Kor rose to his feet. “An eleven-year-old girl burns down a temple, killing dozens, and manages to escape the hordes of Lumina tracking her? Manages to elude them for seven years? There’s no ordinary girl who could do that.” Linking his hands behind his back, he began to walk in circles around Eris. “And then there’s the strange matter of Jemsin sending you away whenever he meets with the empress. As if he doesn’t want you seen by her.” Kor stopped circling and looked down at the top of her head. “I put the rest together myself. I’ve been putting it together for a while now, in fact. I intended to keep your secret . . . but then you burned down the Sea Mistress.”
Safire looked to find Eris staring hard at the floor.
“It was Leandra who came to our aid. She’s the one who lent me this ship.” He waved his hand at the room around them. “If I bring in her fugitive, she’ll give me a reward big enough to buy an entire fleet of ships. Do you know what that means for me? Freedom, Eris. No more living in Jemsin’s shadow. No more coming and going like a dog. Soon I won’t just be captain of my own ship, I’ll be captain of my own fleet. And then I will be the fiercest pirate on the Silver Sea.” Kor made a fist. “So you better pray to that god of yours tonight. Because tomorrow we reach the Star Isles.”
Safire’s head snapped up. The Star Isles. That was where Asha was. Which meant that once they reached the islands, all she had to do was escape and find her way to the scrin.
A tender spark of hope lit her up.
Eris went very still beside her.
“That’s right,” Kor smirked. “I’m handing you over to the Lumina.”
Safire found a ghost of a girl staring out through Eris’s eyes. At Kor’s mention of the islands, the color had drained from her face.
The boat rocked. The nausea swept through Safire again and she planted her hands on the deck, trying to shake it.
The girl named Rain hauled her to her feet, then marched her up the steps, out into the storm and across the slick deck, then down a narrow hall. Rain threw her into a room the size of a closet, then tossed Eris in after her.
The moment they locked the door, the ship rocked again. Safire’s stomach roiled. She reached for the wall.
“I . . .”
I’m going to be sick.
Eris looked at her sharply. Right before Safire threw up.
Thirteen
Safire spent the night wanting to curl up and die. Eris spent it banging on the door, demanding a bucket. Finally, they gave her one. And now Safire clung to it, vomiting up her dinner—the apple, then the herring, then the wine-soaked bread. She vomited until there was nothing but bile coming up, and all the while, Eris held back her hair in her fist.
Finally the sea settled, and with it, Safire’s stomach. It smelled acrid now in this tiny room, lit only by a single lantern high up on the wall. Safire was pretty sure they were both sitting in her vomit. She shook with exhaustion, and her throat felt raw.
Somewhere above her, she heard Eris banging on the door again. This time, demanding water. She heard the creak of the door swinging open, followed by the exchange of barbed words. Then the warmth of Eris returned to Safire’s side, pressed up against the wall.
Eris uncorked the jug they gave her and passed it over. “Drink.”
Safire took the jug, tipping it back and gulping the cool water down.
“Why did you do that?” Eris asked.
Safire wiped her mouth on her wrist. “Do what?”
Eris stared at the wall straight ahead. “Back there. With Kor. He was going to punish me, and you drew him off. Why would you do that?”
Safire heard the things she didn’t say: Why protect me after I kidnapped you and delivered you to the deadliest pirate on the Silver Sea? After I had you tortured?
“I don’t know,” said Safire.
But she did know.
Safire knew what it was like to be at the mercy of cruel men. She and her cousins still bore the marks of their terror. It was why Jarek was dead.
Safire had stopped tolerating abuse a long time ago.
Eris fell quiet beside her. She flicked her wrists, as if agitated, and for the second time Safire noticed the manacles there.
In the growing silence, Safire thought of the things Kor said.
“Is it true that you torched his ship?”
Eris tipped her head back, resting against the boards of the wall. Gone was that luminous otherworldly creature who’d found her on Jemsin’s deck. In her place was a bone-weary girl. If she cared that she was covered in Safire’s vomit, it didn’t show.
“Damn right I torched it.” Eris smiled a little as she said it. “I’ve never been happier to see a thing burn.”
But it was one thing to burn down a cruel man’s ship. It was another to burn down a temple full of innocents.
“And the burned temple full of children?” asked Safire. “Are you responsible for that too?”
Eris’s smile vanished. Her green eyes went dark as she looked away, the shame etched in the hard lines of her face.
“I am,” she said quietly.
The horror of it seeped through Safire. Suddenly chilled, she moved to put space between her and the murderer at her side.
If Eris was the empress’s fugitive, if she was capable of such an awful thing, then she needed to be delivered to the empress, where she could serve the sentence for her crimes and—more important—never find Asha.
Eris flicked her wrists again, this time gritting her teeth in pain.
Safire glanced down. These were nothing like the manacles Eris had locked Safire’s wrists in back on Jemsin’s ship. These looked . . . almost elegant. Two thin circles of pale, silvery steel.
Seeing where she looked, Eris plunged her hands into the shadows of her crossed legs—but not before Safire saw the skin around one wrist. Wherever the band touched, the skin was frost white.
“What are those? What’s wrong with your wrists?”
“Nothing,” said Eris, staring straight ahead.
They clearly weren’t nothing; they were hurting her. “Let me see.”
“Trust me, princess. There’s nothing to be done.”
“I told you to stop calling me that.”
Reaching across the space now between them, Safire pulled one of Eris’s hands roughly out of the shadows and into the light of the lantern hanging on the wall above them. Surprisingly, Eris let her. With her fingers gripping the girl’s forearm—which was eerily cold—Safire held Eris’s palm still while inspecting her wrist.
Safire had seen unnaturally white flesh only once before, in the desert back home. At night in the sand sea, the temperature dropped well below freezing, and if you weren’t prepared, you froze.
“Frostbite,” she murmured.
“Something like that.” Eris withdrew her hand and held up both wrists for Safire to see. “It’s called stardust steel.”
Safire had never heard of such a thing.
“It’s a weapon,” Eris explained. “Used by the Lumina. Or in this case, Kor. Who’s made some kind of deal with them.”
Lumina. The name given to the military class of the Star Isles. Safire had heard stories of the empress’s fearsome soldiers, who she used to keep order on the islands and to patrol her waters.