Loth muttered, “do you understand her?”
The other man was blear-eyed. “Yes, my lord. She’s Seiikinese,” he said slowly. “She asks how you know about the jewel.”
She stayed crouched in front of them, watching their faces. In the glow of the lantern she had brought with her, Loth could make out the scar on her cheek. “Tell her I know where its twin is,” he said. He looked the woman in the eye as Thim translated, and she replied.
“She says that if that is true,” Thim said, “you will be able to tell her what color it is.”
“White.”
When Thim conveyed the words to her, she leaned toward Loth and took hold of his throat.
“Where?” she asked.
So she did speak a little Inysh. Her voice was as cold as her cast-iron expression.
“Inys,” he said.
Her mouth pinched shut. A fine-cut mouth that looked as if it seldom smiled.
“You must give the jewel to me,” Loth beseeched her. “I have to take it to Queen Sabran, to reunite it with its twin. Together, they can be used to destroy the Nameless One. He will rise again soon, in a matter of weeks. He will come from the Abyss.”
Frowning, Thim passed his words to the woman in Seiikinese. Her face hardened before she stood and left them.
“Wait,” Loth called after her, frustrated. “For the love of the Saint, did you not hear what I said?”
“We should not provoke her, Lord Arteloth,” Thim warned. “The rest of the crew could be stranded on Feather Island for weeks, if not months, without a ship. We are now the only ones who can take word of Queen Sabran’s proposal to His Imperial Majesty.”
He was right. Their plan was at the mercy of this pirate. Loth sank into his bindings.
Thim tipped back his head and squinted. It took a moment for Loth to realize that he was reading the stars.
“Impossible,” Thim murmured. “We cannot have got this far east in so little time.”
Loth watched the woman. One of her hands was on the wheel. The other now held a dark stone. For the first time, he became aware of the unbroken roar of water against the ship.
She was using the jewel to drive the Rose forward.
“My lord,” Thim said under his breath, “I think I know where we are going.”
“Tell me.”
“We heard a rumor at sea that the Golden Empress—leader of the Fleet of the Tiger Eye—was sailing east in pursuit of the elixir of life. Her butcher-ship, the Pursuit, left Kawontay not long ago. They were bound for the Unending Sea.”
“What is the Fleet of the Tiger Eye?”
“The largest pirate fleet in existence. They steal and slaughter dragons when they can.” Thim glanced at the woman. “If she is chasing the Golden Empress—and I cannot think why else we would be this far east—then we are both dead men.”
Loth eyed her. “She seems a very good fighter.”
“One fighter cannot best hundreds of pirates, and not even the Rose stands a chance against the Pursuit. It is a fortress on the sea.” Thim swallowed. “We might be able to take the ship back.”
“How?”
“Well, when she leaves it, my lord. A man-of-war needs a vast crew, but . . . I suppose we have no choice but to try.”
They lapsed into silence for a while. All Loth could hear was the crash of the waves.
“Seeing as we have nothing better to do but wait, perhaps we could play a game.” He offered the gunner a tired smile. “Are you good at riddles, Thim?”
The stars burned like a host of candles. Tané kept her gaze on them as she steered the Inysh ship, using the west wind as well as the jewel to spur it.
The Inysh lord and the Lacustrine gunner were finally asleep. For quarter of an hour, the former had been straining to solve the easiest of riddles, making Tané grind her teeth in irritation.
I close in the morning, I open at night,
And when I am open, your eye I delight.
I am pale as the moon and live only as long –
For when the sun rises, behold, I am gone.
At least now he had stopped blathering about how clever it was, and she could think. If she timed this right, she would be under the eye of the Magpie tonight.
Using the jewel had left a fine sheen of cold sweat on her. She breathed slow and deep. Though it never drained her strength for long, she sensed that the jewel was drawing on something in her. She was the string, and the jewel was the bow, and only together could they make the ocean sing.
“Loth.”
Startled, Tané glanced across the deck. The Inysh man was awake once more.
“Loth,” he repeated, and tapped his own chest.
Tané looked back at the stars.
In the South House, she had learned some of every language in the known world. She knew Inysh well enough, but she preferred that the strangers thought otherwise, lulling them into the false belief that they could speak freely.
