Break the Chains

Chapter Thirty-Two

Their captors had the good manners to supply them all with a toasty, roaring fire. It was just too bad they were enjoying it in sodden coats with their wrists trussed up like they were ready to be roasted over the flames. Detan muttered and squirmed, drawing a sharp glare from the man he’d named Grumps, as their captors had declined to introduce themselves.

Grumps sat on an upturned log at one end of the fire. His companion who Detan thought of as Greybeard, sat opposite. The men who’d come at him with crossbows conferred somewhere in the strange forest.

He’d never seen such creepy trees before, with silver bark and leaves so dark green they appeared black. Someone had been tending to those trees, weeding around their roots and pruning the branches with care. Sacks of bark curls huddled near the roots of one tree, and strips of bark had been hung up to dry from a washing line strung between two branches. He eyed Greybeard, imagining him with a flower-embroidered gardening apron and a watering can of blood to feed his trees with.

Upon his return to Pelkaia’s crew, he’d been dismayed to discover that they had nothing to answer for the well-oiled crossbows pointed in their direction. He’d expected, at the very least, the entertainment of a scuffle, but instead they’d put their blades down and lifted their hands to the air much as he had. No doubt they suspected they couldn’t poke holes in the men before their assaulters got their shots off, but Detan had been disappointed by the rollover.

He was wet. He was tired. And he was incredibly sick of having to fight for every damned little thing.

But the watchers hadn’t rolled on them, as he feared they would. They kept their lips clamped as tightly as Pelkaia’s crew did, shrugging in faked ignorance when their captors pressed them for details on the Larkspur’s unique shape, and what kind of crew was left on board.

Pelkaia sat beside Detan, Coss directly across the fire from them, the sparking flames obscuring his face from view. She shifted, a touch more subtly than Detan had done, and he had to repress a sigh. She was clearly trying to communicate something to Coss, and doing it poorly. Which meant he had to cause a distraction, lest they all get beaten for her disturbance.

Trouble was, he had no idea how to go about causing a distraction that wouldn’t get him hit. He eyed their two minders, ignoring Pelkaia’s ineffective squirming, and decided to focus on Grumps. That one looked least likely to do his talking with his fists.

“Hey, Grumps,” he called above the crack of the flame. Both of the guards looked his way.

“Quiet,” Greybeard snapped.

Detan sighed and slumped, shifting his feet as if he had an itch he couldn’t shake. Grumps and Greybeard kept an eye on him, but held their admonishments for the time being.

Pelkaia angled her wrists around her back and tried to flash a hand gesture down low by her hip. No way in the pits Coss was going to see that, not with the flames blaring bright in his eyes. Pelkaia should realize that.

An out of place shadow flitted over Coss’s shoulder. Ah, so the signal wasn’t for Coss. Someone was out there, moving through the woods, and he had a real good feeling it wasn’t the crossbowmen.

“I’ve got to use the little boy’s tree,” Detan said.

“Hold it,” Grumps said.

“Not likely.”

“Just take him,” Greybeard said.

“You take him if you’re so keen.”

“Somebody take him,” Pelkaia said. “Or I’ll kill him if he wets himself sitting next to me.”

“You’re not killing anyone, missy.”

“Sure about that?”

Greybeard stood, baited by her implicit challenge, and Detan had to keep himself from snorting at how easily the old bastard had been manipulated. Greybeard stroked the forward curve of his crossbow, the weapon resting against his shoulder. His walk had a slight stutter to it, some old injury giving his knee a twinge every time he stepped, but he carried himself easily as he approached Pelkaia, his smirk growing with every hitching step.

“Think you’re tough, lady? All tied up like that?”

“I could take you drunk and stumbling, old man.”

He spat at her feet. “You’re not worth the time it’d take to strangle you.”

“And yet you hobbled all the way over here to tell me that.”

He lashed out, striking the side of her head with one flat palm. Her body jerked, shoulder slamming into Detan, and he stiffened his back to keep them both from toppling over. With a snorting laugh, she shook her head and grinned up at Greybeard. Detan winced. This level of escalation really wasn’t what he was after.

“That’s no way to treat a prisoner,” Detan said, forcing his voice to calm gravitas. Greybeard snorted.

“Have I offended the lord’s gentle sensibilities? Mercy me. Was it this?” He spat at Pelkaia’s feet again. “Or this?” he raised his hand to strike her once more.

“Easy,” Grumps said.

“Aw, come on, we’re allowed a little fun.” He grinned with all four teeth. “We’re simple servants of her highness, after all.”

Detan’s brows shot up. “You work for the empress?”

“Shut your mouth,” Grumps said.

“Bah.” Greybeard waved Pelkaia and Detan away with a flick of his hand. “Who cares what they hear? Once Tek takes their ship they won’t be telling anyone about this, will they?”

What warmth the fire imparted to his tired skin fled in a flash. They were being held as potential hostages for Tibs and Jeffin. Nothing else. Which meant that the crew left aboard the Larkspur was unlikely to leave it. Whatever Tek concocted to lure them off the ship, Tibs would see through it in an instant. So they were on their own out here. Just Pelkaia, her tired crew, and a couple of pits-battered watchers. Maybe he hadn’t seen anything important in that shadow after all.

