Inherit the Flame

Chapter Seven

Pelkaia lay dying. Every bone in her body ached. Every pore of her skin bled hot sweat into the fine linen of her sheets. The steady thrum of her heart was a stutter-stop drumbeat in her chest, marching her to her grave.

She twisted, feeling her back peel away from the sweat-puddle it had left throughout the night, the fresh air a blessed, cool kiss over her heat-tired skin. Movement sapped her strength, made her limbs shaky with exhaustion. Fingers jittery, she reached to the trunk bolted alongside her bed, slumping, fumbling with the catch.

So early. Sunlight slanted like blades across her cabin floor, pressed at her eyes and made her vision milky – no, that wasn’t the light. Old eyes. Old, stupid, failing eyes.

Been alive too long. Been moving and breathing and fucking and fighting longer than she’d had any right to. Even of the long-lived Catari, Pelkaia was an anomaly. Must be. Couldn’t even imagine the whole of her people stumbling through old age like this, wretched as she was.

How many years? Her fingertips brushed familiar bottles, body going through the motions even while her mind wandered down old, dusty hallways of memory. Really – how many years? How many children raised and, halfbreeds that they were, left to the dust? Except Kel. Sweet Kel. He’d died before his youth was through, died to hide Thratia’s plans.

She pulled stoppers with her teeth, drank bitter concoctions she hardly remembered the names of. Every morning, she forgot them. By night they’d be back again, filling up the empty spaces that now echoed in her brain. Full formulas, names, methods of growing the plants to make them. Each one was bitter, acerbic. A healthy throat would have rebelled at their abuse, but hers was long past healthy.

Ritual complete, she dropped the last of the bottles into place and flopped back into bed, arms splayed, feeling the potions that would be poison to any other body course through her. Eyes half-closed, she imagined them filling her veins, replacing her blood, re-inflating her vitality. Stolen time. That was all she had left, now.

But a little bit of stolen time might just be enough to do some good.

Or punish some wrongs.

The cabin door banged open, and she was amused to realize she remembered the sound. Coming back up, now, she thought. Raising herself from the dead. Her skin was growing cooler, almost clammy, the sweat that sheathed her turning into chilly condensation. She cracked an eye, saw her vision clear, then risked cracking the other. Took a breath, and noted her lungs inflated fully.

Functional, then. At least for another day.

“Pell?”

Oh. Right. Coss. She’d been so busy raising herself from near-death she’d forgotten he came in to wake her every morning. Well, ostensibly to wake her. She suspected he insisted on barging in as soon as the sun was up to make sure she was still alive.

“I’m here,” she said, which was a rather stupid thing to say because, really, where else would she be?

“I see that.” His voice was soft, amused. Not long ago that voice had made her knees weak. It still made her head swim, her heart thump, if she were being honest with herself.

But that was before she started dying. She’d had to kick him out of her room, then. Couldn’t let your lover see you rot from the inside out. Poor dear thought he’d done something wrong. Probably thought Pelkaia was drinking herself to death, or something, with all the bottles she kept locked up in her room. She almost giggled at the thought, then remembered she had company.

“Give me a hand?” she asked, after she moved to swing her legs over the bed’s edge and realized they weren’t quite ready to obey her yet.

Coss was at her side in an instant, his big hand enfolding hers while he slipped the other behind her back, between her shoulder blades where the sweat was still thick, and helped her upright. Either he didn’t notice, or he pretended not to, when her legs thumped weakly over the edge of the bed, heels dragging on the floor.

Gods below the dunes, but the worry in his eyes almost broke her faster than the age taking its dues on her organs.

“Are you well?” he asked, which seemed a stupid question, because obviously she wasn’t.

“Stomach upset,” she lied easily, giving him a lopsided smile as she pushed a sweat-damp chunk of hair off her forehead. No one ever asked detailed questions about stomach troubles.

Except Coss, apparently. “What did you eat last night?”

She sighed and rolled her eyes, wiggling her fingers to get the feeling back in them. “Same thing as everyone else, just didn’t take well to me.”

The look he gave her was clear enough. He thought she was full of donkeyshit. Which she was, but that wasn’t any of his business.

As clarity seeped back into her overheated mind, she began to realize just what was wrong with this scene. Why Coss was seeing her so weak and shaking when she’d taken great pains to push him away from this, away from the truth of what was eating her up inside. Coss came to her every morning, sure, but after she’d raised herself from the dead. After she’d had her bath and her elixirs and had a moment to sit just breathing, gathering herself against the plain exertion of living.

Essi. Little pouf-headed Essi was supposed to bring her a bucket to wash with in the morning, supposed to knock on the door to raise her from her sleep long before the sun got high enough to glare through her window like it was doing now. Pelkaia blinked, taking in the room through clearing eyes. There was the bucket, full up to the brim by the shut door. But no Essi. And here was Coss. Frowning at her like he’d said something and she hadn’t answered. Probably the truth, that. She forced herself to focus. She was the captain of this ship, and a protocol she’d initiated had been broken. Find out the reason. Find out why Coss was looking at her like he’d seen a ghost, when he wasn’t meant to realize she was teetering on the edge of the pits until she’d fallen into the dark of them.