“May I ask your name?” the Inysh man said.
Great Kwiriki, wash away this fool. Still, he knew about the waning jewel—that was reason enough to keep him alive.
“Tané,” she finally said.
“Tané.”
He said it gently. She stared him out.
Though he could be no more than thirty, and though he looked presently as if a smile had never been further from his face, there were already laugh lines around his full lips. His skin was the same deep brown as his eyes, which were large and full of warmth. His nose was broad, his jaw strong and unshaven, and his black hair puffed in small, tight curls.
She had the sense that he was kind.
Straight away, she shook off the thought. He hailed from a land that spat on her gods.
“If you cut me loose,” Loth said, “perhaps I can help you. You’ll have to stop in a day or two. To sleep.”
“You misjudge how long I can last without sleep.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You do speak Inysh.”
“Enough.”
The Westerner looked as if he might speak again, but seemed to think better of it. He leaned against the gunner and closed his eyes.
She would have to question him sooner or later. If he knew where the other jewel was, then it had to be returned to dragonkind—but first, she needed to reach Nayimathun.
When Loth finally dozed off, Tané took stock of the stars and turned the wheel. The jewel was like ice in her hand. If she continued like this, she would soon be in Komoridu.
She drank a little from her gourd and blinked the dryness from her eyes.
All she had to do was stay awake.
The Unending Sea was an exquisite sapphire blue that turned almost to violet when the sun set. There were no birds in the sky, and emptiness as far as the eye could see.
It was this emptiness that concerned Niclays. The fabled isle of Komoridu had yet to show itself.
He gulped from his flask of rose wine. The pirates had been generous tonight. Their leader had made it clear to them that if they found the riches of the world, they would owe it to the Master of Recipes.
And if they failed to find anything, all of them would know who was to blame.
Death had never held much power over him. He thought of it as he did an old friend that would one day knock again on his door.
For years, he had sought to make the elixir of immortality in the spirit of discovery. He had never meant to drink it. Death, after all, would either end the pain of grief or reunite him with Jannart in whichever afterlife proved to be the right one. Each day, each step, each tick of the clock took him closer to that golden possibility. He was tired of having half a soul.
Yet now death loomed, he did fear it. His hands shook as he gulped more wine. It occurred to him briefly that he ought to stop drinking, to keep his wits about him, but even sober, he would never be able to fight off a pirate. Best he was benumbed.
The ship kept cleaving through the water. Night painted darkness overhead. Soon enough, he was out of wine. He dropped the flask into the sea and watched it bob away.
“Niclays.”
Laya was hurrying up the stairs, clutching her shawl around herself. She took him by the arm.
“They’ve seen something ahead,” she said, eyes bright with dread or excitement. “The lookouts.”
“What sort of something?”
“Land.”
Niclays stared in disbelief. Breathless, he followed her to the prow of the ship, where the Golden Empress stood with Padar.
“You are in luck, Roos,” the former said.
She handed him her nightglass. Niclays squinted into it.
An island. Unquestionably. A small one, almost certainly uninhabited, but an island nonetheless. He breathed out as he handed the nightglass back.
“I am glad to see it, all-honored Golden Empress,” he said frankly.
She beheld the island with a hunter’s intent. As she turned to one of her officers, Niclays glanced at the notches on her wooden arm.
“She’s signaling to the Black Dove to circle the island,” Laya murmured. “The High Sea Guard could still be on our tail. Or rumors could have reached another pirate ship of our quest.”
“Surely no pirate captain would be fool enough to confront a ship like this.”
“The world is full of fools, Niclays. And they are never more foolish than when they smell eternal life.”
Sabran could attest to that.
So could Jannart.
Niclays tapped his fingers on the gunwale. As the island came closer, his mouth turned dry as ashes.
“Come, Roos,” the Golden Empress said. Her voice was velvet soft. “You ought to share in the first spoils. After all, you brought us here.”
He dared not argue.
When they were anchored, the Golden Empress addressed her pirates. This island, she told them, was home to a bounty that would lay waste to their troubles. The elixir would make them all-powerful. They would be masters of the sea. Her people roared and stamped their feet until Niclays was brittle with fear. They might be triumphant now, but one sniff of failure, one whisper that they had come all this way for nothing, and their joy would turn to murderous ire.