Pelkaia stiffened beside him, more than likely coming to the same conclusion. Detan surveyed the state of the watchers. Across the fire, the captain looked hale enough, and by the glower shoving his slate brows down Detan guessed he’d figured out what their future looked like, too. The two watchers tied next to their captain were in a worse state, lolling against each other and generally having a hard time keeping their eyes open. A watcher on the other side of Pelkaia looked like she might be able to get to her feet, but that was about it.

The rest of the crew was exhausted, heads sagging. They may have had the greater numbers, but he doubted they could get the upper hand. If they’d had the strength, they would have fought back when their captors made them leave the most grievously injured of the watchers behind on the beach.

Greybeard shuffled back to his post, and while his back was turned Pelkaia met Detan’s gaze. Her eyes were blood-shot, her temple swollen and purple, her lips tinged with blue from the cold. The sea had plastered her hair to her head, and the warmth of the fire had fluffed it out again. She looked like a wild thing. A creature risen straight out of the thick brush all around them. Wild or not, there was a question in her glance, a slight tip of the chin and raise of the brow that he recognized all too well: ready? she was asking him.

He shrugged. Whatever she had planned, he wasn’t going to be more ready for it anytime soon.

“Coss,” she said. Just that. Just his name. But that’s all it took.

Detan’s world turned inside out.

His ears popped, his head spun. Detan swayed, disoriented. People around him shouted things. He had no idea what they were.

“Honding. Focus.” Pelkaia’s voice was in his ear, her shoulder shoved up against his. He’d slumped into her, nestled his cheek against her collarbone. He jerked up, startled. What in the pits had Coss done?

Above the fire an amorphous blob distorted the air, a place of unreality as tall as his arm was long and wide as his waist. It shimmered, then split, each half hurtling toward Greybeard and Grumps respectively. Sel. Out of a dark, empty sky.

Greybeard drew his arm back, taking aim at Coss, ready to throw his knife. Detan’s stomach lurched. It was them, or everyone else. Maybe all of the above, if he couldn’t rein his strength in. Exhaustion swelled through him, threatened to drain away even the weapon of his anger. He breathed deep, watched Greybeard bring his hand back and cock his wrist as if from a faraway place, as if everything in the world were slow but Detan.

Coss slammed the sel blobs into Greybeard and Grumps. The blobs were too big. Detan’d burn them all.

Greybeard leaned forward, oblivious of the real threat behind him, and his hand angled as he prepared to throw. Coss could not move out of the way in time. Not trussed up like that. He was dead already, if Greybeard threw.

Detan let his anger go.

He was warm and he was wet again and he didn’t know why. His ears rang, a soft tin hiss that wouldn’t let him go. He shook his head, struggled to stand, swayed and put a hand down, realized his wrists had been freed. He blinked, saw grey smudges in his eyelids and blinked again. Pelkaia took his arm and eased him back down to a seat on a log. When did he get a log?

Her cheek was smattered with blood, her hair too, and she stared so hard into his eyes he squirmed from the pressure. “What happened?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, closed it, and shook her head. “You tell me.”

Behind her, the watchers and crew members were cutting their bonds with Greybeard’s knife, grime faces spattered with blood like it’d been coming down with the rain. He scowled, rubbed at his temples, and took his hands away to find them wet with blood too. He stared at his reddened fingers, at the speckled faces of the others. Realized with a sharp start why he didn’t see Greybeard and Grumps anymore. So much sel. So little flesh.

The fire had blown out, but a single tree burned merrily enough, its silvery bark letting off a noxious, acrid smoke. Detan grimaced, reached to rub his sore eyes, and thought better of it.

“Find the other three,” Pelkaia was giving orders to her crew. Orders the watchers appeared more than willing to follow. “Don’t parley.”

Determined nods all around. Of course. They wouldn’t want word of this little display leaking out. Detan shivered and lowered his head into his hands, not caring that he smeared his face and hair with another’s blood.

“Honding?” Pelkaia crouched before him, gripped both his wrists in her hands and moved his palms gently away from his face. They were alone now. There was real concern in her eyes, concern so motherly he almost laughed at it.

“I’m uninjured,” he said. Not all right. Not fine. Just uninjured. She seemed to take his meaning, and nodded.

“How long?” she asked.

It took him awhile, but understanding came. “Aransa.”

“The sky?” she pressed.

He swallowed, and nodded.

She sighed and shifted to sit next to him, keeping one hand locked around his forearm as if she were afraid he would blink out of existence if she let go.

“Tibs warned me,” he said. “Warned me I was losing it.”

“You think you’re losing control?” She shook her head. “You’re wrong.”

“That little display not evidence enough for you?”

She pursed her lips, mulling something over. “Think. Think back. What’s changed since Aransa? What really?”

“The sky. I set the sky on fire. It was too much. It…” He cleared his throat. “It opened a door.”