“Where’s Essi? Why did she not wake me?” And, unspoken, why are you here now? But she didn’t need to explain that. He knew her well enough to scrape the meaning from the surface of her words.

“Essi hollered at your door for a half-mark before Jeffin came and got me. Thought you were dead.”

She was, of course; the timing just hadn’t quite caught up with her yet. But that wasn’t any of his business. “So you decided to let yourself in. Without permission.”

His expression locked down. Well, as locked down as he could make it. Even stoic, practical Coss couldn’t hide his feelings from her. She’d spent too long making a study of faces, the way they ticked away every emotional beat coursing through a person. It was what she was. Doppel. No, that wasn’t right. Illusionist. Yes. Better.

“I thought you were ill and needed assistance.” He gave her a slow look, making a point of taking in her still-trembling limbs and the human-shaped imprint of sweat on her sheets. Just as she didn’t need to say everything she was thinking to get her meaning across, neither did he. What a sweet pair they’d made. She missed that. Missed him filling in the blanks of what she didn’t say, missed him supporting her in all the hundreds of subtle ways only a person who has become your other half in truth ever really can. Missed doing the same for him.

Like now. A few months ago, if she’d seen that look on his face, she’d reach out. Brush his cheek. Give his hand a squeeze. Or even just smile in that way she knew made his belly loose. A little upward quirk of the lips, a sideways peek through her lashes.

She caught herself halfway between smiling and reaching for him. Shook her head to clear it.

“I was ill,” she said, realizing she needed to back up her lie about her stomach. “Thank you for checking on me. I’m strong enough to wash now, if you don’t mind…?”

It wasn’t a question, they both knew that. He pursed his lips at her, shifted his weight uncomfortably in his crouch. He didn’t want to leave, probably feared her drowning in her wash water, but she was captain. And though she hadn’t exactly given him an order… well. She had, really.

“Call for me if you require help.” So formal. So stiff. Not bothering to hide a grimace he pushed to his feet, knees popping, and made a show of rubbing the small of his back. She almost laughed. How old was he? Thirty, forty? She’d never been good at guessing ages, but whatever his small aches, they were nothing compared to the bonewither eating her alive. She envied him his sore knees, his knotted back. Envied him the time he had left.

Envied, too, whoever would get to spend that time with him once she was gone.

He left her there, shutting the door gently behind him, and it took her longer than she’d ever admit to find her feet, to shuffle over to the bucket of sun-warmed water and wash the sticky sweat from her body. The trembling of her limbs sprayed droplets across the floor, sprinkled wet darkness on her walls, her shelf. She grit her teeth, breathed deep and even, and by the time she was washed and dressed in clothes loose enough to hide the bone braces she wore all the time now, she was stable. Calm. Something like her old self.

Whatever that meant. Standing before her mirror as she forced her hair into a tight queue – Ripka’s style, part of her recalled as she worked – she wondered if the madness that had driven her mother to raving fits was finally taking root in her own mind. She’d caught glimpses of it during those days in Aransa, when Kel was left cooling beneath the sand and she had only her vengeance to nurse. Felt the intoxicating lilt of mania speed her heart and sharpen her mind every time she picked up a blade to draw blood. If it wasn’t for the responsibility of the Larkspur and its crew – she had given up hiding it after the Remnant, given up on being the Mirror – then she would have devolved into her mother’s madness in the days after Aransa.

Or dedicated her life to destroying Thratia Ganal.

Maybe that was what she was doing, after all. She had gathered a cadre of skilled deviants, stolen them away from Thratia’s reach, trained them up to be stronger and more refined than they had any right to be as non-Catari.

In those moments she had felt calm. Centered. As if in rescuing her little collection of deviants she was doing a good thing. And she had been. Still was. Rumors swirled about deviants hiding in Hond Steading, after all. That was the only reason they were still lingering here. Fishing, fishing.

But maybe those were just the reasons she gave them all. Lies she’d told to herself. Maybe… maybe the madness had never really left her. Could it ever? She recalled islands of sanity in her life, oases of peace raising her children bracketed by hard rage and desperation.

She had done good, in the literal sense. Had saved lives. But she was doppel – illusionist – and duplicity was bred into her bones. Bones that were leaking their true nature throughout her now.

She had been saving people, yes. But she had also been gathering them. Gathering weapons.

Weapons Thratia Ganal was coming to meet.

Pelkaia smiled at herself in the mirror, and did not bother covering her Catari features with a false face today. When she opened her cabin door to gaze upon her crew, to issue the orders for the day, she looked upon them all – each in turn – and saw them for the truth beneath the veneer.

Sharpened spears, under her command. Weapons the likes of which hadn’t been released upon the Scorched since the time of Catari dominance.

And as they smiled at her, waved good morning and asked after her recovery from her so-called stomach troubles, she realized the true extent of her command, here and now. They trusted her. Implicitly.

Pelkaia looked upon her unknowing soldiers, and was filled with joy.