A boat was readied for the scouting party. Laya and Niclays joined the twenty members of the crew, including the Golden Empress, who would set foot on the island before anyone else, and Ghonra, her heir. Though Niclays supposed she would never need an heir if they did find the elixir.
The rowing boat glided out of the shadow of the Pursuit. It soon became apparent to Niclays that what they could see of the island was only the pinnacle of it. Much of the rest had been claimed by the sea.
When they could go no farther, they left two of their number with the boat and waded the rest of the way. Niclays stepped onto dry land and wrung the water from his shirt.
This place might be his grave. He had imagined being folded into the dirt of Orisima. Instead, his bones would lie on a hidden island in the vastness of a far-off sea.
Drunkenness made him slow. When Ghonra looked over her shoulder and arched an eyebrow at him, he took a deep breath and trudged after her, up a hummock of slippery rock.
Their footsteps took them into the darkness of a forest. The only hint of civilization was the stone bridge they used to cross a stream. He made out a flight of steps, scarped into the rock. The Golden Empress was the first to mount it.
They climbed the stair for what seemed like hours. It snaked between endless maple and fir trees.
There were no dwellings here. No guardians of the mulberry tree. Just nature, given leave to run its course for centuries. Wasps droned and birds chirruped. A hart bounded across their path and back into the gloaming, startling half the pirates into drawing their swords.
Niclays panted. Sweat drenched his shirt. He mopped his brow fruitlessly as rivulets trickled down his brow. It had been a long time since he had exerted himself like this.
“Niclays,” Laya said under her breath. “Are you all right?”
“Dying,” he gritted out. “By the grace of the Damsel, I’ll expire before we reach the top.”
He only realized they had stopped when he walked headlong into Ghonra, who knocked him back with a pointy elbow to the gut. Legs trembling, Niclays looked up to behold a tree. A gnarled and ancient mulberry, larger than any tree he had ever laid eyes on.
Cut down.
Niclays stared at the fallen giant. The feeling bled from his legs. His lips began to shake, and his eyes grew hot.
He was here. At the end of the Way of the Outcasts. This was what Jannart had wanted to see, the secret he had died for. Niclays was standing in the realization of his dream.
His faithless dream.
The mulberry tree bore no flower or fruit. It looked almost grotesque in its mass, stretched beyond its natural proportions, like a body pulled upon a rack. Its trunk was as thick as a baleen. In death, its branches reached for the stars, as if they might hold out silver hands and help it stand again.
The Golden Empress walked slowly among its dead limbs. Laya took Niclays by the arm. He felt her shivering and found himself pressing his hand over hers.
“Yidagé, Roos,” the Golden Empress called, “come here.”
Laya closed her eyes.
“It’s all right.” Niclays kept his voice low. “She won’t hurt you, Laya. You’re too useful to her.”
“I have no wish to watch her hurt you.”
“I am deeply hurt by how little faith you have in my capacity for battle, Mistress Yidagé.” He held up his cane with a weak smile. “I can take them all with this, don’t you think?”
She choked back a laugh.
“There are words carved here,” the Golden Empress said to Laya, when they were near. “Translate them.”
Her face betrayed nothing. Laya let go of Niclays and stepped over a branch and crouched beside the trunk. One of the pirates handed her a torch, and she held it carefully toward the tree. The flames shed light on a cascade of carved words.
“Forgive me, all-honored Golden Empress, but I cannot translate this. Bits of it are familiar, but much of it is not,” Laya said. “I fear it is beyond the realm of my knowledge.”
“Perhaps I can.”
Niclays glanced over his shoulder. The Seiikinese scholar, the one who was never far from the Golden Empress, laid a withered hand on the trunk as if it were the earthly remains of an old friend.
“The torch, if you please,” he said. “This will not take long.”
There was no moonlight to betray the Western ship. From high in its yards, Tané watched the pirates go ashore.
The Rose Eternal was anchored where the pirates could not see. After she had turned the ship southeast at the right moment, they had sailed until her nightglass revealed an island.