“No.”

“No? No? You’re not in my head, Pelkaia, though pits know you’re trying to be. You’ve no idea what I feel when I try to push it back. No idea how good it feels when I finally let go.”

The rustling of leaves and the heavy thuds of a scuffle echoed back to them over the steady patter of the rain and the howl of the winds and the crackling of the burning tree. He wiped his bloodied hands on his knees and tried to ignore it all. Tried to bring his world in so that all that mattered was the warmth of the fire and Pelkaia’s presence, a grounding weight at his side.

“Think harder,” she said. “Burning the sky was something you’ve always been capable of. The Century Gates, your pipeline at the Hond Steading selium mines. They’re all evidence of your ability, reaching back long before you ever set foot in Aransa. The sky is not what’s changed you.”

“Then why do my small uses spiral out of control? If I’m so unchanged, why does every attempt at deviant power I make go haywire?”

“I never said you were unchanged.”

He scratched the inside of his elbow. “Then what? What the fuck is wrong with me?”

“Nothing’s wrong, either. You still know all your calming techniques, all your meditations, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking back to the small meditations that Pelkaia had taught him on the deck of the Larkspur during the days they were all licking their wounds from Aransa.

“You still have Tibal. You still have your freedom. You should be able to achieve the same level of control you had in the days before Aransa. So what changed you?”

He stared at his arm. The heat of the raw spot of skin he kept scratching radiated through his sleeve. “The injection.”

“Yes. You saw, for a moment, what Coss sees when he uses his sel-sense. It’s hard for him, he can’t always see it. Can’t always make it work. What you saw is the limit of his sense, taking the small particles eddying in the winds and condensing them together. He’ll be aching for a week for that effort. But thanks to that injection, you’ve seen it now too.”

“It wore off,” he snapped. “I can’t see what Coss sees.”

“Anyone can tell rain is wet. Anyone can feel damp in a cloud. But it takes a special sense, an unnatural nudge, to feel the moisture in every breath. The tinge of water in the desert winds. It’s there. It’s always there. You saw sel’s omnipresence. That’s a hard vision to shake. I suspected, when you turned that tiny drop into more at Cracked Thorn, but–”

“I can’t see it anymore,” he insisted, and took a deep breath to push his anger aside. “When I reach for my sel-sense all I see is the sky as you see it, maybe even less refined. All those little lost particles, too small to fight the currents of air and rise upward, they’re gone. I’m blind to them now.”

“You don’t need to see them to know they’re there. You aren’t losing control, Honding. You’re getting stronger.”

She pat his knee and stood, striding off into the forest in the direction the scuffle had sounded. There wasn’t a care in the world in her stance, in the sway of her hips or the easy roll of her steps. Detan scowled after her, hating her for being at ease with the world when he was so torn up inside. He relaxed his face and shook his hands out. Harboring a grudge against Pelkaia for being happy wouldn’t help anyone, least of all himself.

Probably he should have been worried about that silver-barked tree catching flame on the other side of the firepit, but he had a hard time rustling up any feeling aside from a vague sense of self-pity.

He lost track of time, sitting there letting the heavy mist in the air dilute the blood on his hands until nothing was left save a ruddy orange stain. He ignored the shouts in the trees, the scuffling and twang of bows nearby. Pelkaia’s crew would win through the night, or they wouldn’t. He’d deal with the consequences of either outcome when they came to find him.

A crunch of leaves nearby brought his head up, made him focus on reality once more. Tibs slipped through the trees, narrow as they were, and settled on the log beside Detan where Pelkaia had sat. His hat dangled from his hands. He spun it round and round by the brim between his fingers.

“Rough night,” Tibs said.

“Had worse.”

“Every night listening to you snore is worse.”

Detan snorted, and Tibs clapped him on the back. “Everything’s secure. Pelkaia’s crew helped the watchers patch up their barge and they’re going to go on their merry way in the morning. Don’t much like the look of that repair job, blasted crew was all left thumbs slapping it together, but it should hold to Petrastad. Watch-captain said he’d tell his superiors back home they lost us in the storm.”

“And us?”

“We’ll spend the night here, and set out for the Remnant in the morning.”

Detan looked up at the sky, at the stars turned into foggy blurs by the smeared clouds and angry winds. “Hope she’s ready for us.”

Tibs chuckled. “This is Ripka Leshe we’re talking about. She’ll probably be queen of the place by the time we get there, ordering Nouli to figure out some new contraption to make food distribution more fair and efficient while forcing New Chum to lead a team of inmates and guards alike in scrubbing the place from top to bottom.”

“That’s our girl.” Detan snatched the hat from Tibs’s fingers and plunked it on his too-wet head. He stood, scrubbing the last of the blood clean on his Fleetie coat, then chucked the coat into the remaining fire. It sparked, warming his cheeks. He brushed his hands together, wiping away his troubles with each stroke. Ripka waited. He was not going to let her down, no matter what strange poison had taken hold in his veins.

“Come along, old chum. Let’s go see if we can rustle up some warm food and warmer blankets.”