Elder Vara believed the rising jewel had come from here. Perhaps this place held the secret of why it had been in her side—or perhaps not. What mattered was Nayimathun.
The wind blew strands of hair across her face. She knew these ships from her days in the South House, where she had learned to identify the most notorious vessels in the Fleet of the Tiger Eye. Both carried the red sails of sickness. The Black Dove, which was half the length of the Pursuit, was circling the island with its gun ports open.
Tané descended to the deck. She had freed her two captives so they might help her.
“You,” Tané said to Thim. “While I am gone, guard the ship.”
Thim watched her. “Where are you going?”
“To the Pursuit.”
“They will tear you apart.”
“Help me survive, and I will see to it that you get to the Empire of the Twelve Lakes in one piece. Betray me, and I will leave you here to die,” Tané said. “The choice is yours.”
“Who are you?” Thim asked, frowning. “You fight better than any soldier. None of the crew stood a chance against you. Why were you drafted into the ranks of the scholars, and not the Miduchi?”
Tané handed him the nightglass.
“If they see you,” was all she said, “fire one of the cannons as a warning.”
But Thim had realized. She watched the deference rise into his eyes. “You were Miduchi.” Thim studied her face. “Why were you banished?”
“Who I am and who I was are none of your concern.” She nodded to Loth. “You. Come with me.”
“Into the sea?” Loth stared at her. “We’ll freeze.”
“Not if we keep moving.”
“What do you mean to do on that ship?”
“Free a prisoner.”
Tané braced herself before she climbed down the side of the ship, shivering in the chill. Then she let go.
Her body plunged into darkness. The cold knocked the breath from her, bubbles exploding from her lips.
It was worse than she had expected. She had swum every day in Seiiki, whatever the season, but the Sundance Sea had never been this frigid. When she surfaced, her breath came in white puffs. Behind her, Loth made wordless sounds of discomfort. He was at the bottom of the slats.
“Just jump,” Tané forced out. “It will b-be over sooner.”
Loth squeezed his eyes shut, and his face took on the forbearance of a man who had consigned himself to death before he let go. He sank and surfaced in an instant, gasping.
“Saint—” His teeth chattered. “It’s f-freezing.”
“Then you will need to hurry,” Tané said, and swam.
The lanterns on the Pursuit were extinguished. The ship was so tall that Tané had little fear of the lookouts. They would never see two heads in the dark water. After all, these nine-masted treasure galleons were larger than any other ship in the world. More than large enough to hold a dragon.
Movement was difficult. The cold stiffened her joints. Tané sucked in a breath and went below the waves again. When she came up beside the Pursuit, Loth was close behind, shivering uncontrollably. She had meant to crawl in through the gun ports, but they were closed, and there were no obvious handholds.
The anchor. It was the only link between the water and the deck. She swam beside the hull until she reached the stern.
Salt water mingled with sweat as she lifted herself from the sea and climbed. She could hear Loth struggling up behind her. Every inch of progress felt hard-won. Each limb was fighting to remember its strength.
Close to the top, she lost her grip.
It happened too fast for her to so much as take a breath, let alone scream. One moment she was rising; the next, falling—then she hit something warm and solid. She looked down to see Loth below her. Her foot had landed on his shoulder.
She could tell he was straining to hold them both up, but he smiled. Tané looked away and kept climbing.
Her arms were trembling by the time she reached the defaced carving of the great Imperial Dragon at the stern of the ship. She climbed around it, pulled herself over the side, and landed, light-footed, on the deck. The Golden Empress would be on the island, but she would have left guards behind.
Keeping low, Tané wrung the icy water from her tunic. Loth fell into a crouch beside her. She could just make out the silhouettes of the hundreds of pirates left on board.
The Pursuit was a lawless city on the sea. Like all pirate ships, it absorbed miscreants from many parts of the world. In this darkness, provided no one stopped them, they might be able to blend in. Three flights of steps would take them to the lowest deck on the ship.
She straightened and walked out from their hiding place. Loth followed her, keeping his head down.
Pirates surrounded them. Tané could hardly see any of their faces. She heard strains of their conversations.
“—gut the old man if he’s betrayed us.”
“He’s no fool. What purpose would there be in—?”
“He’s Mentish. The Seiikinese would have kept him cooped up like a songbird in Orisima,” a woman said. “Perhaps he would take death over imprisonment. Like the rest of us.”
Roos.
There was no other Ment they could be talking about.
Her fingertips grew hot. She itched to wrap her hands around his throat.
It was not Roos’s fault that she had been sent to Feather Island. She alone was to blame for that. Yet he had blackmailed her. He had dared to ask her to hurt Nayimathun. Now he was abetting the pirates who took and slaughtered dragons. For all those things, he deserved death.
She tried to quash the desire for it. There could be no distractions here.
They slipped into the stairway that would take them to the hull. At the bottom, one lantern flickered. Its flame revealed two scarred pirates, both armed with pistols and swords. Tané walked toward them.
“Who goes there?” one of them asked roughly.
One shout would draw a throng of pirates from above. She would have to kill them, and in silence.
Like water.
Her knife slid through the shadows, straight into a beating heart. Before the other guard could react, she had slit his throat. The look in his eyes was like nothing Tané had ever seen. The shock. The realization of his mortality. The reduction of his being to the wetness at his neck. A wordless sound came bubbling from his lips, and he crumpled at her feet.
The taste of iron filled her mouth. She watched the blood throb out of him, black in the lanternlight.
“Tané,” Loth said.
Her skin was as chill as the sword in her hand.
“Tané.” His voice was hoarse. “Please. We must hurry.”
Two corpses lay before her. Her stomach roiled, and blackness hit her like a cloud of flies.
She had killed. Not the way she had killed Susa. This time, she had taken life with her own hand.
Dizzy, she raised her head. Loth removed the lantern that hung above the bodies and held it out to her. She took it, hand unsteady, and walked into the innards of the ship.
She could ask forgiveness from the great Kwiriki in good time. For now, she must find Nayimathun.
At first, all she could see were supplies. Barrels of water. Sacks of rice and millet. Chests that must be filled with plunder. When she caught a glimpse of green, she let out a breath.
Nayimathun.
She was still breathing. Chains held her down, and a wound had festered where scale had been torn from her flesh, but she was breathing.
Loth drew a sign on his chest. He looked as if he had seen his own doom.
Tané sank to her knees before the god who had once been her kin, abandoning her sword and lantern.
No answer. Tané tried to swallow the thickness in her throat. Her eyes brimmed as she took in the damage the chains had wreaked.
A tear ran to her jaw. She boiled with loathing. No one with a soul could do this to a living thing. No one with a shred of shame could treat a god this way. Dragons had sacrificed so much to protect the mortals who shared their world. In return, mortals gave only malice and greed.
Nayimathun kept breathing. Tané stroked a hand down her snout, where the scales were dry as cuttlebone. It was unspeakably cruel of them to have kept her out of water for this long.
“Great Nayimathun.” She whispered it. “Please. It’s me. It’s Tané. Let me take you home.”
One eye peeled open. The blue in it was dim, like the last glow of a long-dead star.
“Tané.”
She had never truly believed she would hear that voice again.
“Yes.” Another tear dribbled down her cheek. “Yes, great Nayimathun. I am here.”
“You came,” Nayimathun said. Her breaths were labored. “You should not have come.”
“I should have come sooner.” Tané lowered her head. “Forgive me. For letting them take you.”
“Someone took you first,” the dragon growled. A tooth was missing from her lower jaw. “You are hurt.”
“This is not my blood.” With unsteady hands, Tané opened the case at her hip and fumbled out the jewel. “I found one of the jewels you spoke about, Nayimathun. It was sewn into my side.” She held it out so the dragon could see it. “This Westerner claims he knows the one who has its twin.”
Nayimathun looked for a long time at the jewel, then at Loth, who was shaking in his boots.
“We can speak of this when we are in a safe place,” she said, “but by finding these jewels, you have given us a way to fight the Nameless One. For this, Tané, every dragon that draws breath is in your debt.” A faint light rippled through her scales. “I am still strong enough to break through the hull, but I must be free. You will need the key to my chains.”
“Tell me who has it.”
The dragon closed her eyes again.
“The Golden Empress,” she said.
